Volumes 3 and 4 are waiting for me in my subscriber file at work; does 4 include The Hunger Dogs?
If you get a chance, try to lay hands on Walt Simonson's ORION series from the early 2000s. Simonson groks the New Gods like no other writer besides Jack himself. I think that only the first six issues have been collected into a TPB, but it's worth hunting the rest down as floppies. It's EPIC.
And, yes. I think the reason so many people don't quite get what Jack intended is because The Forever People was the "uncool" Fourth World book. It's a bunch of dorky, corny space hippies who don't have the anything close to the compelling, dramatic, operatic motivations of Orion or Scott Free.
But that's why it's the book where Kirby explains what the war is about. For the "cool" characters, it's personal -- the Forever People put themselves on the front lines out of principle.
Oh, and if you want sad? Imagine being 8 years old in 1972, and picking up Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #149 -- and instead of finding out what happened to Jimmy and the Newsboys in the volcano lair of Doctor Vulcanus, you get some Kurt Schaffenberger-illustrated fluff about Jimmy causing trouble with some ray gun he's found, or something to that effect.
I was there, my friend, there when the Fourth World died....
Date: 2009-02-10 03:30 am (UTC)If you get a chance, try to lay hands on Walt Simonson's ORION series from the early 2000s. Simonson groks the New Gods like no other writer besides Jack himself. I think that only the first six issues have been collected into a TPB, but it's worth hunting the rest down as floppies. It's EPIC.
And, yes. I think the reason so many people don't quite get what Jack intended is because The Forever People was the "uncool" Fourth World book. It's a bunch of dorky, corny space hippies who don't have the anything close to the compelling, dramatic, operatic motivations of Orion or Scott Free.
But that's why it's the book where Kirby explains what the war is about. For the "cool" characters, it's personal -- the Forever People put themselves on the front lines out of principle.
Oh, and if you want sad? Imagine being 8 years old in 1972, and picking up Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #149 -- and instead of finding out what happened to Jimmy and the Newsboys in the volcano lair of Doctor Vulcanus, you get some Kurt Schaffenberger-illustrated fluff about Jimmy causing trouble with some ray gun he's found, or something to that effect.