The Forever People #6 “The Omega Effect!!” (December 1971)



The Story: A team of Justifiers finds the Forever People’s Super-Cycle. They try to destroy it, but it transforms into a fort and starts automatically shooting back. I’m glad a cop in Metropolis didn’t try to give it a ticket for illegal parking!



Sonny Sumo uses the Mother Box and his innate control of Anti-Life to take control of all of Desaad’s servants, while Mark Moonrider destroys the computers that control Happyland. This frees all the human captives who worked the machines and provided the entertainment there. Glorious Godfrey and his Justifiers attempt to flee in aircars.



Mark says that Sonny Sumo is more powerful than Darkseid, and surprisingly Darkseid reaches the same conclusion in a conversation with Desaad. When Vykin busts into the room, Darkseid shoots out eyebeams, Omega Effect, which cause Vykin to disappear without a trace. Darkseid’s homing beams strike each of the other heroes in turn, including Sonny Sumo but sparing Serifan the cowboy. Are they all dead?



Serifan commandeers an air-car from burning Happyland and flees back to the Super-Cycle, which takes a minute to be convinced that he’s a friendly. What will he do now, before another group of Justifiers attacks him? The final caption assures us that the Forever People have been teleported rather than destroyed.



Backup Story: Raid from Apokolips: It’s a little confusing at first. The previous story ended with a squad of Apokolips soldiers sneaking up on Serifan. This one appears to continue the same scene, but then we learn that this is another Apokolips squad confronting Serifan on a different occasion, when he was back on New Genesis, hanging out on the woods. They have brought a Thermo-Bolt Machine, basically a cannon with which they intend to attack the floating Supertown where the New Gods dwell. Big Bear shows up in a timely fashion, dropping a big log on the Machine. The enemy troops scatter. The end!



Lettercol: DC says most letter-writers are delighted with the “52 pages for 25 cents” experiment. Bob Rozakis gets Mark Evanier to clarify that Gardner Fox’s Golden Age Sandman with the gasmask is the same guy whom Kirby later drew in purple and yellow bodysuit sans gasmask.

My Two Cents: Darkseid’s whole plan up to this point was to find a human who had innate understanding of Anti-Life. But having found Sonny Sumo, Darkseid destroys him with the Omega Effect, because Sonny also had access to the Forever People’s Mother Box, which enabled Sonny to wield Anti-Life for himself. Does that mean Darkseid also will need a Mother Box to wield Anti-Life, or is he above such things? I guess his search for another Anti-Life human goes on.

Darkseid’s seeking beams have always been a terrifying weapon, combining the dangers of a homing missile and a laser beam to create an unavoidable weapon of destruction.



Big Bear has the power to absorb energy and then feed it back out in punches. It’s the same as later characters Sebastian Shaw (in X-Men), Bishop (also in X-Men), and Black Panther (in the movies, thanks to his super-suit).

The New Gods #6 “The Glory Boat!” (December 1971)



The Story: The titular robot-whale destroys tramp steamers, private yachts, and even nuclear submarines as it rampages the Atlantic Ocean. Orion rises from the ocean depths and rescues some survivors who have no choice but to tag along behind him.



Next Orion finds a mummy (horror monster quotient satisfied!) atop a floating ziggurat. Releasing the bandages, inside he finds none other than his comrade Lightray, who had come to help against the Deep Six but was captured instead. Lightray bonds with one of the refugees over their shared dislike of violence.



Inside the ziggurat is the unprotected brain of the Glory Boat. Orion wants to destroy it, but Lightray regresses it back to an immature form for retraining as a nice critter.



While Orion and Lightray fight the Deep Six and the returning Glory Boat, Richard and his dad re-enact a “WW2 vet disgusted with his pacifist adult son” story which was probably pretty common in real life in 1971.



Jaffar, one of Deep Six, attacks the humans, and pacifist Richard feels obliged to defend his family with force. He gets fatally turned into a faceless metal statue for his trouble. Orion guns Jaffar down with his Astro-Force glider.



The other four surviving members of Deep Six attack, along with the Glory Boat. The maturing brain inside the ziggurat transforms into a sleek metal ship which also transforms Richard back to human form. He’s still dead, though. The metal ship rams the Glory Boat, and both are destroyed, along with Deep Six. Lightray carries Orion from the conflagration at light speed.



Lettercol: Mark Evanier warns readers that sending money to DC for back issues is no good; they don’t have a stockpile to sell. “You unfortunate late-comers will just have to scrounge them up elsewhere.” It appears that Kirby is achieving his goal of telling a story that makes people want to have the whole set. Bob Rozakis wants to see more New Gods in New Gods, and less “O’Ryan’s Gang” of human sidekicks. OK, says Evanier. Mike Cherkas on the other hand loves the human sidekicks but complains that Kirby’s page layouts are too gridlike.

My Two Cents: This was an incredibly busy issue, loaded with plot, character and action for 26 pages. Overloaded perhaps. At first Lightray is portrayed as a pacifist, but in the end he’s more of a crafty combatant who uses guile and technology to defeat his foes rather than just attacking them immediately. Even Orion is taken aback by Lightray’s craftiness.



Lightray’s appearance as a mummy on the cover must have been Kirby’s way of complying with the request to incorporate more horror monsters into his Fourth World stories, like the Dragorin/Lupek monsters in Jimmy Olsen.

