![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbFew people, even among those who followed my old Jack Kirby series, ever read this article. So I decided I would give it an airing here. ATTENTION: Disappointments ahead for those of a certain political persuasion.
The spirit in which Jack Kirby started his great epic had little precedent. Neither in America nor, to the best of my knowledge, in Europe and Japan, had earlier cartoonists seen in their form of entertainment the potential of great art. The greatest had been known to take an entertainment formula, breathe life into it and make it something strange and wonderful: as George Herriman with slapstick comedy, Will Eisner with cops-and-robbers, Charles M.Schulz with kid humour. But a formula it still was. Its purpose was not to place people before ultimate truths, but to make a half-hour or so of their time go pleasantly by.
I hardly mean to ascribe this epochal change in comics to Kirby alone. He was part of a trend. Many people in more than one continent were, in the terrible catchphrases that still haunt us today, struggling towards a "more serious", "more adult" kind of comics; like the Metal Hurlant crew in France, Hugo Pratt and others in my country, many of the underground crew in the States, Steve Ditko with his political tracts, and so on. But none of them were, in my view, so completely successful, or so early, as Jack Kirby. Moebius is chiefly notable as an artist. Druillet was narrow and obsessional. Pratt produced much attractive work, but few absolute masterpieces (though his best work came from 1970 on). Crepax quickly declined into pornography, contributing many interesting riffs but no substantial work. Spiegelmann's masterpiece, Maus, is later than Fourth World by a good ten years; Robert Crumb's best work is being done now. And Steve Ditko's work is restricted – in both appeal to readers and artistic truth – by a flawed political system, fanatically held and applied with sadistic rigour.
Politics was a good part of everything that went on in the Sixties, and Ditko was not the only artist to bring it to comics; though, compared with the ruck of his contemporaries, he was probably the only one to make good comics out of it - and I say it though I loathe his views. I defy anyone not to cringe at the would-be Marxist bits in Pratt or among Crepax' T&A, and the American undergrounds, though less absurd, are just as dated. But then, Ditko is a genuine fanatic who does not care a damn about the rest of the world; his contemporaries did care. Most of them aspired more or less consciously to be part of that contemporary intelligentsia whose mixture of media glamour and intellectual prestige was probably the major feature of the decade; their artistic ambition, itself a good thing, carried along a good deal of social ambition, of lust for "intellectual" status, and they had an unfortunate tendency to replicate the worst features of the "intellectual" caste. Hence a narrow and idolatrous idea of literary work (like Pratt's indebtedness to Joseph Conrad), or the arrogance of those who thought that they were going to bring "maturity" to the juvenile art of comics, or the immature need to prove one's adulthood by being shocking for its own sake (the young Moebius was a notable offender, and as for the American underground artists, it would be hard to find one who was not thoroughly adolescent). It was part of these problems of culture and attitude that hardly a single cartoonist of that generation can be found who did not suffer from political ideas either jejune, or extremistic, or pre-digested and ill-conceived; and always expressed with heated arrogance.
Kirby suffered from few such problems. A top professional in comics for more than thirty years, he had no arrogance towards the artform; immature he was not - if he had ever had any nonsense in him, it had been knocked out by war and parenthood; and his combination of fairly basic education and intense intellectual curiosity, although it led him to follies such as taking Erich von Daeniken seriously, certainly preserved him from the narrow culture of the average "intellectual", who never read Virgil and would not know what you meant if you spoke of Kalidasa or Chuang-Tzu, but who feels that his almost wholly nineteenth- and twentieth-century education makes him part of the learned caste. Nothing, in matters of the mind, is more important than knowing that you do not know; Kirby knew, as he told Will Eisner, that he was a Lower East Side kid and would never be anything else, and, compared with this basic humility, even an interest in Daeniken became a minor matter – indeed, in The Eternals, an artistically fertile one.
The comics he worked on until 1970 were brilliant formula entertainment, artistically no bolder or more profound than those of his predecessors; though, had he died in 1969, he would still have been remarkable for the variety of genres he had successfully tackled and for the visceral energy he had brought to them. A Herriman or a Segar, a Schulz or a Caniff, chose a genre early and worked in it throughout their careers; there is no evidence of Schulz ever wanting to draw much of anything besides funny little round-headed kids, or Caniff anything besides bold and handsome adventurers in exotic lands. It was rare, at least among major artists, to find someone like Alex Raymond, successful in three separate genres - the heroic fantasy of Flash Gordon, the colonial adventure of Jungle Jim and the crime shenanigans of Secret Agent and Rip Kirby. But by 1970, Kirby had done, and done brilliantly, humour, western and crime comics; superhero, magic and horror; science fiction, editorial cartoons and heroic fantasy; kid gangs, history, classics adaptations, and war; love, dreams and monsters. It was as if he had spent his life mopping up every kind of story that could possibly be told in comics. To the best of my knowledge, there is only one known genre that he did not tackle: to wit, pornography (and don't tell me that he could not have done so, since his contemporary Steve Ditko could and did).
Marvel comics pushed the formula approach to its absolute limits; with Fourth world, Kirby burst right through it. It was, firstly, a deliriously rich mixture of everything he had ever done in comics, from love to monsters to war to crime to horror, with the superhero aspect little more than a coathanger for every other kind of genre idea known to him; but more than that, it had an unprecedented freedom in conception, approach and treatment, that made it like the opening of a new ocean. At Marvel, Lee had been responsible for the creation of a new formula, broader and more flexible than any ever seen before, and with great potential for elaboration; but a formula it still was. Its purpose was still to entertain; to entertain, perhaps, with a smile and a tear; but hardly ever to deal with reality with all masks off. Stan Lee would not - perhaps he could not - subject the reader to the demanding, possibly even harrowing, experience of a full take on reality, not mediated by formulas and stereotypes. Yet, at the same time, Jack Kirby, as an artist - but also as a co-plotter - had reached an altogether new depth of treatment. His line had hardened to iron firmness, reducing the component of pure caricature in his art; his composition had broadened and simplified, resting on large areas of solid white and black like rocks; and his eye had been seized by a demon of vertiginous depth, so that every panel was in three dimensions and there never was a figure, however badly drawn, that did not either leap at the reader or sink back into an endless perspective to the very end of vision.
