Our Gods Wear Spandex (27 page)

Kirby's influence on Lucas went far deeper than a similarity between the heroes and villains of
Star Wars
and
The Fantastic Four
. The cosmic struggle that drives
Star Wars
may be as old as time, but Lucas almost certainly first encountered it, not in Joseph Campbell's obscure academic works, but in Jack Kirby's landmark
comic-book series,
The New Gods
. DC hired Kirby away from Marvel in 1971. One of his first DC titles was
Spirit World
, an anthology that dealt with occult phenomena like the prophecies of Nostradamus, astrology, and ESP. DC also let Kirby create an entire line of new titles—
The New Gods, The Forever People
, and
Mister Miracle
—which Kirby collectively named
The Fourth World
.

The Fourth World
was unprecedented in its scope. These characters were extra-dimensional gods, superhuman beings who traveled to Earth with the use of the “Boom Tube,” a sort of Stargate that bridged dimensions. The god of
The New Gods
was “the Source,” an omnipotent energy field that plays the exact same role in the
Fourth World
comics that the Force plays in
Star Wars
.

Just as in
Star Wars, The Fourth World
is divided into two opposing, Manichaean factions—the followers of Highfather on the Utopian world of New Genesis, and the subjects of Darkseid (pronounced “Dark Side”) on the slave planet Apokolips. In the past, Apokolips and New Genesis had fought to the brink of mutual destruction, but a truce is sealed by the exchange of Highfather's and Darkseid's first-born sons (“The Pact”,
New Gods
#7). Darkseid's feral son, Orion, is raised on New Genesis and becomes its mightiest warrior. Highfather's son, Scott Free, is raised on Apokolips, but escapes and becomes the “super escape-artist,” Mister Miracle. Orion becomes the sworn enemy of his father and Scott Free is tutored in the ways of The Source by an Obi-Wan-like character named Himon (
Mister Miracle
#8). Darkseid is more a spiritual version of Darth Vader, but his henchman, DeSaad, is the absolute spitting image of Emperor Palpatine in
Return of the Jedi
.

While Kirby produced a mind-boggling array of characters, monsters, and machinery for
The Fourth World
comics, his fertile imagination eventually overwhelmed his narrative skills. The stories bogged down under the weight of Kirby's endless parade of concepts, and lackluster sales caused DC to cancel the entire line in 1973. Hardcore fans like Lucas, however, loved
The Fourth World
books, and the characters remain a vital part of the DC Universe to this day. Another hardcore fan, Bruce Timm, eventually became the producer of the hugely popular
Superman
and
Justice League
cartoons, and introduced the new gods to an entirely new generation of fans.

After the cancellation of
The Fourth World
titles in 1972, Kirby dove headfirst into the supernatural with
The Demon
, an occult-themed title featuring Merlin's pet demon, Etrigan, who is summoned in the last days of Camelot. Etrigan also
has an human alter ego, occult detective Jason Blood. Kirby pitted The Demon against foes like Morgaine Le Fey and Klarion the Witch Boy. In addition to a smattering of stories dealing with witchcraft, Jack used
The Demon
to pay tribute to the classic horror stories of his youth, including
Frankenstein, The Wolfman
, and
The Phantom of the Opera
.

The cancelation of
The Fourth World
books led Kirby back to Marvel in 1975. He took over
Captain America
and set to work on a storyline plucked directly from the fevered rantings of Seventies right-wing conspiracy theorists. The “Madbomb Saga” (
Captain America
#193– 200) set the Captain and Falcon against a secret society of Royalists, ancestors of pre-Revolutionary British loyalists working to reclaim America for the Crown. To this end, they genetically engineer a slave race and develop a massive mind-control weapon that can cripple the entire population of the United States on its Bicentennial. The Cap had battled secret societies before, but none as explicit or seemingly well-researched as this. Kirby revisited the theme of secret societies in his run on
Black Panther
in 1977, where he introduced the Collectors, a secretive band of plutocrats who search for ancient artifacts that contain supernatural power.