Kirby’s human conflict between Richard and his father rings true. He leaves ambiguity: When the pacifist fought and died to protect his family, whose view was being vindicated? Was he really a pacifist at heart, or just a man who hadn't yet found something to fight for, until his family was threatened?

Orion says (and an editorial note confirms) that Orion killed Slig last issue, though all we saw was Orion throwing Slig into a deep pit with what seemed like a “this will hold you for a while!” attitude. Heroes didn't usually kill villains in this era.

The send-ups I've watched (far more times than the actual story) are on GET SMART, with Don Adams playing 2 roles and doing a Ronald Colman impression, and James Caan as one of the baddies... also, the season 16 DOCTOR WHO story "The Androids Of Tara", where Mary Tamm got to play 4 different roles (2 of them robots), Tom Baker got to do a swordfight, and Peter Jeffrey played one of the most charismatic rat-B****** bad guys in the show's history. Looking back, I often find myself thinking he would have made a much better "Master" than Anthony Ainley did 2 years later.

My personal favorite Stewart Grainger film is "SODOM AND GOMORRAH", where he plays Lot, the leader of the Hebrews. At the IMDB, it's a film that really polarizes reviewers, as half complain it "doesn't follow the Bible", while the other half LOVE it exactly for that reason.

Lois Lane # 117 “S.O.S. from Tomorrow!” (December 1971)



Creative Team: Kanigher, Roth, Coletta again

The Story: It’s an anti-drug allegory. Lois visits a hospital wracked by drug cases. Sitting by the lake, she wishes she could think of some novel way to warn kids about the dangers of substance abuse.





A message in the bottle summons her and Superman to the year 2196, where hallucinogenic plants are making everyone bonkers as part of an alien plot. Even Lois and Superman get sent on a bad trip.






The good guys prevail and return to present day, where Lois wonders whether kids will get the message and avoid plants that alter the senses. Translation: Don’t smoke pot, kids!



My Two Cents: It’s a pretty obvious allegory for grown-ups to decode, though I bet a lot of kids didn’t figure it out. A letter from Bob Rozakis a few issues later approved of the story as “the kind of tale that has a moral but doesn’t hit you over the head with it.” This issue has almost no Fourth World content, but there is a single crucial panel in which Morgan Edge looks in a viewscreen… at himself! More to come as this story develops…

Given the eventual answer, it's also goofy that Morgan-on-TV is wearing the exact suit as Morgan-at-the-desk.

Jimmy Olsen #144 “A Big Thing in a Deep Scottish Lake!” (December 1971)



The Story: Morgan Edge threatens to reclaim the Whiz Wagon unless Jimmy Olsen and the Newsboy Legion travel in it to Scotland to investigate an alleged monster, “The Orm of Loch Trevor.” It takes them six pages to say “OK.”



Getting to Loch Trevor takes several more pages. There, they meet Felix MacFinney, who serves them dinner, and they meet his lovely, silver-tressed daughter Ginny.



Flippa Dippa swims into the Loch to find the Orm but is attacked by a second diver. Felix turns out to be an Intergang agent with murder on his mind. What, Morgan Edge had to lure Jimmy and the Newsboys all the way to Scotland to murder them with a pistol? Why not just crash his private plane when they were the only passengers?



The tiny Scrapper Trooper turns on Felix’s sonar device. This summons Fin Fang Foom from the depths, upsetting the boat and pulling Felix underwater. The second diver turns out to be Ginny. She claims she’s really on their side. Is she really?



In a B-story, Superman and Guardian respond to a request for help from a woman named Terry Dean at the Cosmic Carousel disco club in Suicide Slum. It seems the club’s new band “The San Diego Five String Band” plays weird instruments and is oddly familiar with The Project and Apokolips. Below the club is a tunnel to The Project… made by whom? The disco band attacks Superman with their instruments’ noises, causing the club to collapse.



Covers That Lie: Superman goes nowhere near Jimmy or Fin Fang Foom in this issue. He doesn’t even use his super powers, except for x-ray vision. He basically just walks into a nightclub and looks around.

Strange Stories from the D.N.A. Project: The Torn Photograph This back-up tale shows how during the hollowing of the cave under Metropolis, a subterranean Lost World was discovered, and a caveman killed some of the excavators. The End!



Lettercol: A certain Martin Pasko praises the Goody Rickels two-parter. He loves Kirby’s plotting but criticizes his dialogue and pans the Fourth World as a whole. Bridwell reports having seen Pasko dressed as Darkseid at the Comic Art Convention. A British fan is extremely pleased by Kirby ending the formulaic “Superman saves Jimmy from his latest mess” stories that used to predominate.

My Two Cents: I’m no big fan of the Newsboy Legion, but I understand their purpose here. Jimmy Olsen was always a lighter book, and the Legion provides comic relief, as well as someone for Jimmy to talk to. Also, they provide an excuse to print Golden Age Newsboy Legion stories as the back-ups in these 52 pagers. Really Superman is the odd one out in this title now. It would be nice if he could just be omitted from some stories, but I guess DC editorial wouldn’t hear of such a thing, so he’s getting shunted into his own B-stories instead.

This issue title seems like a riff on something, but I don’t know what.