Following Jack Kirby’s DC debut — Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen — February 1971 (cover-dated) brought us two pure Kirby creations, Forever People #1 and New Gods #1 (though Alan Stewart says Kirby wrote the Forever People’s first issue before he started on Jimmy’s book). “In Search of a Dream” is written by Kirby and drawn by Kirby, though Al Plastino redid Superman’s appearances to fit the house style.
As I keep mentioning, the Fourth World books came out when Dad returning to America and bringing us with him led to a no-comics-buying couple of years. By the time I got to the Kirby stuff, it was on its last legs. The super-hippies of Forever People were the weakest of the books. Reading the earlier issues later, though, I realized they had the strongest statements of the life vs. anti-life theme fueling this mythos.
This issue opens with the sight of a boom tube, then our new heroes emerge through it in Kirby’s usual dynamic style.
As we soon learn, they’ve arrived on Earth to rescue the final member of their commune, Beautiful Dreamer, from Darkseid. Almost immediately we learn about Mother Box.
Meanwhile Superman, as I mentioned Monday, is suffering some heavy-duty angst. First a boxer complains Superman makes all physical effort pointless.
Then Clark has the blues.
When Jimmy barges in with a photo of the Forever People and the Boom Tube, Clark’s super-eyes spot a miraculous town at the far end. Is it possible it’s somewhere even a Superman could be happy? The Kryptonian Crimebuster flies off to investigate. Meanwhile the Forever People have become targets of Intergang, under the orders of Darksed.
Superman teams up with the Forever People only to have Intergang unleash fighters with heavy-gravity powers to take him down. Which they shouldn’t — Superman has a lot of other tricks he can pull — but it sets up the Forever People’s mysterious ally, Infinity Man, to demonstrate he’s playing at Superman’s level.
The two supers then meet Darkseid.
One thing that bugs me is that Darkseid never seems like someone who’d get this up close and personal with anyone less impressive than Orion or Highfather. Evil gods have people for that. However he does introduce Beautiful Dreamer, and gives Superman a chance to prove he plays on Infinity Man’s level too.
Infinity Man then trades places again with the Forever People. To their dismay, Superman decides to leave Earth and the battle against Darkseid for a visit to Supertown, the one place he can call home.
This feels like Kirby trying to write Superman with Marvel-style melodram, but it doesn’t work for me. He’s got the Justice League, he’s got Supergirl; if he wants to go home to Krypton, he has Kandor. What’s the unknown Super-Town going to offer him? And I can’t buy Superman deciding to leave Earth, even if Darkseid wasn’t around. He’s not the type to pull a Spider-Man No More character arc.
#1 is not a bad book by any means. If I’d read it fresh in 1971 would I have been blown away? Maybe. Then again if not for Superman I might have assumed it was a Marvel book and passed it by (IIRC, that’s what I did with Mr. Miracle #1). Looked at now … well, it’s a decent start. I’ll have more to say as the saga gets further along.
I actually always thought this issue was a super strong issue of a weaker series. The melodramatic angle with Superman works quite well with me and I always felt like, though Kirby is often synonymous with bombast, he used some really nice, subtle body language to emphasize the “man” in Superman.
I agree The Forever People does have maybe the clearest theme of any Fourth World books, but the characters are the least memorable for me.
Kirby was sympathetic to the hippies and Hairies but his dialogue for them in this series (“Truth is forever — and we are the Forever People!”) did not work.
When I reread this about a decade ago, I wound up scratching my head that everyone saw them as hippies when they look superhero. Then I remembered guys with long hair in 1971 wouldn’t be seen any other way.
I’ve never been much of a fan of Kirby’s work, neither at Marvel or DC.
Early FF I didn’t mind so much, it was more Lee’s dialogue that was a bit problematic at times.
I have never really understood the adoration that fandom holds for Kirby.
Well, I for one like his art style, his quirky poetic dialogue, his larger-than-life over-the-topness, and the themes that run through his work, especially 70s stuff like the Fourth World and OMAC. His work is both quintessential American comics and also very idiosyncratic.
I was not the biggest fan of the Forever People when I first read through the Fourth World. But I really need to revisit. The images of the Justifiers and ‘victims’ of Glorious Godfrey have really hit differently in our current climate.
