KEEPING VS. SHARING PT 3

 In my previous recent essays, I've been examining the way two ethical systems, the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing, have interpenetrated human history in the past and continue to do so. principally through their modern manifestations as "conservatism" and "liberalism." However, I added a couple of subdivisions to the mix. Keeping and Sharing can both manifest into extreme forms, both of which can be subsumed under "radicalism." The less extreme forms of both are best described as "meliorism"

Routine political discourse often distinguishes between radical and meliorist forms of liberalism. In the meliorist form, the ethic recommended to those that hold power can be summed up as "You Should Share" such things as rights and privileges with those that do not have (or do not think they have) said capacities. In the world of American civil rights, it's almost de rigeur to name Martin Luther King Jr as an exponent of persuading powerholders to cede power to the marginalized. In the radicalist form, the prevailing argument says, "You Must Share" and the best-known advocate from the same Civil Rights era, Malcolm X, favored the stick rather than the carrot.

Conservatism, though, displays the same two subdivisions. Liberals are usually only able to recognize the extreme form, so that everyone from the KKK to the guy running the Christian cake-shop are viewed as equals in tyranny. Naturally there are specific agents who want to Keep Power under all circumstances and cede nothing.  However, meliorist conservatives display the ethic that "You Should Share," albeit only under the right conditions. Franklin D. Roosevelt earned the reputation of a Liberal for measures like empowering the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Yet, the act of interning Japanese-Americans was fundamentally a conservative act, even if one takes the most charitable view of FDR's action.

And so I come to my first fictional example, that of the opposition between meliorism and radicalism seen in SPIDER-MAN #68-70 (dated January, February and March 1969). Yet to examine this scenario, a little grounding is necessary, since the conflict revolves around one of Spider-Man's support-cast, Joe Robertson. Though introduced in ASM #51, not until issue #55 does Stan Lee set up the newsman's role as a regular character, where he's a voice of reason as against the mule-headedness of publisher J. Jonah Jameson. He's also the epitome of a Liberal meliorist view: Joe Robertson ascends to his position of authority purely on the basis of merit. 

Jumping forward a year and some months, Joe's son Randy Robertson is briefly seen in ASM #67, but only in #68 do we see Randy's purpose: to show Stan Lee's negative view of radicalism. Thus, almost as soon as Peter Parker encounters Randy on the campus they both attend, up comes the shadow of Randy's friend Josh-- who, since he never has a last name, might as well be called Josh X.

Though Lee was often criticized for the piddly nature of the "campus protest" involved here, he shows considerable acumen in showing how militant Josh X is. There's no "hey, how they hangin,'" just, "are you joining the cause?" Lee obviously means readers to find Josh abrasive here and later, even though Peter Parker nominally approves of his cause. The campus protest will tie into Spider-Man's adventure with his frequent foe The Kingpin, but the cause is less important here than showing how Randy, the offspring of a meliorist parent, is being influenced by a radical who demands that the campus authorities "Must Share," while said authorities are taking the radical conservative posture, presumably currying favor with alumni to garner donations (though Lee does not say this).

Josh X is even less appealing in his second scene in the story. Though Randy is the first to invite Parker to help the students fight the good fight, Josh not only acts like Parker owes him allegiance, he addresses a near-stranger as "Whitey" as if he doesn't owe Parker the slightest courtesy. Stan Lee doesn't have Parker react to the racial slur, but rather to Josh's statement that the young militant doesn't think he has to listen to, or account for, the response of the authorities to the protesters' demands. On the next page, an unnamed Black protester casts aspersions on Randy for being "the son of an Uncle Tom," and Josh, for whatever reason, defends Randy as a "soul brother." But it's not hard to imagine Josh flinging the same insult if Randy failed to follow Josh's lead.

The battle between the spider and the gang-lord continues into ASM #69 and #70, but Stan Lee devotes just a handful of scenes to winding up his mini-debate about meliorism and radicalism. In the first of the two scenes above, Joe is aghast that a son of his was involved not just in protest, but in causing damage to personal property, which is something neither Randy nor Josh apologizes for. (In the next issue, Lee changes his mind and says no damage was caused by the protesters.) Randy, probably channeling whatever Sidney Poitier movies Stan had seen, complains that he has to be more "militant" because his meliorist father is part of "the White Man's establishment." Joe makes the more reasonable argument about proving oneself, though oddly, Josh gets the last word, claiming that "we" (meaning Black people) won't get anywhere unless they "kinda shake Whitey up a little." Given that Stan Lee was almost certainly a meliorist, it's fairly generous that he at least acknowledges the rationale of the radicalist in this issue. In #70 the voice of the "Must Keep" authority is at last heard, as the dean admits having failed to listen to the voices of his students, and that he was on their side but was busy fighting the real entrenched interests. the college's trustees. Josh admits the need to think about things a bit more, but no one's ever privy to his thoughts since I don't think he ever appears again.  

So in this late 1960s tale, some respect is accorded the "You Must Share" ethos even if the "You Should Share" is clearly the superior ethic. Yet what about one of the principal franchises of the era of identity politics?

The 2018 MCU film BLACK PANTHER presented audiences with a world where "You Must Share" is the only game in town. However, it's not a power structure based on the racial politics of America. Rather, Wakanda, an idealized African fantasyland, is called upon to pledge fealty to the radicalist ethos. In a loose way Wakanda is also governed by an Ethos of Keeping, though it's implied to be a world without the racial divisions found in the outside world, only a heritage of tribal quarrels that can be solved with rituals of combat. Wakanda keeps its miracle element vibranium out of the hands of the powerful and the powerless alike. However, their isolationism takes a major blow thanks to a poor relation of the realm's hereditary ruler, The Black Panther.   

Considering that T'Challa's uncle N'Jobu is critical to the end of Wakanda's isolationism, the character is barely more than a bare function of the plot. We are never told what radical influencer managed to persuade N'Jobu, brother of the reigning Wakandan king T'Chaka, to betray his country's policies and try to sell weapons to radicals in that hotbed of political activity, Oakland. Nor does the film tell us why T'Challa is so traumatized by the death of his traitorous uncle. N'Jobu's main purpose in the movie is to spawn Erik Killmonger, whom many critics described as the film's "real hero." Even though Killmonger takes over Wakanda with zero concern for its people and with the agenda of using their weapons for his network of blacktivist conspirators (also never defined), all that counts is forcing Wakanda to Share with the downtrodden, "By Any Means Necessary." Of course, Whitey is still the main villain even when no White person is directly involved in Killmonger's plans. Thus CIA agent Everett Ross is automatically a "colonizer" according to one of T'Challa's guardians. Yet none of the Wakandans uses that term for Killmonger, even though he's applying CIA tactics to ruin their country for his own agenda. Even though Killmonger dies, he succeeds in ending Wakanda's isolation. And the audience knows this must be a good thing because the nation starts donating money to American Blacks-- who I guess are supposed to be way worse off than all the impoverished tribes of real-world Africa.            

