Such is my love of the character and penchant for self-inflicted punishment that not only do I now have all issues of the entire 1964 “let’s make The Shadow a blonde no wait black hair is better superhero” Archie series, the last few issues of which were written by Jerry Siegel, but I intend to read them. And maybe write about them.
Still figuring out summer break schedule; expect infrequency and (greater) incoherency.
Better late than never, but I only just stumbled across Mark Evanier’s amazing News From ME blog by way of his “Jack F.A.Q” about Jack Kirby and, as The Fourth World is one of my Kirby obsessions, had to share this bit about where the name originated:
I can give you about eleven answers to this and if you'd asked Jack eight times, you'd have gotten eight more. Len Wein, who worked at DC at the time, says that it was a cover blurb intended to only appear on the covers of the fourth issues. It referred to the fact that every issue of a Kirby comic was like a world unto itself; ergo, each #4 was a "Fourth World." Folks then adopted it to refer to the whole epic that flowed betwixt Jack's books. Meanwhile, Steve Sherman — who worked with me as Jack's assistant at the time —recalls Jack coming up with it as a variation on the term, "The Third World," as used in a socio-economic context. It was Jack's way of transcending that term, as Jack transcended everything.
That may be true but I don't recall that. Apparently, Jack also told a few folks that he considered the material his fourth universe in comics. The Marvel books would have been "Kirby's Third World" and I've never quite gotten clear what the first two were. There are other answers, even less credible. Personally, I buy none of them. I don't think there was any logic behind it, at least when Jack first used it. I think it was just a term that popped into his head and he liked the sound of it. Later on, he came up with several different retroactive explanations.
The whole blog is an amazing resource and has been duly added to the RSS reader for daily brainfood.
Current reads; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.
After two disappointing releases – WORLD GONE BY and SINCE WE FELL, the former being a forgettable coda to an otherwise unforgettable historical fiction trilogy and the latter a notable though deeply flawed effort at playing outside his usual wheelhouse (I think, at the time, I called it his effort at GONE GIRL – and not in a good way) – Lehane roars back to life with, perhaps, his best work yet, one I will gladly mention in the same breath as MYSTIC RIVER, the masterpiece to which SMALL MERCIES feels like a spiritual successor: after a middling effort at a female protagonist in SINCE WE FELL, Lehane has crafted, in MERCIES's Mary Pat Fennessy, one of his most fascinating protagonists, a "broken and unbreakable" mother on a vengeance-driven suicide run through the mid-70s Southie underbelly ("Marty Butler" standing in for Whitey Bulger) on the eve of the 1974 school desegregation, an uncompromising ripping of the duct-tape bandaid from one of the ugliest, darkest periods in Boston's appalling racist history. A must-read; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.
P.S. While I believe SMALL MERCIES was meant to be a standalone, should Lehane decide to continue the story of Detective Michael "Bobby" Coyne, I'd be beyond thrilled...
