With all the brilliance he displayed on the Marvel Universe, it's almost bizarre that his 4th World endeavor was such a crushing failure for Jack Kirby.

Were the characters not cool enough? Were the stories too strange and weird? What was the problem?

BTW, are the New Gods figure completely awesome or what?





EDITED TO PUT BETTER NEW GODS PICS IN.

I'll go with timing. By the time he did the New Gods, Kirby's style looked dated. Honestly (and I know I'll get crap for this) it's like Speedball versus Spider-Man. Times change and tastes change, so while Speedball is no goofier than Spider-Man, and while the Black Racer is no sillier than the Silver Surfer, the timing was just wrong.

If you think of them as the guest stars for the Fantastic Four that they were created to be, it makes more sense why they couldn't make it on their own. They're somewhat like the Asgardians in Thor ... a backup series works, an occasional special works, but mostly people seem to like them best as guests in other series. I think the concept is too marginal to hit with a big audience consistently. (Not a putdown of Kirby's work -- quite the opposite.)

Would you really say that the Silver Surfer and Spider-Man are equal to Black Racer and Speedball in terms of goofiness?

I'd say the two sets are night and day in terms of cool; both Spidey and the Surfer are still considered pretty cool visually to this day while the other two, are not.

Maybe conceptually they are.

I agree with Welles, 100%. I think that some of the best artistic work in the world comes from situations where artists were restrained in some way to work within a certain framework. I don't think that Kirby's New Gods "didn't work", but it may have been more understandable if he'd had to share the load with a co-plotter or an aggressive editor. DC's answer of fixing his art with Murphy Anderson and reigning in his stories by adding their retcons and corrections in non-Kirby titles didn't really help.

Fixed.

they kinda suck

and I agree with linda. It's a place to get a glimpse of in a backup story, or a place Thor or the FF would visit.

Not some place or character we want to be with all the time.


Art wise, Kirby starting getting kinda out there by the 70s

As far as Speedball, I did like it, but it was no Spider-Man. not even close. It was totally wrong for the market.

That's wrong.

the SS is less silly than the BR because of Stan. Stan made him not Silly. Stan made him noble.

Not that he could have saved the BR

I can't believe you guys are putting down Speedball.

Pretty much this, seasoned with a sizeable pinch of Monk's "timing" theory.

It'd have been nice if the original books had been able to run to their planned conclusions without compromise, and still believe that, while it might have cost them a bit of money in the short-term, the long-term benefits to DC of simply letting Kirby do his thing would have been immense. But I'd rather have what we got than a watered-down-for-mass-consumption version, even if it would doubtless have been more successful. It's his masterpiece, for me - a hugely-flawed masterpiece, of course, and FANTASTIC FOUR and arguably even THOR are more polished, more immediately-accessible -but the New Gods capture Kirby at his purest, and that makes for some absolutely magical comics.

i said i liked it.
I even started the Speedball supey

Wikipedia says:

As described by Ronin Ro in Tales to Astonish:

“ "The idea of the New Gods had come to Jack years earlier, when he was plotting 90 percent of the "Tales of Asgard" stories in Thor. He wanted to have two planets at war and end with Ragnarok, the battle that would kill Thor's lucrative pantheon. Instead, he tried the idea in his Inhumans stories. Now he was presenting it in its original context. Though he wouldn't ever say it publicly, the New Gods books started right after the gods in Thor killed one another. The first page of Orion of the New Gods showed the same scenes from Thor - a planet torn in half and armored gods holding swords and dying on a fiery battleground."

Sorry, I knew I shouldn't have listened to that Evanier fellow Kurt mentioned.

Everything I've ever read or seen says they were created for Thor. Last time this came up, me and others pointed this out and you ignored us -- where are you getting the FF connection?

Evanier or whatever his name is. You were right and I am ashamed. Here's a bag of taffy.

I thought that Ronin Ro's book was pretty much regarded as crap.

I'll take Evanier's word on it.

Is it? It had some good reviews at one time

I forget if i read it.

I don't think so.

Mark Evanier? Does he claim the New Gods were created for the FF in that Inhumans storyline or something? It could just be that someone somewhere got something transposed. Evanier usually is the go-to guy for Kirby scoops.

I'd say it was a combination of things. As Kurt mentioned above, the lack of editorial control left the stories unfocused and Kirby's heavy-handed (and often-times downright bizarre) dialogue probably left more than a few of the readers cold. The Murphy Anderson "fixes" probably didn't help matters any, either.

And I'm not trying to criticize -- I just want the real story. There is the fact that there's those panels in the Thor comic that are almost identical to the opening panels of the New Gods.

And in the end, he was doing it for the wrong company. DC and its heroes weren't the kind of place for something like the New Gods. They still feel shoehorned in to me.