“I like to do just like the rest; you know, I like my sugar sweet. But jumping queues and making haste, you know, it ain’t my cup of meat. Everybody’s out there feeding pigeons on a limb, but when Quinn the Eskimo gets here the pigeons gonna run to him.” From The Mighty Quinn, written by Bob Dylan.

Three days before Christmas 1970, Jack Kirby introduced the Source to a bevy of anxiously awaiting fans in The New Gods #1, a gaggle of fans that, at the time, included me. The Source was the “wall” surrounding the Promethean Galaxy where the gods of the DC Universe both old and new power up their cosmic gifts. The Promethean Galaxy is guarded by the Source Wall which traps all those who attempt to get through it by turning them into stone and trapping them in the Source to be seen as a warning to those who might wish to escape our intergalactic confines.

And, really, who doesn’t?

Like just about everything worthy in the DC Comics universe, the Source has played a continuing and important role in their stories over the subsequent fifty-five years… and impacted (Fun Fact: that’s not really a verb) plenty of DC stories, even those few without the words “crisis” and/or “absolute” in the title. When Tom Raney and Marco Santucci needed a corporeal visualization for the Source they chose the visage of Jack Kirby, which was both fitting and appropriate for their story.

The New Gods started six years before George Lucas told us about the Force and explained how said Force always was with us. Lucas was, and remains, a fan of comics and comics art and, shortly after the time of New Gods, had been co-owner of a comic book art gallery in Manhattan’s upper east side.

The comics art form long has been seen as a predictive force in storytelling. For example, Buck Rogers’ interstellar gizmos influenced generations of NASA scientists, and Milton Caniff predicted both the atom bomb in Terry and the Pirates and, later, the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst in his Steve Canyon strip. Of course, Flash Gordon predicted the election of our current president way back in 1934.

Now it appears that Jack Kirby was onto something. According to IFLScience, some scientists have amassed enough data to detail a theoretical wall of fire surrounding our solar system where outer space is not quite so cold. In fact, this wall is between 54,000 and 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It is amusing to note we have Voyager to thank for that.

No, not the villain from that really crappy Star Trek movie. I’m talking about the flying space satellite that has an old (well, not so old at the time) laserdisc welded to its side. I’m also talking about its sister sputnik, Voyager 2, which confirmed its older sibling’s data from a different perspective in our solar system.

Our sun lashes out a massive solar wind called the Heliosphere which is guarded by the Heliopause, where the balance in pressure causes the solar wind to turn back and flow down the tail of the Heliosphere. The gasses are compressed and the heat increases to levels that, as noted two paragraphs north, would keep Dante Alighieri up nights.

The aforementioned Voyager — the first one — crossed the Heliopause back in 2012, followed by Voyager 2 in 2018. NASA scientists have been grokking the data ever since, and because there is a significant conflation of comic book fans and NASA scientists, I suspect more than a few dipped into their long-boxes to find ways to verbalize their efforts. In time, they put it all together… until some point in the near-future when other scientists prove its all bullshit.

Maybe. That’s what makes science fun.

But this predictive abilities of comics are not going to go away. A plethora of scientists and intelligence-plumbers have been debating the whole multiverse thing since, well, since long before the American comic book storytellers came up with that phrase. They call it quantum mechanics, and I believe that’s where The Daily Show got its “Sports War” routine. No two quantum physicists can agree about anything, at least not for long and certainly not forever. I await the day when we finally theorize Schrödinger’s cat can fly.

(Author’s Note: The many “No Kings” rallies held over the past few days were not about Jack Kirby. Long live the King.)