{"id":581,"date":"2010-05-03T23:59:01","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T03:59:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/05\/04\/read-this-jack-kirby-fourth-world\/"},"modified":"2010-05-04T00:00:56","modified_gmt":"2010-05-04T04:00:56","slug":"read-this-jack-kirby-fourth-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/05\/03\/read-this-jack-kirby-fourth-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Read This: Jack Kirby’s Fourth World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"kirby-fourth-world.jpg\"I was reading this essay at the Jewish Review of Books<\/i> about “why there is no Jewish Narnia<\/a>” earlier tonight, and at first I mentally countered that if, as Michael Weingrad claimed, “Jews do not write fantasy,” where was I supposed to shelve the Avram Davidson books? But then I figured, okay, let’s grapple with the more specific version of Weingrad’s lament, which is the lack of a Jewish epic fantasist comparable to J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, and the answer to that<\/i> came to me in an instant: Jack Kirby.<\/p>\n

I confess that I haven’t read the entirety of DC’s multi-volume hardcover collection of Kirby’s “Fourth World” stories, which was spread out over four separate comics that “the King” came to the company to write and draw in 1970—creating The New Gods<\/i>, The Forever People<\/i>, and Mister Miracle<\/i> from scratch as well as taking over Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen<\/i>—but only because I didn’t have the $200 to spare when they were coming out. I did, however, read the first volume<\/a>, and I can assure you, it’s seriously mindblowing. Yes, it’s not explicitly Jewish, but it’s not like Aslan is explicitly<\/i> Christian, either.<\/p>\n

Not to mention that the Fourth World’s influence on the two generations of comic book creators who’ve followed in its wake has been enormous; people with a more rigorous grounding in the history of DC and Marvel could make a richly detailed, persuasive argument about the majority of “epic” series over the last quarter-century being a series of attempts to grapple, either directly or indirectly, with the precedent that Kirby established here. (If you’re not dealing point-blank with the New Gods, as Grant Morrison was in Final Crisis<\/i>, you’re working up a story that “threatens” to “revolutionize” your entire “continuity,” like Mark Millar on Civil War<\/i> or Brian Bendis on Secret Invasion<\/i>… which turned out to be two chapters in an even larger saga). And this is just the most blatant example of how Kirby would build an epic world from scratch; when DC pulled the plug, Kirby returned to Marvel and started up a new series called The Eternals<\/i>…<\/p>\n

Anyway, that’s my answer to the question of why there isn’t a Jewish Narnia: There is, and it’s called The Fourth World.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was reading this essay at the Jewish Review of Books about “why there is no Jewish Narnia” earlier tonight, and at first I mentally countered that if, as Michael Weingrad claimed, “Jews do not write fantasy,” where was I supposed to shelve the Avram Davidson books? But then I figured, okay, let’s grapple with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}