THE FOUR COLOR GRIMOIRE
MEDITATIONS ON COMIC BOOK DAEMONS
This is part of No Gods But My Own, Volume 2. Read this if you’re just joining in.
KRACKLE KANON, PART 4
THE LAST KID ON EARTH
At some point Jack Kirby developed a real obsession with the end of the world.
Maybe it was the result of his rough childhood? Perhaps it was a lingering influence of his time in the armed forces, fighting Nazis in World War Two? Could it have been an overwhelming sense of failure after leaving Marvel Comics and not being able to find any measure of success at their rival? Maybe it was just an older man looking ahead and seeing the end of the road?
Whatever it was, Kirby had apocalypse on his mind throughout most of the seventies.
I’m not necessarily talking about apocalypse on a full-on global scale. What Kirby explored during the beginning stages of the twilight of his career in comics was the idea of abrupt and world shattering endings and what that trauma might inspire. From something as small as a man trying to find purpose after losing his father, spanning all the way to the end of humanity as we know it, Kirby seemed like a man searching to find what comes after absolutely everything falls to ruin.
Kirby was dealing with the dark night of the soul here. Humanity at its lowest point, faced with giving in to the bottomless void or fighting its way back into the light. For those of us who have faced off against our own demons, be that failure or mental health, these stories are archetypal touchpoints that can serve as a salve for our more desperate times that Kirby was particularly well-equipped to provide.
GONE, GONE, FORM OF MAN
GONE, GONE,
FORM OF MAN
RISE THE DEMON,
ETRIGAN!
With that dreaded incantation a man named Jason Blood trades places with a powerful spawn of hell that breathes fire and has a penchant for rhyming couplets.
In The Demon, Kirby showed that trauma can forge heroes out of even the worst of beings by showing the personal and cyclical apocalypse of Jason Blood. Even though Blood had been a knight in King Arthur's court, he unwittingly became a pawn in one of Merlin’s machinations to preserve Camelot during a siege with Morgan le Fey. Using his Eternity Book, Merlin bound his half brother, a demon named Etrigan, to Blood in a last ditch effort to stop the enemies at the gates.
Merlin's gambit paid off. Le Fey was vanquished but victory had not come easily. Camelot had been reduced to ruins and Merlin had been so weakened that he had to escape to another plane to heal. But the ultimate price for that last ditch effort was paid by Blood. When he was bonded with Etrigan, Blood was made immortal and his fate was forever tied to the demon.
For Blood this was a gift and a curse, leaving him to endlessly wander the earth. The rise and fall of empires are nothing but footnotes in his long march through time. Allies and lovers age, die, get replaced, and the cycle continues on repeatedly while he is forced to live on. This perpetual wheel of loss makes Blood cynical and shrewd, bringing him riches but leaving him emotionally insulated from the few allies he keeps within his orbit.
Blood's apocalypse is slow and repetitive, unrolling like waves onto a beach, eventually eroding any semblance of whatever shape the landscape had once taken. It's hard not to see parts of that in my own life as different pieces of my social circle fall away or a cherished family passes on. Blood's apocalypse is our own, written on a legendary scale that spans through time.
HUNTED, HOUNDED, HE FIGHTS TO SURVIVE IN A HOSTILE WORLD
Like Jason Blood, Machine Man finds his origin in tragedy and sacrifice. His apocalypse was the loss of his humanity.
Aaron Stack, otherwise known as X-51 or Machine Man, was the last in a series of failed experiments in mechanical sentience created by robotics expert Abel Stack. Each of the fifty robots that had come before X-51 had to be taken offline when their sentience became activated, all of them driven mad by the existential malaise of being an individual with no identity. To solve the problem Abel Stack gave X-51 an identity, Aaron Stack, and treated him as a son. The illusion of humanity was deepened when X-51 was given a mask to hide his robotic nature and allow him to have a human face to call his own.
When the military caught wind of the fifty failed robots they tasked Abel with destroying all of his experiments. They had always been afraid of the idea of sentient machines and the inherent potential for disaster that the experiment posed. This fear was what made Abel install self-destruct mechanisms in all of the robots he had created, even X-51. Abel could not bring himself to take away the life he had created in X-51 and attempted to remove the bomb that had been implanted within him at birth. Sadly, Abel lost his life in the process, leaving X-51 alone and on the run from an army who thought him a dangerous machine instead of a frightened orphan.