As for the stories, the levels at which he now aimed can be gauged by his repeated statement that Galactus was God. This has been poorly understood because people forget that Kirby was Jewish; and, unlike Lee, whose views hardly ever sound like anything else but sentimental Christianity, Kirby took his Hebraism seriously. Galactus is the God of Jewish nightmares, God as Job thinks of Him on his ash-heap, unknowable, terrible, visiting the most dreadful evils on His people for no visible reason, or for reasons that have nothing to do with humanity. Another Jew, Will Eisner, later embodied a similar nightmare of Him in A contract with God. The point is however that Kirby - if not Lee - was, by the time of the Galactus three-parter, ready and willing to deal in comics with the highest possible realities; and to deal with them in a way that was neither sentimental, nor arrogant, nor formulaic. The notion that Galactus is an image of God, whatever you may think of it – and Kirby never quite went back to such a distant, uncaring view of the Almighty in later work - is a daring and thought-provoking one; it does not make for facile edification, it does not indulge either in oily devotion or in juvenile blasphemy, but it makes a powerful and valid point. As Kirby liked to insist, he always told the truth; he did not fob off the reader with facile piety or equally facile atheism, but presented a picture that demanded a reaction on the deepest levels of intellect and personality.
When, therefore, he started his great epic, he was at a stage of artistic development no cartoonist before him had achieved - in absolute control of a matchless array of narrative approaches, and mentally ready to deal, not in pre-digested views or bland generalities, but in the absolute truth of the world as he had experienced and felt it. Other long-serving professionals with fine track records, like Pratt and Ditko, were also making the effort to turn their comics from unintellectual entertainment to art; but, if I was to put my finger on the thing in which their work - though often magnificent – is inferior to Kirby's, I would say that they did not have quite the same commitment to the art of storytelling as such. People like Steve Ditko used stories for a further purpose; to Kirby, the stories were the purpose. Fourth World is far more about the art of storytelling than Mr.A or all but the finest episodes of Corto Maltese. The view of the world is not imposed on the material from above, but develops from the narrative material itself. The moral of the story is not, as with Ditko's work - or with a lot of the worse Pratt material - a rigid framework inside which the story must develop, but a deeper layer of meaning born from the free development of the story events, once they are considered as a whole.
While it goes without saying, therefore, that such a piece of work from such a man carries a definite political view, since it embodies his view of the world, the point is that his politics will not be, like those of Steve Ditko, scrawled on a placard and hoisted aloft. They will be part of the texture of the story, to be read in the way the characters exist and interact, in what they are and what they do to each other. Kirby's first concern is to tell a story; but as the story is built out of fifty-four years of life experience and a visceral, heroic approach to the art itself, it will necessarily carry a view of the world; with no restraint, no hypocrisy, no pandering to others' views, and no compromise.
Fourth world is an uncompromising piece of work. And possibly the most uncompromising item in it, the one that concedes least to lazy expectations and reader habits, was, until management interfered, the one he picked up in the middle - Jimmy Olsen. Kirby is so keen to throw the reader straight into his own imaginative world that he even commits what could be construed as narrative mistakes. Things come much too fast. We start with the unprepared appearance of a forties Simon and Kirby kid gang, the Newsboy Legion; most of Kirby's readers at the time must never have heard of them - I know I did not; and before we know it, there is a new owner for the Daily Planet, a "whiz wagon" and the discovery of a previously unknown "wild area" harbouring mysterious new societies, within easy reach of Metropolis. Kirby has altered the whole Superman world, throwing all the readers into a welter of new situations without so much as a by-your-leave. The effect is somewhat murky, bewildering; it feels nervy.
But what really makes those Jimmy Olsens so befuddling is that their basic thrust is out of kilter with received views. The story does not take us where we expect to be taken. The very idea that, within a few miles of a great metropolis - or Metropolis - there should live, above the surface of the Earth, a whole outcast society unknown, except by rumours, to the urban readers of Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen's newspaper, is hardly a part of standard comic-book themes. But before we know where we are, we have heard that the bikers of the Wild Area are only the outer skin of the mystery. In the middle of American territory, indeed not very far from Metropolis, a yet more unknown tribe, the "Hairies", have built a whole alternative silvan town, holding itself up among the great trunks of ancient trees - and have vanished; and the dialogue suddenly grows tense and expectant as the scared biker Yango describes the mystery and terror of this legendary race.
Kirby should, in my view, have taken more time before taking us to the Hairies and the Mountain of Judgement, especially since, at first, it is not clear that the two things are connected. The mystery is barely raised before it is solved. But whether or not this is a narrative mistake, the point of the story clearly is that we are travelling from the outside inwards. The Wild Area is simply the outside edge of the mystery; the Outsiders, who seemed at first to be Olsen's goal, were themselves only on the edges of the greater secret he had really been sent to reach (and, unknown to himself, to destroy).
And when we reach the heart of the secret, we find what may well be the most significant single picture in the whole story. The Hairies only feature as it were as the gateway to the secret: as the land of the Outsiders is a by-product of Hairie activity, so the Haires themselves come from somewhere else themselves. Superman, who had seemed all at sea among the Outsiders, takes charge and leads the young heroes, who had been stubbornly pushing on against his advice, through a clearly governmental underground complex, to find the first of the answers they had been seeking. And what do they find? ...their own fathers. To misquote Pogo's famous misquote, "We have met the mystery, and he is us".
