Review - Jack Kirby’s Omac
July 7th, 2008 John Posted in Comic Books, Reviews |
The 1970s was a great decade for weird science fiction — in fact, it was probably the last time that clunky pluck and scrappy strangeness combined with doom and gloom social satire in order to create some real oddities. By 1977, “Star Wars” had ushered in a more facile and flashy vision of science fiction that took hold and never went away — once the genre of ideas, no matter how clumsily realized, science fiction became the genre of toys, no matter how smarmily marketed.
Jack Kirby’s comic book “Omac” was a creature of these times, one of several charming and short-lived titles of the time that tread this territory. In Kirby’s energetic tale, Omac stands for “One Man Army Corp,” a futuristic riff on his more famous creation, Captain America, and an indictment of a country gone wrong. Thirty-four years later and there are more than a few similarities between Omac’s world and George Bush’s America.
In Omac, a normal man — amusingly named Buddy Blank — is chosen by the masked participants of the Global Peace Agency to be transformed into a super law enforcer by the intelligent satellite Brother Eye. The peace agents, you see, aren’t allowed to be violent and need to create Omac to circumvent their shackles and take care of the high-level criminals who service millionaires in the otherwise crime-less world.
The problem is, they don’t bother to ask Blank — they just do it. Shades of “they’ve given you a number and taken away your name!”
Omac sets to work right away — rich people are up to no good and are using the poor for eternal youth, renting out cities to go on lawless sprees, harboring killer super germs and trying to control all the water resources in the world. Through Kirby’s typically stylized and bombastic visuals, Omac barrels through a future where the rich are free to be greedy and corrupt and the poor must serve themselves up for money.
It’s very heady stuff for a kids’ comic and to Kirby’s credit — as well as the fact that this was the 1970s — he never gets academic or preachy and keeps the action flowing with his subtext as fuel. Sadly, the comic only lasted eight issues, but they’re all in this collection, which stands alongside “Howard the Duck” as one of the pioneering political and social satires of that decade, as well as a throwback to a lost era in popular culture science fiction that is missed more every time George Lucas burps up another property.
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