New Gods #2 (1971)
by Jack Kirby
Last time, on New Gods: nothing happened.
We now return to the series.
The first page is a splash page of Lightray. It informs us that he’s friendly and personable but still a strong warrior. We COULD have a scene or two of him demonstrating these qualities, sure, but Kirby is such an amazing writer that he skips that nonsense and just informs us about it.
The second page is ALSO a splash page, which recaps the backstory of the series.
It’s a MAGNIFICENT splash page, don’t get me wrong, but do we REALLY need a whole page?
Especially when the following TWO PAGES are a two-page spread!!!
Okay this is going so out of control that it needs a dedicated counter.
New Gods #1: out of 23 pages, 4 are splash pages. That’s 17% of the comic.
New Gods #2: out of 23 pages, 6 are splash pages. That’s 26% of the comic, but if add the double page spread… 35% OF THE COMIC are either splash pages or spreads!
Kirby clearly concentrated on those and not on stuff like a background for Highfather and Lightray. Or giving them a personality.
Especially not when there’s ANOTHER SPLASH PAGE to draw!
Or make that TWO, because we first witness Darkseid’s favorite hobby: sitting on couches.
I’m not kidding. Darkseid looooooves sitting on couches.
Now that he’s comfortable, Darkseid can have his minions fight Orion.
Aaaand Orion wins in five panels. Not surprisingly, considering one of the minions has bricks for hands and… no that’s it, that’s his whole gimmick.
We have JACK FREAKING KIRBY drawing, how is it even possible that every single fight up to this point sucked!?
“We were kidnapped by an alien stone man and barely survived an attack from his minions. Quickly, let’s repeat our first and last names to introduce ourselves, even if we’ve already done it last issue! To the same guy!”.
There are people who SWEAR this is written by the same guy who did the dialogue for Fantastic Four. Sometimes I wonder if Kirby fanatics just look at the artwork without reading the story.
When throwing in a guy with a cattle prod and one with bricks for hands didn’t work, Darkseid them moves to the Fear Machine™.
DeSaad looks a bit different than what we’re accustomed to.
The Fear Machine™ does exactly what you think.
I don’t understand why writers later turned the nature of the Anti-Life Equation as this massively complicated metaphysical concept. It’s EXTREMELY clear what it does.
Meanwhile, Orion introduces his human friends (well, more acquaintances than friends really) to the Mother Box™.
The Mother Box™ is quite versatile, being able to work as a McGuffin Dispenser or as an Exposition Machine.
The Mother Box™ informs us that Darkseid is sending his minions for an invasion. Orion only knows because the Mother Box™ informed him, or perhaps he read the script.
You’d expect the comic to address this, but it’s been 9 pages without a splash page.
So we need one to introduce supervillain Mantis. This isn’t even his first appearance, since he first showed up in Forever People!
(I will review Forever People AFTER New Gods, because I can only take so much nonsense at once)
And then ANOTHER splash page to show that Darkseid’s minions have taken over the Wild Area, the community of super-hippies from Jimmy Olsen #133.
Because Kirby wasn’t content to introduce a million plots here, he also has to address the plots of his other series.
The Mother Box™ also informs Orion that the city has been hit by the Fear Machine™.
Because ORION NEVER DISCOVERS ANYTHING ON HIS OWN and always needs somebody else to tell him everything.
What masterful class of storytelling.
The Mother Box™ tells Orion how to find the device shooting fear rays. Because, again, Orion ALWAYS needs someone else to tell him where to go and what to do.
On paper, Darkseid’s plan IS interesting: he’s searching for the Anti-Life Equation hidden inside the human mind, so he was monitoring people affected by the fear rays to find clues.
If only we had any sort of insight on the effect the rays were having on civilians, instead of generic “we’re afraid for no reason!” cries, it might have meant something.
Also the experience had no lasting effect whatsoever on humans.
Are we really supposed to sympathize with the struggle between “do absolutely nothing” and “shoot some machine that is torturing people”?
No wonder Darkseid is the more popular character to come out of this: how do you root for Orion?
Historical significance: 10/chair
The establishment of Darkseid’s fondness for sitting down.
Silver Age-ness: 10/10
Kirby sure loves his fear-creating machine, since he’ll use a similar device on his Captain America run. It leaves absolutely no mental scars, something you couldn’t get away with today.
Does it stand the test of time? 2/10
This sucked. The plot is barely there, characterization is either absent or it’s just an informed trait, the action is underwhelming (that was a surprise, where’s the trademark Kirby epicness?), and the decompressed storytelling is REALLY distracting.
Saved from a 0/10 exclusively on the strength of the splash pages, most of which are truly a sight to behold… but there’s no real story behind them.
Splash pages: 6 out of 23 (26%)
Splash + double splash pages: 8 out of 23 (35%)
Most Kirby panel
Most WTF panel
I get what Kirby was trying to do, but it’s hard to be afraid of an empty chair.
Cattle Prod and Bricks For Hands are obviously the same guy. A bit of a wonder I don’t think Brola has been seen since, with him being built up to be an elite henchman and surviving the fight…
I suspect the humans need to keep repeating their names out loud because otherwise they might forget they even have names. Even Orion has more personality than they do, and at this stage in his existence, he has precisely zero.
I happened to read this while re-watching Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and was struck by the similarities between Jack Kirby and David Lynch. I’m sure somewhere on the internet someone has already made that observation, but I couldn’t find it if they have.
Both men were legends in their fields who could conjure up startling visuals that hit on a primal level. Both tended to value sensibility over sense – you might not have any clue what they were going on about half the time, but it was usually intriguing enough that you wanted to know. Both could have unusual relationships to dialogue, though in Lynch’s case that seemed intentional while with Kirby, it just seemed he couldn’t help it.
They were both archetypes straight out of American central casting – Kirby the taciturn, cigar-chomping poor NYC street kid who could’ve been one of the Bowery Boys/Dead End Kids, while Lynch was a gee-whiz Eagle Scout from out west with a soft spot for cheeseburgers and milkshakes – who seemed unlikely sorts to generate the outrageous visions that they often did. Both seem to have eschewed drug use but conjured up some of the most psychedelic and hallucinatory images in the history of their mediums.
Both their names became adjectives. I would say that Lynch was at his most Kirbyesque with Dune and episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, where his dreamlike imagery was expanded to a planetary scale full of massive machines and weird creatures (and on Dune, his vision was constrained by outside forces, which is nothing if not Kirbyesque). The Fourth World is Kirby at his most Lynchian – as close as he ever came in his career to being entirely off the leash, he strained to produce something primal. Storywise, his reach far exceeded his grasp, as he continually threw enormous concepts at pages that were too small to contain them and were way, way outside his own ability to write about coherently. It was often impossible to figure out what the heck he was doing, but there was a subconscious power to the whole thing that made the whole fascinating even when the parts didn’t add up.
I doubt that I will ever completely understand Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway or The Fourth World, but the visions of their iconic creators will always draw me back to their work.