They are in a government project set up when the genetic code of man was cracked (something which is being systematically done as I write by the Human Genome Project, promoted and financed by the American government). The Hairies are among its most successful products. Their peculiar genetics make them gifted technological wizards, but their technologies - like the deserted tree-top city Habitat, where Yango and the Outsiders now live - have a distinctly non-violent, environmentally friendly flavour.
The Hairies used to live in Habitat, and why they abandoned it we aren't told; but we may make a guess. They left for the Mountain of Judgement, a monstrous, monumental vehicle patrolling a "zoomway" on the road to the Project. Now, the Project already knows, even before Olsen and the Legion arrive with their rigged car, that they are under assault from a shadowy enemy. Evidently Habitat, environmental paradise or not, was too exposed; a more secure site was needed, and a powerful sentry mechanism such as the Mountain of Judgement to guard its entrance. The arrival of the Evil Factory meant the ejection of the Hairies from the paradise of Habitat, and its threatening presence has conditioned everything we now see
of the Project and the Hairies. We are in the middle of a community at war.
It cannot be underlined too strongly that the Hairies are part of the Project; and the Project is part of the American Government. Kirby is not starry-eyed (except about the Hairies), and is hardly blind to the dangers of genetic experimentation, even in well-meaning hands: Jimmy Olsen makes the point to Superman with some force, and Superman changes the subject, from which we gather that he has no real answer to Jimmy's concern. He himself, after all, has compared the Project to the Manhattan Project, which made the atom bomb: hardly a reassuring parallel! The point seems rather to be that research and discovery happen more or less under their own power. Kirby does not believe in burying discoveries under the sand and hoping they will have no further results; he believes that a discovery is a final event, it cannot be undone. Its consequences cannot be shirked; especially since there is always some sleazeball around to take advantage of them if you do not. The Evil Factory did not achieve the DNA reading itself, but rather stole the results of the American Project and immediately got busy making all sorts of mischief out of it.
Kirby is, in that sense, something of a progressive fatalist, believing that the advance of knowledge is as inevitable as the next sunrise. There is a saying that "s**t happens"; less pessimistically, Kirby tells us that discoveries happen, and that what matters is to cope with them. From the moment the DNA code was cracked, there was no going back. The point of the Project is to tackle its results responsibly. And the results can be momentous: what the Project is dealing with is neither more nor less than a new evolutionary step. One, or rather many, new human races, is/are being born. As Kirby showed later in Silver Star, the conscious scientific work of mankind may itself be the reason for the next step of evolution, the one that makes homo sapiens obsolete; in Marvel's mutant mythology - descended at several removes from an earlier Kirby idea - mutants happen as if by chance, by the irrational whim of fate; in Fourth World, and in Silver Star - even to some extent in Machine Man - they happen by the internal logic of the daily work of human beings.
And there is another thing. The problem of how to overcome the destructive and exploitative aspects of human activities is central to Kirby's whole thought. He is very conscious of the wasteful and dangerous aspects of normal human life, and regards them as, in the long run, not just dangerous but lethal. He does not seem to believe in a policy of small steps and incremental improvements; at least, there is no trace in any of his stories of a belief in the possibility of reform, it is never even discussed. His stories with an environmental background hinge on a strong feeling that only a further evolutionary step, a genuine change in the nature itself of mankind, can save it from - to put it brutally - drowning in its own dirt. Regular readers of this magazine will remember that I analyzed all of his 2001 #s 1-7 in that light.
This is where the Hairies come in. The main role of the Hairies, who take almost no part in the war against the Evil Factory in spite of being among its targets, is to embody the great, almost messianic hopes Kirby had for the sixties counter-culture, and, more generally, for future generations. They are definitely constructed on hippy late-sixties beliefs, which the 54-year-old artist probably took more seriously than many hippies less than half his age. Environmentalism, non-violence, egalitarianism, music and mind-expanding experiences are the very core of what they are about. Environmentalism: they built Habitat, a forest town which, right from its name, is clearly designed as the answer to sixties "ecological" concerns. Egalitarianism: their captain Jude (surely a tip of the hat to Paul McCartney's song) is "elected", a fact he punctiliously mentions to Superman. Non-violence: Kirby has even toned down his usual massive anatomy to make them look slender and unaggressive – they prefer to deal with attacks by misdirection and technical skill. And their electronic-psychedelic-musical "trip" of #137 is an utopia of art as the most direct and profound form at once of communication between people and of personal self-realization.
This brief scene tells us why Kirby had so passionately seized on the more or less inchoate beliefs and hopes of love, peace and rock'n'roll that tried to shape what came to be called the "counterculture": his own personality answered to them on the deepest level. It was Kirby's very strong belief, forcefully stated dozens of times, that every person has the potential of good, "creative" art, and that talent is not restricted by nature to a more or less small elite of gifted people; and it was more than his belief, it was his most profound lifelong experience, that the arts are at once the most perfect means to convey personal and universal truths, and also the finest and most satisfactory avenue to self-realization. After all, that was what the art of comics had done for him: it had given a voice to be heard to one of the lowest of the low, "a Lower East Side kid"; and it had afforded him a successful and deeply fulfilling life. A lifestyle based on music, art and mind expansion, even envisaging them as avenues to a future without violence (Kirby never stopped having nightmares about the War) could not but answer his deepest desires and beliefs; and the fact that, for a few years, such a lifestyle seemed not only possible but forthcoming, must have meant, for him, almost the beginning of utopia.
