No, it wasn't the New Gods - it was issue #133 of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen.
As part of his new contract with DC, the powers that be were willing to let Jack create new comics - but they wanted him to do an established DC title, too.
It's been reported that his big concern was not taking a job away from someone in the industry, so he told them he'd take anything, as long as it was a book that didn't have an existing creative team.
So they gave him Jimmy Olsen.
You have to wonder if he even looked at previous issues of the title. After years and years of Jimmy getting into strange adventures, usually resulting in a goofy transformation of some kind, suddenly he's dropped in the middle of a wild, over-the-top science fiction adventure.
With his usual burst of incredible creativity, Kirby gives us: the new Newsboy Legion (descendants of the original group); the (unfortunately-named) Whiz Wagon, which provides transportation to the team (and looks like an amped-up Fantasticar); the strange land known as the Wild Area, which is inhabited by all kinds of bizarre characters, massive machinery and more than a few mysteries.
Oh, and you get Superman, too! (Though it's disturbing to see Kirby's version of the Man of Steel so obviously redrawn by diverse hands.)
It's wild, over the top and doesn't always make sense - but it's a heck of a lot of fun and was a great shot in the arm for a title that had become much too predictable.
It's not Kirby's best, but even his lesser efforts are better than most!
Grade: B+
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2 comments:
I decided to read that on Jack's birthday. Now I'm hooked all over again and am re-reading the entire Fourth World series for about the sixth time since it came out.
I worked for a short while as news director at a small television station in Zanesville, Ohio. Its call letters were WHIZ TV. We called the tiny Subaru station wagon the Whiz Wagon. Also, for a while, I got to say I was working where Billy Batson used to work.
Out of range of management, we joked that the call letters stood for "Where the Hell is Zanesville?"
Hoy
Ha! Great story, Hoy! I enjoyed re-reading this comic for the first time in - well, more years than I'd like to admit. It was certainly a heckuva change from what DC had been publishing up to that point - Kirby unleashed!
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