Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies
Part XXVIII: The Fourth World v: Play
by Travis Hedge Coke
The quest narrative is centered on the pursuit (and achievement) of a goal. A person or group are pursuing a particular end. The retrieval of something. Stealing a golden fleece. Winning the championship game. Trying to put the Holy Grail in a museum. Trying to save the living mannequins who dwell in a museum.
Quest narratives have become the primary mode of commercial storytelling in our modern day anglophone culture. Whether driven by the colonialist base of English-language culture, capitalist primacy of the I, or a subconscious rejection of other modes as connoting foreignness, “what does this character want and what are they doing to get it” has become seen as the only real form, or mature form of storytelling.
“The quest narrative is centered on the pursuit…”
Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics contain solid cosmological efforts to get away from purely quest stories, a process already begun, by Kirby, in the experimental narrative forms of his late-era Fantastic Four comics, with Stan Lee, and continued, sometimes to even finer execution, in post-Fourth World comics like Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers and Silver Star.
Already primed for the interwoven tale formats of sagas and framing stories, due to the serial nature of the comic book market, Kirby leaned into the pilgrimage aspect of many frame tale story-sets, treating the Fourth World comics, often, as pilgrimage narratives and as traditional survivance and experiential stories.
“Solid cosmological efforts…”
The Fourth World stories are told as full-length comic book stories, short stories, vignettes, single page pin-up illustrations, multi-issue arcs, and as elliptical arcs which cross titles and issues without announcement or flagging, leaving the connecting of narrative, character, and symbol to the audience.
At no time do the comics attempt any form of Realism, or even realism which is not emotional or social realism. Fourth World comics are, always, a social and political commentary, very rarely an explication of direct and clear mechanics, either social or biological or physical or chemical. Cloning, in this world and narrative, is not real world cloning and Superman is Superman, not Superman but in our world; a miracle figure.
“Emotional or social realism…”
Social realism, art which draws attention to the working class situation, a critique of the powers behind those conditions, is no strange form for comics, but one which is continually pushed against by classicist and conservative movements, and loud hate groups, who insist that in some past golden era, comics were “not political.”
Common received wisdom on Jack Kirby, very pushed by publishers, historians, and the sort of comics professional who is happy to throw others under buses when they can, is that Jack Kirby was apolitical, or, that as political as he got was to vaguely hate Nazis. If you have gotten this far, I hope you understand this is absurd. Manipulatively absurd.
Kirby’s comics always allow for missteps, though, and mistakes. And, they allow us to be mistaken.
You or I can reread an issue of Mr Miracle or the run of New Gods and we can learn new things, pick up new things, but it is also open for us to misunderstand. We are allowed to not understand, as all of the characters in the comics are allowed to not understand everything. The Source, a power or entity or resonance beyond us and beyond the gods sometimes communicates with a sense or writing by fiery hand, and the Source might know, but us? We can strive. We can try. We can even luck into understanding.
“Luck into understanding…”
Like Bob Dylan’s character says, Jack Fate, in Masked and Anonymous, you cannot pursue happiness. “It either comes to you or don’t.” This, too, is understanding. The joke about Muslim and Jewish students debating whether God is against you eating gummy candies made with gelatin from pigs while eating them, as an embrace of tradition.
A rabbinical, a preschool, a religious, epistemological, nerd, fan, shooting the bull tradition, rumination and study are forms of work and forms of play. Conversation and consideration become unfair, untrustworthy, manipulative when they become only a work tool towards success. Jack Kirby’s comics are forms of play especially when they work through thought problems of most sincere life. The Forever People are good-timing kids and earnest students. Fastbak pursues studies and races, races in studies and studies speed. We don’t have to get pretentious about it, even as we get real, real, real real pretentious about it.
“Forms of play…”
Once upon a time, what became the Fourth World could have been a comic about an escape artist written by Evanier. It could have been drawn by Steve Ditko. There could have been a comic about the Black Racer, following this death god who subsides in a living human being, handled by a Black artist, Black writer. Just, as we could have four leather-bound volumes. Or, the elements could have become Thor stories at Marvel and Fantastic Four stores. Some of what found its way to the original pages of these comics had sat in archives of Kirby’s, or inside his head, for decades.