It is worth noting that, by 1970, there had been sufficient warning of the dark potential of the counterculture: Altamont, Charlie Manson, the crime and violence at Woodstock, dozens of smaller outbursts, and the stunted but unmistakable growth of terrorist movements, had all taken place and been extensively reported. There was more than enough to make older people doubt its benevolence and promise; but none of this seems to have made any impression on Kirby. Or rather, he separated altogether the darkness from the light, as a lot of old hippies do to this day: he placed the violent Outsiders in the no-man's-land between the Hairies and mundane Metropolis, dressed them in sheepskins and leather, and put them on big, ferocious bikes - placing on them, but not on the Hairies, the image of the Dark Sixties. The Outsides are violent, ignorant (Yango sounds like a "grade school reject", to use the American idiom) and rootless, squatting into the Hairies' beautiful domain because the Hairies - the beautiful, unpolluted, innocent images of that first Summer of Love - have gone into hiding. They choose their leaders by trial of combat; the Hairies elect theirs. Both groups form autonomous societies, but the Outsiders simply live on the edges, contributing little and taking everything they find; the Hairies are part of the greater whole that is the Project, and have done a great deal for its technology and art.
The Hairies are the future. They incarnate a progressivist dream, and are probably the only instance in Kirby's work of genetic manipulation (an abiding concern) as unmixedly positive. Kirby was 53: he was not speaking about his own generation or himself. He was looking at his children, and I think that all the warm glow with which the Hairies and all their works are invested comes from the love he felt for them. He believed in sixties idealism, not for himself, but for them.
It is about the secret of life that the rest of Kirby's Jimmy Olsen will be played out, not excluding even the rather wasted #s 142-143, whose issue was a whole planetful of creatures brought to life – and threatened with extinction – by a mad scientist. Nothing was more important and more emotional to Kirby than parenthood, and it is absolutely typical of him that the climax of the Newsboy Legion's journey into all things weird should be nothing else than a multiple father-son meeting. The heart of the connection between the world of the Project and that of the Hairies is incredibly simple: the Project is directly bound with the idea of parenthood because it is about giving birth and raising new generations. It is not casual that the Newsboy Legion's parents should live there: it is the home of the secret of life. And indeed, though we are not told how each of the old Newsboy Legion (plus the history-rewriting Flippa Dippa Senior) should have happened to have a son exactly like him, I think the conclusion is obvious: the children are themselves sons of the Project, and don't know it. One detail supports it: the super-advanced car designs sent by Big Words Junior to Morgan Edge, from which the Whiz Wagon was built, are quite beyond the forties Big Words, who was nothing more than a classic class swot. They are, rather, closely reminiscent of the Hairies' technological abilities, and suggest that the boy may enjoy some aspect of the extra factor that is often found in the minds of Project creatures, both human and alien. The children may well be Hairies themselves.
The purpose of the Project is, ultimately, to raise children; and to raise them, as much as possible, as useful and happy people, with work that satisfies them and is helpful to the community. Therefore the Project pays a great deal of attention to education; as one would expect from Jack Kirby, who, right from a child, had a very strong sense of its importance. A great experience of his was the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, one of many Thirties projects for getting dead-end ghetto kids out of the inner cities and giving them such things as holidays in the country. It will be remembered that Frank Capra's masterpiece Mr.Smith goes to Washington hinges on the attempt to set up a similar project, opposed by land speculators and media barons; and it may be that a cynical modern spectator would feel that Capra was making a great deal out of very little - a sticking-plaster project that will do nothing to amend inner-city poverty and little even for the few children it could reach. But any time we feel such doubts, we should reflect on the importance that a similar small-scale project (still ongoing today) had in the life of one of the century's greatest geniuses. Even before he became a father, Kirby had experienced, as a child, the importance of such things.
Never mind how unusually the Project's children have been born, they are treated as children in a family. That is shown not only in the relationship of the new Newsboy Legion and their parents, but also in a tender little two-pager (JO 146) in which we meet with the paternal relationship of Professor Packard, one of the scientists, and one of the most alien genetic aliens of the Project, Arin. Arin can only live in an airless environment, and therefore we are to understand that the "lad" and his adopted father have never touched at any time in their lives; even as they say farewell, they can only reach out for each other through a thick glass slab. Yet there is no doubt at all that this is a personal and wrenching pain for "father" and "son".
Packard's lack of importance is worth underlining, because it contains an important message. If Packard's character were ever reprised by any of the many writers who have taken up the Fourth World characters since 1972, I think we can all imagine what they would do with him: he would be immediately revealed to be a major player, an important idea man with several major secrets in his head; and there would be some storyline set up about some villain or other trying to abuse or corrupt him or his scientific secrets. This is exactly what Kirby has not done. Packard has no special features; he seems to be a middle-ranking scientific worker in the Project, assigned to Arin as any employee might be assigned to any particular task. The only thing that is notable is the success of his task - the "lad" is super-powered and a nice person - and the paternal relationship he has with him. He is one of thousands of people working in the Project; without this paternal emotion, his story would hardly be worth telling.
The point of the story is this: that in the middle of this super-scientific and rather militarized environment, even as men and aliens are being grown – one might think - like cattle, there is room, and a lot of room, for parenting and individual care. The Project provides it by assigning individual employees to care for some of the growing children. Kirby had already hinted at the role of positive education by picturing a group of Project children playing with a pretty young nursery nurse (#136,p.18, panel 2), an expressive and even rather sentimental picture which clearly made the point that these children were being cared for; but the #146 two-pager explained that, by the workings of the Project itself – Packard was assigned to it: it was part of the duties the Project allotted him – they are brought up, not as the hatchling of some impersonal nursery, but as individuals with parents. And the power of the relationship this generates is a surprise to Packard himself: he has ended up feeling about this result of his laboratory work exactly as he would feel about a child of his loins.