Kirby returned to the Vril-ya for his 1976 Marvel series,
The Eternals
. His main focus here was to explore the themes of ancient alien visitation laid out in Erick Von Daniken's 1971 blockbuster
Chariots of the Gods
. Like Von Daniken, Kirby proposed that the ancient gods of mythology were actually extraterrestrial visitors. The first three issues of
The Eternals
presented wild theories of alien genetic engineering and races created by the gods: humankind, the demonic Deviants who lived in the undersea ruins of Atlantis, and the aloof, superhuman Eternals who lived on Mount Olympus. Kirby himself describes
The Eternals
as “the place where I started being mystic, dealing with what I sincerely think is moving in the root cores of all of us.”
¹⁴⁷

In 1976, Kirby wrote and drew an adaptation of
2001: A Space Odyssey
for Marvel, using it as a vehicle for his psychedelic bent. The series revealed Kirby's obsession with the Star Child transformation theme. Kirby claimed in his introduction to the series that “the Monolith is a fictional element in a very real process,” i.e., the extraterrestrial transformation of the human species, which Kirby felt the aliens
“were doing for purposes beyond our understanding.”
¹⁴⁸
The book soon became a vehicle for a new character called Machine Man, signaling Kirby's conclusion that cybernetics was the ultimate destiny of the species. “We're not Star Children,” Kirby said, “we are headed towards the age in which machines will do all the things for us. That's why HAL is perfectly correct in killing these guys (the crew in the
2001
film) because he can do the job better.”
¹⁴⁹

Kirby's influence on sci-fi film was by no means limited to
Star Wars
. His 1981 series
Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers
concerned a crack military unit of space marines, led by the androgynous Victory, who travel the galaxy in pursuit of a race of giant aliens called the Insectons. Seemingly invulnerable, the Insectons invade planets and build underground hives where they entomb living humans and use their “life fluid” in incubators for their young. Kirby recycled the Insectons from
The New Gods
, intending Captain Victory to be the son of Orion. Since
Captain Victory
was created for another publisher, Kirby was unable to incorporate the
The New Gods
character names.

If the story of an androgynous warrior and a band of elite Space Marines fighting an army of vicious, insectoid aliens seems strangely familiar, you may have seen what is essentially the
de facto
Hollywood adaptation of
Captain Victory's
first six issues in James Cameron's 1986
Aliens
. Though there are significant differences (Kirby's stories are extremely odd), Cameron's film has so much in common with
Captain Victory
that it's hard to believe the similarities are coincidental.

Many of the most powerful scenes in
Aliens
have direct antecedents in C
aptain Victory
. The Galactic Rangers engage the Insectons in a series of subterranean tunnels, just as the Marines do in
Aliens
. There is a horrifying alien hive in both stories. The climax of
Aliens
, in which the androgynous Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) defeats the alien queen while manning an enormous, anthropomorphic robot, has a direct parallel in the androgynous Captain Victory's destruction of the Insecton hive while manning an enormous, anthropomorphic robot (
Captain Victory
, #6). It's probably an appropriate time to mention that James Cameron is a big comic-book fan, and that none of these elements were introduced in the first
Alien
film in 1979.

In Kirby's other major 1980s series,
Silver Star
, we see the Vril-ya again, but in a very different form from the X-Men or the Inhumans.
¹⁵⁰
Silver Star is one of a new scientifically engineered race
Homo Geneticus
, whose siblings are scattered and unaware of their true identities. Like the Vril-ya, Silver Star is blunt about man's future and predicts the coming dominance of
Homo Geneticus
: “I suppose it just
happens
, Pops. One man makes a
spear
, another counters with a
shield
… and so on, through the ages. They do it
all
!
Bigger, Scarier!
Never realizing how
long
they've been at it…
and that their time has come to clear the stage
! No offense, Pop,
you're obsolete
.”
¹⁵¹

Much of the six-issue mini-series has Silver Star trying to gather up his genetic kinsmen to protect them from the villain Darius Drumm, who wants to ensure his status as the only post-human.
¹⁵²
Driven to madness, Drumm becomes a literal Angel of Death, who telekinetically turns everything he flies over into desert. Although
Silver Star
was not a hit series, Kirby's concept has, nonetheless, filtered up to the mass media. The idea of a race of superbeings living anonymously and unconsciously among us has become increasingly popular in the past few years. M. Night Shamalayan used it for his film
Unbreakable
. Two hit TV series, USA's
The 4400
and NBC's
Heroes
have also expanded upon the theme, as has Marvel's recent revival of
The Eternals
.