It's clear from BLACK PANTHER that without any sort of compensatory ethos, the radicalist ethos loses all control of whatever moral compass it might potentially possess. I would like to think that PANTHER's success at the box office was a short-lived anomaly, since most of the radicalist MCU movies since then have tanked. But as another famous Liberal-with-Conservative-tendencies observed, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance."                 

   

NULL-MYTHS: ANGEL AND THE APE VOLUME ONE (1968-69)

 

The best thing about the original run of DC's ANGEL AND THE APE -- lasting just one SHOWCASE issue and six issues of a regular magazine-- was the above house ad.

Now, whenever I first saw this 1968 ad, I had been collecting superhero comics for at least two years. Thanks to an easy-to-reach used bookstore where a lot of kids dumped their comics, I had amassed a substantial collection. (Just as a marker, by the time the first SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted on TV in September 1967, I had read reprints of all the Spider-stories that the show was kinda-sorta adapting.) I didn't have much interest in DC Comics' comedy features, so I never bought any issues of AATA. 

I would have been at least twelve whenever I saw this ad, so I'm not sure my memory is entirely accurate. But what I seem to remember is wondering if the opposition of the "Angel"-- a lithe-looking young woman-- with the brutish (albeit clothed) "Ape" was supposed to have some weird romantic vibe. I may or may not have seen the 1933 KING KONG by 1968, but I'm sure I had heard that there was at least a one-sided amour fou going on there. And everyone knew, without being able to put into words, that the classic fairy tale BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was all about an angelic human female getting mixed up with a hideous male brute. As it turned out, there were no real romantic vibes between the titular "funny detectives" Angel O'Day and her partner, intelligent gorilla Sam Simeon. However, I still think that the artist who drew the ad had a little salacious intent-- for I now notice something I didn't in 1968. I might have mistaken the shape with the logo, the form separating Angel and Sam for an angel's wing-- but now I realize that angel-wings don't have stems. The object separating angelic female and brutish male is the venerable fig-leaf of Judeo-Christian art.     

Two years before AATA, one of the feature's creators, E. Nelson Bridwell, had been responsible for another DC humor-title, THE INFERIOR FIVE. But though both IF and AATA boasted roughly the same sort of cornball comedy, IF at least had a rationale for its parody of superheroes. AATA was a detective parody in which a martially-trained human girl and an intelligent gorilla went around solving mysteries. The creators-- which seems like a committee of three or four guys throwing crap at the wall-- don't supply even a minor rationale as to why the two of them run a detective agency, which kind of conflicts with Sam Simeon's regular job, that of drawing comic books. (He sometimes used Angel as his model.) 

Given the short duration of the original title, I gather most readers weren't even slightly curious about the feature. It didn't help that most of the time the stories wandered about from one comic schtick to another with no rhyme or reason, as if the creators thought the fans would simply go ape over a funny gorilla-- or, in a different fashion, over the toothsome hottie Angel, ably rendered by artist Bob Oskner. Probably those Silver Age fans who remember AATA at all recall that it was one of the first times any comic satirized the figure of Marvel editor Stan Lee, in the form of Sam's wacky editor Stan Bragg. However, Stan himself had already produced better self-satires than anything in this comic.

The only story that stays on point in spoofing detective cliches is issue #3. In "The Curse of the Avarice Clan," Bridwell produces a decent sendup of the "old dark house" subgenre, in which some mystery killer seeks to murder all the heirs to a fabulous will. But how many kids in 1968 even knew what an "old dark house mystery" was? 

The last story in the last issue was the only one in which there was a very minor suggestion of gorilla romance. In it, Angel goes on a date with a handsome rich guy, and Sam spies on their date, allegedly because he doesn't think the judo-savvy lady detective can defend herself against a masher. The main schtick of the story is that Sam repeatedly masquerades as human beings like waiters and cabbies, and that only Angel can see through his transparent disguises. It wasn't much of a story, but it's the only one in which there's a little conflict between the two principals-- and though the jealousy angle is only potentially present, it would finally get some development (albeit not much better executed) in the 1991 ANGEL AND THE APE reboot, to be discussed in a future post.     

ADDENDUM: I posted the house ad on CHFB and another poster thought the "leaf" was a bunch of bananas. If any of the serrations along the edge of the shape were rounded, I would agree that this was a good possibility, since banana jokes were frequent in AATA. At the same time, I admit that the shape dividing the characters doesn't look like a real fig leaf-- and in both canonical and pop art, most fig leaves need to have those compound blades in order to cover all the unmentionables.  My revised theory is that the house-ad artist knew he needed to leave room for the letterer to place the logo on the shape, so what he produced is more like a standardized serrated leaf-- and there's no reason to associate leaves with angels and apes unless you're thinking about primeval angel-ape encounters.

IDIOMS PULPY AND TALKY

 I saw FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS yesterday, and prior to crafting a review for the movie-blog I decided to mediate on why I found myself less than captivated with the movie, even though it's a general improvement on the standard MCU product.

One problem is that of all the previous adaptations of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR have been unable to put across the unique blend of action, pathos and imagination found in the comic book, with the possible exception of the 1967 FANTASTIC FOUR cartoon, which was largely a straightforward recycling of the original stories. Though the FF was the conceptual flagship title of Marvel Comics, the property was owned for several years by 20th-Century Fox, and thus was outside the grasp of the Disney-owned MCU during its formative years. Disney's acquisition of the FF franchise in 2019 finally made it feasible to integrate the FF into the current universe. Because for the last five years most MCU movies and television shows have become creatively constipated and generally unprofitable, some fans held out hope for STEPS to be a game-changer. At present STEPS' box office won't even come close to the billion-dollar mark of last year's DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE, so it's not going to alter the MCU's downward spiral in terms of popularity. It's possible that STEPS will enjoy aesthetic prominence, though, given rumors that the company plans to go forward with an Avengers-FF crossover and possibly a STEPS sequel after that.

