End of Night

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Volume 4: written by Jack Kirby; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, Greg Theakston, and others (1974-1986; collected 2010): The last omnibus of Jack Kirby's Fourth World work, or at least of Fourth World work that he both wrote and drew, spans about a decade. Kirby was having major problems with his eyesight by the mid-1980's, and it shows a bit in some of the art, but the conclusion to the saga of Apokolips, New Genesis, and their far-reaching war is a fascinating and essential part of Kirby's body of work.

Of course, it's not really the end: DC Comics would use Kirby's creations again and again after this 'conclusion,' a couple of times with Kirby on-board writing and/or pencilling in the two Super Powers miniseries. The saga was never meant to be wrapped up in less than a hundred pages. So the final graphic novel of Kirby's Fourth World, The Hunger Dogs, is really more of an intermission than anything else, albeit an intermission without any more of the play after it.

The volume collects the last few issues of Mister Miracle from the early 1970's, Kirby's last Fourth World title to remain standing back then. That title concludes with a truly bizarre sequence involving the wedding of Mister Miracle and Big Barda, a wedding the evil god Darkseid decides to crash at the last minute. Groovy!

The concluding material from the 1980's goes places super-hero comics generally don't go -- into the futility of endless war and the possibility that conflict can sometimes simply be walked away from. It was never meant to be an ending, but the last scene between Darkseid and his warrior son/nemesis Orion is both poignant and celebratory. Orion has changed. Darkseid has not. There will be no last battle of prophecy. This time, anyway.

Perhaps thinking of President Nixon's squirmy final days, Kirby invests the previously nigh-omnipotent Darkseid with hitherto unseen characteristics of failure, impotence, and obsolescence. The dark god stands revealed as just another tyrant watching his empire crumble, shaking his fist impotently at the sky.

It's powerful stuff, capped by a terrific final one-page spread that could have stood as the final image of the Fourth World and the New Gods. Kirby was still teaching writers and artists where to go near the end of his colossal and unparalleled career. In all, highly recommended.

Man vs. The Gods: The Road to Victory

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Volume 3: written and illustrated by Jack Kirby with Mike Royer, Roz Kirby, and Vince Colletta (1971-72; collected 2008): Jack Kirby's grand, ahead-of-its-time, multi-title epic moves towards its truncated conclusion with three of the strongest stories of Kirby's long and distinguished career.

Volume 3 also features a misguided two-parter in which DC foisted C-lister Deadman upon Kirby and The Forever People. It's interesting to see Jack try to figure out a new direction for the character, but the whole thing shows how DC didn't seem to have much of a clue in the early 1970's.

Marvel had finally passed DC in comic-book sales, which didn't stop DC from imposing its Superman house-style on Kirby and having other artists redraw the heads of the Man of Steel and his significant supporting characters whenever Kirby drew them. Kirby had co-created much of the Marvel universe that had surpassed DC in popularity. You'd think the heads he drew had at least a bit to do with that.

Long-term cross-continuity between four different titles hadn't been attempted in comic books before. Volume 3 sees DC dialing down the links among New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle, and Jimmy Olsen. The galactic war between the planets of New Genesis and Apokolips, fought in part by proxy on Earth, would cool down; decades later, it would become the mythopoeic backbone of the DC Universe, but for now, Kirby's New Gods would move towards cancellation.

Of those three stories, though. In New Gods, "The Pact" explains the history of the war between New Genesis and Apokolips; more importantly, it explains the forging of the fragile peace that is only now coming apart. It's one of Kirby's most consciously mythic tales, like something out of The Silmarillion as filtered through Kirby's superheroic, day-glo, New-Deal-liberal sensibilities.

Kirby also mythologizes in Mister Miracle's "Himon." But while telling the story of the leader of the Resistance on Apokolips with more than a nod to The Scarlet Pimpernel, Kirby also shines a light on the day-to-day realities of life on the Hell-world of Apokolips. Most of the citizenry have been ground down to a cowed philosophical masochism by the endless oppression and lies of Darkseid, Kirby's fascistic overlord of darkness. But hope endures: Himon refuses to leave, but he inspires the future Mister Miracle to escape Darkseid and flee to Earth.

Darkseid's redeemed son, Orion, may be foretold by prophecy to kill Darkseid, but Mister Miracle represents the direct counter to Darkseid's obsession with control. In Kirby's cosmology, the Anti-Life Equation that Darkseid seeks to complete, that will give him control over every sentient being, is countered by Freedom -- the Life-Equation represented by the being who will become the super-powered escape artist known as Mister Miracle.

The third giant would be "The Death Wish of 'Terrible' Turpin," one of the rare superhero stories of the first 30 years of superhero stories to portray the terrible, humanity-destroying effect that the mere existence of superheroes would have on ordinary humanity. Turpin, a human police officer caught between the warring factions of god-like beings on Earth in the New Gods, vows to take down one of these beings using whatever resources the police department can muster.

Kirby makes Turpin's quest into a cry of resistance from humanity itself -- resistance to the dehumanization that gods and superheroes, light or dark, bring to the world of the normative. The story, just a bit over 20 pages, supplies the sort of ending that an enlightened Hollywood movie about superheroes could really use: human beings, kicking ass, while the gods themselves stand down. In all, for all the stories (even the wonky Deadman story), highly recommended.

