Nostalgically, I’ve got plenty of reasons I should be loving this book. Jack Kirby’s New Gods and other Fourth World titles were the first books that really made me “get” Kirby. After growing up on a steady diet of 60′s reprints, primarily his Fantastic Four and Thor stuff, I
couldn’t understand why the artistic “gods” like John Byrne and George Perez worshipped at the feet of Kirby. His stuff was clunky and odd. It lacked the fluidity of a Byrne or Neal Adams. (I don’t claim to have had much taste when I was 12 years old.) I wrote all of the Kirby accolades off as a stupid generational thing. And then DC put out baxter reprints of The New Gods and my whole world changed.
In DC’s six issue reprint series, Orion and Lightray made me see Jack Kirby in ways that Reed and Sue Richards never could. The epic myth that Kirby was constructing with his newly created gods revealed the grace and fluidity in his artwork. Maybe his figures were blocky (my lord, those hands!,) but they moved gracefully through the page. The power behind each and every punch practically shook the walls of my bedroom. The story captured a mad epic pitch that FF and Thor (New Gods’ closest precedent) could never achieve. I can’t imagine something like Intergang or even the Glory Train (perhaps one of the finest pages in all of modern comics) showing up in a Marvel book. New Gods was Kirby unleashed. Not even Vince Colletta’s inking could ruin the comic opera that Kirby was trying to build. When you added The Forever People and Mister Miracle to the mix, Kirby’s epic storytelling became its own world.
In the past, Jim Starlin has had a hand in the adventures of The New Gods, most notably in the miniseries Cosmic Odyssey, a fun but relatively minor event back in the late 1980s. Now DC has recruited him to chronicle the alleged last days of Kirby’s creation in The Death of the New Gods, an eight issue miniseries. The first issue picks up from plot threads from Countdown where Lightray was killed in an early issue. Jimmy Olsen began investigating his death and ended up witnessing the death of at least one other Fourth World related creation, Sleeze. Someone is killing the New Gods, indiscriminate of whether they’re of New Genesis or of Apocalypse. And when the Black Racer, the New God of death, is killed, the evidence points to one of the Forever People, Kirby’s hippy team of gods.
Starlin understands the breadth and depth of the New Gods. The mystery spans from New Genesis where another god is found dead to the back alleys of Metropolis. The killer can touch the New Gods in their home celestial city and in the down-to-earth dwellings of Mister Miracle and his wife Barda. It seems that since Identity Crisis #1, DC has realized what a cash cow death can be. This issue has at least three killings both on panel and off but only the last one may have any emotional impact as it’s the death of a character who has appeared in other books.
The biggest problem with The New Gods is that almost no one in the last 35 years has figured out what to do with them. Kirby’s work is all about imagination but since his short run on the title very little has changed over the years. Now it seems that death will be used as a catalyst for change. Walt Simonson had a memorable run on Orion but that title has had little impact though Starlin does pick up on one or two threads from that book. Grant Morrison, both in JLA and Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle, managed to do different things with Orion and Darksied and all the others but he made them almost unrecognizable.
Starlin remains fairly faithful to those original Kirby issues. If you read nothing but the 20+ issues that Kirby produced, there’s probably only one or two characters and plot points that is any different than what Kirby left behind when the books were canceled on him. So Starlin is working with the same basic plot that Kirby is but he’s missing one thing that everyone has missed: Kirby himself. Or, at least, the unrestrained imagination of Jack Kirby. Kirby’s original stories worked because you saw Kirby’s imagination at work. Kirby wasn’t held back by anything. Since then though, everything has been held back by their lack of Kirby’s courageous imagination or by a controlling devotion to Kirby’s work. Starlin falls into the same traps as everyone else has.
This unfailing devotion to Kirby is evident in a number of pages that recounts the history of the New Gods where Starlin adopts a faux-Kirby art style to rather faithfully recreate images from Kirby’s work. Starlin’s urge to make these as close to Kirby leaves little room for Starlin to put any individuality in the book. More than just in the artwork, the story itself feels trapped in Kirby’s shadow (with a little Byrne & Simonson thrown in.) Nothing feels particularly imaginative or creative in this book. That may actually be the biggest problem with The New Gods; it’s such a product of Kirby that almost no one else can do anything that comes close to matching his work. Plenty have tried but few have ever had anything original to say with the characters. Unfortunately, Starlin falls in with the majority, producing a book that feels more forced and rote than brilliant and world-shaking.
The Death of the New Gods #1
“So Begins… The End”
Written and Penciled by: Jim Starlin
Inked by: Matt Banning
Colored by: Jeromy Cox
Lettered by: Jared K. Fletcher