Yeah, people are so used to it in comics they don't see anything strange about, let alone wrong with it. But to me, if someone's trying to sell me a New Gods series I'm going to have certain minimum expectations, just the same as if someone is trying to sell me a Sherlock Holmes story or whatever the case may be. If they give me a story where Holmes is a dumb guy who doesn't have a clue, the odds are very low that I'll like it, though I wouldn't say they were at absolute zero.

Emotional attachment or personal history certainly comes into it: for example, I've never read, I dunno, say Little Women and probably never will. If someone makes a Little Women movie or writes a sequel, I'm not going to have much to say about it one way or the other. Even if I did happen to see it or read it, I won't know enough about the original to understand any changes they've made.

The New Gods #3 “Death Is the Black Racer!” (June 1971)



The Story: An exciting in media res opening shows Lightray fleeing the Black Racer. He uses a crystalline asteroid to change his light-beams into “a fiery holocaust” which Black Racer easily dodges. I don’t think that’s how light and fire interact. The word “holocaust” shows up in Fourth World books a lot. Just as Black Racer is about to touch Lightray, presumably killing him, Metron shows up and uses a Boom Tube to send Black Racer to Metropolis on Earth.



Black Racer spies a gunfight between two black members of Inter-Gang. Sugar-Baby guns down a black man in a suit. The scene is witnessed by Willie Walker, a mute, paralyzed Viet Nam vet. Black Racer prevents Sugar Baby from murdering Walker, then heals Walker’s paralysis and allows him to take up the mantle of the Black Racer.



On Earth, Orion spends several pages changing into civilian clothes. He cryptically comments that his appearance as a New Genesis inhabitant is “not the true face of Orion” but rather has been somehow fashioned by Mother Box. Orion and one of his human friends, police inspector David Lincoln, track some Inter-Gang thugs to their hideout and interrupts their plan to attack a “communications building” with an Apokolips bomb. The plot gets confusing at this point. Sugar-Man flees with the bomb. Black Racer intercepts him and sends Sugar-Man’s truck sailing up toward space:



But then Orion says that Mother Box is responsible for sending the Apokolips bomb over a thousand miles into space so that when it explodes, it won’t damage all the communications equipment in North America. This is just handled in dialogue and doesn’t fit with what we saw Black Racer doing. This issue appears to have been hopelessly tampered with late in the production cycle to insert the story of Black Racer, so that the narrative is completely jumbled.



My Two Cents: Well, this issue is just a big fat mess due to editorial tampering. Jack Kirby had a detective story to tell about Orion and Detective Lincoln playing gumshoe and tracking down an Intergang bomb. But Mark Evanier reports what happened instead:


The Black Racer is an obvious take-off on the Silver Surfer, spoofing Kirby’s days on Fantastic Four. His alter ego as a comatose man is an amping up of the power fantasy behind Billy Batson and Don Blake. As a figure of death, he ought to be faceless and swathed in black but instead is black in the African sense and wears garish yellow and red. And he gets way too much of this issue, resulting in an incoherent climax in which both Orion and Black Racer never meet and independently claim full credit for ending the bomb threat.




I feel like there’s a political statement here. Metron doesn’t dispose of Black Racer; he just makes him someone else’s problem to save his friend. Black Racer himself is handled in a confusing manner. His initial combat with Lightray sets us up to see him as an agent of Apokolips. But then he becomes more of a Spectre-like angel of vengeance who attacks criminals. Are we then to understand that Lightray deserved to die, like Sugar-Baby? We haven't seen any evidence of his guilt.



The cover makes the odd choice of asking readers whether the Black Racer is going to exit the comic book and attack them. Once again the cover background is a B&W photo, as in many of these New Gods titles.

Which is why it's odd that he intervenes to save the communications equipment of Earth from Intergang's attempt to bomb it, by flinging the bomb-laden van into outer space. This just shows how his appearance in this story was never intended by Kirby. But having given Black Racer the first half of this issue, Kirby obviously felt obliged to include him in the solution to the bomb plot that occupies the second half.

I included Goody Rickels as a member in my Substitute League of America fanfic.

I wonder what would have been in the seventh issue. The story of the Hairies and the Habitat was already quite decompressed, with lots of large panels and splash pages. I would have liked to see some actual interaction between the two tribes of teens, but neither seemed inclined. Instead, the story mainly serves to reboot the Newsboy Legion and Guardian as clones of their Golden Age selves. And also to introduce Mokkari, Simyan, and the Evil Factory which has access to Guardian's and Superman's genetic samples yet chooses to make clones of Jimmy Olsen instead. I guess they did make tiny clones of the JLA in that Lois Lane story, but why not giant clones? Think of a ten foot Flash whizzing around at gale force!

Forever People #4 “The Kingdom of the Damned” (August 1971)



The Story: The scene opens on the Happyland amusement park, where bright lights and whirling machines drown out the plight of a tortured subset of the attendees; the rest enjoy their time, oblivious to the dark underbelly of an entertainment-saturated culture. Religion has been dethroned as the opiate of the masses. Powerful stuff! It’s the work of Darkseid’s lieutenant Desaad, and ol’ stoneface has come to congratulate him.



While Desaad experiments with the captured Mother Box, Darkseid wanders the park and is mistaken for a carnie by some. As always, Darkseid stands with his hands clasped behind his back. He doesn’t need to be ready to fight. Who would dare, and who could hope to win?



The Forever People are prisoner here somewhere; they spend several pages in a futile escape attempt. They are separated, and their distresses are incorporated into various theme park attractions.



The Motherbox teleports away and is picked up by this issue’s new character, "Sonny Sumo, the Banzai Express." Is this where "Buckaroo Banzai and the Tokyo Express" got their name?



My Two Cents: This was a pretty decompressed issue plotwise, giving multiple pages each to the plights of the captive Forever people, but it’s so effective an indictment of the anaesthetizing nature of mass media that we ought to give it a high grade anyway.



Grant Morrison used an amusement park similarly in his Seaguy series, doubtless consciously following Kirby.



“Desaad” is a straightforward reference to the Marquis de Sade. The stage and film musical “Marat/Sade” was a counterculture pop phenomenon in the late 1960s, casting the Marquis as a hero of free thinking rather than a sexual deviant.

Nah, disagree. Kirby's Darkseid is actually quite consistent. His response to the world around him is mostly "Quiet amusement." He's not in a hurry, he has all the time in the world, and he's fascinated by people on a sociological level. He'll interact with you just to see how you'll respond. He's a cat playing with a mouse.