Review of Jack Kirby's OMAC
TJ Dietsch reviews Jack Kirby's OMAC.
I bought the first issue off the newsstand in 1974, and the story, about suicide-bomber sex-robots, blew my mind.
DC recently released an anthology of all 8 issues of the short-lived series.
Which brings us to Buddy Blank, a regular dude who works for Build-A-Friend until he’s selected by the faceless Peace Agency to become the One Man Army Corps. When OMAC takes over, Buddy disappears, but does return later on in the series.Link | Buy OMAC anthology on Amazon. (via Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat)Over the next 8 issues, Kirby throws OMAC against everything from a rented city of assassins trying to kill him, a giant spider-like monster, future gangsters, a vast cloning ring, a mad scientist stealing the Earth’s water and more. Kirby’s wild pencils really bring these out-there concepts to life, punching you in the eyes with incredibly crisp pencils.
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First?
Boyvbar,
I'm hoping that's an in-joke that I don't get.
@2 I think Boyvbar is stating Kirby was first.
I have a few of these and will be anxious to get the collection.
Kirby's dialogue is some of the most odd I've ever read. It wasn't as if he wrote dialogue that was any better or worse than other DC and Marvel comics writers at the time (though he had 10 times the imagination), he just wrote weird. Other mainstream comics writers were just as melodramatic and bombastic, but Kirby's writing seemed as if it were being translated from a foreign language.
I think Kirby is a hard sell to people who aren't complete comics nerds. The writing is just too odd, and on a pure technical level, it's not good writing in the traditional sense of good writing. He has the irritating habit of putting anything he considers a figure of speech or slang in quotes. People talk wrong, even by the standards of genre conventions.
That's why a review like this doesn't really do anybody any good. If you already know what Kirby's about and are into Kirby, you're into Kirby. If Kirby is a completely novel idea to you, you're very likely to pick it up and put it down and go "bleah". Fpr non-Kirby initiates, I think a stronger argument needs to be made for why Kirby should be read. It's dense with original and funky ideas for sure, but the actual Kirby reading experience is a hard sell all around.
Without knowing anything about the contents, that cover is rather disturbing.
@5
The insides were pretty disturbing too.I first read these when they came out and they were different from anything else on the newsstands. I liked his 4th World books too. Kirby was a raw idea factory, and he chunking this kind of stuff out by the pound. Often pretty crudely finished, but always interesting.
I'm surprised to see these anthologized. I remember reading several of them when they came out (who could forget a cover like that?) and I didn't think it was DC's best work. Maybe they're just going to re-issue absolutely everything.
As odd as the old OMAC was, I'd take it anyday over the current boring bodysnatcher version DC has been hammering us over the head with for the last few years.
I've always loved the "M" in the title.
Jed, you hit the nail on the head with all of your comments.
That being said, I'm into Kirby and think Omac 1-8 was some of his most interesting self-written stuff from his DC period.
Antinous, "first" is a particularly noxious meme I've seen on some liberal blogs. Nip it, nip it in the bud before it spreads everywhere.
This really creeped me out when I got it as a kid which may explain why I've never really liked Kirby (except for his 2001 series which is totally bizarre.)
Kirby had his own language visually and for dialogue. Genius work even though it can appear crude and clunky to outsiders. I'm not sure if the article mentions it or not but Kirby very accurately predicts Virtual Reality in one of these issues with the VR helmet and everything.
What does "first" mean? The first to post?
OMG! This is it!
I read this comic back in 74-75, when I was a little kid. It disturbed me, and I've never been able to get the image of the woman being led to be turned into a dissasembled suicide-bomber sex-robot out of my head.
Over the decades since, I've tried to figure out what comic book it was that I read back then, but have never been able to. Now I have!
Thanks Mark!
I was about twelve when OMAC came out. I absolutely loved it. I didn't know at the time, of course, that the idea was to advance on Captain America, but it makes sense: these were the Watergate years, and this was Captain America (who was also a skinny "loser" transformed into a super-soldier by technology) for a paranoid, terrifying era, far into the future, where global peace was kept by men so in danger because of their jobs that they had to wear masks! (They were OMAC's bosses!)
