New Gods

Not particularly, no. Not that I know of, anyway.

I love the New Gods, it was an incredibly imaginative, far-out series. However, Kirby's dialog always made me cringe. Say what you will about who came up with what for the Lee/Kirby collaborations at Marvel, but a big part of those books being successful was Lee's ear for dialog, which is something Kirby just never really had.

The only ones I've seen that are worth a shit are the Simonson titles. But then I've been out of things for a long time now so who knows.
You might try finding some Omac reprints instead. They were from the same era and are full of freaky Kirby shit.

That's the best fucking first issue cover in history. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!?

To answer the question: NO I AM NOT READY FOR OMAC BECAUSE HOLY FUCK WHAT IS HE DOING TO THAT WOMAN?

AUGGHHH!!!! I have that comic! Cover's long gone, but it was a pretty cool story. The girl on the cover was a "Build-A-Friend", an android that was the precusor to a RealDoll, except it walked and talked and acted like a real human. It was also a bomb.

Great story - would make a damn fine movie. So would New Gods, a big sweeping LOTR type of flick. I missed, but read thanks to my collecting buddies, most of Kirby's original run a long time ago, and have to pick up the collections ASAP for my own library and give 'em a good re-read.

He's delivering Fabfunk's mail order bride.
I actually had that issue as a kid. The interior is just as freaky, if not more so. Omac has a big fight inside a factory that produces cyborg women and delivers them in those boxes. I remember a lot of disembodied limbs hanging from hooks.

Robot or not, that woman is built like a human headcrab.

Also: Many of you are old.

I gave my son a copy of the Fourth World Omnibus Vol 1. He is having a hard time getting through the dialog, poor little fella. He fucking LOVES the art though. He is still sifting through the first issue of Jimmy Olsen.

I read it and it was pretty much a chore to get through the dialog myself. I can't wait to get to the Mister Miracle issues.

Wasn't there an Orion series in the 90's? I have read somewhere that they were pretty good.

I think Byrne did that Orion series.

No, the Orion series was Simonson.

Yeah, I just looked al that up on Wikipedia and still have no idea who did what.

Actually, the Mr. Miracle episode of Justice League Unlimited, "The Ties that Bind", is pretty fucking great. And it was written by Jim Steranko!

Off the top of my head, as far as post-Kirby New Gods stuff...

I somewhat liked Simonson's Orion (lasted 25 issues). It had it's problems, but it was better than Byrne's New Gods comic by a long shot (and I liked the nods to Simonson's Thor run, like Desaad finding Thor's belt of strength in the ruins of the Old Gods).

Other than that, all I can come with is the great Mr Miracle Special from the mid-80's, a one-shot written by Mark Evanier and drawn by Steve Rude.

Evanier & Rude tried to get DC to let them do a New Gods series, but it never happened. Which is a fucking shame.

Well, Morrison did a version of Mr Miracle in his Seven Soldiers series. I didn't take to it.

I believe DC is coming out with a trade featuring a handful of New Gods stories (including some from Simonson's Orion, some from Byrne's Tales, and the aforementioned Evanier & Rude Mr Miracle one-shot).

Jim Starlin's doing the Death of the New Gods. Starlin's just not what he used to be. The guy was money back in the 70's (Shang-Chi, Captain Marvel, Warlock) but...anyone remember The Infinity Crusade? And various things Infinity-related?

Also, his Cosmic Odyssey miniseries played a little fast and loose with some New Gods characterizations (Orion is suddenly racist, for example).

For the record, the writing in the Fourth World books improves notably as it goes on, I think. It's never *great*, but it gets less utterly ridiculous. And some of the books are significantly better than others. I think "New Gods" was definitely the best of the three/four books, actually well-written in parts, and "The Forever People" starts pretty dumb but gets decent. In "New Gods", especially, Kirby really starts to get a handle on how to play to his strengths, i.e., by having his characters shut up and letting the pictures do the talking. Also, when Stan Lee isn't writing him, the subtext in Kirby's books starts to get a little richer and more interesting. Stan may have been better at dialogue, but he tended to keep everything pretty superficial.

Jimmy Olsen is pretty lame throughout the series, though. It's usually lame in a hilarious, interesting way, but it's always lame.

Now is the point for me to plug the series of posts I'm doing on the Fourth World on my blog. It starts here.

Can't say I was wowed by the first issue of Starlin's Death of the New Gods. It's a long, ponderous monlogue by Darkseid, punctuated with various New Gods being discovered lying on the ground with their hearts ripped out. The art's pretty great (though the man's still got that thing for giraffe necks), so really it's sort of like having Kirby back again... the difference being that Kirby's dialogue was often howlingly funny, while Starlin's here is just kinda drab.

