Omac Issue 1 by Jack Kirby Resonates Powerfully in a 2021 World!
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- Опубліковано 12 вер 2024
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A month after the last issue of Kirby's OMAC, his Captain America return issue came out at Marvel. It's both heartbreaking and inspiring how he kept coming up with new ideas no matter how many comics were shot out from underneath him.
I love OMAC, Kirby's science fiction ideas are always so out there and wild compared to other creators at the time and even now. Hope you guys cover Kamandi at some point. Keep it up fellas
I love this issue, but I also love Paul Pope's remake of it in Solo. Is pure energy!
Having bought OMAC off the rack way back when, I was delighted with this review. I still see the stark white cover standing apart from all the other comics. It's so great to hear my own views of Kirby's genius confirmed with your spot-on observations. BTW, Kamandi's Grandfather who survived the Great Disaster and lived with him in the "Command D" bunker is Buddy Blank...AKA OMAC.
I first read this comic as a kid in the late 70's. So, my perspective experiencing it in the era when it was created was this:
It was extremely creative, but OMAC was very much a product of its time. The 50's were rocketpunk, the 60's were tales of nuclear Armageddon (There were something like six Planet of the Apes Movies), and the 70's were all about weird dystopias. I was a huge SF fan, so OMAC didn't seem like some crazy outlier. And pop culture had become obsessed with psychedelic art. In the 60s psychedelic art was confined to the counter-culture, but by the time I was growing up in the 70's the style was everywhere- even Saturday morning cartoons and the covers of grade school textbooks.
This kind of SF never really made it to movies and TV- except for Logan's Run. The movie Logan's Run came out after the OMAC comic, but the book came before it. I'm not saying it was a direct inspiration, but it was typical for the time. There was a lot of literary SF at the time that told these kinds of stories. The setting of OMAC is a lot like the one in John Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar, which was published in 1969 and set in 2010.
As far as the Mohawk goes- some American paratroopers in WW2 wore a (much flatter) mohawk haircut, to advertise their elite status. Kirby would have seen mohawks when he served in France, and associated them with being a badass. But my impression as a kid was that it was meant to look like the feather crest on the helmet of a classical Greek hoplite. I think it's a clever way to set him apart from other superheroes.
My mom used to take me with her to this mall, in Anchorage, one of the places we would visit was a bookstore and everytime we went there, I was allowed to get 2 comic books, but I didn't know anything about them. So, I would just buy the one that had the coolest cover. Coincidentally, I bought that very issue, when it came out, and continued to by subsequent OMAC issues. One of the coolest series of panels of all-time was in one of those subsequent issues. In the first panel he's just sitting there with a contemplative look on his face. The second panel is panned back so you can see that he is sitting on a vanquished foe. Each panel is further away with the last panel revealing that, what he's actually sitting on, is a very, very big pile of vanquished foes. I think I was 7 or 8 years old when I saw that and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Peace
Nothing makes my day like a deep dive into Kirby's work! If you guys make a "READ KIRBY COMICS" shirt I'd buy one in a heartbeat!
Kirby was talking about the concept of downloading information in Omac years before the internet was a thing. It really is a crazy comic.
So glad to see you cover this, it blew my mind and expanded my vision of Kirby as well. As for Ed’s questions about influences on Kirby : Westworld (as noted), Logan’s Run, Rollerball, Silent Running, Soylent Green, Outer Limits, THX 113, planet of the apes and the sequels, Star Trek, 2001, Cyborg (Six Million Dollar Man). There were also newsstand magazines like Analog and Omni about science tech and futurism. Lots of stuff in the ether.
Always good to see content about Jack Kirby, thank you gentlemen.
My two fave KIRBY DC books are OMAC and Kamandi.
Damn...I almost forgot. You guys are doing a great job! Your insights into the comic world have returned the fun back in comics. You've helped me remember a time when I found joy in comics. The DC & Marvel comics of today will likely destroy the future of comics. Thank God for the independents, and all the brave souls, like yourselves, who create from the heart (albeit sometimes a very bloody heart!)
You guys need to follow this up with Byrne’s mini series. Just the covers of the prestige format are worth a look from a design perspective. Not many books looked like that back in the day.
From a design/production standpoint, it's noteworthy that those books are black and white. Marvel and DC were not publishing a lot of new, prestige format projects in black and white in the early 90s. - Jim
When I was younger I kinda did not like Kirby work, I was drawn to more realistic art styles. As I have gotten older (50+) and appreciate comics more I have discovered that the best of what comics are is due to Jack Kirby. This got me into looking at his art more and more and he is now my favorite of all time.
Man, Im glad you guys brought up TDKR in the middle of the video, because I always thought it'd make more sense for Millar's Batman to fight OMAC over Superman. OMAC is a better embodiment of the ideas Millar wanted represented by Superman, down to the fact that he was engineered.
This came after Westworld.