Buddy Blank (OMAC's alter-ego) was in love with a replicant pleasure-bot named Lila. OMAC was powered by a satellite named "Brother Eye." He'd weaken and need a charge, and if Brother Eye was in trouble, so was OMAC.
When you talk about the quality of Kirby's writing, you have to break it down into his dialog - which was weird, for sure (I loved it, but I get that some just couldn't get into it) - and his storytelling. To me, one barely has to say it: Kirby was an amazing writer, and OMAC is astounding storytelling. Yes, it is experimental; this is the series, to me, where he gets into territory that was also being walked by Kubrick and Philip K. Dick - not imitating, but forging paths alongside them.
God, I loved the DC Kirby stuff. I've even gotten over the fact that it all went unfinished. I'm almost glad it did - it makes it, in a way, immortal. I worked for DC briefly in the early 1980s and made the mistake of telling one of the veteran artists there how much I loved the Kirby era. He looked at me with utter hatred.
In retrospect, OMAC is one of the most revolutionary works of that revolutionary period from Kirby. He's taking his most traditionally great creation - Captain America - and tossing him into one of the most bizarre dystopias in the history of comics.
The dunderheads trying to "darken" the character these days have no idea. In a way, the biggest complement - sadly - one can pay to OMAC today is that if it came out right now, it would probably still fail.
Thank you, Soulbarn. You articulated my feelings about Omac much better than I could have.
I never realized how few issues there actually were. If I recall right, the series didn't really end, or maybe Brother Eye sort of gets killed. I do remember OMAC turns up again when Kamandi the boy of the future (another kick-ass series) gets turned into the new OMAC.
A million! A billion! Money's no object! Just KILL OMAC!!
From what I remember of the world of OMAC, it was the near future (of the 1970s) and one whose advanced technologies created opportunities for new and bizarre types of crime. That was very much of the 1970s post-Watergate, post-Vietnam and post-oil embargo era.
that cover just makes me think of Udo Kier in The Kingdom...
Saying that Jack Kirby wrote clunky dialogue really is the equivalent of complaining that Rembrandt couldn't draw feet. (Mostly, he's guilty only of overusing exclamation points.) The King could spin out an entire comic-book mythos that would be a career-crowning achievement for a lesser writer or artist, before breakfast.
I recall reading a quote to the effect that when Man reaches the end of the universe, he will find the name "Jack Kirby" scrawled in the lower right hand corner.
I couldn't agree more.
(Sorry, I don't know who to credit with that quote.)
Can someone explain what is the thing that the superhero is throwing? Is it a woman in a cement block? Are the hands and wrists just sitting on top or are they attached? Is the woman all bent up, or what?
I really need to know.
IIRC, that is a crate packed with the unassembled parts of an exploding sexbot.
I've never liked Kirby"s art. He drew two faces, the male on and the female one. Many of the poses in action sequences were awkward. And frankly, just looking at the costumes hurts the eyes are seeing enough of them (I's love to Alex Ross to do an Eternals vs. New Gods painting to best illustrate this)
Calling him an idea machine may be true, but when the ideas come out unfiltered, such as in a series where he's the only creator present, this means most of the bad ideas make it in as well.
and "First" is an old one. Used to see it on AICN when I would comment there. every article's first fifteen comments would be "First!' "First" "Awww DAmmit you beat me!" and so forth.
I say ban anyone who does it here. It's juvenile.
I've always loved Jack Kirby. I have every issue of OMAC, including the Kamandi/OMAC crossover issue. I also have another short-lived series of his called 'Demon'. It always saddens me when the Kirby-haters show up, but I always loved his style.
I pretty much agree with Jed.
I got the entire 4th World set for Father's Day (best family EVER), & while the guy was undoubtedly a genius, his storytelling and dialogue don't quite match the genius of his pencils.
Maybe it has something to do with Kirby's being a 50s beat-influenced kind of guy writing in the groovy 70s.
It might explain clunkers like Jimmy Olsen's line: "Even if the story's a lie, it's a whopper!" Or a character named Scott Free.