Long before Alan Moore came along, Steve Englehart was injecting esoteric concepts into superhero stories. And he was doing so at a time when most of his contemporaries were recycling left-wing clichés into their stories in a bid for relevancy. Born in 1947, Englehart left his home in Indiana for New York City, where the occult renaissance outlived the Sixties. Groups like the OTO were very active there in the 1970s, and like-minded esotericists gathered in occult bookshops like the Magickal Childe in Chelsea. While the rest of the counterculture movement was being co-opted, these initiates created a counterculture of their own—a close-knit
community devoted to drugs, sex, and magic. Luminaries like former
Village Voice
writer Alan Cabal, occult writer Peter Levenda, Bonnie Wilfrod (then wife of
X-Men
writer Chris Claremont), filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and assorted fans of sci-fi and other genres were all drawn into the scene. This invisible underground had a major influence on sci-fi and fantasy, and, through writers like Steve Englehart, on comics.

Working for Marvel, Englehart enlivened several tired old titles, incorporated Watergate-era conspiracy theory into
Captain America
, and wrote the first eleven issues of the occult-themed
Defenders
, pitting the trio against a host of magical foes with Lovecraftian names like The Nameless One, The Undying Ones, and Necrodamus. The final story in his
Defenders
run even pays tribute to Bulwer-Lytton (“A Dark and Stormy Knight,”
Defenders
#11). Englehart also did a four-year stint on
The Avengers
, where he explored esoteric and occult themes, and, in 1974, such as Astrology.

Given his occult interests, Englehart was a natural for
Doctor Strange
. He himself explained that “when I took on his solo series, I decided I should learn a little about actual magick—and it led to a continuing interest in the subject.”
¹⁵³
Working with artist Frank Brunner, he killed off the Ancient One, making Doctor Strange the Sorcerer Supreme, then he set the Doctor into action against a super-powered incarnation of Caligostro, the infamous 18
^th
-century Italian occultist (
Marvel Premiere
#14). In 1976, in his final storyline, Englehart sends Strange back in time to investigate the occult origins of America, including Benjamin Franklin, the Rosicrucians, and the Hellfire Club (
Doctor Strange
#17). Unfortunately, Englehart quit the title before the storyline was resolved.

Englehart moved to DC and penned a classic run on the Batman title
Detective Comics
with frequent collaborator, the late artist Marshall Rogers. He worked briefly on a revival of Kirby's
Mister Miracle
and a 1981 title featuring the occult-oriented
Madame Xanadu
, whose cover pictured the Madame wielding Tarot cards closely modeled on Aleister Crowley's
Book of Thoth
deck. Following a dispute with DC, Englehart decamped to the independent publisher Eclipse, where he reworked the Madame Xanadu concept and renamed her Scorpio Rose, an immortal born at “a time when magick was alive”
¹⁵⁴
A more faithful rendering of the
Book of Thoth
was pictured on the cover of
Scorpio Rose
#2. While at Eclipse,
Englehart created the Native American shaman Coyote and set him on a series of occult adventures.

Most comics fans and historians agree that Alan Moore is the most important and influential comic-book writer since Stan Lee. Moore has almost single-handedly raised the level of sophistication of mainstream comics, and his influence has been crucial in shifting the center of power in the industry from artists to writers. Four major motion pictures—
From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Constantine
, and
V For Vendetta
— have been adapted directly from his creations. Besides being the best-known comics writer of his time, Moore is also a practicing ritual magician and a student of the occult sciences.

Born in England in 1953, Moore began his career as a cartoonist, creating strips for music magazines and underground papers. He later moved into writing, and worked extensively for Britain's small but active comics industry. His initial success came in
Marvelman
, which he wrote for the anthology magazine
Warrior
. Moore also created the dystopian drama
V for Vendetta
with artist David Lloyd. When DC Comics began raiding the U. K. for talent in the early 1980s, Moore caught the attention of
Saga of the Swamp Thing
editor Len Wein, who hired him to help save his faltering title. Moore performed radical surgery on
Swamp Thing
, turning it into an unholy admixture of Lovecraftian horror, Southern Gothic fiction, and ecological speculation.