The NEXT THRILLING CHAPTER 7
- Captain Antifa, Jack Kirby, and the Anti-Life Equation
This is the seventh part of The Next Thrilling Chapter, and is dedicated to Jack Kirby, co-creator (with Joe Simon) of the anti-fascist superhero, Captain America.
When I was between the ages of six and thirteen, Jack Kirby was one of the most important artists in my life. I don’t mean just as a comic book artist, but, more broadly, as the maker of aesthetic objects that shaped my vision of the world and my understanding. I discovered Marvel Comics at age six, reading early stories featuring the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, and Ant-Man, among others.
When I was ten years old, Kirby stopped making comics for Marvel, and moved to DC. For about two years, I was in awe of what he was doing. Looking at these comics half a century later, I can’t help but see them with different eyes. Even at the time, I had to overlook all manner of infelicities and inconsistencies, both visual and narrative; but I was fiercely loyal, and knew Kirby had transported me to realms of wonder. I felt freer reading comic books—Kirby’s stories in particular—than when engaging with the world around me.
That’s why they call it escapism.
Looking at Kirby’s work now, its shortcomings and sometimes its ugliness are glaring. If I hadn’t read it when I did, I couldn’t read it today. But I did read it, and if I can’t help re-reading with a somewhat jaundiced eye, I can still look beyond a surface that no longer delights me and catch, alive in memory, the echoes of a long-ago excitement. It’s not my purpose here to valorize a period in my life when I was ignorant and lacked judgment, but rather to take account of something Kirby did for me, for which I’m grateful, that had nothing to do with escapism.
Kirby grew up during the depression of the nineteen-thirties, but, as a comic book artist, he was an optimist. Sure, there were bad guys, but you could fight against them. In some ways, the four titles that made up Kirby’s “Fourth World”, from 1970 to 1972, harked back to what he’d been doing in the forties: fighting against fascism—first in the comic books, with Captain America and the Boy Commandos, then with a rifle in his hand, in the army. Three decades later, he projected fascism, totalitarianism and the forces of destruction onto a pseudo-cosmic scale. The new comic books—New Gods, Forever People, and Mister Miracle—were well-named, because they were mythic; and the forces of light and darkness, good and evil, were fighting over humankind, as they always do; but Darkseid was the symbol of an evil that might arise anywhere, and Kirby was bringing the war home.
Darkseid (as the transparent pun in the name implied) personified the dark side of the human project. He was in search of the secret of “Anti-Life”, which sounded scary and fascinating when I was ten or eleven, but I was never sure exactly what it was. I thought there was a big secret, and waited for Kirby to tell me. And for a long time afterward, it seemed he never had. But, when I look back, he was telling me in every issue.
In fact, he handed me the key early on, in the first issue of New Gods, where High-father says, “THE RlGHT OF CHOlCE lS OURS! THAT lS THE LlFE EQUATlON! ” and Metron tells me, “THE ANTl-LlFE EQUATlON ... MEANS THE OUTSlDE CONTROL OF ALL LlVlNG THOUGHT ! ”
I didn’t see how explicit Kirby was being, because how could he tell me a secret—then pretend it was still a secret, as if I didn’t know what it was already? Mistaking the props for the play, I didn’t grasp that if the LIFE EQUATION = the RIGHT OF CHOICE, then the Anti-Life equation was denial of that right.
And when Metron identified the Anti-Life equation with thought-control, I wondered how it might be controlled, imagining that how was the secret the story would eventually reveal. Thought-control was old hat before I was squeezed out of my amniotic innocence to take a look around; but what Kirby called it connected a hackneyed fictional device with a circumstance that has never ceased to plague the world in which we exist. In a later exchange in Forever People #5, one of Kirby’s techno-hippie heroes says that Anti-Life is “THE VERY OPPOSlTE OF LlVlNG! lF SOMEONE POSSESSES ABSOLUTE CONTROL OVER YOU -- YOU'RE NOT REALLY ALlVE!”