                

  While I've not followed any of the publicity statements by director Matt Shakman or the movie's four credited writers, it seems obvious that they all sought to choose a particular SF-idiom not found in previous adaptations. In my 2023 essay THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION, I expatiated on two idioms that had influenced the science fiction genre since its formulation in the late 1800s, calling them, informally, "gosh-wow" SF and "philosophical SF." The new names in my title. "pulpy" and "talky," are not meant to be any less informal, but they're a little more direct in encapsulating distinct forms of narrative appeal. "The pulpy" appeals to sensation and emotional melodrama, while "the talky" appeals to ideational concepts. Some critics automatically prefer the latter idiom, as per the nostrum that "science fiction is a literature of ideas." Yet not all ideas are good just because they share a didactic approach, any more than all sensations are good because they share a sense of immediacy.

In the SEEDS essay, I argued that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as well as other Marvel raconteurs to a lesser extent, tapped into the two rough idioms of science fiction because they all had been exposed to those idioms in the 1950s through the proliferation of SF cinema in that decade, and they sought (as their chief competitor DC Comics did not) to convey both idioms to their young readers. The Marvel creators were not the first in comics to do this. But when they crossbred the SF idioms with the superhero genre in the 1960s, they created a self-sustaining mythology-- one that the MCU managed to adapt for cinema, to some extent bringing things full circle. 

The Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR was the most fully developed blend of the two idioms, allowing the quartet of heroes to vary their adventures from high-tension battles with supervillains to meditative reflections on man's place in the universe. But because Shakman and company chose to launch STEPS with their take on the highly praised "Galactus Trilogy," they clearly chose one idiom over the other-- and thus failed to capture the rich dichotomy of the original comic book. I know that during my viewing I found myself pulling back from all the homages to 1995's APOLLO 13, which was fine for a mundane film about space-exploration but became draggy within the context of a superhero franchise film.      

Indeed, the only places in the film that I saw any of the "pulpy" idiom of the original comic was in sequences showing how the "real" Fantastic Four had been adapted into kids' cartoons, like that of the 1960s Hanna-Barbera toon mentioned above. Shakman et al advocated a "talky" approach to their Galactus story, and yet didn't succeed as well as they might have with respect to some of the ideas they raised. I'll engage with more specifics in the blog-review of STEPS, but I wanted to get these idiomatic divagations out of the way first.   

NEAR MYTHS: KNIGHTS IN BLACK SATIN

This week, before I get to my second mythcomic of the month, I have to precede it with a whole lotta near myths that went into its making, thanks to Marvel Comics' palimpsest approach to universe-building.

I begin with the five-issue BLACK KNIGHT comic, appearing in 1955, right on the cusp between Golden and Silver Ages. Through most of the Golden Age, the company then known as "Timely Comics" generally had a reputation of slapdash but energetic product, represented largely by the superheroes. That genre began fading in popularity in the late 1940s, and in 1951 publisher Martin Goodman re-branded his company as "Atlas." For the last six years of the Golden Age, the look of Atlas comics was arguably more streamlined than that of the best-selling Timely titles. Still, even editor Stan Lee didn't speak well of Atlas's general output, though he had nothing but praise for his sometime collaborator Joe Maneely. Lee collaborated on the first two BLACK KNIGHT stories and Maneely drew most of them, though Fred Kida and Syd Shores also contributed pencils. 

Despite the popularity of the PRINCE VALIANT comic strip, launched in 1937, my impression is that comic book publishers did little memorable work with the "knights in armor" adventure-genre. Hollywood by contrast, came with a smattering of knighthood-films in the forties and fifties, one of which, the 1954 BLACK KNIGHT, may have played some minor role in the genesis of the Atlas title. 

What Lee and Maneely produced was a medieval take on the Superman/Clark Kent trope. In the sixth century, King Arthur reigns over most of Britain, but there are conspiracies against him by his kinsman and nephew Modred (significantly called "Modred the Evil" on the first issue of BLACK KNIGHT). Merlin wants an agent to spy upon Arthur's enemies at court, so he convinces the noble aristocrat Percy of Scandia to pretend to be "Clark Kent," a contemptible weakling. Once Percy susses out the schemes of Modred, his wife Morgan Le Fay, or any other evildoer, the apparent wimp dons the armor and helmet of The Black Knight and thwarts the plot.

Barely any marvelous material appears in the five issues. Merlin has a crystal ball in which he sees visions of distant events, and on one occasion he obscures his movements with "powders" that create a concealing cloud. The other marvelous element is the weapon Merlin gives to Percy as the knight's primary weapon: a sword always called "The Black Blade." No origin is given for the weapon, and only once is it seen to perform an act beyond any commonplace blade, when the Knight uses the sword to chop his way through an iron door.

The stories are all decent though unexceptional formula. The only stories that come close to myth involve the relationship between the aristocracy and the commoners, as when Percy liberates a town from the onerous taxes of a local official. The standout aspect of the series is Maneely's refined art, and that of other raconteurs emulating his approach.

The medieval Black Knight was then forgotten, but in 1964 Stan Lee used the name for a Giant-Man opponent in TALES TO ASTONISH #52. This Knight used an assortment of gimmicks incorporated into medieval weapons and flew around with the help of a winged horse. Three years later, after the evil Knight had made only a handful of appearances, in AVENGERS #47, Roy Thomas introduced a heroic Black Knight: Dane Whitman, nephew of the deceased villain. There was no attempt to connect either costumed cavalier to Percy of Scandia until MARVEL SUPER HEROES #17 (1968).

In this story, delineated by Howard Purcell, writer Roy Thomas posited a conclusion to the story of the original Knight. At the fall of Camelot, Modred and his forces ambush Arthur and his men at Percy's castle. Percy for some reason is not as his own castle, but Merlin sends him, as the Black Knight, to succor the King. The rescue attempt is of no avail. Arthur is slain, and so is Percy, struck from behind by Modred, though the hero manages to slay his assailant as well. Thomas adds two major details: that the Black Blade was forged from a meteor with mysterious properties, and that Merlin forged another weapon with leftover meteor-material. Somehow Modred got hold of the weapon, which either was a dagger or was reworked into a knife (Thomas is confusing on the point). For centuries the Black Blade lies concealed in the castle of Sir Percy. Then Dane Whitman visits the castle, and the ghost of Percy informs them that they are not only distant relatives, the 20th-century Black Knight must now employ the magical sword against modern evil. Then the ghost of Modred, repeatedly called "Modred the Evil" by Thomas, provides Dane with his trial by fire. Modred enthralls a modern-day man, transforms him into a knight with a flying gargoyle for a steed and gives the pawn the deadly dagger. Dane, atop his own airborne mount, defeats the pawn, though the meteor-dagger is lost at story's end.

One interesting aspect of the Thomas story is that the author attempted to promote Modred as a supernatural opponent for Dane in case a series was greenlighted. No such series came about in the seventies, though the Knight had a couple of adventures with his enchanted blade. Then he was sidelined for a time so that in THE DEFENDERS the newly minted Valkyrie could assume both Dane's weapon and his mount for her exploits. 

