"Kirby could throw away in one single panel a high concept that would keep others busy for years : Crippled Vietnam War veteran Willie Walker became the vessel for The New God of Death — a black man in full armor hurtling through walls and space on skis. The Black Racer was a twist on Kirby’s original idea for the Silver Surfer, here as an angel of Death, not Life. The Mother Box, a living, emotionally nurturing, personal computer was the fusion of soul and machine carried by all the inhabitants of New Genesis. Metron the amoral science god with his dimension-traveling Mobius chair. The Source was for Kirby the ultimate ground of being, like the Ain Soph Aur of Judaic mysticism, beyond gods, beyond all divisions and definitions. Genetic manipulation, media control, the roots of Fascism — Kirby was on fire and had something new to say about everything under the sun.
The Fourth World cycle was to be a great interlocking mechanism of books combining to form a complete modern myth, while, as an afterthought, re-creating the very idea of the superhero from the ground up and infusing it with Divinity. It might have run for five more years.
But then The Fourth World spun off its axis. Carmine Infantino, promoted to DC’s vice president, allegedly looked at sales figures and canceled the books, which were doing well enough but not as well as had been hoped based on Kirby’s name. The King was hit hard, and The World lost the conclusion to a Great Work. He went on to create more titles, of course. Hundreds more original, quirky stories burst from that relentless mind, but the great mythographer had been thwarted in the midst of his masterpiece, brought down by dark forces and jealous gods. Kirby’s personal vision, his avalanche of novelty and energy, was too new for a culture in retreat, looking back to the fifties, dreaming of sock hops and ponytails, in the happy days before ’Nam and Richard Nixon.
When Kirby returned in 1985, older and more wary, to complete his story, he was given only sixty pages to wrap up a saga that warranted thousands more. Imagine God halfway through Exodus having to hurry it up. The Hunger Dogs showed the passage of time and the footprints left by the relentless march of cynicism. Still The King delivered. As a dreadful elegy for the hopes of the baby boomers and the stark truth of their lives—growing older, facing Reagan and Thatcher — The Hunger Dogs, Kirby’s completion of The Story, was bleak, unforgettable, and in many ways the only perfect end to The Fourth World saga.
But by the time it was released, Kirby’s hand-to-eye coordination had deteriorated significantly, making some pages appear ugly and rough-hewn. A more generous approach might imagine the artist embracing a new primitivism, a shorthand in which scale and perspective played second fiddle to the immediate expression of the ideas. But too many of the drawings were doodles that told the story with the barest minimum of effort. And his audience had flown. Fashion had passed him by. He was “Jack the Hack” now, an old man mocked and derided by the same people who had hailed his genius twenty years earlier and would again ten years later.
The Epic had stalled and, like the great Aquarian youth revolution that had inspired so much of it, unraveled into world-weary cynicism. The Forever People had all grown up, gone bald, got jobs, and given up the struggle for a future among the stars. But Kirby had one final trick, one last visionary warning to leave his readers : A new superhero saga that would jump so far into The Future that it’s still reverberating and is more relevant today than it was when it was published to little acclaim in 1974...."
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