2018 Revival: OMAC Essay

This only went up on the Shelfdust site a week or so back, despite my having written it in… October? November? I can’t even remember at this point. Internet deadlines can be weird, here’s an essay I wrote to accompany the Shelfdust Top 100 Comic Issues list. It’s kind of a mess — I was in a very strange frame of mind as I wrote it — but I like it anyway.

The very first page of 1974’s OMAC #1 tells the reader exactly what to expect; the opening narrative capture explains the set-up for the entire series as Jack Kirby starts the book in media res: “OMAC One Man Army Corps is the story of a young man in The World That’s Coming!!” it starts. “In that strange place, the common objects of today… may become the terrors that we never bargained for… like the one below!”

Kirby gets a lot of shit for his writing tics, all the weird emphasis and “random” “quote” “marks” where it doesn’t really seem to make sense from today’s point of view, not to mention the irrepressible momentum of it all; it’s a million miles away from the stylized, self-conscious thing that passed for naturalism in today’s mainstream comics, and for that reason alone it’s often criticized or targeted as a guilty pleasure. But it’s genuinely amazing stuff, as immediate as the best pop music and featuring turns of phrase or ideas that are wonderfully memorable and memetic decades before anyone knew what that word meant. OMAC is filled with so many examples of this kind of thing, from “The World That’s Coming!!” to Lila the Build-A-Friend, who pleads “Put me together… I will be your friend…” prompting OMAC to respond, “Where does humanity stop and technology begin? We no longer know, Lila…”

The techno-suspicion of the first issue is wonderful, and wonderfully prescient; Buddy Blank’s discovery that the one person in the world who was kind to him was just an artificial intelligence — although, again, this was decades before that term would enter popular usage — feels like a predication of the relationships formed through social media and the ways in which they can turn out to be not as real as some hoped for, or believed. But Buddy, the nebbish alter ego of the One Man Army Corps who essentially disappears from the series midway through this first issue, is what makes it feel like Kirby knew what The World That’s Coming!! was like more than most.

There’s a scene in the issue, where Buddy is wandering aimlessly through the halls of “Pseudo-People, Inc.,” the dehumanizing corporation he works for, having been bullied. What initially seems like a Marvel-esque origin story — is he the loser that no-one understands? — gets turned on its head by a subtlety and ambivalence that Stan Lee would’ve jumped away from in fear. “Maybe Fox is right,” Buddy thinks to himself. “I’m angry enough to flip out!” A page later, he says to himself, “I’m not angry at anybody… I just feel depressed, that’s all…”

OMAC #1 has all the hallmarks of a Kirby comic that people would expect from reading his Marvel work, and arguably even the majority of his Fourth World material — it’s visually bombastic, it’s fast-paced and dynamic and filled with astounding concepts that are at once ridiculous and utterly perfect. But at the heart of it is a character who feels honest and true and recognizable to so many people today: A character who is somehow more real than the milquetoast nerd stereotype of a million other comics by that point, who feels alienated and abandoned by a world around him that’s hypnotized by the toys and the technology at its fingertips, and who — most importantly, perhaps — doesn’t get a last-minute vengeance or score-evening moment of redemption.

Instead, Buddy is swallowed up by that same technology, against his will. He isn’t changed into OMAC by choice, or even an accident; he’s chosen by an authority he isn’t even aware or, and once “Omactivated,” is essentially a different person altogether: He’s more violent, more confident; a version of the cliched alpha male. Buddy is murdered by the state so that OMAC can live, if you like.

OMAC as a series is great; it’s got everything you could want from 1970s Jack Kirby, who is undoubtedly my favorite Jack Kirby. But OMAC #1, taken on its own, is something far greater than what followed; it’s a sneaky, but perfect, horror story about the world that we live in today, and the ways in which the everyman — “Buddy Blank” is a poetically perfect name for someone who could be all of us — is powerless to resist against its lure of techno-distraction and authoritarian control. 44 years after it was published, it just continues to feel more and more timely with each new reading.

WAM! BAM! POW! KRONTCH!

manhunterCOMICS, EVERYONE.

Seriously, Jack Kirby (with inker, D. Bruce Berry, in this case): This is just amazing. Manhunter is something that Kirby did for one issue, an edition of a series called First Series Special, in the 1970s, and it’s this entirely unfinished story filled with melodrama and potential and everything that I love about superhero comics. There’s so much there there.

Plus, that costume design is so, so great.

Are You Ready For…?

This is apparently a presentation drawing by Jack Kirby used to sell the OMAC series to DC Comics, back in the 1970s. Firstly, it’s an astonishing piece of work. Secondly, OMAC is the comic that originated the phrase “the world that’s coming,” so this drawing is, oddly, directly responsible for this blog.

Thanks, Jack.

“Harmony is The Word, Donnie!”

Jack Kirby / DC Comics

Kirby does synaesthesia, from Forever People #2. There’s something wonderfully compelling about an old square’s idea of being “turned on” to the flower people, especially when he’s doing it years after the peak of the flower children movement. I’m not being sarcastic, I should add; I think I like Kirby’s take on psychedelia more than I like the “real thing” in many ways – there’s a purity of intent to it that was very quickly vanquished from the genuine article. Kirby’s Forever People must have seemed out of touch when it appeared in 1971, as opposed to the more charming “out of time” quality that it has now, because it was too close to what it was writing about, but not close enough to be concurrent with the movement… But, looking back now, all I can really think is that I wish that Kirby’s version of the Age of Aquarius had come to pass, somehow.

A Startling Look Into The World That’s Coming!

“The World That’s Coming” is a phrase that comes from OMAC, a Jack Kirby comic cover-dated October 1974, which just so happens to be the month in which I was born. The idea that OMAC is the same age as me seems weirdly wrong, somehow; Kirby comics feel eternal in some way to me – I have no problem accepting that it’s 37 years old now, for example, but the idea that it was just 20 years old when I was in school, or in its teens as I was struggling with acne and puberty seems somewhat mystifyingly wrong in ways that I can’t properly explain.

It struck me, awhile back, that I am always living in The World That’s Coming, these days; not just in the sense of living in the future that Kirby was writing about in the mid-70s (OMAC is filled with futuristic devices and ideas that have come to fruition in one way or another) – although we’re in “the 21st Century,” a phrase that still feels like the future to me sometimes, more than a decade in – but also in that I make a large part of my living writing about technology, social media and the like, and so am constantly thinking about what’s to come (Another part of my living is made writing about comics that are months from coming out, speculating as to their meaning, their plot, their quality, the whole shebang). And so… The World That’s Coming.

The plan, such as it is, for this blog is pretty much a personal challenge: To write more for myself in 2012, without making myself crazy. There’ll be 366 posts about pop songs over the course of the next year – intended to be one every day, but that’ll slip at some point, I can tell, so then I’ll have to double up or whatever to get caught up – and lots of other ephemera, me working out ideas that I might use at Techland or Newsarama or whatever, as well as just… random things. Photographs, memories, commentary on whatever’s on my mind at the moment. We’ll see what happens together, I guess. Are you ready for The World That’s Coming?, as DC Comics used to ask.