Though medieval characters like Merlin were sometimes evoked in the early seventies, there had been no knighthood-serials since the 1955 BLACK KNIGHT. But monsters were on the rise in that period, and in a 1972 WEREWOLF BY NIGHT story, Gerry Conway alluded to a book of evil magic, the Darkhold, which was plainly Marvel Comics' version of Lovecraft's Necronomicon. The evil book was referenced a few more times, but in 1975 the tome received an explicit role in the story of Marvel's first "new" medieval character-- though he was more wizard than warrior.

The first two issues of MARVEL CHILLERS were devoted to "Modred the Mystic," a sorcerer from the Arthurian era, but one whose life was preserved until 1975, at which point two modern archaeologists revived him from a deathless sleep. Both of Modred's exploits are written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by two separate artists. Marv Wolfman is credited with having "inspired" the story of issue #1, which is edited by Len Wein, while the second issue has no additional writing-credits but Wolfman is credited as the editor of Modred's second and last appearance.

The two issues contain no creator-observations regarding Modred's provenance, nor are there any references to any version of any Black Knight. It is faintly conceivable that none of the three writers had read the 1968 Thomas story, though not likely. But it's impossible than none of them would have heard of the established role of Modred in Arthurian lore, where he was still the schemer who dooms Camelot, though he's more often Arthur's illegitimate son rather than the king's nephew. Morgan LeFay, usually a sorceress in most iterations, is not anything of the kind in the 1955 comic, and she's not mentioned by Thomas, though in Thomas Modred the Evil is made into a supernatural threat.  

The second Modred, though nominally a "hero," also partakes of one major horror-trope: that of a man possessed by a demon. Back in the Arthurian era, King Arthur commands that Young Mage Modred, apprentice to a wizard named Gervasse, must report to Camelot and become apprenticed to Merlin. Arthur and Merlin are not seen "on stage," but the tempestous Modred does not want to accept anyone's tutelage. He is so rebellious that, against his mentor's advice, the young man seeks out "The Tower of the Darkhold," the repository of the forbidden magical book, in order to empower himself. Through an involved set of circumstances, the power of the Darkhold possesses Modred and then propels him into an unaging sleep, until he's awakened to a new life in 1975. Once he has awakened, he soon finds that though he has the superlative magic power he coveted, the unnamed demons/spirits of the Darkhold expect him to serve them.

Not much happens in the first story except Modred's revival, his backstory, and his use of magic to free himself and his two support-cast members from being buried alive. The second story loosely implies that, had Modred's adventures continued, he would have faced a continuing struggle with the Darkhold. In line with this plan, Modred spends the rest of CHILLERS #2 fighting a demon called "The Other." After some very unimpressive pyrotechnics by artist Sonny Trinidad, the story closes with Modred telling his friends that he expects to suffer further attacks by the Darkhold's malefic influence.

The only time the Modred mini-saga comes close to the mythic is when Modred awakes from his sleep, a scene well rendered by Yong Montano. This trope was clearly a callback to stories in which King Arthur is unnaturally preserved so that he may rise to defend England from future threats-- though there's a weird irony about shifting that story-trope to the history of a character who shares the name of Arthur's greatest enemy.

Whereas the five issues of THE BLACK KNIGHT are efficient if simple formula work, MODRED THE MYSTIC is messy and rushed, lacking a strong concept that might given some depth to the narrative of a semi-possessed sorcerer from the sixth century. A few years later, Roger Stern made Modred a vital part of an extremely intricate AVENGERS continuity, sometimes known as "The Yesterday Quest," and some Marvel fans know him mostly as a puzzle-piece in that design.

But before Modred was initiated into that design, he had one more limited guest-starring role to play-- and that would link him to a modern superheroine. That heroine did have a sort of "knighthood" connection-- though, as my next essay will show, she was less likely to have known a "Sir Bors" than a "Sir Boar."  

ADDENDUM TO SAVING TIME IN A BRAIN

 

In the preceding essay, I forgot that AMAZING ADVENTURES wasn't just dropped, but that it was converted into Stan Lee's experimental all-Ditko book AMAZING ADULT FANTASY, which in its final-issue form (with the "adult" ironically knocked from the title) had at least as much consequence for Marvel as FANTASTIC FOUR #1. I'm sure I read of the title changeover many times but it just got filed in the "not significant" pile of memory engrams.

The switch from AA to AAF is also more significant than I'd thought, now that I've read all the AA issues online. Though there's some Ditko mixed in to AA, the six issues are heavily Kirby-dominated. Kirby's SF/monster books had evidently been selling OK for Atlas/Marvel even during DC's big superhero push around 1958. But AA must not have sold well, possibly indicating a sea-change in reader preferences. (It would take a little longer for all of DC's SF-anthology titles to become saturated with continuing-character features.) So the transition to AAF shows Stan Lee trying to aim a little higher than the usual Atlas/Marvel fare, building up Steve Ditko's aesthetic. I've never seen any commentary on AAF by either Lee or Ditko, so I have to accept the reigning fan-theory, that Lee hoped to emulate the model of TV's successful TWILIGHT ZONE anthology. I doubt he was counting on that as a long-term strategy for success, given the fate of EC Comics about six years previous; he probably just hoped for decent sales while enjoying seeing his stories brought to life by Ditko's burgeoning talent.

Most of the Kirby stuff in AA is pretty ordinary fare, by the way. I need to do a writeup of the "Doctor Droom" stories some time, because they definitely don't feel like "New Marvel."

SAVING TIME IN A BRAIN

 First, a pair of juxtaposed quotes:

Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.

Why couldn't the past, present and future all be occurring at the same time-- but in different dimensions?

The first quote comes from one of the most famous graphic novels of all time, the 1986-87 Moore/Gibbons WATCHMEN, and the sentiment expressed, about the relativity of time, is "intricately structured" as one of the narrative's main themes.

The second comes from a very obscure Lee-Kirby story in AMAZING ADVENTURES #3 (1961), "We Were Trapped in the Twilight World." It wasn't reprinted until the twenty-first century and I doubt that even its creators remembered it after they tossed it out within the pages of a title that was finished in three more issues.