X-51 fought hard to preserve his humanity in a world that feared him, using the gifts his father had given him to help people as much as he could. Abel had made him incredibly strong and hid away a wide array of devices that would come in handy when the need arose. His arms and legs could stretch great lengths and his fingers concealed things like cutting torches, input/output devices, and even a handgun. He was faster and smarter than anyone tasked with capturing him.
Even with all of these amazing powers, X-51 had the emotional complexity of a normal man. He devoted himself to Abel Stack’s dream: that there existed a great potential for a sympathetic machine to change the world for the better. X-51’s apocalyptic loss brought him to selfless heroics and the impossible drive to be more human than human.
BROTHER EYE, HIGH IN THE SKY
Set in a time that Kirby describes as “the world that’s coming,” the planet was protected by a globally unified police force known as The Global Peace Agency. To maintain the appearance of non-partisanship, their agents remained masked and anonymous so that they may represent all nations equally. Their job was to prevent dangerous situations that arose in a world lacking in autonomy but fully devoted to peace. Sometimes their arsenal of non-lethal methods fell short and when that happened they call upon a sentient satellite called Brother Eye to activate their ultimate agent OMAC, or One-Man Army Corp.
Buddy Blank was a simple factory worker employed at Pseudo-People, Inc., a company known for building synthetic human companions but was suspected to be carrying on illegal operations. Once Brother Eye activated, Blank’s body was hijacked. He received what was known as a computer-hormonal operation that transformed his body and mind. Blank, now OMAC, used the new strength and stamina bestowed upon him by the satellite to fight off security guards and weaponized companion robots. During the fight he discovered that the company he had been working for had always been making weapons, hiding robotic assassins in with their otherwise benign robotic products.
The apocalypse for Buddy Blank was the complete and total loss of what little autonomy was left to him in a world built on maintaining absolute peace, no matter the cost of personal independence. This is not a foreign concept for many of us today. Plenty have to sacrifice levels of identity to maintain our jobs and homes, always afraid of just how tenuous our grip on stability truly is. There are still many people alive today who lived a reality close to this, having to drop everything and fight a foreign war for no reason other than their name was chosen in a lottery.
There is no choice left for Blank. He had no say in how his life changed and no way of transforming it back to the simple existence it had once been. Though Blank eventually relents to the demands of The Global Peace Agency, accepting his new roles as their protector and enforcer, the ruins of the life taken from him always remain as a reminder of his loss.
THE ANIMAL IS OURS!
Taking place in a ruined world, after an event known as The Great Disaster, Kamandi tells the story of one of the last humans on Earth. Named after the bunker he was found in, Kamandi was raised by his elderly grandfather and taught the ways of the world before it all ended. When his grandfather died in a wolf attack, Kamandi was forced to venture out of the bunker and into the new and strange world transformed by an unknown nuclear catastrophe.
Outside the bunker, Kamandi found a backwards world. What remained of humanity had been reduced to feral savages not even capable of intelligible speech. Animals had taken the place of mankind and rule a sectioned off world, separated into regions by ruling species. Barracudas, bats, cheetahs, coyotes, crocodiles, dogs, gophers, gorillas, kangaroos, leopards, lions, lizards, pumas, rats, sloths, tigers, and wolves each control their own territories in their own ways. Due to this new hierarchy, Kamandi was always treated as an unintelligent savage but that constant underestimation saved his life time and time again.
Kamandi found few allies on his journey. His first and most loyal friend was a dog by the name of Dr. Canus, lead scientist for Great Caesar, the leader of the tiger territory. Canus found Kamandi to be a curiosity at first but grew fond of the boy over time. Next, Kamandi was joined by Prince Tuftan, the son of Great Caesar and advocate for the potential of humankind. Later Kamandi found an exotic mount in the form of a gigantic cricket he names Kliklak and made friends with a fire throwing alien by the name of Pyra.
Eventually Kamandi discovered three other humans who had somehow maintained their intelligence and sense of civilization. They were a group of mutants, manipulated and transformed to have powers tailored for the dystopian world they all found themselves in. Each of them could change their skin to metal to protect themselves from dangerous radiation and project force blasts from their cores. Led by Ben Boxer, the group wandered the Earth to find some sense of purpose. Each of them wore decommissioned space suits, modified to contain the radiation from their Cyclo-hearts, the fission core for their strange powers.
