Freed from the the ironic hedging of Stan Lee (his long time scripted/editor at Marvel Comics), Kirby pitched superheroics toward allegory, freighting the genre with grim purpose. He gave his costumed heroes a new raison d'être: to save humankind from totalitarianism on a cosmic scale, personified by Darkseid - a granite-faced tyrant who represented a sterile, suffocating order, in opposition to Kirby's ideal of freedom. This was to be the great conflict between Life and "Anti-Life".
On the side of Life were such characters as Darkseid's tortured son Orion, his foster son Scott Free (alias Mister Miracle), a band of hippies called the Forever People, and a buglike hive dweller named Forager; on the side of Anti-Life were such monsters as the brutish Kalibak, the sadistic aesthete Desaad, and the despotic harridan, Granny Goodness. It was a nightmarish vision, tempered somewhat by Kirby's native hopefulness and respect for youth.
Though scuppered by the cancellation of New Gods and Forever People, the Fourth World represents Kirby at his Zenith. Its stories are some of the most frenzied and eccentric in the superhero tradition; they are also some of the most personal and deeply felt. The work sizzles: there are electric bursts of violence, wrenching transformations, rude metaphors. There are also unexpected pauses and complexities. Above all, there is the spectacle of Kirby's style - looming, monolithic, raw - in search of a fitting subject.
REVIEW BY DAVE SIM:
(from 'The 2000 Virtual Kirby Tribute Panel' in The Jack Kirby Collector #27, February 2000)
Had he known that the direct market was only six or seven yeas away from coming into existence, he might have bided his time - or divided his time between his Marvel workload and his Fourth World epic, using the former to keep food on the table and getting the latter ready to sell to the comic book stores on a non-returnable basis. 20-20 hindsight. I knew enough not to trust any company to have Cerebus' or my best interests at heart when I decided to turn it into an epic 26-year story. Kirby didn't have that option. At the time he started the Fourth World epic he had to trust somebody and the only somebody besides the company he was working for was DC. He trusted that he would make enough money for them that they would see financing the whole epic from start to finish and then keeping it in print to be a smart idea. Of course what he didn't take into account was that a corporate motivation in hiring him away from Marvel had as much to do with hurting Marvel as it did with helping their own bottom line. From DC's standpoint, I think, Jack's departure didn't hurt Marvel enough to warrant seeing the Fourth World through - as Mark Evanier had pointed out and I believe him, the books were still profitable. It was a tragedy and it was very, very regrettable, but that is what corporations are like.