Not only was"Twilight" probably tossed off to fill space, the idea of the simultaneity of past, present and future isn't even important to the story's plot. Shortly after the handsome young theorist expresses his time-theory, he drives away with his girlfriend. A mysterious, never-explained mist transports them both back into Earth's prehistoric past. While the two of them flee various menaces, the scientist theorizes that entities from the past sometimes entered the mist and showed up in modern times, so that ape-like cavemen generated the story of the Abominable Snowmen. Grand Comics Database believes that "Twilight" is one of many SF-stories plotted by Stan Lee but dialogued by his brother Larry Leiber, so, failing the discovery of original Kirby art, there's no ascertaining which of the three creators involved generated the line.

In both stories, the simultaneity of all times has one common function: to cast a light on the limits of human perception. But is there any truth in it?

In the sense of the bodies we occupy, not really. Our common experience as human beings is that our bodies are totally enslaved by the unstoppable progress of the future, remorselessly eating away the present the way age eats away at our bodily integrity. And yet, one organ in the body defies future's tyranny and that's the brain.

Only in the brain are past, present and future truly unified-- though one may question if Moore's correct about how "intricate" the structure is, even assuming that the paradigm applies only to fully functioning human brains. And time is only unified in terms of a given subject's own memories. I don't necessarily dismiss such things as "memories of a past life" that are usually cited in support of reincarnation. But those type of memories are not universal enough to draw any conclusions.

My ability to "time-travel" in my memories is similarly limited. I can summon a quasi-memory of being on a family vacation and finding MARVEL TALES #11 at an out-of-town pharmacy. That comic book would have been on sale in 1967, probably a few months prior to its November cover-date. I *think* this was probably the first SPIDER-MAN comic I bought, but my memories of reading the comic for the first time aren't that specific. I hadn't been buying superhero comics for even a year before late 1967, having only started doing so after the debut of the BATMAN teleseries in early 1966. That show would have finished its second season in March 1967, at which time I might have felt venturesome enough to sample a superhero I'd never heard of. Now, for me to be correct on that score, I would have to have bought MARVEL TALES before the 1967 SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted that September, since it's also my memory that I watched that TV show when it first aired. But can I be *absolutely* sure that I didn't see the cartoon before buying the comic book? Not in the least. I *seem* to remember that I'd bought enough back issues of SPIDER-MAN or MARVEL TALES that when the cartoon debuted, I recognized how some of the cartoon-stories had been adapted from the originals. But that memory is not reliable.

In the WATCHMEN chapter referenced, Doctor Manhattan can foresee future events as accurately as he can memories of the past-- or at least, whatever past experiences are important to Moore's narrative. And in "Twilight," the protagonists live through the past so as to clarify events in their present. But total narrative clarity is denied real people. However, what our functioning memories do preserve are not just every single experience we have, but the IMPORTANT experiences. 

Humans can travel in time from SIGNIFICANT THING #1 to SIGNIFICANT THING #4566 via chains of mental association. Some of these associations might be subconscious. I once noticed that Robert E. Howard's barbarian hero Kull first appeared in print in the August 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, about three or four years before Siegel and Shuster collaborated on their landmark hero Superman. We know that Siegel named Superman's dad after himself, making "Jor-L" out of the first syllable of the author's first name and the last syllable of his last name. But whence comes "Kal-L?" Did it come from... "Kul-L?" Even assuming that Siegel read the Kull story, there's no way of knowing if he consciously remembered reading it. But IF he read it, maybe something about the hero's name appealed to Siegel, and he simply recycled that appeal when it came time to name his own hero.

We do not know if anything survives the demise of our physical forms. But while we are alive, it's entirely logical to build up our stores of significant memories, whether we can take them with us or not. To borrow from the title of an old English poem, those memories provide us with our only "triumph over time."

One last Significant Thing: the last issue of Marvel magazine AMAZING ADVENTURES was cover-dated November 1961, the same date assigned to FANTASTIC FOUR #1. So that arbitrary date becomes something of a threshold between the Old Marvel Way of doing things, and the New Approach, which would, as I've argued elsewhere, saved the medium of comic books from extinction.

MYTHCOMICS: "I AM THE LAST MAN ON EARTH" (STRANGE WORLDS #1, 1958)

I went into a lot of detail in this essay about the importance "philosophical SF" had on both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1950s, prior to their contributions to "The Marvel Superhero Universe." Thus it behooves me to provide at least one example of such a story from the period following Kirby's return to the company.

Since the title STRANGE WORLDS only lasted five issues, from 1958 to 1959, it was relatively easy to read all five in quest of mythcomics with a philosophical slant. Now, I never claimed that every story at Atlas/Marvel was in the vein of Arthur C. Clarke (any more than was true of the celebrated EC SF-line). Of the fifteen or so comics stories in STRANGE WORLDS, most of them are "gotcha" stories in which some fool or criminal gets his destined comeuppance, or the opposite, in which some steadfast character's travails are validated, if only in the viewpoint of the reader. But LAST not only has a philosophical bent, it also manages to breathe new life into what's often considered one of prose science fiction's hoariest cliches.

After the first two panels, most of the story is related by the "last man" in flashback, though by his own testimony he will continue alongside what is implicitly "the last woman." The flashback establishes that this Future-Earth has banished the majority of human ills, but has remained hemmed in by biological constraints, since humans still only live eighty years or so. But then a report from a space-mission brings back biological data on the planet Xernes. On Xernes, the atmosphere  will allow humans to endure for five hundred years. This immediately fills almost all human beings with a passion to emigrate, to leave a qualified paradise for a garden where the grass seems much greener.

I'll mention in advance that the emigrants never suffer, to the reader's knowledge, any dire "gotcha" fate. As far as the reader knows, all of the emigrants are wildly successful in reaching Xernes, settling the planet and living extended lives, with absolutely no consequences. Such a gotcha, in my opinion, would have diluted the author's philosophical question: is it right for people to desert the "cultures that were born out of the pain and suffering of countless millions of people?" The Last Man doesn't go into detail about why he considers the emigrants "ungrateful, greedy fools." But he avers to the Last Woman that the two of them will manage to build an "even better world" even without all those greedy souls; a world that implicitly will be marked by the struggles and triumphs of their ancestors.

As noted above, there are a number of science fiction stories which end with a man and woman of some futuristic civilization traversing space and becoming stranded on some Edenic alien world, with the big revelation that the man's name is Adam and the woman's Eve, with the clear implication that the "alien" world is really "our" Earth. Usually this trope is simply a bland attempt to recast an archaic myth into science-fiction terms, and some iterations, like the 1966 WOMEN OF THE PREHISTORIC PLANET, are content to use the situation with characters not named Adam and Eve. At most the point is to present the reader with a conclusion that suggests the continuity of the human species in a paradisical environment, wherein Adam and Eve will be fecund and multiply.

