There’s pretty much no denying that Jack Kirby is ‘The King’ of all comic writers and artists. His wild and innovative ideas, his unrelenting work ethic, and his ability to pack more action into a single panel than most comics pack into an entire book, all add up to Kirby being one of the most influential forces in making comics what they are today.

Recently, DC Comics published the first volume of the Fourth World Omnibus, a collection of four different comic series beginning in 1971 that Kirby wrote, drew and edited ALL BY HIMSELF, all at once, and all of which interwove to tell a greater tale about the world of Apokolips trying to take over our Earth. In ‘Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen’, ‘New Gods’, ‘Mister Miracle’, and ‘The Forever People’, Kirby introduced a collection of characters so diverse that they were always a pleasure to experience, and many of whom still are important elements in the DC Universe today. Creating and controlling four books is no small task, but even during his mid-50s, Jack Kirby was going strong.

Of course, he was going weird a lot of the time too - but that’s part of the Silver Age (and early Bronze Age) charm. Here are ten panels from the Fourth World Omnibus that, all for different reasons, have made me love Jack Kirby.

1) Now, Jimmy Olsen went through more than his fair share of crap, but that kind of thing just happens when you hang out with superheroes. He’s been turned into a giant turtle, a gorilla, a Viking, grown a beard (under circumstances which are far more sinister that they might seem), found himself with six arms, married to a gorilla, and even became a dirty hippie. In the above panel, Jimmy finds himself in the underground labs of Project Cadmus, which has been growing strange duplicates of Superman, Jimmy, and the whole Newsboy Legion. I mean, if I were going to grow a duplicate of someone, I’d sure pick a newsboy who perpetually dressed in a SCUBA suit and called himself ‘Flippa Dippa’, wouldn’t you? I’d also make some of them 7 inches tall, just for the hell of it.

Superman knew about this stuff all along, but decided to omit these little details in his conversations with Jimmy. Not so much as a “Oh, by the way, there’s an army of mutant YOUs underground somewhere, but it shouldn’t be a problem unless the giant green one somehow breaks out in comic-book fashion, so, like… don’t freak out,” from the Man of Steel.

Jimmy meets his enormous, verdant doppelganger. And this is why I love Jack Kirby.

2) Of course, the Giant Green Jimmy broke free from his holding area because of the machinations of evil operatives from Apokolips, of where there were many, many factions infiltrating Earth. And of course, each faction needed a leader, and none was more terrifying than Granny Goodness.

Kirby created any number of truly eclectic characters in the Fourth World, including the dwarf Oberon, the death-like Black Racer, and Anti-Life cult leader Glorious Godfrey, but Granny was a stroke of genius. Talking of herself in the third person and mercilessly beating her bumbling minions, Granny’s primary job was, get this, the head of an orphanage. Genocidal evil was just a hobby. Misbehaving children-slash-soldiers would be sent to the X-Pit, one aspect of which was a large, clear box with buttons that allowed you to choose how to be tortured, from fire and ice, to poison and drowning in mud.

Just look at that transformation between the two panels above! None but Kirby could deliver such a purely psychopathic enragement as convincingly. I suggest Bea Arthur or Ed Asner (who voiced her in the JLU cartoon) for the casting call.

3) Speaking of ‘goodness’, issue 139 of Jimmy Olsen fell victim to one of the odd celebrity appearances that peppered and plagued comics of the era. Why would Don Rickles appear in a DC comic book? The reasons are lost to time, and mild embarrassment, but it still remains rich in campy kinda-awesomeness.

But wait - this isn’t Don Rickles after all! It’s ‘Goody’ Rickles, who’s… some kind of non-evil Rickles twin who happens to work in the R&D department of a newspaper. Now, why there’s a creepy clone of Don Rickles working at a newspaper is never explained, but let’s just assume that it’s yet another poor cloning choice that the 1970s seemed to make so often. Mr. Edge seems just as surprised as we are when ‘Goody’ barrels his way into his offices, and it’s an unusual comedy of errors from there on in, until finally, Goody is stuffed full of explosives (along with Jimmy Olsen and The Guardian) by a gangster and thrown from a truck. Which is pretty much what you feel like doing to anything in your immediate vicinity by the time the comic is done.

What will become of Goody Rickles? Will this ever make sense? We’ll find out in the next volume of the Fourth World Omnibus.

4) With a title like ‘The Forever People (of Super Town)’, you know that you’re in for some out-there sci-fi brain-punching. The Forever People were a brand of hippies that made their way into Kirby’s Fourth World stories (in addition to Jimmy Olsen’s ‘The Hairies’), spouting things about ‘unity’ and ‘harmony’. It was surely unusual for a 50-year old man to be portraying the ‘hippie’ demographic in a positive, productive light, but the Forever People could ‘join hands’ around the ‘Mother Box’, chant a magic word and become / summon The Infinity Man, who had seemingly limitless powers.

Maybe the Forever People weren’t ready to come back to our time, though. When you meet a small, crippled boy, the first thing you do should NOT be to ‘hand him a cosmic cartridge that makes his brain explode into awareness of the entire universe’, and then tell him to shut up while you run away to fight The Mantis. Something about that chain of events doesn’t sit right. I usually save rocking someone else’s perceptions of the universe for at LEAST the second date.

5) Jack Kirby was also known for mixing collage-like elements into his comic pages, and here’s but one example of that. Along the Zoomway, the mysterious bridge that links the Wild Zone to the Mountain of Judgment, things get… wacky. Kirby seems to do this in moments where consciousness is being altered, or things are shifting from one reality to another - in very start contrast to his bold, animated linework. Artists from Bill Sienkiewicz to Sam Kieth would later employ college elements into their comic pages, but Kirby was the originator.

Check out Part Two for another five panels of Kirby greatness from The Fourth World Omnibus! If this doesn’t make you love comics, I’ll personally come over and give you the lobotomy that you so sorely need.

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Article Tags: , DC Comics, Don Rickles, Fourth World Omnibus, Jack Kirby

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