The Fourth World gives us an Evil World and a Good World and lets one produce wonders and kindness and the other produce war and pettiness. Evil and Good worlds are not really worlds. Worlds hold both as we hold both. We hold to both.
The theme park, Happyland, an amusement park created by or for Darkseid, is a place of torture and cruelty, of fishbowl politics, oubliette torture, and of laughs and rides and silliness and commerce. In one deft movement, over a few pages, Kirby handles the basic tenets of colonialism via commercialism better than How to Read Donald Duck, while Duck is treated as a seminal work and Forever People a lark or a goof until Forever People is attached to the rest of the Fourth World, and then it can be, maybe, afforded some respect or treated as being elevated by the other Fourth World comics.
The Fourth World is an amusement park. But, so are cathedrals.
“An Evil World and a Good World…”
Quest narratives are pilgrimage experiences are experiential being are survivance in the sense that amusement park rides go round on a loop or they run forward and then run back. These narrative forms cover the same territory with differing agendas.
Superman and Orion, the big smart fight guys, the chosen sons, both believe they are on quest narratives, and so they are, but the world around them has a different plan. Superman may fly out on missions, rescue missions or fight missions. Orion may feel his goal is the battles and war against his birth-father, Darkseid. But, Superman and Orion are being taught lessons by the people and scenarios they pass. Their goal is not the goal.
The pilgrimage narrative emphasizes how events, people, situations encountered by a person during their journey affects them as a person. The same scenarios and people that affect them, affect us and our understanding of politics or art, history or religion. Orion dies in his quest and returns to continue his life, because the quest was a pilgrimage. Superman’s pursuit of Supertown, the home of the New Gods, and a place he can be just another god, is circumvented and shaped by the pilgrimage to get there and his return to Earth is necessitated by what he learns during the journey.
These are the two storytelling modes most favored by commercial entertainment, especially superhero comics and Hollywood movies. Most are quests, and if they get artsy, they are pilgrimages. But, Kirby was already expanding his range throughout the 1960s, and prior to the Fourth World, Kirby’s Fantastic Four had begun to transition from quest stories to a rolling, overlapping epic of experiential narrative.
By the final years Kirby was on that comic, the structure of the individual issue was no longer beginning-middle-end goal-pursuit narratives or stories of instructive lessons and metaphors along a path, but life. Life rolled on.
The Fourth World rarely partitions a sequence in a three act pursuit of goal, and for characters like Oberon, Jimmy Olsen, Terry Dean or Scott Free, there is no quest dominating their life. They have goals, but the goals are not subsuming or overwhelming, they drive neither narrative nor daily life. The three humans in The Glory Boat! are not in a quest story or engaged in anyone’s pilgrimage; from their perspective, the human perspective, they are alive. This is life.
This is the part that, as a comic, can confuse and annoy audiences and critics who are trained to very specific expectations. When people talk of the Fourth World comics being sloppy or unstructured, they mostly mean that the structure is not quest or pilgrimage. The stories that do not deal directly with a god-enemy, with the god-planets, which are regarded as filler or missing the point really put the lie to filler as a concept, and as for the point…
The tiny alien, Mystivac, who pilots a robotic humanoid form to pretend to be a human/god/idol, is as much of the point as Darkseid. The wide variety of masked control-addicts, the church and club boosters, the con artists, the Nazis in hiding and pretentiously-dressed would-be conquerors. The myriad voices which cannot be resisted. Control, hypocrisy, and fake faces; every story with those elements is in on the point of the Fourth World.
The Fourth World is not a series of sequential stories, like a run of James Bond movies and no one person is especially more important than anyone else. Mr Miracle might be Scott Free’s comic, but are you or I going to tell Scott he is more important than his wife? And, Barda makes concession for Scott’s manager, Oberon.
And, Mr Miracle is only one of the four serial titles. The titles with their shorts, vignettes, reprints, and full-length
Ideas are tested, in Kirby’s comics, the way a wrestler or prosthetics are tested by robots in the comics. Not really at all. They are presented, the presentation is in earnest, but not necessarily fair. That the Fourth World comics were written so quickly and patched together from myriad old ideas and catalogued elements, the present often as both a living world and a lively rumination. It is up to us whether Orion, god of soldiers, or Lightray, who does fight and does try to be a soldier, but is warned by Orion as a friend to stay off the frontlines; if either of them is correct.