War in the Deep

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Volume 2: written and illustrated by Jack Kirby, Roz Kirby, Vince Colletta, Mike Royer, Al Plastino, and Neal Adams (1970-71; collected 2009): The second omnibus volume of Jack Kirby's early 1970's work for DC Comics sees Kirby rapidly fleshing out the war of the New Gods while also tap-dancing his way through Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen with some of the weirdest comic-book work of his life.

Vampires had been absent from all mainstream comic books approved by the industry watchdog Comics Code Authority since the mid-1950's. So of course, when DC decided to bring vampires back, they got Jack Kirby to do it, in what could only be described as the strangest vampire story ever told. I'm not sure I can do justice to it by describing it.

Suffice to say the vampires are teeny-tiny lab experiments living on a teeny-tiny globe. They face destruction, along with a variety of other micro-races that all look like various horror icons such as the Wolf Man and the Mummy, at the hands of their scientist-creator Dabney Donovan. And then comes...the musical Oklahoma!

Besides the weirdness, the volume also offers an expansion of the war of the New Gods, as Darkseid's forces continue to land on Earth, to be confronted by Orion, Superman, the Forever People, and Mister Miracle on different fronts.

What Kirby does here with a multiple-level conflict hadn't been done before in superhero comics, and really hasn't been done since: four partially integrated books focusing on different aspects and fronts of the same battle, all four of them written and illustrated by the same person. The breadth and depth of it make most superhero comic books before and since look imaginatively impoverished by comparison.

Amidst all this comes one of Kirby's greatest single issues, the New Gods story entitled "The Glory Boat." The second half of a story dealing with the underwater invasion of the Deep Six, super-powered terrorists from Darkseid's Apokolips who are destroying Earth's shipping lanes, "The Glory Boat" plays off a small-scale human conflict between a conscientious objector of a son and his hawkish, patriotic-gibberish-spouting father against the final battle between Orion, Lightray, and the Deep Six. A moment of hard-nosed poignance is achieved, magnified by the mercy and the vengeance of the New Gods against their enemies. Don't ask -- just buy it! Highly recommended.

Platonic Concepts Gone Wild

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Volume 1: written and illustrated by Jack Kirby, Vince Colletta, Al Plastino, and Neal Adams (1971; reprinted 2007): DC cleverly re-collected the various comics dubbed "Jack Kirby's Fourth World" (by DC, not Kirby) into chronological order, rather than by individual title. Doing so makes the shape of the saga much clearer.

Superman found himself drawn into the never-really-completed Kirby saga by virtue of the fact that Kirby started his 1970's tenure at DC by writing and drawing the Jimmy Olsen comic book. Things get super-scientifically weird very, very quickly, with sci-fi concepts such as The Cadmus Project and the Evil Factory becoming part of Superman mythology, though it would be fifteen years before writers and artists other than Kirby -- most notably John Byrne, Dan Jurgens, and Roger Stern -- would bring these concepts back into the Superman books.

The titles collected here are Jimmy Olsen, Forever People, New Gods, and Mister Miracle. They lay out Earth's fate as the battleground between the opposing forces of New Genesis and Apokolips, the planets of the New Gods who are either aliens who act like gods or gods who act like aliens. Or something. Later, non-Kirby interpretations would vary wildly on this question. Writer Grant Morrison suggested in one series that the New Gods are living, physical Platonic Concepts, which is as good a way to look at them as any.

In any case, Darkseid, the evil ruler of Apokolips and wielder of the powerful Omega Force, seeks dominion over Earth so as to find the key to the Anti-Life Equation, a philosophical concept that would give anyone who knew it complete control over all life in the universe. He's opposed by the forces of New Genesis as embodied by his own son, Orion, who wields the Astro-Force; the Forever People, cosmic hippies who can combine to form the powerful Infinity Man; and Mister Miracle, the son of New Genesis leader Izaya the Highfather who has escaped imprisonment on Apokolips to become a super-powered escape artist on Earth. Guiding and commenting upon all actions is the avatar of The Source, the energy field that suffuses the universe and possibly created it.

Kirby's level of invention here is extraordinary, though in some cases he was running so far ahead of the curve (with Darkseid, for instance) that it took DC Comics ten to 20 years to figure out what to do with the concepts. In Darkseid's case, that meant becoming the uber-villain of the entire DC Universe both in the comic books and in various iterations of the Justice League cartoon.

Kirby's writing is funky and bizarre and idiosyncratic. The art is explosive. Artistically, though, two problems plague DC's handling of Kirby from the get-go. One is that DC decided that Kirby's face for Superman didn't fit DC's House Style for the Man of Steel, leading them to have veteran Superman artist Al Plastino redraw the faces of Clark Kent and Superman throughout. It's a bit jarring, as all other faces are Kirby faces.

The other problem lies with DC's choice of Vince Colletta, who'd previously inked Kirby on Marvel Thor, as the inker for the various Fourth World titles. Colletta's virtue was that he was really fast. Unfortunately, he's also one of Kirby's two or three worst inkers, with a tendency to avoid inking backgrounds in certain situations. Steve Ditko famously expressed disgusted agogment at Stan Lee's choice of Colletta to ink Kirby. I imagine these pages would have provoked further agogment.

So it goes. It's still better than the Kirby-pencilled issue of The Avengers that Chic Stone seems to have inked with a crayon and a broken hand, but it would be a couple of years yet before Kirby took control of the inking process with his own hand-picked inkers, Mike Royer and D. Bruce Berry. But despite Superman's head and Vince Colletta's hand, highly recommended.