Jack Kirby's Fourth World material is transcendent. Part of me hates that I didn't get around to it until my mid-20s. The other part of me fully realizes that had I come to this any earlier, I wouldn't have gotten it. I'm still making my way through the rest of the stuff, but Volume 1 was enough to turn me on my head. I could write a thesis on why these books are so good, and why it's one of the most important pieces of pop art ever made, but I'll just state that it's a masterpiece and everyone

Kirby's New Gods stuff is a classic of comic book epics. However the stuff in this collection from the Forever People has not aged well--the time of Aquarius type feel is not as eternal as the New Gods (double entendre intended!) are. Also the material from Jimmy Olsen is just down right bad. The News Boys are utterly ridiculous. I wish the Olsen material could just have been not written and Darkseid introduced in one of the other titles. The fact that Darkseid, one of the greatest villains ever...

I follow a Jack Kirby fan group on Facebook. They claim Jack Kirby is the greatest comicbook creator ever. Not only that, but he transcends comics and stands among the world's greatest artists and myth-makers.This and some of his Fantastic Four work are what the group members point to when asked for justification.I can clearly see that he took the super-hero world by storm in the early 60s with Marvel. He's created many of the characters that would go on to be super popular, but looking at his w...

It's been so long since reading something has been a mind-blowing experience, but this is mind-blowing, and woke me up at least temporarily from a life-long slumber. It was so good I kept it a week overdue from the library. It is a psychedelic, revelatory new bible for the post-atomic age. Before reading, I was somewhat familiar with the Fourth World, having read derivatives of it in the Death of Superman saga and other DC pulp. Now I see Kirby is worth all the praise he gets and more, and how i...

I originally read most of these comics when they were published in 1970-71. DC Comics had ads proclaiming "The King is Coming!" While I knew Jack Kirby from Fantastic Four & Thor reprints, I had no idea what the impact would be. Immediately upon reading Jimmy Olsen I was overwhelmed with the King's imagination: The Whiz Wagon, the new Newsboy Legion, the Hairies, the Wild Area, the Mountain of Judgment and a giant clone of Jimmy Olsen infused with Green Kryptonite! This collection not only repri...

I'm not the world's biggest Kirby fan -- in fact, my take on his work probably runs counter to most comics fans -- but I did want to finally begin reading the Fourth World. I've had the omnibus volumes for a number of years, and just never got around to reading them. How I've finished the first volume, and I have to admit that it was enjoyable. A little hokey at times -- and some of the hokieness is due to the time/context in which it was written -- but this might be one of the series' endearing...

Ah, Kirby! When ever I'm down and need some lifting up, I know I can always revisit one of Jack Kirby's innovative creations and the long lost joy of youth and sense of unashamed wonderment will be restored. Kirby was one of a kind. His record for creating new characters, concepts and even genres in the comic book industry is unparalleled. This volume of the Fourth World introduces more new characters in the first half dozen issues than most comic book artists create in their entire careers, and...

I've read scattered issues of Jack "The King" Kirby in the past, some Avengers, Fantastic Four, maybe a Weird Tales , and while I enjoyed what I saw it didn strike me as being whole heartedly genius or miraculous. So, I keep going to see in a comic book shop a whole section of Jack Kirby books specifically his work after he left Marvel with DC, including the Demon, and this, the Fourth World. I also thought, hey, it comes with a glowing introduction from Grant Morrison, who called it "the new ps...

I do not get what this is all about. Like, literally. Whole stretches of this were incomprehensible like a 5-year-old telling a story. "There was this superhero and he came from space with his friends and everybody had a big car and they were all WHOOSH BANG and then there was a evil alien who can control minds and he is purple!"The scope of this is epic, but the execution is weak. Like he was making it up as he went along. It took an awfully long time (like, into volume 2) to start coalescing.

Essential and mind-blowing. Kirby writes and draws like a man possessed, like an outsider artist weaving a mad mythos of his own, only with real storytelling chops. This first volume collecting Kirby's DC work introduces so many new entities - the New Gods, the Forever People, Mister Miracle, to say nothing of their dread nemesis, Darkseid and his henchmen, that its hard to keep track of what is going on at times. But it's all glorious, madly inventive epic comic book storytelling, so sit back a...

