New Gods #6 (1972)
by Jack Kirby
This cover promises gods, laser guns, sea monsters and mummies.
At least it accurately portrays the insanity of a Jack Kirby story.
We begin with a sea monster attacking a ship.
I should point out that we’re at issue 6 and we still have no clue WHY Darkseid sent these monsters to attack Earth. He did say that he’s looking for the Anti-Life Equation hidden inside human brains, but what does that have to do with Spiky Moby Dick?
We spend 4 pages (including a splash page and a double-splash) on this monster attacking a single boat. While it’s beautifully drawn… it’s Jack Kirby, of course it is… it would really help to know why we should care.
Three civilians… including a woman who looks like she’s cosplaying as a mermaid… witness Orion coming out of the water.
Orion saves them by, what else, magnetizing a raft.
These people BARELY survived a giant sea monster destroying their ship and just witnessed a weird flying alien flying them to safety… but the father is weirdly more interested in calling his daughter a pacifist (???) to be particularly surprised.
I know this is the DC universe, but BE IMPRESSED DAMMIT!
Orion then spots a mummy standing over a nearby wooden ship… as you do… and decides to help because it’s “the way of the Astro-Force”.
Which makes me wonder: Kirby apologists, as anyone ever attempted to give the slightest explanation for what the Astro-Force is even supposed to be!?
Hidden beneath the wraps is Lightray, because at this point Orion is so incredibly devoid of personality that ANYONE would be a better protagonist.
Although his facial expression is creepier than most Apokolips villains.
We could have SEEN Lightray fight the Deep Six and get captured, sure, but that would have been more interesting than following Orion playing gangster or fight a clam.
Yes, Orion, you truly look upset.
One of the big problems of this dynamic is that we’re asked to feel for the friendship between these two, but I’m not buying it in the slightest because A) we’ve BARELY seen together B) they’re both unbelievably generic C) every single time their emotions are addressed, it’s by one of them talking about it out loud and nothing else.
EVERY. TIME.
Every single civilian in this series is introduced like this.
“Hello, I am Name Surname and this is my occupation. My only character trait is this one thing.”
Kirby simultaneously drops this nightmarish alien design AND has his characters IMMEDIATELY know everything they need about it, dropping any potential for any kind of mystery.
And then Lightray manages to bring the creature back to its factory setting.
This took no effort whatsoever, mentally or physically.
This is all so that the reset creature can summon the Super Moby Dick Of Not Space…
…but that doesn’t lure out the villain controlling it, a guy named Jaffar.
WON’T ANY OF YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THE GIANT SEA MONSTER!?!?
In theory, having father and son argue about pacifism would be a great idea for a 1972 comic.
Especially since Earth is supposed to be in the middle of a war between alien planets.
So what the heck is it doing IN A STORY WITH A SEA MONSTER!?
It doesn’t help that this is the most heavy-handed way I’ve ever seen a 70s comic address this conversation, WHICH IS SAYING SOMETHING.
For crying out loud, use this plot for the issues where there’s an actual space army invading Earth!
Or even the issues with the gangsters, at least it would make some kind of sense for the father to want the son to fight some armed men!
How is fighting Nazis comparable to fighting a sea monster!?
Then again… this is the DC Universe, where WWII was absolutely bonkers.
The son notices that the weird machine reset by Lightray has changed again, and in fact it summoned Jaffar back.
Okay now THIS is a more believable reaction.
The pacifist son decides to attack Jaffar and is punished with the worst torture possible…
…being turned into Silver Surfer.
Orion then shows up to straight up DISINTEGRATE Jaffar!!!
Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen.
They decide to send the daughter back home on Orion’s harness (why don’t they fly her? Or use a Boom Tube™???), with the father too broken to leave his son’s side.
This has all just been the preamble of a Big Dumb Fight between Orion and the Deep Six.
Instead of helping in the fight, Lightray tied up the father (WTF!?), even if the boat is now on fire (double WTF!?) and the son has turned human again (triple WTF!?).
And then they charge at the big sea monster riding this thing.
I have no idea what the heck is going on.
To be fair, the splash page DOES include an explanation.
I just can’t make sense of it.
Whatever just happened works, and the big monster is blown up.
And so we end with the father being left alone in the middle of the ocean, presumably starving to death after witnessing the death of his son.
And there goes any level of sympathy I could have had for Orion and Lightray because HOLY CRAP are they completely indifferent!!!
Historical significance: 0/10
We never see again the father or the daughter. Or if the son was disintegrated in the final blast.
Silver Age-ness: 4/10
An ultimately nonsensical plot.
Does it stand the test of time? 0/10
Oof, this one’s reeeally bad. Even the Kirby artwork, which is stellar as usual, isn’t enough to overcome all the negatives.