Also, like– Captain Planet is a riff on the Forever People, right? A bunch of leftie teens who, by their powers combined, form one superhero?
Yes, Kirby had a chillingly clear eye about fascism and its followers.
Could be a connection with Captain Planet. Could be inspired by Psi-Force or even the Unimind. And I doubt any of them were the first gestalt characters.
I fall between Bill and Conrad regarding Kirby, as I’ve mentioned before. Post Fourth World (including the last few issues of Mr. Miracle) Eternals and Kamandi were great; everything else was readable but no better than that.
Exception being his resolution of the New Gods.
You really need to take the 4th World as a whole, not the individual segments. When read across the combined series, you see a lot of the themes interwoven. Not as stringently as others, as Kirby was more of a jazz creator, working freeform and stream of consciousness, rather than a rigid outline. That said, the Forever People is a bit muddled. Part of the problem is that Jimmy Olsen was covering the same ground, with more interesting characters and conflicts. Where Forever People excelled was when Desaad and Glorious Godfrey are introduced and we see more of the broader evil of Darkseid and Apokolips…especially Glorious Godfrey. The character, visually, was based on evangelist Billy Graham, whose rallies and speaking engagements had more than a little fascist overtones, as did his dialogue with Richard Nixon, which was caught on tape, with plenty of racism and un-Christian statements. Even more, it explores Anti-Life, as Kirby saw the concept, which was the ultimate fascism; the complete loss of all freedom, mind and body.
Kirby’s intent was to show the potential of the youth culture, which he admired, as seen in his kids and his young assistants and the fans he met at conventions and pilgrimages to his home.
As for the adoration of Kirby, he, more than any other artist, created the visual language of the superhero comic; but, he also worked with classic mythological concepts which stand the test of time, because they contain all stories. I wasn’t a fan of a lot of Kirby’s work, in the 70s, at the time; but, in reading more of it and with more life experience, I see more and more depth in it. Not the showy angst of a Neil Gaiman or the pseudo-revealed truth of a Grant Morrison; but in the human experience, as seen in the novels of Erich Maria Remarque, or the archetypes of Joseph Campbell. Kirby is opera on the page, in 4-color. It is grand in scale, but remarkably insightful into the human condition. Mark Evanier said that Jack had a way of saying things that meant nothing to you, at the time; but, there would come a time where it would suddenly hit you what Jack was saying and you realized how profound it was. The problem was you lacked the context of what he was saying, until you got more life experience or approached it from an entirely different angle. I found that after living more life and doing things like serving in the military and experiencing a war, even though mine was from stateside, that I started to see Jack’s perspectives. Jack thought a lot about his world and he put those thoughts into his stories. Everyone else copied what he was doing, without understanding it. Once you understand where Kirby is coming from , Darkseid makes Thanos look like a schoolboy, trying to please his teacher.
The previous time I reread the Fourth World I did it reading them all together, in publication order. It works better. I’ll agree Kirby has more depth than he’s sometimes given credit for, but I can’t agree about his 1970s stuff.
I agree with you, Fraser, about the oddity of the Superman in this period focusing so much on being alone after the Silver Age spent so much time and effort adding to his circle of friends (or, if you prefer, the Superman Family). You couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting another survivor from Krypton, much less another hero who had teamed up with Super at one time or another. But if you look at all of the changes he was being put through by new writers and editors in the early Seventies — Kirby, O’Neil, Schwartz, Wein, Maggin, Friedrich, Pasko, et al. — and squint a little at his face, you can see an aging guy going through a mid-life crisis. His job’s changing, the world is changing, all of these new people (not to mention new gods) are popping up around him, and maybe all of those old friends aren’t as friendly as they used to be. (Heck, he used to be able to count on teaming up with Batman at least once a month, but now the guy’s gotten all moody and moved out of Wayne Manor…). It doesn’t smooth out every line of dialogue in these books, but it makes some of them make a little more sense.
Maybe. Though this was the era when Superman was a perpetual 29, perhaps because The Kids wouldn’t trust anyone over 30.
They were playing with something similar with Samaritan in Astro City before the series ended: people he knows are retired or dead, the Honor Guard (JLA equivalent) has almost completely new members and he’s feeling very old.