The spirit in which Jack Kirby started his great epic had little precedent. Neither in America nor, to the best of my knowledge, in Europe and Japan, had earlier cartoonists seen in their form of entertainment the potential of great art. The greatest had been known to take an entertainment formula, breathe life into it and make it something strange and wonderful: as George Herriman with slapstick comedy, Will Eisner with cops-and-robbers, Charles M.Schulz with kid humour. But a formula it still was. Its purpose was not to place people before ultimate truths, but to make a half-hour or so of their time go pleasantly by.
I hardly mean to ascribe this epochal change in comics to Kirby alone. He was part of a trend. Many people in more than one continent were, in the terrible catchphrases that still haunt us today, struggling towards a "more serious", "more adult" kind of comics; like the Metal Hurlant crew in France, Hugo Pratt and others in my country, many of the underground crew in the States, Steve Ditko with his political tracts, and so on. But none of them were, in my view, so completely successful, or so early, as Jack Kirby. Moebius is chiefly notable as an artist. Druillet was narrow and obsessional. Pratt produced much attractive work, but few absolute masterpieces (though his best work came from 1970 on). Crepax quickly declined into pornography, contributing many interesting riffs but no substantial work. Spiegelmann's masterpiece, Maus, is later than Fourth World by a good ten years; Robert Crumb's best work is being done now. And Steve Ditko's work is restricted – in both appeal to readers and artistic truth – by a flawed political system, fanatically held and applied with sadistic rigour.
Politics was a good part of everything that went on in the Sixties, and Ditko was not the only artist to bring it to comics; though, compared with the ruck of his contemporaries, he was probably the only one to make good comics out of it - and I say it though I loathe his views. I defy anyone not to cringe at the would-be Marxist bits in Pratt or among Crepax' T&A, and the American undergrounds, though less absurd, are just as dated. But then, Ditko is a genuine fanatic who does not care a damn about the rest of the world; his contemporaries did care. Most of them aspired more or less consciously to be part of that contemporary intelligentsia whose mixture of media glamour and intellectual prestige was probably the major feature of the decade; their artistic ambition, itself a good thing, carried along a good deal of social ambition, of lust for "intellectual" status, and they had an unfortunate tendency to replicate the worst features of the "intellectual" caste. Hence a narrow and idolatrous idea of literary work (like Pratt's indebtedness to Joseph Conrad), or the arrogance of those who thought that they were going to bring "maturity" to the juvenile art of comics, or the immature need to prove one's adulthood by being shocking for its own sake (the young Moebius was a notable offender, and as for the American underground artists, it would be hard to find one who was not thoroughly adolescent). It was part of these problems of culture and attitude that hardly a single cartoonist of that generation can be found who did not suffer from political ideas either jejune, or extremistic, or pre-digested and ill-conceived; and always expressed with heated arrogance.
Kirby suffered from few such problems. A top professional in comics for more than thirty years, he had no arrogance towards the artform; immature he was not - if he had ever had any nonsense in him, it had been knocked out by war and parenthood; and his combination of fairly basic education and intense intellectual curiosity, although it led him to follies such as taking Erich von Daeniken seriously, certainly preserved him from the narrow culture of the average "intellectual", who never read Virgil and would not know what you meant if you spoke of Kalidasa or Chuang-Tzu, but who feels that his almost wholly nineteenth- and twentieth-century education makes him part of the learned caste. Nothing, in matters of the mind, is more important than knowing that you do not know; Kirby knew, as he told Will Eisner, that he was a Lower East Side kid and would never be anything else, and, compared with this basic humility, even an interest in Daeniken became a minor matter – indeed, in The Eternals, an artistically fertile one.
The comics he worked on until 1970 were brilliant formula entertainment, artistically no bolder or more profound than those of his predecessors; though, had he died in 1969, he would still have been remarkable for the variety of genres he had successfully tackled and for the visceral energy he had brought to them. A Herriman or a Segar, a Schulz or a Caniff, chose a genre early and worked in it throughout their careers; there is no evidence of Schulz ever wanting to draw much of anything besides funny little round-headed kids, or Caniff anything besides bold and handsome adventurers in exotic lands. It was rare, at least among major artists, to find someone like Alex Raymond, successful in three separate genres - the heroic fantasy of Flash Gordon, the colonial adventure of Jungle Jim and the crime shenanigans of Secret Agent and Rip Kirby. But by 1970, Kirby had done, and done brilliantly, humour, western and crime comics; superhero, magic and horror; science fiction, editorial cartoons and heroic fantasy; kid gangs, history, classics adaptations, and war; love, dreams and monsters. It was as if he had spent his life mopping up every kind of story that could possibly be told in comics. To the best of my knowledge, there is only one known genre that he did not tackle: to wit, pornography (and don't tell me that he could not have done so, since his contemporary Steve Ditko could and did).
Marvel comics pushed the formula approach to its absolute limits; with Fourth world, Kirby burst right through it. It was, firstly, a deliriously rich mixture of everything he had ever done in comics, from love to monsters to war to crime to horror, with the superhero aspect little more than a coathanger for every other kind of genre idea known to him; but more than that, it had an unprecedented freedom in conception, approach and treatment, that made it like the opening of a new ocean. At Marvel, Lee had been responsible for the creation of a new formula, broader and more flexible than any ever seen before, and with great potential for elaboration; but a formula it still was. Its purpose was still to entertain; to entertain, perhaps, with a smile and a tear; but hardly ever to deal with reality with all masks off. Stan Lee would not - perhaps he could not - subject the reader to the demanding, possibly even harrowing, experience of a full take on reality, not mediated by formulas and stereotypes. Yet, at the same time, Jack Kirby, as an artist - but also as a co-plotter - had reached an altogether new depth of treatment. His line had hardened to iron firmness, reducing the component of pure caricature in his art; his composition had broadened and simplified, resting on large areas of solid white and black like rocks; and his eye had been seized by a demon of vertiginous depth, so that every panel was in three dimensions and there never was a figure, however badly drawn, that did not either leap at the reader or sink back into an endless perspective to the very end of vision.
