GODLAND

Whatever it is GØDLAND is Kirbyesque in the best sense of the word. There have been any number of clever pastiches of Jack Kirby's work over the last decade or so but Casey and Scioli go beyond mere nostalgic homage to completely overhaul the essentials of the Kirby Kosmic style. Compared to the master, this reads like the difference between Frank Sinatra singing 'My Way' and the Sid Vicious cover version. This is Kirby strobing through the mall lights and VDU glare, Kirby sampled and duplicated in the dazzle of MTV and YouTube, overloaded, cranked beyond all tolerance, ripped, burned, détourned and reconfigured to create a cosmic soap opera populated by thoroughly modern heroes - Adam Archer recalls Kier Dullea's haunted astronaut Dave Bowman in '2001: A Space Odyssey', the returned Starchild here cast adrift in a world of TV re-runs, internet porn and narcotics, where the transcendence he promises is just one more item on the menu, one more distraction of the Spectacle - and unforgettable villains like Discordia, The Tormentor, and the engaging Basil Cronus, whose mark of louche sophistication can't help but slip to reveal a babbling street corner junkie on the make. The world of GØDLAND bristles with life and energy as it gives birth to these and other post-quantum Dickensian grotesques. What may at first seem familiar is soon revealed to be the work of restless innovators, slyly recuperating and recontextualising Kirby Kosmik as a day-glo inoculation against deadening 'reality'.

Face front, true believer, it's 2007...

GØDLAND IS THE NEW REAL.

Grant Morrison, Glasgow, April 2007

...

Kirby's work in the late '60s gave rise to a '70s wave of so-called 'cosmic' comics; as the 'relevant' superhero titles of the period tried and failed to offer any lasting insight into the soul of America, it took a generation of acid-tripping writers and artists to confront the real questions of Life, Death, Time and Transcendence in the pages of books like 'Captain Marvel', 'Warlock', 'Doctor Strange' and 'Silver Surfer'. Emerging at the end of the Vietnam War, the cosmic comics held up a mirror to the sick and weary American psyche and offered, in place of South East Asia's blood-soaked mire, an imaginative vision of human possibility and a destiny in the stars.

In a time of war once more, at a point where the mainstream comics aesthetic is again working its way through a periodic obsession with filmic 'realism' and heartfelt, ham-fisted, globo-political commentary, Joe Casey and Tom Scioli have elected to swim against the prevailing current and to go 'cosmic' again. Perhaps it's this acute awareness of what it most definitely does not want to be that gives GØDLAND its laser-like focus and powerfully contemporary resonance.

GØDLAND - CELESTIAL EDITION - Joe Casey & Tom Scioli (Image Comics, 2007)

When Jack Kirby, the King of Comics, died in 1994, he left behind more than simply thousands of pages of art and ideas, he left us a whole new way of seeing the world, and so the word 'Kirbyesque' came to signify a kind of monumental, myth-making grandeur, a muscular engagement with the elemental Pop Art potential of the comics, where massive forms embodying the best and worst qualities of human nature can be unleashed to hammer out the issues on a grand stage whose scope extends to the farthest reaches of the universe and beyond; as far, in fact, as the eye of Kirby Konciousness can see.