THE KING IS HERE!

Jack Kirby is Here!

After leaving Marvel in 1970, Jack Kirby moved to DC Comics, where editor Carmine Infantino handed him near-total creative freedom, and Kirby seized it to launch one of the single most ambitious experiments in comics history. His first assignment was to take over Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen with issue #133, but that was just the entry point for something far bigger: the "Fourth World" saga, a sprawling cosmic mythology spread across New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle, and Jimmy Olsen itself. It was through these titles that Kirby's fingerprints landed squarely on Superman's own corner of continuity, blowing the character's cosmology wide open with new gods, new worlds, and a scale of storytelling DC had never dared attempt before.

Taking over the long-running but flagging Jimmy Olsen series, Kirby detonated it into an explosion of pure creative invention, packing nearly every issue with new concepts, teams, and characters at a pace almost no other creator in comics history has matched. Alongside Darkseid's earth-shattering first appearance in 1970, one of the greatest villains ever created, Kirby introduced the Whiz Wagon, the DNA Project and its underground Cadmus complex, and a revived Guardian, the golden-age hero now recast as the leader of a squad of genetically engineered Guardian clones. He resurrected his own creation the Newsboy Legion in a bold new generation, threw them against the savage biker gang the Outsiders, led by the monstrous Victor Volcanum, and unleashed the Hairies, a freewheeling band of hippie inventors and engineers who built the Whiz Wagon and the towering Mountain of Judgment. He even wrote in a fictionalized version of comedian Don Rickles, spinning a wildly memorable, self-aware storyline out of his real-world friendship with the entertainer. And Superman was right in the middle of it all, appearing regularly in Jimmy Olsen as Jimmy's friend and ally, which meant Kirby was, in effect, writing and drawing Superman every single month without ever officially touching the character's flagship title. Artists Al Plastino and Murphy Anderson touched up Superman's face and emblem over Kirby's pencils, and Neal Adams occasionally inked covers, but everything underneath was pure, unfiltered Kirby: sprawling and relentlessly innovative.

Superman's ties to the Fourth World didn't stop there; they extended straight into the very first issue of Forever People. There, using a Boom Tube to travel to Earth from New Genesis, the young New Gods enlist Superman's help to rescue one of their own, Beautiful Dreamer, held captive by Darkseid, who mistakenly believes she holds the secret to his ultimate obsession, the Anti-Life Equation. In that same issue, Superman utters one of the most quietly powerful lines of his Bronze Age history, musing that meeting the Forever People may be his only chance to find his own kind, a rare, poignant moment that fused his own isolation as the last son of Krypton directly into Kirby's new mythology. This brief but electrifying chapter left a permanent, indelible mark on the Superman mythos, seeding Darkseid and Apokolips as two of the most enduring and consequential cornerstones in the character's entire history, forces that would go on to shape Superman stories for decades to come.

"Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel created Superman, Bob Kane and Bill Finger created Batman,
and Jack Kirby created everything else."
- Julius Schwartz, Man of Two Worlds

"In the end, the world didn't really need a super man. Just a brave one."
- Superman: The Animated Series, Apokolips Now Part 2 (February 14, 1998)

"Jack created many characters before he even met Stan.
He created almost all the characters when he was associated with Stan, and after he left Stan, he created many, many more characters.
What has Stan created before he met Jack, and what has he created after Jack left?"
- Roz Kirby, February 1990