Old Gods & New: A Companion To Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Paperback – July 6, 2021

I am a child of the bronze age and grew up with Kirby's Fourth World. Sadly my original comics are bent, mutilated and spindled or "well loved" to be kinder. A few years ago I bought the rather unwieldy but beautiful Kirby Fourth World Omnibus. Old Gods and New is a fascinating behind the scenes book which adds texture and context to the stories. Highly recommended!

This is an amazing volume, and I'm glad I splurged on a limited hardcover edition from the publisher. I even bought a second hardcover as a gift for a friend. It's well made and absolutely beautiful.What made it so impressive?As a launching point, it takes Jack's famous dispute with and move from Marvel to DC to begin his magnum opus, The New Gods and related "Fourth World" series. The book frames this with his career-long fascination with and crafting of stories and artwork of gods (including his interpretations of the god of his Jewish faith).Marvel Comics' Mighty Thor was not his first examination of Norse themes, and the unrealized fullness of his vision for the Fourth World line was not his last exploration of gods and Old Gods and New takes us beyond his days at DC to his return to Marvel with cosmic Celestial beings, and cousins to mankind in The Eternals (MCU version coming soon to a theater near you.) Meticulously tracing the flow of his many ideas, the book goes beyond his Marvel and DC concepts as well.It's a must-have addition to any Kirby fan's collection, worth perusing time and again.It's a fitting companion piece to their Stuf' Said! book contrasting the disparities in Jack's version of his days with Marvel in the '60s with Stan's, also highly recommended.

Remember Cliffs Notes for literary works during your college days? Well, this “companion” to Kirby’s Fourth World is just that. Besides giving you the backstory of Kirby’s famous move to DC in 1970, and Kirby’s personal knowledge on mythology and its gods and goddesses, John Morrow and Jon B. Cooke also adumbrate at extra textual explanation about the Fourth World and its characters. In addition to this, it shows who inspired the artwork behind many illustrations that Kirby uses for his characters (for example, Big Barda’s image was based on Lanie Kazan, a singer model admired by Kirby), and devotes some pages on Stan Lee’s inspiration on Funky Flashman, another character within the Fourth World.Accompanied by lots of artwork, interviews, and biographical anecdotes, this text gives its readers and Kirby fans a satisfactory background to ALMOST every angle that shaped Kirby’s own mythos. It covers the Fourth World’s background from its inception till its conclusion owed to DC’s decision to cancel it (and explores the roots behind the cancellation).As in a previous tome I read, where Morrow explores and extrapolates on the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby relationship, Morrow uses the same method in crowding too much text with illustrations and captions of different sizes, making its reading at times slightly fastidious. That’s the reason why I give this text a 4. Another reason for this 4 is that while most of the text focuses on extratextual analyses of the Fourth World, very little is devoted to Kirby’s artwork during this period; albeit there is a thorough discussion on Vince Colletta’s contribution to Kirby’s art - for a profound discussion about his artwork, it’s better to read Hand of Fire by Charles Hatfield.On the other hand, Morrow shares about a dozen beautiful one-page illustrations by Kirby and Jon B. Cooker’s Fourth World encyclopedia which includes every single character, place, and technological gimmick. That’s a wow!In general, the text fulfills its purpose, and if you are a Kirby fan, there is no need to apologize for its small weaknesses as a text (which is not meant to be scholarly in the first place). For Kirby fans, it’s a plus!

Since the mid-1990's, John Morrow and the rest of the JKC crew have continued to give credit where credit is due when it comes to Jack Kirby's boundless creativity and contributions to the comic art form. With "Old Gods and New" Morrow has raised the bar once again: shedding as much light as possible on Jack's unfinished masterpiece - the New Gods. John's taken virtually every tidbit of information pertaining to the New Gods and created as detailed a timeline as we're probably ever going to get: from the initial idea(s) for the series, to what went right, what went wrong and how the New Gods laid a foundation/template that countless comic books and graphic novels are still following/copying to this day. This effort is screaming to be repackaged a much-larger coffee-table edition so readers can really enjoy all the artwork therein at near-original size.Highly recommended and a fine bookend not only to Morrow's recent Kirby-Lee examination "Nuff Said" but to all the many issues of the Jack Kirby Collector that have been published over the years. In the famous words of Jack Kirby himself, "Don't Ask, Just Buy!"