Jack Kirby's Fourth World and Paul Celan's "Death Fugue" (Part I)
Try the Boom Tube--if you dare!
Wow, it’s good to be back—to be writing about what I love. Today, what I love is a comic book series from the 1970s and a German poem from the 1940s.
This is the first part in what I expect to be a three-part series of posts about Jack Kirby’s The Forever People and some post- and anti-war poems. I’m having fun thinking about this. I hope you have some fun reading about it, too.
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Jack Kirby’s 11-issue comic book series The Forever People (1971-72) is some of the most imaginative and moving anti-war literature from that era—if not the entire 20th century—and more people beyond comics circles should know about it.
Honestly, more people in comics circles should know about it. Jack Kirby himself is one of the most famous creators in the comics industry. Before his death in 1994, Kirby co-created some of the most recognizable characters on the planet: Captain America to start, Thor, Iron Man, Black Panther, and more—and that’s just for Marvel.
Without going into the industry weeds, Kirby took his talents to DC Comics in the early 1970s, hoping to receive more credit and rights as a creator. There he created one of the strangest corners of the DC Universe: the Fourth World, home to the New Gods, Darkseid, and the adventuring Forever People.
Despite my perpetual obsession with DC and DC history, the Fourth World has long been a mystery to me. And of course! In my original years of comic book obsession, over a decade ago, I was a teenager engaged almost solely in the interpersonal drama of these superhero comics. I loved Batman comics the way one loves a soap opera; I wanted to know who loved whom and with what quality, who hated whom and how much, which characters would kill each other if given the chance and which would smooch.
Can you blame me? I was a teenage girl on the internet.
I was interested in the history of the comic book medium and its creators primarily as an offshoot of that soap operatic interest. But I still collected and stored that history through osmosis—one reads a lot of Wikipedia pages as a superhero fan—and eventually, even as an older teenager and especially now, I began to appreciate superhero comics as a distinctly American genre, and one that rose to prominence in the hands of Jewish creators in the shadow of World War II.
I could talk about it all day: Superman, “champion of the oppressed,” was created by two young Jewish Americans from the midwest. In 1938. The connection is inescapable.
Born Jacob Kurtzberg to Austrian Jewish immigrants in New York City, Jack Kirby began working in comics in 1936, using a handful of pen names until he settled on Kirby. In 1943, he was drafted into the US Army, and he served in Europe until 1945.
Kirby’s post-war comics career is unfathomably influential. From helping to invent the entire genre of romance comics to his years at Marvel—seriously! Thor! Iron Man! Black Panther! More!—comic books and Hollywood itself would not be what they are today without Jack Kirby. But creators were (and still are) notoriously mistreated in this industry; in the early 1970s, feeling under-appreciated and under-compensated, Kirby left Marvel to work for the Distinguished Competition, DC Comics, where he once again reshaped the entire medium.
When talking about anti-war literature of the 20th century—especially in the context of World War II—I can’t help but think of Kirby’s contemporary, the Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan. Strange to think of these two titans as contemporaries, as their worlds feel so different: one an American comic book creator, the other a German-language poet. But their individual contributions to their respective forms are well-documented, yet still indescribable.
Both Kirby and Celan wrote in the wake of World War II, but I think I can be forgiven for suggesting that Celan’s experience was far more harrowing. Kirby may have served in the Army as an American Jew, but Celan was both a victim and survivor of the Holocaust. Separated from his family, he was imprisoned in a work-camp, where he eventually learned of his parents’ deaths before his camp was abandoned in 1944. These experiences inflect his poetry, and famously so in “Death Fugue,” translated here from the German “Todesfugue” by Pierre Joris:
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Black milk of morning we drink you evenings we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth he commands us play up for the dance Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease He calls jab deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play he grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue jab deeper your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the dance Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon we drink you evenings we drink you and drink a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamit
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The language and imagery are strange, enigmatic, and gestural, yet still evoke the horrors experienced by Celan and the millions, victims and survivors both, affected by the Holocaust and its aftermath. Many, many others have written and discussed “Death Fugue” before me, and I don’t want to try and say anything new; mostly I want to lay out, like one might a garden, some poems that reflect and then re-light how I experience Jack Kirby’s Fourth World saga, and especially The Forever People.
What I will say about “Death Fugue,” then, is this: the strange, hazy, broken language and imagistic landscape that define the iconic poem are unique to Celan, and unlike anything else I, personally, have encountered in poetry from this post-war era—at least at this caliber and with this kind of influence on world literature. It seems to me that the strangeness is the only angle from which Celan could begin to touch such a momentous horror, such a terrible and personal experience. Especially when he needed to use the German language to do so.
In John Felstiner’s translation of “Todesfugue,” he includes some of the original German in the English version, almost like the poem degrades back into its own inescapable language—its home.
How does one use their oppressor’s—their nightmare’s—language to write of that oppression, that nightmare?
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He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease
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Jack Kirby’s Fourth World is an expansive saga, too sprawling to cover with any depth in a single essay. The expansiveness itself was revolutionary; Kirby invented new worlds, new characters, a brand new story, and, for the first time in this medium, told that story using multiple comic books over many months. He created and introduced to DC the planets Apokolips and New Genesis with their race of New Gods, among them such imposing figures as Orion, Mister Miracle, and the intergalactic tyrant Darkseid (you may have even heard of him).
Kirby’s Fourth World wasn’t, at first, all that well-received by the public; the original series were all canceled before he could complete his story as he first imagined it. But the Fourth World and the New Gods have since reshaped the DC Universe and have become major players in their own rights, spanning comics, TV, and film.
(That link, by the way, is in no way an endorsement of the Snyder Cut—no way, no way.)
But all this is just the context I feel compelled to provide. What I really want to talk about is one particular series, perhaps the least well-known of Kirby’s Fourth World, at least outside of deep-dive comics lovers: The Forever People, which ran for eleven issues in the years 1971 and ’72. In my next li’l missive—because this is turning into a doozy, even for me—I’ll expand a little on a single issue from the series, #3, and pair it with another poem. I’ll do the same for #4-plus-poem in a post after that.
Like Kirby, I’m learning to plot, to weave, and to let my story take up the space it needs. Until then, friends. In the words of New Genesis’s own Mark Moonrider, and as a teaser for next time: “Life is good! Live it for others—not against them!”
wait you're saying kirby invented tying in different comics and doing crossover stories??? he's the reason i'm broke?????????