As for the stories, the levels at which he now aimed can be gauged by his repeated statement that Galactus was God. This has been poorly understood because people forget that Kirby was Jewish; and, unlike Lee, whose views hardly ever sound like anything else but sentimental Christianity, Kirby took his Hebraism seriously. Galactus is the God of Jewish nightmares, God as Job thinks of Him on his ash-heap, unknowable, terrible, visiting the most dreadful evils on His people for no visible reason, or for reasons that have nothing to do with humanity. Another Jew, Will Eisner, later embodied a similar nightmare of Him in A contract with God. The point is however that Kirby - if not Lee - was, by the time of the Galactus three-parter, ready and willing to deal in comics with the highest possible realities; and to deal with them in a way that was neither sentimental, nor arrogant, nor formulaic. The notion that Galactus is an image of God, whatever you may think of it – and Kirby never quite went back to such a distant, uncaring view of the Almighty in later work - is a daring and thought-provoking one; it does not make for facile edification, it does not indulge either in oily devotion or in juvenile blasphemy, but it makes a powerful and valid point. As Kirby liked to insist, he always told the truth; he did not fob off the reader with facile piety or equally facile atheism, but presented a picture that demanded a reaction on the deepest levels of intellect and personality.
When, therefore, he started his great epic, he was at a stage of artistic development no cartoonist before him had achieved - in absolute control of a matchless array of narrative approaches, and mentally ready to deal, not in pre-digested views or bland generalities, but in the absolute truth of the world as he had experienced and felt it. Other long-serving professionals with fine track records, like Pratt and Ditko, were also making the effort to turn their comics from unintellectual entertainment to art; but, if I was to put my finger on the thing in which their work - though often magnificent – is inferior to Kirby's, I would say that they did not have quite the same commitment to the art of storytelling as such. People like Steve Ditko used stories for a further purpose; to Kirby, the stories were the purpose. Fourth World is far more about the art of storytelling than Mr.A or all but the finest episodes of Corto Maltese. The view of the world is not imposed on the material from above, but develops from the narrative material itself. The moral of the story is not, as with Ditko's work - or with a lot of the worse Pratt material - a rigid framework inside which the story must develop, but a deeper layer of meaning born from the free development of the story events, once they are considered as a whole.
While it goes without saying, therefore, that such a piece of work from such a man carries a definite political view, since it embodies his view of the world, the point is that his politics will not be, like those of Steve Ditko, scrawled on a placard and hoisted aloft. They will be part of the texture of the story, to be read in the way the characters exist and interact, in what they are and what they do to each other. Kirby's first concern is to tell a story; but as the story is built out of fifty-four years of life experience and a visceral, heroic approach to the art itself, it will necessarily carry a view of the world; with no restraint, no hypocrisy, no pandering to others' views, and no compromise.
Fourth world is an uncompromising piece of work. And possibly the most uncompromising item in it, the one that concedes least to lazy expectations and reader habits, was, until management interfered, the one he picked up in the middle - Jimmy Olsen. Kirby is so keen to throw the reader straight into his own imaginative world that he even commits what could be construed as narrative mistakes. Things come much too fast. We start with the unprepared appearance of a forties Simon and Kirby kid gang, the Newsboy Legion; most of Kirby's readers at the time must never have heard of them - I know I did not; and before we know it, there is a new owner for the Daily Planet, a "whiz wagon" and the discovery of a previously unknown "wild area" harbouring mysterious new societies, within easy reach of Metropolis. Kirby has altered the whole Superman world, throwing all the readers into a welter of new situations without so much as a by-your-leave. The effect is somewhat murky, bewildering; it feels nervy.
But what really makes those Jimmy Olsens so befuddling is that their basic thrust is out of kilter with received views. The story does not take us where we expect to be taken. The very idea that, within a few miles of a great metropolis - or Metropolis - there should live, above the surface of the Earth, a whole outcast society unknown, except by rumours, to the urban readers of Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen's newspaper, is hardly a part of standard comic-book themes. But before we know where we are, we have heard that the bikers of the Wild Area are only the outer skin of the mystery. In the middle of American territory, indeed not very far from Metropolis, a yet more unknown tribe, the "Hairies", have built a whole alternative silvan town, holding itself up among the great trunks of ancient trees - and have vanished; and the dialogue suddenly grows tense and expectant as the scared biker Yango describes the mystery and terror of this legendary race.
Kirby should, in my view, have taken more time before taking us to the Hairies and the Mountain of Judgement, especially since, at first, it is not clear that the two things are connected. The mystery is barely raised before it is solved. But whether or not this is a narrative mistake, the point of the story clearly is that we are travelling from the outside inwards. The Wild Area is simply the outside edge of the mystery; the Outsiders, who seemed at first to be Olsen's goal, were themselves only on the edges of the greater secret he had really been sent to reach (and, unknown to himself, to destroy).
And when we reach the heart of the secret, we find what may well be the most significant single picture in the whole story. The Hairies only feature as it were as the gateway to the secret: as the land of the Outsiders is a by-product of Hairie activity, so the Haires themselves come from somewhere else themselves. Superman, who had seemed all at sea among the Outsiders, takes charge and leads the young heroes, who had been stubbornly pushing on against his advice, through a clearly governmental underground complex, to find the first of the answers they had been seeking. And what do they find? ...their own fathers. To misquote Pogo's famous misquote, "We have met the mystery, and he is us".