First of all, Orion is still a black hole of personality. Lightray was supposed to balance that, but he’s either equally bland or incredibly inconsistent. He’s been portrayed as the fun-loving one who enjoys life and friendship, but according to Orion he’s a schemer that treats everyone like pawns? What kind of sense does THAT make!?
The Deep Six are utterly generic bad guys. Usually one of the bright spots of the Fourth World is that the Apokolips characters have lots of personality and stage presence, but not these losers.
The worst part, however, is the entire subplot about the humans. If Kirby was attempting to say something profound, he managed to get all the way around it and come off as shallow and confusing.
What’s the message supposed to be here? Besides I suppose “war is bad”, but if that’s the case it falls flat when you end with a bombastic call to a last-minute bombastic explosion.
It’s also rather uncomfortable to read. I’ll give the comic that the son’s death is VERY effective in how it’s brutal, but Kirby completely squanders it.
We could’ve had the father realize his son was more brave than he realized, or that being against war doesn’t mean you can fight for a good reason… but instead he’s just left to die alone as a broken man.
Not to mention, the son’s death is utterly meaningless.
I’m not giving this one a negative score only because the message is too unreadable be truly harmful.
Splash pages: 4 out of 26 (15%)
Splash + double splash pages: 6 out of 24 (23%)
Most Kirby panel
Most WTF panel
Turtles are known to swim as fast as dolphins and manta rays, right?
Interesting letters: future DC writer and editor Rozakis has a good question.
Why is this series even called “New Gods” when we mostly see just Orion? I wonder if Kirby took this to heart when he named “Eternals” after the characters that actually appear in their series.
Darkseid is undeniably the breakout star of the Fourth World. Even though the series starring is son is the one where he shows up the least.
I still can’t believe anyone would ever praise Kirby’s dialogues, though.
The human characters don’t seem to be very well-liked. Plus a rare complain about the artwork, which I agree with.
I haven’t talked about it because the Legion’s 9-panel grid is so much worse than anything Kirby ever did that I’ve built up a tolerance for repeating layouts.
Well maybe the problem is that ANYONE ELSE would be a better protagonist than Orion.
I would argue about the historical significance slightly, only because that final splash page is pretty iconic in the history of Kirby’s art… even though it makes absolutely no sense.
Sorry to again pick at an obvious nit, but I’d bet money it’s his son Farley Sheridan is calling a pacifist, and not his daughter.
Kirby was interesting in the way that he did seem to genuinely admire the American hippie generation – I’m not sure if it’s because that generation were the ones who were treating him like a god at the early comic conventions or what, but Kirby sure never would’ve portrayed Peter Parker scorning campus protesters the way Ditko did. It seems informative that a World War II combat veteran like Kirby would portray the character in this story who would’ve been his peer in real life as an obnoxious blowhard using his military service to belittle his son, only to cower before a threat that that son was willing to stand up to. Kirby died a few years before Tom Brokaw published the book The Greatest Generation, which essentially deified the WW2 generation in America and made any criticism of them a virtual taboo, but you get the feeling Kirby would’ve rolled his eyes at the whole thing had he lived to see it.
Farley Sheridan drags his kids on a boat trip that neither of them particularly seemed to want to be on for the sole purpose of belittling his son who he can’t stand and is so full of himself and his own perceived greatness that he considers himself an equal to the two actual gods in the story and kind of thinks he can boss them around a bit. Then when he’s confronted with the actual situation he’s gotten his family into, he has a complete meltdown and his supposedly useless son has to take charge, and ultimately the gods use him as a prop and then abandon him when he’s of no further use to them, alone and with no family left. He thought he was the main character, but he’s just a broken old windbag adrift at sea.
It’s pretty harsh stuff, and while I’m not entirely sure what message Kirby was trying to get at, it’s clear that he felt more at home hanging out with the weirdos at Comic Con than he ever would’ve sitting at the bar at a VFW hall trading war stories with the other WW2 veterans. He didn’t seem to have much patience for that sort of thing. When his arm was finally twisted into doing a WW2 comic (other than Sgt. Fury, which he had bailed from as soon as he could), it was the Losers – about as modest a team as there ever was, about guys who got the job done because they had to and didn’t have much use for glory, which was good because they rarely got it.
At around the same time, Kirby’s old partner Joe Simon created Prez, which seemed to argue that the U.S.A. would be better off if teenaged hippies and Native Americans were running the place. Simon & Kirby were a pretty progressive couple of old dudes for the early 70s. They both seemed to believe the kids were alright, and that their own generation didn’t have all (or even many) of the answers.
Yeah, I’m older than some but too young myself to really get what a generation gap meant. And you’re leaving out the Forever People….