To recap, Chris Sims, longtime comic book blogger and somebody I would call myself a fan of, was asked in his Ask Chris column about the best gods in comics. As you may remember from my last post, I took a great deal of issue with the way he portrayed mythology as a whole and wanted to set that record straight. This is the place where I get to give credit where it’s due because in the latter half of the piece, Mr. Sims nailed it when he talked about Jack Kirby’s Fourth World and how it worked as modern mythology.
One early idea that Mr. Sims gets absolutely right is how comics, being more focused on ongoing entertainment rather than education, bear more in common with folk tales than mythology. I agree with this and would only add that my own ideas on meta-mythology in superhero comics often happen without the creators entirely realizing what they’re doing. Even through the folktale, mythical archetypes win out. Robin Hood and Pecos Bill aren’t to their cultures what Hercules was to his, but they nevertheless still embody the virtues of their cultural waters, even if the virtues are so idealized as to be nearly fictional.
We Dealt With the Bad and the Ugly, Here’s the Good
Jack Kirby created a series of comic books that were truly mythological in scope. But rather than dealing with the explanations that the rapidly advancing science of the 20th century had made irrelevant, he focused on other, more metaphysical questions: What is the nature of good and evil, and is it possible for one to arise from the other? What does it mean to be free? What does it mean to lose that freedom? Can the horrors of war and violence be justified? These weren’t new questions by any means, but they were the ones people ask that don’t have easy, scientifically provable answers, which is why they persist and inspire stories that explore them.
In the above quote, we see the last of Mr. Sims’s wrongheaded thoughts on ancient mythology and transition into his views on the modern. I’ve already spent a great deal of words dissecting those misunderstandings in my previous post, so I bring it up again only to say I am very impressed that Mr. Sims is able to start in such a bizarre place and still wind up seeing right to the core of what makes the meta-mythology of superhero comics so great. Here is the place where we can nod sagely at one another’s points and make noises like learned men as we discuss them. The Fourth World works as modern myth because it taps into what has always been the core of mythology, the all-important question of why, the question of what gives this physical, temporal world meaning.
I’ve spoken briefly about Jack Kirby and some of his creations before, but never in the detail that Mr. Sims gets to go into in his essay. The King’s genius is in that he can obviously write a tremendous action story full of superhero tropes while injecting deeper meanings into the ongoing narrative. Although injecting probably isn’t quite the right word because there isn’t so much subtext in the Fourth World as there is just text wearing a cape and spandex.
Mr. Sims’s spotlight on Mister Miracle, Orion, and Darkseid as the best examples of mythic themes played out through these characters and stories is very good and there is very little I’d add to it. I do see some Judeo-Christian overtones as central while they are skipped over by Mr. Sims). Kirby obviously wanted to tell a story where good wins out over evil without cheapening the depths that evil is willing to sink to nor hiding the fact that good often wins in spite of itself.
Darkseid seeks Anti-Life which Sims describes as “a slavery that masquerades as freedom by allowing its victims to give in to the dark side of humanity.” As he says, there isn’t much subtlety here. Except that you could almost miss the Judeo-Christian concept of sin (Kirby was himself Jewish) as humanity sets aside that which would make it most human in favor of the sensual, the cheap, and the mean. This isn’t world beating, yet, as Sims says, “This is a villain who exploits the small selfishness that we all see, experience, and even commit on a daily basis and shows how it all adds up to towering evil, and that makes him one of the most genuinely terrifying villains in comics. Darkseid’s not real, but the evil he dabbles in is.”
Mister Miracle is the seed of good planted in dark, evil soil that still sprouts freedom and goodness. He even overcomes a fake kindness in Granny Goodness “a monster wrapped in the name of something pleasant, the living embodiment of lies and propaganda.” But Orion is a more subtle ideal, and in many ways an inversion of one. He’s Darkseid’s child, but he struggles against his darker nature simply because he’s been shown what goodness is. This is another mythic theme, but the Judeo-Christian ethic that inverts so many of those themes rears its head again. Orion is so in love with goodness that he’s willing to fight for it. Yet, in that fighting, he sacrifices that which makes him good. Orion loses every single time he’s willing to do violence in the name of goodness. Kirby, a war veteran, seems to have came back from the front with some strong feelings about war.
Though Sims starts out with some very confused ideas about mythology, he never fails to understand how it works when it crosses the path with superhero comics. This is why I enjoy his commentary so often and why the first of his essay was such a shock to my system. Because I respect his work so much, I’ll let Sims have the final word on both mythology and the Fourth World.
And that’s the essence of mythology. As real as Darkseid’s evil is, the struggle that Orion experiences to avoid giving in is just as real, as is the desire for freedom that drives Mr. Miracle. It’s designed to teach something as well as entertain, and it succeeds.
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