Fecundity, however, is not the point in LAST, but rather, continuity between the labors of the past and the labors of the future. Whatever the original intent of those who first told the story of Genesis, the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden has usually carried a tragic note. Because the first two human beings disobeyed God, they were cast out of Paradise and forced to labor for their bread, and Eve, who may or may not have been able to bear children in Eden, became the first woman to know the pains of childbirth. The broad implication of Judeo-Christian myth is that through future obedience to God, mortals have a chance at some "Paradise Regained," if only in some afterlife.

LAST, however, anticipates a contrarian reading of the Story of the Fall along roughly the same lines as the 1967 STAR TREK episode "The Apple." This story also validates the virtues of hard work and the necessity to bear children in response to limited lifespans (though to be sure the STRANGE WORLDS author does not bring up the question of restoring the population except in the most general sense). But since the TREK narrative deals with a genuinely alien race, that tale cannot address the question of a continuity with earlier, hardier cultures. 

LAST interestingly takes both God and The Serpent out of the picture. All that exists is the temptation of Planet Xernes, which takes the place of the Tree of Life in Genesis. Clearly the world of The Last Man is one in which humankind has never been in Eden at all, but has from the start pulled itself up by its bootstraps, and after centuries of suffering, has finally rejected violence and endorsed reason. But whereas all the children of Adam and Eve in the Bible have no choice but to labor by the sweat of their brows, the human beings in LAST *are* given a comparable choice-- not in terms of being free from labor, but in terms of being able to enjoy the fruits of one's labor for five times the normal human span. The story's author does not quite say that shorter lifespans force humans to take more risks and to live life more fully. But I think that's implied, and it was certainly a familiar enough theme in 1950s prose SF.

While the penciller of LAST is unquestionably Don Heck, I've been circumspect about the writer because the story bears no writer's credit. Stan Lee usually signed any story he fully wrote, so it's possible that either (a) he had nothing to do with this tale, or (b) that he supplied a basic idea to a writer who completed the actual plot and dialogue. GCD also notes that LAST was used as a template for two other "Adam and Eve" anthology-stories with altered plots, and of those two, Lee DID write and sign one. It's my opinion that writers usually find it easiest to swipe from themselves rather than others because their own earlier works always encode the writers' own story-priorities. In any case, there are also a handful of other Lee works that stress the necessity for risk and conflict, most notably THE ORIGIN OF THE SILVER SURFER. So in my mind, I AM THE LAST MAN ON EARTH is a prime example of Lee himself using, or at least signing off on, the use of science fiction for philosophical reflection.

ADDENDUM: I neglected to note that the title contains a mythic irony not present in all similar Adam-Eve SF-tales, since this version of Adam is at once "the last man" and "the first man" on Earth. "The last shall be first," indeed.

THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION

For once, I got permission from a forum-poster, one DoctorHermes428, to reprint here a post from CHFB that sparked my current essay. The conversation involved in part talking about the reasons why in the late 1960s Jack Kirby declined to accept any offer Stan Lee may have made re: taking over Lee's de facto Art Director duties for Marvel Comics, and why he Kirby decided instead to sever relations with Marvel in 1969 and go to work for DC Comics under head editor Carmine Infantino.

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I don't see how Jack Kirby would have enjoyed being Art Director, no matter if it paid better. He loved working on his own, sitting up all night over the drawing board. Being in an office with people coming in and out all day, the phone ringing, arguments over a cover layout... all this would have annoyed him beyond bearing (as I see it).
What happened at DC really broke Jack Kirby's heart. His grand plans for the Fourth World books where he had some of his favorite creators working for him, as well as his ideas for a line of black and white magazines, weren't supported by DC (mostly Carmine Infantino). 

I don't think Kirby was ever the same after this. He still turned out some fine comics but increasingly he was jus going through the motions. The spark had been damped. He wasn't out to change the world or create his life's work, he just settled down to make a living. I know most people will say, "It's just comic books, what's the big deal?" but to me it's one of the biggest missed opportunities in pop culture ever. -- DoctorHermes428.

Now in my essay STAN, JACK, AND JOE STUFF I mentioned in a general sense the way the Marvel Universe had in essence undermined Kirby's independent way of doing comics, though I didn't address any long-term creative consequences. I wrote:

From my outsider's standpoint, though, the synergy between Kirby and Lee was far different [from the Simon-Kirby collaboration], and I think Kirby got from Lee as good as he gave. But Kirby had spent a long, long time spinning his fantasies on the drawing-board, and he probably wasn't all that sensitive to the ways in which Lee MAY have turned him in new directions. Years later, when Kirby was seeking to reclaim his original art from the recalcitrant Marvel Comics, the artist said many dismissive things about Stan's talents, and some fans have taken those pronouncements as gospel. To me, the obvious fact that Kirby's later solo productions abjured the "soap opera" approach of Marvel proves to me that Kirby did not originate this approach to characterization, despite the fact that together Kirby and Lee could do soap-opera tropes better than anyone else in the business.

Kirby, unlike most professionals in his time, had an incredible capacity to remember and rework dozens of story-tropes from dozens of genres, so that much of his work, alone or in collaboration, seems like raw creativity unleashed. But he didn't always know the best way to channel his own creativity, precisely because he was so many-faceted. In addition, that creativity insured that he could never be entirely comfortable just cranking out stories for a client like DC Comics, and even if he didn't especially want to return to Marvel in the late 1950s, the ways in which his talent responded to Stan Lee's innovations re-defined the superhero genre at a time when the comic-book medium lay on the edge of extinction. Without the intense fandom that arose from Marvel Comics, it's possible that few readers would even care these days about sorting out who did what, and why.

 First, I should enlarge on what I said about "new directions." 

I've the impression that both Lee and Kirby read widely in many pulp genres as young men, and that, unlike many of their contemporaries, they were able, whether with one another or with other collaborators, to convey that enthusiasm to their young reading-audience. And of all the genres they both absorbed, the most important one to their 1960s collaborations was the genre of science fiction.

Now, the prose pulps of the 1940s would have offered a rather schizophrenic view of the genre, for one could encounter on the stands both pure "gosh-wow" space operas like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Captain Future alongside and deeper, more thoughtful philosophical meditations by authors like Asimov and Heinlein. So far as I can tell, though, almost no comics raconteurs of the 1940s tapped into the philosophical side of SF. All, including Lee and Kirby, were totally invested in "gosh-wow." And I will extend that argument (for reasons that will soon become clear) to the employment of SF in American cinema. In the decade of the 1940s, nearly no "philosophy-SF" was attempted, and the few attempts hardly came close to touching the hem of Fritz Lang's trouser-leg.