This was the truest apocalypse Kirby envisioned. The story of Kamandi is that of the end of humanity, brought low because of our own lack of responsibility to the world and our urges toward self-destruction. Kamandi’s purpose is the return of the human race to a place of civilization and dignity. His fight is for the very essence of mankind but that has long gone extinct in his world.
Kamandi touched on another subject close to Kirby and his work. At one point, Kamandi and Boxer find an altar to Superman, hidden away in a catacomb. The opening is decorated by an ornate comic strip carved in stone that tells the story of how Superman created a new continent while trying to call off an atomic fire geyser. The people of that continent worship Superman as a god, calling him The Mighty One.
This was one the most hopeful points of the series, ending with Kamandi saving Superman's preserved costume from destruction by the hands of a heretic of the land. The reason he risks his life for a scrap of cloth is hope, pure and unyielding, able to survive in the shadow of the end of the world.
THE END?
More than anything, I think what Kirby best illustrates with these apocalyptic visions is just how lonely the end of the world truly is. Each of these characters go through catastrophic trauma that strips them of all stability. They react just as any of us would and as Kirby must have, back when the mainstream comic publishers turned their backs on him and left him to fend for his family on his own.
The comic book industry of 1978 was not the cultural phenomenon that it is now. Kirby never would've found a place in the independent scene. His art style and storytelling would've looked far too tame for the more adult-oriented underground market at the time. He needed the mainstream superhero market but that market had told him he was no longer relevant or necessary, even after all that he had contributed to the field.
Jack Kirby never really recovered from the failure of those titles in the seventies. A few years after leaving Machine Man he retired from comics and joined up with an animation studio, making pitch packages and designing characters for cartoons that never saw the light of day. Kirby was a yeoman-like artist at the end of the day. Work was work as long as the money spent when it was all over.
This is not to say that Jack Kirby was not loved during his time. His family never left his side and neither did his fandom. Back issues of his work were more popular than ever and there was even an award named after him, The Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards.
The devastation entirely resided in what had once been his career and his passion to find new ways to tell stories in the comic book medium. This was Kirby's apocalypse, the absolute inability to get anyone to see his idiosyncratic visions for what they were and the eventual erosion that corroded that vision into the pale comparison it became in the end.
Jack Kirby died in 1995 and still couldn't get the credit he deserved for everything he had done for comics. Like all the great underappreciated artists, his influence has only grown with time. The flair and bombast found in his art has gone on to find treatment as fine art while his stories get harvested for artistic organs to be implanted in the Frankenstein's monster of adaptations of his comics
This is why I always return to the source. His original comics contain more energy and magic than a shelf full of occult tomes. His stories were epic in scope while maintaining the most human of hearts. From his early collaborations with Stan Lee, spanning all the way through his various apocalypses, the visionary scope of Jack Kirby shines through every single panel of every single page.
SUGGESTED READING
The Demon, issues 1-16 by Jack Kirby (DC Comics, 1972-73)
Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, issues 1-40 by Jack Kirby (DC Comics, 1972-76)
O.M.A.C.: One Man Army Corps, issues 1-8 by Jack Kirby ( DC Comics, 1974-75)
Machine Man, issues 1-9 by Jack Kirby (Marvel Comics, 1978)
That’s it for The Krackle Kanon! Tune in again next week for A/NOT A: The Brutal Dichotomies of Steve Ditko!
It’s been a busy week here at NGBMO Central. Here’s a roundup of things that might interest you.
I was a guest on Anthony Tyler’s BLACK HOODIE ALCHEMY on Fringe FM. I did the cover the Anthony’s latest book and it was great to finally have a long conversation with him. We talked about comics and esoterica. You can check it out here.
This last week saw the publication of I SUFFER ALCHEMY, a novella by Laird Lee Kirk. It was published in association with We the Hallowed Press and I did design duties on the paperback. I highly recommend the book. Laird’s a good guy and has a truly independent voice. Well worth checking out and supporting.
Finally, I finished work on the paperback collection of THE FOUR COLOR GRIMOIRE and it’s already available on Lulu. I’m not doing an official launch until the first of May but wanted to let the subscribers to this newsletter know a little bit earlier than everyone else.
I am incredibly happy with how this cover turned out. It’s a tribute to the corner box from the single issues of Marvel Comics in the nineties. I wanted to make it as accurate as possible, going as far as tracking down the exact font that was used during the era I grew up in and have the fondest memories of.
That’s all for this week. As always, thank you for sticking around and subscribing. This work is a labor of love and I appreciate each and every one of you out there reading this.
Until next time,
EJM