And yet, and yet ... some fascinating ideas, a really epic vision of the universe.
But I still prefer his work with Marvel. His falling-out with Stan Lee seems the equivalent of the Beatles breakup.
"Saying that Jack Kirby wrote clunky dialogue really is the equivalent of complaining that Rembrandt couldn't draw feet."
I didn't say clunky, I said odd, though I wouldn't rule out "clunky". But clunky might describe most of the comics writing at the time. He was an artist and storyteller first, but his writing was naive in a formal sense. That doesn't make it bad writing per se, just very ideocyncratic.
There's nothing about Rembrandt that's naive, and comparisons like this just aren't very useful because it's a completely different form and venue. Rembrandt didn't make comic books. Neither did Hemingway. Comparing Kirby and Rembrandt is like comparing apples and sauerkraut.
This said, I love the way Kirby drew and he had an amazing sense of composition and his gadgetry sometimes verged on the non-objective. There are people who have imitated the superficial aspects of his style but don't have nearly the understanding of space that Kirby had, let alone the imagination. They often just don't get Kirby on a fundamental level.
Now some of his stuff was just godawful, like Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers, but their were exceptions. Though the narrative was a mess, even Silver Star of that late period was visually inventive.
As for his writing, point being: it's not the most accessible to folks who don't have a vested interest in comics. Your average Joe who has just heard that comics are something to pay attention to is more likely to identify with Maus and Persepolis than they are to Kirby, not because these books are better or more important, but because they more closely resemble a prose novel, and prose is more familiar than comics to most people. This is why us folks who are really excited about Kirby typically have a difficult time selling the idea to our wives and girlfriends. To the uninitiated, Kirby looks like easily dismissible superhero schlock, and to someone who isn't familiar with it, it's hard to argue that it isn't.
In a sense, Kirby is more like Henry Darger than Art Spiegelman. This is not a bad thing. He invented universes in his little studio with very little social interaction or outside input. Without his very devoted wife Roz who could practically finish his sentences in interviews, (and even inked his work at one time), he would have been a total hermit, which makes his accomplishments all the more amazing.But I i would bet that every single person who has expressed enthusiasm about Kirby on this thread is really really into comics.
I didn't do anything to "First" because I've never seen it here before. Plus, the commenter is not new, and presumably knows how things work here. I know the meme, but it's so utterly alien to BB, that I couldn't believe that it wasn't something else that I just didn't get.
let's just see. If someone has perfect, witty, referent humour, sure, why not? If on the other hand it's just stupid, we'll mercilessly kick the living shit out of them so they'll have to abandon that handle for eternity. But in a loving way.
Especially in a loving way.
This is a fascinating discussion. Thanks to all of you for keeping it interesting and lively!
(Except that "first" stuff. Don't do that any more.)
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After OMAC was cancelled the character, written by Jim Starlin, appeared as a backup feature in Warlord.
He also appeared in an issue of DC Comics Presents with Superman.
John Byrne wrote a decent 4 issue miniseries in 1991 that attempted to tie up all the OMAC loose ends.
For more high weirdness from Jack Kirby you might want to check out Devil Dinosaur, which came out a few years after OMAC, from Marvel
I love Kirby's 70s work so much because it was often inspired from the high concept sci-fi of the day and spun off in wild directions. Planet of the Apes = Kamandi. Chariot of the Gods = Eternals. 2001 = well, 2001, and then later Machine Man. But each one took the source material and cranked it up to eleven and a half. And then you have the New Gods/Fourth World which could be argued to have been one of the inspirations for Star Wars. The Source = The Force, Darkseid = Darth Vader, Apokolips = Death Star, Darkseid is revealed as Orion's father, and so on. And the time frame also of the series come out right before Lucas started writing Star Wars in early 1972.
Jack Kirby was one of the greatest imaginations of the 20th century. Just a solid, indisputable fact.
#34, Too true. I've been arguing the Kirby-Lucas thing for ages/
You have my friend Dr. K to thank for this anthology. He asked for it at comic.con last year. You can read about it at his blog as well as his adventures at this past weekend's comic.con. If you're a comic geek, you should discover him anyway.