But comic book SF took on its own schizophrenic division in the very early 1950s. Going by my partial reading of the early issues of DC's flagship  SF-anthology comic, STRANGE ADVENTURES (1950), I would say that DC remained steadfastly committed to the "gosh-wow" method. In the same year that ADVENTURES debuted, William Gaines' EC Comics published its two SF-titles, WEIRD FANTASY and WEIRD SCIENCE. EC experts would know more than I of Gaines' reading-proclivities. But for whatever reasons-- which probably include the proclivities of contributors like Wally Wood-- EC's two magazines proved to be more in the spirit of "philosophy-SF" that had been best propagated in the forties by ASTOUNDING MAGAZINE and in the fifties by THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (said magazine having begun in 1949). To further support the sense of a changing ethos, American cinema suddenly began investing heavily in "thinking-man's SF," with DESTINATION MOON in 1950 and both THE THING and THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL in 1951. 

I can't say at present how much the changes to comics-SF and movie-SF affected either Lee or Kirby in the first half of the fifties. I don't think by that time either man was likely to be reading pulp magazines any more, whether the magazines were simple or sophisticated. But I have the distinct impression that both of them kept a weather-eye on the new breed of SF-movies, and that both men began emulating cinema's version of "philosophical SF" in their comic books, and MAYBE imitating EC's efforts in that department too. How much these emulations affected their work in the early 1950s is not important to my thesis. But it seems without question that when they started collaborating on SF-work in the late 1950s-- even on the works where Stan's brother Larry Leiber provided the dialogue-- they began giving the characters in their short-term anthology-tales more characterization than anything one could see in DC's gosh-wow stories of the decade.

The DC gosh-wow dynamic also informed the company's SF-heavy superheroes of the late fifties and early sixties: FLASH, GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE. But when Lee enlisted Kirby to collaborate on their flagship superhero title in 1961, the first thing they did was to work in one of the tragic monsters they'd been using in their SF-anthology tales, but as an ongoing hero. 

Though Lee and Kirby were very different individuals and had very different attitudes toward their creative endeavors, I think the synergy between them came from a common understanding that you could tell far more engaging comics-stories if the characters were at least on the same level of a movie like 1953's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. From the years 1961-1964, that's as far as their aspirations went.

Then, during the years 1965 through 1967, Kirby goes through a period of incredible dynamism in terms of designing new characters. In FANTASTIC FOUR alone, he visualized the Inhumans, Galactus and the Silver Surfer, the Kree, and the Black Panther in that short period. It's possible, as Kirby apologists believe, that Lee simply let Kirby create everything during that period and just filled in the dialogue. But there's no literal proof that Kirby never picked up any ideas from his editor and collaborator. One can only say that Lee probably could not have designed a character to save his life. That said, before Kirby wasted time coming up with a design for comics' first Black superhero, I think it's axiomatic that Lee would have signed off on spotlighting such a character. Indulging some of Kirby's wilder flights of fancy didn't mean letting the artist do whatever he pleased. Lee was the editor, the guy who made decisions about what did or didn't benefit the image of the company he was building into a small empire. So if Lee had wanted to turn King T'Challa into just another White jungle-hero, that's what Kirby would have been obliged to draw.

As DoctorHermes says, in the late sixties Kirby saw that for the first time his works were getting a little serious attention from the non-comics world. He didn't think, probably correctly, that he was getting due credit for his contributions-- though to be fair, outsiders would not have cared about the specifics of who created what. As I said in my earlier essay, only hardcore fans kept track of such minutiae. For the last two years of his second Marvel tenure, Kirby reined in his creative impulses, probably to keep from giving away any more profitable ideas to the company. One anecdote suggests that Kirby might have shown Stan Lee a few rough ideas he'd later take to DC Comics. When some interviewer related this anecdote to Stan Lee, the Marvel editor typically said that he didn't remember one way or the other.

Ironically, one of the models for Kirby's "Fourth World" was not a major SF-author, but the foremost fantasy-author of the sixties decade, J.R.R. Tolkien. To be sure, the only thing Kirby really took from Tolkien was a general metaphysical attitude toward the struggle between the Good of New Genesis and the Evil of Apokolips, a theme not present in most SF prose works. But almost all of the imagery of the Fourth World stemmed from science fiction, not fantasy. 

What Kirby presented in the Fourth World was usually "gosh-wow" SF garnished with occasional philosophical content. Nevertheless, the scripts he wrote were fully as ambitious as those he co-created with Lee. I think it's likely that, aside from just wanting to be independent of his collaboration with Lee, Kirby hoped to establish his Fourth World as an artistic rival to the Marvel Universe he'd helped build.

I like many fans wish that Carmine Infantino had allowed the Fourth World story to come to a decent conclusion. But even given such circumstances, I don't think Kirby-at-DC had a chance in hell of challenging the popularity of Marvel. I hypothesize that in the early years, both Lee and Kirby probably enjoyed, as much as any professional adults could, the fannish pleasure of having two heroes from different features clash. At least I can't look at the 1964 "The Hulk vs the Thing" and see anything but two creators having fun, rather than just hacking out a job for pay. But when Kirby went to DC, the only way he could prosper at that company-- where various characters were parceled out into separate feifdoms-- was to keep his creations isolated from everything in mainstream DC, apart from some minor usages of Superman, Jimmy Olsen, and new incarnations of the Guardian and the Newsboy Legion. 

By 1970, though, the DC approach of keeping their features largely isolated from one another was beginning to lose favor with the hardcore fan audience. Those fans were a minor subgroup of the general audience, of course. But the casual comics-readers weren't ready to commit to Kirby's big project. Could the hardcore fans have made the Fourth World profitable enough to keep it going a little longer? No one can possibly know. All we know is that comics fandom of the early 1970s was divided on the merits of the New Kirby Universe. I've seen a fair number of fans reminisce that they just couldn't get into Kirby's rather eccentric scripts, and that may be because they'd become accustomed to the greater quality control seen at Marvel under Lee's editorship. I'm fairly sure that Don Thompson expressed contempt for the Kirbyverse in his fanzine NEWFANGLES, just a year or two before he and wife Maggie began writing for the tradezine THE BUYER'S GUIDE.

I concur that after the premature cancellation of the Fourth World books, Kirby never again sought to equal the incredible creativity of either that creative era or of the 1965-67 period. Some particular ideas are very good; some are pretty bad. As for mainstream comics after Marvel's classic period, I don't see a lot of writers and artists seeking inspiration from either prose or cinematic SF with the intensity that I discern in the works of Lee and Kirby. More often, I saw the tendency to rework tropes from the Lee-Kirby days, or from standout SF-comics of the sixties, like the Fox-Infantino ADAM STRANGE. (Chris Claremont riffing on the ALIEN movies is not my idea of a meaningful SF-influence.) Kirby's creative decline mirrored the demise of both gosh-wow SF and philosophical-SF in the comics medium so far as I can see, as Lee's linking of superheroes and soap-opera melodrama (which merits separate discussion) took precedence. 

