Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Drops 12/12/2017

As I said in one of my previous videos, the main reason I started this channel is to keep other people who interested in omnibus editions up-to-date with upcoming titles. Especially the ones I am most interested in.

Now at any given time there are a boatload of new and reprinted omnibuses coming out as well as collected editions, collected editions usually being the trade paperback that generally contains 6-8 issues of a given title. Sometimes collected editions are lumped in with omnibuses but an omnibus is usually an event comic that contains the main event title and all the related tie-ins. Other times an omnibus will contain an entire run of a title or, as in the case of my most highly anticipated omnibus of the next few months, an entire line of comics.

Currently scheduled to be released on December 12, 2017 and part of the Kirby 100 celebration is Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus  is my number one 'get' of all the upcoming omnibuses. It is impossible to understate the importance of Jack Kirby to comic books in any way. When Stan Lee nicknamed him King Kirby he wasn't exaggerating. Jack Kirby's creative minds is one of the rarest forms of creative genius. Mozart, Beethoven, Van Gogh, Wright, Kirby. This is more than hyperbole. The man was there from the start and while he didn't create the medium he did revolutionize it with his ability to make the characters seemingly jump off the page.

Comics, like old movies, used to be very static with everything contained within a frame. Like Frank Lloyd Wright 'broke the box' in terms of architecture, Jack Kirby broke the panel. Captain America literally jumped out of the 2D page to span across panels. As much as possible, Kirby made you believe that Cap could jump out of the funny pages and into your study hall.

Captain America leaping into your living room

In the early 1970s, Jack Kirby was feeling unappreciated by Marvel. At the time creators of characters basically had no rights to them. And Stan Lee was an amazing promotor but sometimes he maybe took a little too much credit. At any rate, feeling unappreciated, Kirby approached DC, he had had this idea at Marvel to kill off Thor and the entire pantheon of old gods in replace them with some ideas he had been kicking around called them The New Gods.  The New Gods inhabit the Fourth World, which is sort of like another dimension. I don't really know. I have never read any of the original Forth World comics, but when I got back into comics in 2015, I had noticed that a few years before, around 2010, DC had released a four volume Forth World omnibus but as luck would have it, they were out of print by the spring of 2015.

So when I went on a weekly search of  "Omnibus in Books sorted by Release Date" on Amazon and saw they were issuing a brand new omnibus that contained everything EVERYTHING from the previous four volume omnibuses in ONE Amazing Volume, I hit that "pre-order" button faster than I could hit that "pre-order" button.

Now the Fourth World isn't without its flaws, or so I'm told, not ever having the opportunity to read it. At Marvel, Kirby plotted the story and did the amazing art but Stan Lee put the words in the characters' mouths. As part of his deal in going to DC Kirby had secured a deal where he would be the sole creator of what amounted to an entire line of comics within DC. When I say, 'an entire line,' I mean when the Fourth World launched it included three books, The New Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Tomorrow People. And the whole Fourth World Saga kicked off in Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen.  All of these plus some later stories are included in this massive omnibus.

While I know almost nothing about the contents of the omnibus, I have come across some of the New Gods in various books over the last two years, Superman Doomsday had Superman chasing Doomsday to Darkseid's home of Apokolips. I met Metatron in Zero Hour and Alan Moore's run of Swap Thing(Note: I've linked to the sixth volume of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing where the New Gods appear but the stories may be hard to follow if you don't start with the first volume which I'll do a video on sometimes soon), and I encountered Mister Miracle in a collection of New Gods stories called Tales of the New Gods, a collection of stories from the 1980s. But even with this exposure, I really don't feel I have a grasp on any of these characters or the Fourth World in general, and even if The Fourth World Omnibus is a flawed classic, I cannot wait to experience it for myself directly from the man who created it.

I was reminded that DC also has a current run of New Gods titles in celebration of Jack Kirby 100. While I am more focused on collected editions and omnibuses, the Jack Kirby 100 is due out on February 20, 2018 and the first part of the new Mister Miracle run will be collected and available April 24, 2018 an will contain issues 1-6.

When I started this blog post, I thought I would just be listing a few up the upcoming Omnibuses I am excited for with a short blurb for each but it turned out to not be that way. Next week I try to give a brief summary of two or three Omnibuses coming out in the next month or two.

It just shows the enthusiasm I have for this upcoming Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus and I hope some of you are as excited as I am. Tell me what you are excited about either in the comments below or on the companion video on this topic.

Thanks and be well!