“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. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: Damn! The Source IS With Us!”