And that's as good a place as any to end these somewhat doleful meditations.

FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2

 I first used the terms "formal postulate" and "informal postulate" here, but I've devoted many earlier posts to sussing out which aspects of  a story appeal to the intellect, which to the imagination, and which to a combination of both abstract "vertical values."

But as I want to try out the new terms on something, it's time to break down some examples in terms of the didactic and/or the mythopoeic potentiality.

The famous EC Comics story "Judgment Day" (WEIRD FANTASY #18, 1953) is my selection of a story that appeals only to the didactic potentiality, and thus is a pure formal postulate. Symbol-hunters like myself would search in vain throughout Al Feldstein's story for any of the symbolic discourses familiar in prose science fiction-- discourses about whether robots can take on a wide variety of human traits, or man's quest to conquer the cosmos. Feldstein subordinates everything in this one-story universe to making one pedagogical point: that even in the far future, the scourge of bigotry will still exist, improbably incarnated in artificial beings-- despite the intimation that actual humans have overcome bigotry, which is the point of showing the galactic inspector to a Black man.

Since this essay-series started with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the reader will notice that it's no coincidence that I'm going to pick particular stories by each to illustrate two other types of vertical value.

I mentioned that some stories combine the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities, and this combination appears in the Stan Lee-John Buscema story "Origin of the Silver Surfer." For this story, Lee-- almost certainly the dominantly creative member of the team-- sought to give the character more humanity than the "science fiction angel" in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR, who was essentially beyond commonplace humanity. Lee's new origin not only posited that the  Surfer had once been a mortal alien humanoid, Norrin Radd, but also that he hailed from Zenn-La, a civilization that had advanced so far that it held no challenges for one as restless as the future hero. This new element had a didactic purpose-- beware of becoming too coddled by advanced technology-- but there's a mythopoeic quality to Norrin's discontent as well. He's seen as a throwback to a more venturesome era, one who would be more suited to Zenn-La's frontier era. In other words, the Silver Surfer was just a "space cowboy."

Then Galactus comes calling, making a mockery of Zenn-La's defenses as the gigantic alien prepares to devour Norrin Radd's homeworld. Here Lee follows through on the loose God the Father/Jesus the Son opposition that arguably appeared in the Galactus Trilogy. But this time the Surfer is not an inhuman angel sacrificing himself for Earth-humanity; he's a mortal sacrificing his freedom to save his own world. So he's a cosmic Christ-cowboy, but significantly, this mythopoeisis still carries a didactic message. As the Surfer bids his beloved farewell before beginning his servitude to Galactus, he tells her. "Let not the spirit of our ancestors be lost a second time! Let not our people grow soft and indolent!" Norrin Radd gets his earlier wish, to emulate the ways of Zenn-La's early explorers, for now he can range the entire universe in his quest to find non-inhabited worlds for his master. Even the Surfer's estrangement from his girlfriend resembles the sacrifice of similar pleasures by heroes in Western films, in order that they may serve a greater cultural cause. So "Origin's" vertical values include a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates, though in this case I find that the mythopoeic postulate predominates.

Lee's story-- which may be the finest single story he ever wrote without input from "The Other Big Two"-- was the beginning of a series, but for my selection from Kirby, I choose a conclusion, the end of the NEW GODS series, issue #11, which bears the curious title, "Darkseid and Sons." Some fans speculate that prior to scripting this story, Kirby had been told the axe was about to fall upon the majority of the Fourth World. Thus he had but one issue to present some rough thematic conclusion to his series, while leaving the door open for a follow-up. An earlier issue had established Kalibak, son of Darkseid, had been captured by humans following Kalibak's inconclusive battle with his frequent rival, the heroic Orion. So Kirby chooses to match the two powerhouses against one another for his NEW GODS finale.

In early NEW GODS issues, Kirby had dropped broad hints that Orion might bear some shadowy relationship to Darkseid, Lord of Apokolips, and then he let fall the other shoe in NEW GODS #7. That story explicitly stated that Orion, Darkseid's son, was raised on New Genesis from perhaps age five onward, while Highfather's son Scott Free was raised on Apokolips, in an exchange one might call "hostage-fosterage." So it's a little anti-climactic when Darkseid makes a reference to Orion and Kalibak having fought as "children," though apparently neither warrior remembers growing up alongside the other. During Orion's battle, he more or less guesses that he and Kalibak are brothers. Kalibak himself has apparently never told of his parentage, but even the basic idea inflames him with nascent sibling rivalry.

The title actually gives the game away: the final revelation is not that either sibling, but that of Darkseid's own history. NEW GODS #7 also introduced the reader to both Heggra, Darkseid's mother, and Tigra his wife, also Orion's mother. There's no didactic point to this revelation, but there's a very big mythopoeic quality evoked by Kirby. Darkseid he complains that his two sons "darken my future as surely as their maternal forbears ruled my past! My mother, Queen Heggra! Orion's mother, Tigra! And the sorceress Suli!" It's not just an instance of misspeaking for him to include Heggra, who was obviously not mother to either of Darkseid's sons. Symbolically, he's including himself alongside his sons as having been "hag-ridden" (or "Heggra-ridden?") by powerful women. He wanted Suli, who possibly complemented Darkseid's own evil by spawning the brutish Kalibak. But Tigra, the choice of Darkseid's mother Heggra, unleashed from the seed of Darkseid's loins a force for good, a son capable of opposing his father rather than serving him. The story strongly suggests that Darkseid comes to admire the son who fights him, even though he retaliated for Heggra's murder of Suli by an act of indirect matricide. 

Kirby got one final chance at a sequel to NEW GODS in the graphic novel HUNGER DOGS in 1985, but he didn't bring up this maternal trope again. Did the artist, who was at least lightly conversant with some of the famous plays of Shakespeare and the Greeks, just happen upon the same trope so frequently evoked by Greek playwrights, in which stalwart heroes are undone by conniving females like Medea, Electra, and Clytemnestra? I think he incorporated the maternal motif into NEW GODS because he understood its dramatic appeal, at least on an instinctive, mythopeoic level. But because he doesn't have a didactic point to make with these revelations, "Darkseid and Sons" can only be what I term an "informal postulate," because there's no attempt to subject the correlation to intellectual cogitation.