Fourth World: When the Old Gods Die by Jack Kirby, et al.

Trippy, dippy stuff from the King of comics

Jack Kirby, one of the most highly regarded creators in the history of comic books, began his career way back in the 1940s. From the late 1950s through the 1960s, he co-created most of Marvel Comics’ most popular characters, including the Hulk, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the X-Men, and Doctor Doom. In 1970, Kirby left Marvel and moved to DC Comics, where he was given some free reign to develop his own projects. He created three new titles for DC: The New Gods, The Forever People, and Mister Miracle. He was also assigned to an existing DC title: Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. Kirby connected the four magazines into one intertwined narrative arc utilizing a new fictional universe of his own creation, dubbed the Fourth World. (I’m guessing the name arose from the fact that, long before the Marvel multiverse, DC had three parallel Earths inhabited by different versions of their superheroes.) DC Comics recently released a volume of Kirby’s Fourth World stories in their new DC Finest paperback line of full-color reprints, with a second volume planned for the near future. The first volume, subtitled When the Old Gods Die, reproduces roughly 21 issues of comics from 1970 and 1971. This includes a few issues of Lois Lane, not by Kirby, that are very loosely related to this story and really shouldn’t be in here.

The gist of Kirby’s Fourth World is that long ago, in some other dimension, two antithetical worlds were created: New Genesis, home of the New Gods, and Apokolips, home of all things evil. The forces of Apokolips are led by the supervillain Darkseid, who searches for the anti-life equation that will allow him to control the universe. This formula is locked inside the mind of some unknown human on Earth, so Darkseid sends gangsters and monsters to hunt for it, and New Genesis sends heroes to stop them and to protect humans. Characters travel between worlds via boom tubes, which are similar in function to Asgard’s rainbow bridge. The Forever People are hippy teenagers from New Genesis. Mister Miracle is a Fourth Worlder who comes to Earth and assumes the identity of a performing escape artist.

The art in these comics is the typically spectacular and bombastic drawings one expects from Kirby. Surprisingly, however, when Superman appears, Kirby does not draw DC’s staple superbeing in his own trademark style but rather in a more mundane style resembling that of Curt Swan. I can imagine an order coming down from on high: Don’t get creative with Superman! With that one major exception, the art in this book is classic Kirby, and it is beautifully reproduced in this DC Finest volume.

The stories, however, as is typical of post–Marvel Kirby, are hit and miss. After bringing life to Norse mythology with his pantheon of Thor characters, Kirby started creating his own original mythologies of gods and cosmic forces. He began with Marvel’s The Eternals in 1976, and the Fourth World is a continuation of similar themes and elements, but more unrestrained in its weirdness. The most enduring element to come out of all this is Darkseid, but in these stories he doesn’t really do much except show up for brief appearances to look mean and give orders. The three Kirby-created titles are the better material here, but you only get three or four issues of each. There’s an awful lot of Superman, Jimmy Olsen, and Lois Lane in this book, however, and most of those stories are rather stupid. Kirby dredges up characters from the 1940s: the Newsboy Legion, whom no one was asking for, and the Guardian, a generic superhero. Comedian Don Rickles makes a guest appearance in Jimmy Olsen, and as if that wasn’t dumb enough, Kirby creates a second Rickles, a silly fictional doppelganger of the first.

So for the most part, this volume amounts to silly stories with exciting art. The rogues gallery of villains is interesting. The plot involves mentions of DNA and cloning that might have been advanced for their time, but Kirby doesn’t do much more with them than mad scientists creating monsters and evil twins, an idea that’s been around since the Golden Age of the 1940s. The Comics Journal named Kirby’s Fourth World one of the 100 best comics of the 20th century, but I don’t see anything here to merit such accolades. Maybe all the good stuff will be in the second volume, subtitled The Storm of the Battle, scheduled for publication in the Summer of 2027.