I read these in the original comic format when they came out. Jack Kirby changed his style in the early 1970s and I fell out of being a fan of his art and stories. While I do like several of the characters he created for his 4th world stories, particularly Darkseid and Orion, overall I never could seem to get into the books. If you are a Kirby fan then these are the core of his creation. Recommended

So this was a bit different to what I normally read, and by different I mean older...much older. Coming straight out of the 70's it was a good 15 years older than anything I'd previously delved into. Part of the reason being I thought most comics were pretty campy back then, don't get me wrong this definitely had its moments, but overall the story was way more expansive and epic than I had thought possible in that era. No wonder Jack Kirby was such a renowned writer and artist.I wanted to get my...

Jack Kirby is insane. I realized that the first time I saw Jimmy Olsen flying in a space car with the New Newsboy Legion in a pencilled/photograph collage in which they went into a previous unknown realm. The second thing brought to my attention through this first volume is that I like insane Kirby. I enjoy an Incredible Jimmy Hulk, hippy superkids, harbingers of death that sky ski, etc. Jack Kirby's DC creations are sometimes painfully cliche and made me cringe with some of the dialogue, but it...

Jack Kirby was easily the most influential figure in American superhero comics. He co-created the majority of the Marvel Universe during the Silver Age. Unhappy with his arrangements at Marvel, Kirby defected to DC in 1970. His first project at the "Distinguished Competition" Was an ambitious project called The Fourth WorldJack Kirby's mind was bursting at the seams, his imagination in overdrive. This volume sets up the stakes. A new god of evil, Darkseid, is in search of the Anti-Life Equation,...

The dialogue is an awful product of Jack Kirby's era. Make a drinking game out of the number of times someone says "Groovy," their own name, or something blatantly obvious from the art, and you'll be nice and toasty for this groovy trip in comics history.But everything else about this is a 6-star book, so who cares? Kirby was a manic genius that couldn't stop creating, and it's so refreshing to see what he could do outside of Stan Lee's massive shadow. If you can't get past the 60's style of com...

This was my first attempt to read Kirby's "Fourth World" stories straight through. Everything I had read about it turned out to be true. It's packed with ideas (too many, really), his art and layouts are wonderful, and his dialogue is awful. Of the four series collected, the New Gods issues are the strongest (mostly because of the time spent on Darkseid and the other villains). The Mr. Miracle issues are the most accessible (it almost starts out as a typical superhero series). The Forever People...

For a couple days after I read this, I kept designing a Fourth World-based amusement park in my head revolving around New Gods/ Forever People/Miracle Man/Jimmy Olson’s Pal Superman and the mythos that ties them all together (Apokolips, New Genesis, Darkseid). I concluded that it would be the greatest amusement ever created (with me at the helm and billions of dollars in funding). This might not seem like very deep reflection after reading a 1500 page comic book, but designing amusement parks in...

I’m not quite sure when I first noticed the existence of the New Gods, it might have been the "DC Superpowers" figure of Darkseid that first captured my heart and started many battles between my friend and I on how to pronounce his name "Dark-Side" or "Dark-seed". I was on the losing side on that battle in the end I became a convert to how it is correctly pronounced. Either way im an easy sell on most things if the main man from Apokolips is hanging around so this wasn’t a stretch for me to get

The art is certainly wonderful, and I can't imagine a more stately treatment for a comic than this current edition. The *physical* act of reading the Fourth World Omnibus was pleasant, but the mental act was a little tedious.While reviews that praise Kirby's overflowing imagination are certainly on-target, they don't deal with the fact that it's the overflowing of an imagination targeted squarely at 12-year-old boys. I very nearly enjoyed reading this edition, and will probably read the second,

I'm sorry, but I just had to give this up. I got about 300 pages into it, but I just couldn't care. The 70s throwback lingo was too campey, Flippant Dippa was too offensive, the Newsboy Legion was too old-fashioned, Superman was too square, and I just wasn't interested in piecing together the mythology Kirby was trying to create. It was a cool idea, and I applaud his ambition, but it just feels too dated and stilted for me to care. Sorry, King.