“WlTHOUT lNDEPENDENT WlLL” says another, “YOU MAY JUST AS WELL BE A ROBOT ! ”
That’s it in a nutshell. The essence of Anti-Life, in Kirby’s comic book fiction, is a mysterious power. In the world you and I inhabit, it’s just power—the power to compel obedience. It has been exercised repeatedly throughout history, and Kirby, in these stories, by means of caricature and exaggeration, put on display the will to power and its instruments. Anti-Life harnessed everything destructive of life or of the value of life: hatred, violence, greed, ideology, coercion, oppression, conformity, lies. That it was supposed to be some great secret was just what kept the story going. All Darkseid really wanted was to have everything his own way. Whenever tyrants achieve that, suffering and repression are sure to follow.
There was something else. I saw it at the time, but didn’t properly understand it. Darkseid’s world was Apokolips. The heroes were from New Genesis. I could see that the forces of world-ending destruction were opposed by those who believed life had a future. But even when Glorious Godfrey—an exaggeration of slick tv evangelism—fronted for a bunch of futuristic stormtroopers, I didn’t grasp Kirby’s in-your-face linkage of apocalyptic belief with fascism.
I see it now.
Almost everything on the cover of Forever People #3 shouts the point I’m making. Anti-Life is not death, but an antidote to life explicitly designed for the fearful and vindictive. The story involves a demagogue justifying the use of violence against anyone who’s different, who doesn’t agree with his followers. The first page opens with a quote from Adolf Hitler
as the blank-eyed members of the crowd are allowed to diagnose a political tendency at once universal but presented here in a peculiarly American context:
“TELL lT, GODFREY! TELL US HOW OUR PRlDE lS BElNG ATTACKED AND DRAGGED lN THE DUST ! ”
“lT’S THE OTHERS, GODFREY! THOSE WHO DON’T THlNK RlGHT !”
“THlS lS OUR WORLD! OUR WORLD! THEY HAVE NO RlGHT TO MEDDLE WlTH lT ! ”
Demagogues articulate and exaggerate the anxieties of people, in order to compel their allegiance and manipulate their behavior. Others are identified and blamed for those anxieties, with the result that those others must be deprived of their rights, becoming the targets of ill feeling and violence.
Turning the page, I find a double-page spread, where Glorious Godfrey declares, “I HEAR YOU, RlGHT THlNKERS! YOU’RE SHOUTlNG ANTl-LlFE-- THE POSlTlVE BELlEF!” Positive belief = ideological conviction, and the signs held up by Godfrey’s stooges hammer the message home.
I didn’t fully understand this when I first read it. It wasn’t clear how Anti-Life could do all the things the signs said it could. And if it didn’t make sense, I thought, how could anyone believe in it? But Glorious Godfrey was determined I get the message, no matter how deaf I was:
YES, FRlENDS! THOUGH LlFE lS EVER FlLLED WlTH THOSE WHO THREATEN US, lT lS ANTl-LlFE WHlCH GlVES US THE POWER TO ELlMlNATE THEM! THE HOLOCAUST lS COMlNG! THE DAY OF APOKOLlPS ON EARTH! THE DAY OF DARKSElD, WHO BRlNGS THlS POWER FOR ONLY US TO USE!
YES, lT lS HlS GlFT TO US, FRlENDS! THE COSMlC HUNTlNG LlCENSE! THE RlGHT TO POlNT THE FlNGER OR THE GUN! WHO CAN STAND AGAlNST US, FRlENDS?
What Godfrey offers his followers, along with a helmet and a uniform, is the absolute conviction that their enemies—the people who represent what they fear—ought to be eradicated:
THUS THE HARBlNGERS OF HOLOCAUST LlNK UP WlTH THE HUMAN MlNDS AND HEARTS THAT WAlT TO ACT lN CHAOS! LlKE THE ANClENT WlTCHDOCTORS OF OLD, GLORlOUS GODFREY SOUNDS THE CLARlON CALL AND BEGlNS THE DANCE OF DEATH lN MODERN TlMES! THE MESSAGE OF ANTl-LlFE lS POWERFUL...