I just got through with Vol 2 of the Fourth World Omnibus and have to agree with the Consensus: The Basic Storyline and Themes are great,the Artwork is simply beyond praise, but the dialog is not very good,and I have a feeling that Kirby's attempts at "hip" dialogue probably caused snickers back in 1971. But there is so much to like in the series.
BTW does anybody know what exactly will be included in the final Volume? I understand there will be some version of "The Hunger Dogs",but is is the published version or the much rumored about unpublished Kirby version?

I was expecting DC to do this as a sort of follow up to the Fourth World Omnibus series. Know when it is due out?

If Jimmy's new powers were Giraffe Neck and Super Hair Growth the art in this would have been great.

It's hard to say for certain what exactly will be included--DC announced that The Hunger Dogs story in vol. 4 will include 24 pages of art restored to the size Kirby drew them (DC altered the Hunger Dogs art to fit into the larger trim of the Hunger Dogs graphic novel) and inked by Mike Royer.

I'm unsure what that means, though, as far as the Hunger Dogs story. Will it be very different? Originally Kirby drew a 24 page ending to the New Gods to be included in the last issue of the 80's reprints of the series, but DC rejected it. I believe Orion and Darkseid were to die at the end of it, but I'm not sure if that's ever been confirmed. Could this be those 24 pages? I'm not sure how they'd be able to be added into the Hunger Dogs story, but...perhaps it's a possibility?

The Tales of the New Gods trade is slated for January--it seems like it'll mostly feature a selection of the Tales of the New Gods back-up stories from Byrne's Fourth World and Simonson's Orion (some were great, some were not. I'm specifically remembering a Liefeld-penciled one that was unsurprisingly putrid), but also include the Evanier/Rude Mr Miracle one-shot, as well as a back-up story that was meant for inclusion in Orion but never made it--written by Mark Millar, drawn by Steve Ditko. The mind reels.

That broad in the cement is almost as good as when Mr. Natural stuffed Devil Girl's head down her neck and tied it off so Flakey Foont could sodomize her.

Yeah I think something got in the way of those designs making the final product. One thing Jones did was update the looks without completely pissing all over what Kirby had whipped up.

I think that the New Gods are on Earth 51 or the Earth 51 universe. DC will bring them in soon enough. They are great characters. I'm pumped to see where the ygo next as New Gods of the 5th World.

Agreed. I always thought the Forever People were the worst designed out of all the 4th Worlders. A Cowboy? I read the Mr. Miracle series from the Seven Soldiers "epic" and they all made an appearance there, but in completely different forms again. DC really fucked the dog with the Seven Soldiers/Death of the New Gods/Final Crisis thing. It's simply amazing.

I always rather liked Kirby's Demon stories myself.

You can see the unaltered faces in Mark Evanier's Kirby. They're pretty distinctive, and I don't think any of them slipped through.

I believe his Perry White faces were altered, too. I'm not sure about any of the actual Supes/Jimmy bodies. If so, probably only very few.

C'mon, it's gotta be Flippa. He has an orgasm every time you mention something even TANGENTALLY related to water.

For all the silliness Kirby put into the Fourth World, there are some really solid ideas in there...it's mostly the execution that's lacking. Even his reconceptualizing of Jimmy Olsen was quite clever--he turned the usual "Jimmy vs. Superman" fakeouts into a commentary on how the younger generation were becoming cynical about the establishment. And I absolutely LOVE the lost tribe of libertarian biker hippies in the first few issues.

A fun game to play with Kirby's dialogue when reading New Gods is "count the periods."

I think there were 3 or 4 in the first volume of the Omnibus.

Well obviously I've got to go with young, but cool, Harvey Lockman. The guy who does nothing except provide youth appeal. Supposedly.

O'Ryan's mob was a great idea, though. It gave Orion a bunch of "followers", thus making everything seem more mythical and epic, AND providing a human dimension to the goings on. And yeah, Victor Lanza was the best example of that--a regular schmoe who's suddenly forced to tangle with the mob on behalf of a fucking GOD. Orion basically forces people to become more than they are--a nice Christ parallel without being too heavy-handed about it. Kirby could actually be quite subtle when he wanted to be. If only he'd had the dialogue chops...

Yeah. I do.

He's so HOTTTTTTTT!!!!!! MMM COCK

You had hint of that when idea way back in the first few issues of Jack Kirby's Original "Orion" run, but it was not really followed up.

Extra points for reading the original Shadow novels . I am hooked on them...particulary in the great new format that Sanctum Publications is putting them out in. The Two "Origins of Batman" issues are really great. And getting Jerry Robinson to do an introduction in which he fesses up "We swiped an awful lot from Walter Gibson's The Shadow when we created Batman" was a nice touch.

Two words

BIG. BARDA.