The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1154: New Gods #1, June 1984

I thought it was time I read this. I've always been intrigued by this story. Whenever I read it, all I can think about is just how far it could be taken, a warring society of gods played out as a war between archetypal patterns generated by the collective consciousness of...the Earth? The Universe? That is one thing I've never been too clear about - just whose gods are these anyway? Do different species see them in different forms, like when Martian Manhunter encounters Morpheus in the early Sandman issues?

I would really love to write stories using these characters.

Kirby's writing and art are Kirby's writing and art. I don't know what I could say about them that hasn't been said by hundreds, if not thousands, of more articulate scholars and fans than I. When we think about superhero universes operating more simply than our own, it is Kirby's that operate at almost the simplest level. His dialogue is stilted and choppy. But everything in this world is an event. His art cries this louder than anything else. And not just an "event," but an EVENT. In this kind of context, the staccato of the speech in the stories makes a certain kind of sense.

Now, while this is a cool way to tell a story, there are reasons that most of our stories that are mythically inflected add a dash of nuance to the bombast. I think this is why Kirby's stories are sometimes difficult to take. At the level of myth where the hero is superior to both environment and peers (or, indeed, has no peers), it's difficult to tell stories that are anything but kerygmatic. This kind of teaching text is not necessarily what one wants in a superhero comic, though it's really in all of them. So does that mean that Kirby is trying to teach us anything with this comic? I think, through most of his work, he actually is. He's offering perspectives on our relationship with the divine. If you think about it, the vast majority of his work looks to this, be it the incarnation of the divine in the superhero (Fantastic Four, elemental avatars, springs to mind) or straight up divinity itself, like today's comic.

That said, reading a comic in which everything is a SUPER-MYTHIC EVENT AEONS IN THE MAKING!!!! is exhausting. Hence nuance. If we can hold a less mythic story up in comparison, or in conflation, both are cast in new lights.

More to come...