Everyone in the Fourth World is on a Learn as You Go plan. Everyone is subject to progress, egress, regression and they are subjective terms for something centrally one. They are a play for us. The New Gods put on example skits for Superman. Darkseid is continually commenting or demonstrating, as much a teacher by trade and choice as Granny Goodness, who runs an orphanage that produces slaves and slave-soldiers, Desaad and his lessons of unfair cruelty and abuse, Izaya and the lessons of rhetoric and patience, Orion and his war-worn knowledge, his war-borne.
The reprinted short comics from Jack Kirby’s back catalogue dovetail with some of the new short comics, some of the main-narrative characters are aged up editions of those earlier caricatures, making a quilt, too, of history and historicity. A spot-the-differences and find-the-figure game in narrative and politic.
The Fourth World, as a whole, is an experiential, multi-perspective, multi-genre flood. Mystic. Intense. Full-bodied. It is not unreasonable to compare Kirby’s Fourth World to a cup of strong coffee first thing in the morning or a big glug of whisky leaving you warm and ready and a little more off-kilter than you notice.
We have to be off-kilter, because the Fourth World is a survivance. Whether than to walk between two worlds, to be in worlds. To hold worlds. Diane Glancy’s “survival outside survival.” Superman is a minority of one. The last of a culture, a world, a people without not also being an American, from Earth, a citizen of the world, a superhero amongst superheroes. The gods of New Genesis and Apokalips live on those worlds and ours and everywhere. They are in us and us. Orion’s self-loathing is.
“Those earlier caricatures…”
Communal survival, exodus, genocide and the threats of and from genocide are implicit in every panel of Kirby’s Fourth World. Orion’s self-loathing and Orion’s classism and Izaya permitting a class and ableist system and the necessity of short comics like Arin the Amored Man!!! and Genetic Criminal are all parts of one cosmic scream. One song. One soul.
Aaron is a prophet of the Torah. “The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron.” Arin is the prophet, sent, the wisdom of Superman’s genetic code in his care. Arin has his exodus across outer space.
Arin. Superman. Izaya. Forager.
In 1970, Jack Kirby said, “I’m competing against myself.” Jack Kirby did not fall into the myths that there were Americans and then there were ethnic-Americans. That there are people who are born bad. That there are genetic ethical failures.
“The feet of his work never touched the ground. The results were impressive, and quite boring,” said Jonathan Lethem of Kirby’s Fourth World and other mid-century work for DC Comics. He says the Fourth World had no “important human counterparts or identities.” To each her own. Kirby’s agents, writers, club managers, stunt people, performers, entertainers, fathers, daughters, soldiers, poets, students and farmers feel human to me often in their divinity. The farmers, daughters, managers, entertainers, veterans and journalists and singers and carnies and good-timers and dads and ocean monsters I know have felt the same.
Aaron is a prophet in the Torah, a biblical figure, an intermediary for God, but he has a sister. He has a life. He dies. Arin, the Armored Man, is a guy. He has a dad. He has a goal, a life, pleasures and philosophy.
Survivance is not survival, it is surviving survival. It is survival beyond, outside, to the side of survival. Survivance is knowing genocide, knowing extinction, knowing how easily, how readily, how willingly others may put you against the wall and aim their guns or let someone else aim theirs. Survivance is knowing that survival might not be an option.
“Manipulatively absurd…”
Even the gods of Kirby’s Fourth World are born from death. Born from war that ended their ancestors. Children are destroyed, saved, manipulated, educated by adults. Adults fumble and try and reach and burn. Superman is a scared minority. Kids carry their weird hobby stuff with them everywhere. There are always Nazis, always hate mongers, always sadists and the jealous and frauds. You do n0t escape those watching television or reading comics or dancing or singing or kissing or fishing. But, you can do those with a little more pride knowing that the Nazis, the hate mongers, the jealous and the cruel will hate you even more for it. They lessen themselves the less we worry whether our feet are touching the ground or we are flying in the stars.