They are in a government project set up when the genetic code of man was cracked (something which is being systematically done as I write by the Human Genome Project, promoted and financed by the American government). The Hairies are among its most successful products. Their peculiar genetics make them gifted technological wizards, but their technologies - like the deserted tree-top city Habitat, where Yango and the Outsiders now live - have a distinctly non-violent, environmentally friendly flavour.
The Hairies used to live in Habitat, and why they abandoned it we aren't told; but we may make a guess. They left for the Mountain of Judgement, a monstrous, monumental vehicle patrolling a "zoomway" on the road to the Project. Now, the Project already knows, even before Olsen and the Legion arrive with their rigged car, that they are under assault from a shadowy enemy. Evidently Habitat, environmental paradise or not, was too exposed; a more secure site was needed, and a powerful sentry mechanism such as the Mountain of Judgement to guard its entrance. The arrival of the Evil Factory meant the ejection of the Hairies from the paradise of Habitat, and its threatening presence has conditioned everything we now see
of the Project and the Hairies. We are in the middle of a community at war.
It cannot be underlined too strongly that the Hairies are part of the Project; and the Project is part of the American Government. Kirby is not starry-eyed (except about the Hairies), and is hardly blind to the dangers of genetic experimentation, even in well-meaning hands: Jimmy Olsen makes the point to Superman with some force, and Superman changes the subject, from which we gather that he has no real answer to Jimmy's concern. He himself, after all, has compared the Project to the Manhattan Project, which made the atom bomb: hardly a reassuring parallel! The point seems rather to be that research and discovery happen more or less under their own power. Kirby does not believe in burying discoveries under the sand and hoping they will have no further results; he believes that a discovery is a final event, it cannot be undone. Its consequences cannot be shirked; especially since there is always some sleazeball around to take advantage of them if you do not. The Evil Factory did not achieve the DNA reading itself, but rather stole the results of the American Project and immediately got busy making all sorts of mischief out of it.
Kirby is, in that sense, something of a progressive fatalist, believing that the advance of knowledge is as inevitable as the next sunrise. There is a saying that "s**t happens"; less pessimistically, Kirby tells us that discoveries happen, and that what matters is to cope with them. From the moment the DNA code was cracked, there was no going back. The point of the Project is to tackle its results responsibly. And the results can be momentous: what the Project is dealing with is neither more nor less than a new evolutionary step. One, or rather many, new human races, is/are being born. As Kirby showed later in Silver Star, the conscious scientific work of mankind may itself be the reason for the next step of evolution, the one that makes homo sapiens obsolete; in Marvel's mutant mythology - descended at several removes from an earlier Kirby idea - mutants happen as if by chance, by the irrational whim of fate; in Fourth World, and in Silver Star - even to some extent in Machine Man - they happen by the internal logic of the daily work of human beings.
And there is another thing. The problem of how to overcome the destructive and exploitative aspects of human activities is central to Kirby's whole thought. He is very conscious of the wasteful and dangerous aspects of normal human life, and regards them as, in the long run, not just dangerous but lethal. He does not seem to believe in a policy of small steps and incremental improvements; at least, there is no trace in any of his stories of a belief in the possibility of reform, it is never even discussed. His stories with an environmental background hinge on a strong feeling that only a further evolutionary step, a genuine change in the nature itself of mankind, can save it from - to put it brutally - drowning in its own dirt. Regular readers of this magazine will remember that I analyzed all of his 2001 #s 1-7 in that light.
This is where the Hairies come in. The main role of the Hairies, who take almost no part in the war against the Evil Factory in spite of being among its targets, is to embody the great, almost messianic hopes Kirby had for the sixties counter-culture, and, more generally, for future generations. They are definitely constructed on hippy late-sixties beliefs, which the 54-year-old artist probably took more seriously than many hippies less than half his age. Environmentalism, non-violence, egalitarianism, music and mind-expanding experiences are the very core of what they are about. Environmentalism: they built Habitat, a forest town which, right from its name, is clearly designed as the answer to sixties "ecological" concerns. Egalitarianism: their captain Jude (surely a tip of the hat to Paul McCartney's song) is "elected", a fact he punctiliously mentions to Superman. Non-violence: Kirby has even toned down his usual massive anatomy to make them look slender and unaggressive – they prefer to deal with attacks by misdirection and technical skill. And their electronic-psychedelic-musical "trip" of #137 is an utopia of art as the most direct and profound form at once of communication between people and of personal self-realization.
This brief scene tells us why Kirby had so passionately seized on the more or less inchoate beliefs and hopes of love, peace and rock'n'roll that tried to shape what came to be called the "counterculture": his own personality answered to them on the deepest level. It was Kirby's very strong belief, forcefully stated dozens of times, that every person has the potential of good, "creative" art, and that talent is not restricted by nature to a more or less small elite of gifted people; and it was more than his belief, it was his most profound lifelong experience, that the arts are at once the most perfect means to convey personal and universal truths, and also the finest and most satisfactory avenue to self-realization. After all, that was what the art of comics had done for him: it had given a voice to be heard to one of the lowest of the low, "a Lower East Side kid"; and it had afforded him a successful and deeply fulfilling life. A lifestyle based on music, art and mind expansion, even envisaging them as avenues to a future without violence (Kirby never stopped having nightmares about the War) could not but answer his deepest desires and beliefs; and the fact that, for a few years, such a lifestyle seemed not only possible but forthcoming, must have meant, for him, almost the beginning of utopia.