Years later, I’d be puzzled when I read (or tried to read) Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko’s “objectivist” comics (Mr.A, Avenging World, etc.). I eventually figured out he was trying to get a point across, and doing it by exaggerating the negative characteristics of people and ideas he objected to. Kirby’s work here, rife with exaggeration and satirical slogans, has some of the same characteristics. Unlike Ditko, however, Kirby had a genuine point to make, and, as it turns out, his satire was prophetic. Back then, I didn’t know enough to see the parallel he drew between the techniques of religious revivalism and fascism, but half a century later, believers in apocalypse, marching under a banner of pro-life rather than Anti-Life, entertain fantasies of a would-be theocratic totalitarianism that promises to disenfranchise and punish those who refuse to submit to its control. And some of these fine Christian people are ready and willing to become (or to cheer on) the shock troops and executioners of this fraternal bloodbath.
There’s no question what Kirby was doing functioned as propaganda, sometimes dealt out with a pretty heavy hand. The title page shows a boy with crutches manhandled by a uniformed and helmeted ogre who calls the boy “GARBAGE” and “LlTTLE SWlNE” and threatens to kill him.
So, a bad guy, right?
But where Ditko’s objectivist stories were propaganda for an ideology he tried (clumsily) to present, the targets of Kirby’s satire very much include propaganda and the pernicious effects of ideological conditioning. Kirby promoted little in the way of positive or prescriptive ideology beyond a commendation of civility, common decency and optimism. “LlFE lS GOOD! ” the Forever People advise the boy, once he’s been rescued. “LlVE lT FOR OTHERS--NOT AGAlNST THEM!” (Ditko would no doubt have recoiled from this repulsive collectivist doctrine.)
When Justifiers swoop down on the unsuspecting city, Kirby’s satire merges with allusion to a history not too remote (and broadly sustained, back in 1971, in popular culture) by offering a lightly disguised precis of Nazi terror: their victims are referred to as “SWlNE”, “NOTHlNG BUT ANlMALS” and “HUMAN TRASH” as Justifiers break down doors and drag them away. All are treated roughly: “THE WOMEN AND CHlLDREN ARE AS HATED AS THE MEN!”
“LlSTEN TO THElR CRlES!” says one thug. “I’VE BEEN WAlTlNG TO DO THlS FOR YEARS!” Another tells his victim, “GET GOlNG! WE’LL SHOW WHAT WE DO WlTH YOUR KlND!”
And that’s what Kirby was doing—showing me. If he’d shown me Nazis doing this kind of thing, I’d have thought, well, that’s just the kind of thing Nazis do, because I’d seen them doing it in innumerable movies and tv shows. Here the behavior was projected onto a group of people who didn’t have German accents, and didn’t belong to the past, so it was more unsettling, not just something I had to put up with so I could watch a bunch of heroes later mowing them down with machine guns or blowing them up with hand grenades. Why do you think I went to the movies, anyway?
Another Justifier enters a library to burn “DECADENT ” books: “THE NONSENSE STORED lN THlS PLACE SHALL NEVER POLLUTE ANOTHER MlND! YOU NEED KNOW NO MORE THAN THE PROPER THlNGS!” If the rhetoric doesn’t sound familiar, you haven’t been following the news in the year of Our Lord 2023.
And as Godfrey looks on, his thugs smash one window and paint the letter “S” on another. It’s not a “J”, but the echo of Germany in the nineteen thirties is clear enough. As Godfrey helpfully explains, the “S” stands for “SCAPEGOAT.”
“ANTl-LlFE lS A HEADY, EXHlLARATlNG EXPERlENCE,” says one of Godfrey’s assistants—an experience that takes the form, in this instance, of destructive violence.
“YES,” replies Godfrey. “THEY NO LONGER THlNK! THEY REVEL lN VlOLENT EMOTlON! THEY WlLL DO ANYTHlNG I SAY--lN ORDER TO FEED THElR EMOTlON! THEY ARE NOW NO MORE THAN ZOMBlES lN MY CONTROL!”
Zombies being the living dead, Anti-Life propaganda is depicted as robbing those who succumb to it of their independence, rendering them subject to those by whom they are manipulated.
When Kirby declared, on the opening page of Jimmy Olsen #138, that “THE END OF THE WORLD lS AT HAND!”, he was exaggerating. On the other hand, the overall symbolic scheme in these stories was based on the proposition that the stakes are high—and so it has turned out. The end of the world is more visibly at hand, as I write these words and look again at these comic books, than it ever was in the sixties and seventies. And the forces of Anti-Life are determined that it shall happen.