It is worth noting that, by 1970, there had been sufficient warning of the dark potential of the counterculture: Altamont, Charlie Manson, the crime and violence at Woodstock, dozens of smaller outbursts, and the stunted but unmistakable growth of terrorist movements, had all taken place and been extensively reported. There was more than enough to make older people doubt its benevolence and promise; but none of this seems to have made any impression on Kirby. Or rather, he separated altogether the darkness from the light, as a lot of old hippies do to this day: he placed the violent Outsiders in the no-man's-land between the Hairies and mundane Metropolis, dressed them in sheepskins and leather, and put them on big, ferocious bikes - placing on them, but not on the Hairies, the image of the Dark Sixties. The Outsides are violent, ignorant (Yango sounds like a "grade school reject", to use the American idiom) and rootless, squatting into the Hairies' beautiful domain because the Hairies - the beautiful, unpolluted, innocent images of that first Summer of Love - have gone into hiding. They choose their leaders by trial of combat; the Hairies elect theirs. Both groups form autonomous societies, but the Outsiders simply live on the edges, contributing little and taking everything they find; the Hairies are part of the greater whole that is the Project, and have done a great deal for its technology and art.
The Hairies are the future. They incarnate a progressivist dream, and are probably the only instance in Kirby's work of genetic manipulation (an abiding concern) as unmixedly positive. Kirby was 53: he was not speaking about his own generation or himself. He was looking at his children, and I think that all the warm glow with which the Hairies and all their works are invested comes from the love he felt for them. He believed in sixties idealism, not for himself, but for them.
It is about the secret of life that the rest of Kirby's Jimmy Olsen will be played out, not excluding even the rather wasted #s 142-143, whose issue was a whole planetful of creatures brought to life – and threatened with extinction – by a mad scientist. Nothing was more important and more emotional to Kirby than parenthood, and it is absolutely typical of him that the climax of the Newsboy Legion's journey into all things weird should be nothing else than a multiple father-son meeting. The heart of the connection between the world of the Project and that of the Hairies is incredibly simple: the Project is directly bound with the idea of parenthood because it is about giving birth and raising new generations. It is not casual that the Newsboy Legion's parents should live there: it is the home of the secret of life. And indeed, though we are not told how each of the old Newsboy Legion (plus the history-rewriting Flippa Dippa Senior) should have happened to have a son exactly like him, I think the conclusion is obvious: the children are themselves sons of the Project, and don't know it. One detail supports it: the super-advanced car designs sent by Big Words Junior to Morgan Edge, from which the Whiz Wagon was built, are quite beyond the forties Big Words, who was nothing more than a classic class swot. They are, rather, closely reminiscent of the Hairies' technological abilities, and suggest that the boy may enjoy some aspect of the extra factor that is often found in the minds of Project creatures, both human and alien. The children may well be Hairies themselves.
The purpose of the Project is, ultimately, to raise children; and to raise them, as much as possible, as useful and happy people, with work that satisfies them and is helpful to the community. Therefore the Project pays a great deal of attention to education; as one would expect from Jack Kirby, who, right from a child, had a very strong sense of its importance. A great experience of his was the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, one of many Thirties projects for getting dead-end ghetto kids out of the inner cities and giving them such things as holidays in the country. It will be remembered that Frank Capra's masterpiece Mr.Smith goes to Washington hinges on the attempt to set up a similar project, opposed by land speculators and media barons; and it may be that a cynical modern spectator would feel that Capra was making a great deal out of very little - a sticking-plaster project that will do nothing to amend inner-city poverty and little even for the few children it could reach. But any time we feel such doubts, we should reflect on the importance that a similar small-scale project (still ongoing today) had in the life of one of the century's greatest geniuses. Even before he became a father, Kirby had experienced, as a child, the importance of such things.
Never mind how unusually the Project's children have been born, they are treated as children in a family. That is shown not only in the relationship of the new Newsboy Legion and their parents, but also in a tender little two-pager (JO 146) in which we meet with the paternal relationship of Professor Packard, one of the scientists, and one of the most alien genetic aliens of the Project, Arin. Arin can only live in an airless environment, and therefore we are to understand that the "lad" and his adopted father have never touched at any time in their lives; even as they say farewell, they can only reach out for each other through a thick glass slab. Yet there is no doubt at all that this is a personal and wrenching pain for "father" and "son".
Packard's lack of importance is worth underlining, because it contains an important message. If Packard's character were ever reprised by any of the many writers who have taken up the Fourth World characters since 1972, I think we can all imagine what they would do with him: he would be immediately revealed to be a major player, an important idea man with several major secrets in his head; and there would be some storyline set up about some villain or other trying to abuse or corrupt him or his scientific secrets. This is exactly what Kirby has not done. Packard has no special features; he seems to be a middle-ranking scientific worker in the Project, assigned to Arin as any employee might be assigned to any particular task. The only thing that is notable is the success of his task - the "lad" is super-powered and a nice person - and the paternal relationship he has with him. He is one of thousands of people working in the Project; without this paternal emotion, his story would hardly be worth telling.
The point of the story is this: that in the middle of this super-scientific and rather militarized environment, even as men and aliens are being grown – one might think - like cattle, there is room, and a lot of room, for parenting and individual care. The Project provides it by assigning individual employees to care for some of the growing children. Kirby had already hinted at the role of positive education by picturing a group of Project children playing with a pretty young nursery nurse (#136,p.18, panel 2), an expressive and even rather sentimental picture which clearly made the point that these children were being cared for; but the #146 two-pager explained that, by the workings of the Project itself – Packard was assigned to it: it was part of the duties the Project allotted him – they are brought up, not as the hatchling of some impersonal nursery, but as individuals with parents. And the power of the relationship this generates is a surprise to Packard himself: he has ended up feeling about this result of his laboratory work exactly as he would feel about a child of his loins.