And here I just got my own copy in the mail this week. Thanks for the deep dive.
Recillect that the 8th and final issue was written and drawn by Kirby, but cover was by Joe Kubert.
10:41: I think OMAC did the original badass stroll away from an explosion without looking back.
One of Kirby's best... I also really dig Paul Pope's interpretation from his issue of Solo!
I first read OMAC in 1988, and I was blown away. Years later, I read something on the internet that said that OMAC was pretty much proto-cyberpunk, and it made a lot of sense.
Hope you guys turn this into a playlist/series of videos just about Kirby #1s.
I bought it when I was nine years old- it was truly mind-blowing, Omac was one of the most exciting comics of that era and showed Kirby at his artistic best. From this era, two Kirby issues will always be pivotal in my love of comics: Omac No. 1 & Kamandi No. 6, with the death of Flower. For another vision of Omac, check out the Paul Pope revision on Omac from Solo. Kirby was King!
I believe the original concept of OMAC was that it was originally intended to be a futuristic Captain America.
Like New Gods was Jack's plans for Thor brought over to DC, Omac was meant to be his new Captain America. And, yes, there’s always a startling prescience to his work that makes you go "whoa, he predicted that" when you reread it. It’s like his brain was simultaneously existing in the future, which sounds like one of his stories, lol. And as you said, there’s a Kirby language, both visual and verbal, that is unique to him and, for me at least, never seems dated; as if his comics occupy some strange universe where time has no meaning and they’re always “new.” Which once again, is a Kirby story right there, lol. Hail to the King.
OMAC is a book that I never get tired of re-reading. I discovered it in my teens and while I found Kirby's art off-putting (I would later grow to appreciate it as I got older), the ideas in the story totally bewildered me
OMAC’s mowhawk always reminded me of the brush on top of Roman Centurian helmets.Great character and concept.It would have made an excellent cartoon.
An interesting story point in a comic filled with them is that OMAC does not remember Buddy Blank. Buddy is a fading voice in OMAC's mind. It's subtle but it points to the totalitarian nature of "The World That’s Coming".
one of my favorites of The King!
Bit of a tangent here; there were cute exploding child/robots in the Raven series that ran in Thunder Agents in the 60's. Very quirky stories and art by Manny Stallman, who looked unlike any other creator at Tower Comics. Miller was about the right age to have seen those books.
I remember buying this issue from the newsstand. In the UK we didn't always get them predictable deliveries. US comics came to the UK as ballast on Merchant ships. If you wanted to get a halfway decent collections, you needed to weekly trawl of the newsagents and secondhand book stores. I bought this when I was in my first year at Art College. I loved Kirby. I'd been buying comics from the very early sixties. Kirby was always in my estimation the king. Omac was such a find. I loved it. Shame my 18 year collection was thrown away. But the memory still stands. Thank you my friends.
I love collecting beat up but cheap copies of Kirby DC books, and I recently got this for $10. That cover alone is iconic enough to want to own it, the story inside is bonkers.
Dudes , glad to see others who love Kirby like I do ! I mean , Kirby IS comics !
Full stop .
I hope you guys do more analysis of Jack’s DC work, i find his comics are a lot more enjoyable when he’s doing his own writing
A great reminder of this tremendous comic, which I read decades after it was released! Kirby was a visionary! I actually read issue #2 as a boy, and it packs a wallop, too! I'd encourage you to give Omac #2 the Kayfabe treatment!
Thank you for reviewing this short lived OMAC comic, I really like all Kirby’s comics in the 70s and 80s. My favorite issue of this series is #4 , it was action packed and a crazy concept that is so much fun for me.
I ordered the OMAC collection after 5 minutes into the video, I'm really looking forward to read it.
According to an inflation calculator this comic was a $1.07 in today’s money think about that
Glad I got my copy a few weeks ago, beating the Kayfabe effect that will surely make this hard to get now!
Well dc is releasing a collection reprint of the Kirby Omac run this summer, so I wouldn't worry too much about it
@@gmosphere that’s cool, but I prefer having the original comic. There is something about the paper, ink, that a reprint can’t compete with.
I once had this amazing book! Kirby clearly was ahead of his time and always did great futuristic stories!
Thanks for posting this. I only recently read it myself and it's definitely a favorite Kirby book. Side note, I believe Buddy Blank was intended to be Kamandi's grandfather
@10:40ish -- amazing, that YOUNG ROMANCE was still running at this time.
Ed, OMAC was not a Fourth World book, but like The Demon and Kamandi, were created after Jack Kirby's New Gods books were canceled (Mister Miracle being the last of them). DC Comics just basically let him run out his contract with these books.
My father had a mohawk back in the late 40s-early 50s. It was related to the cowboys and Indians genre that was super popular back then. But it wasn't like the huge Trojan crest.
Yeah, Machine Man was my first Kirby comic. Devil Dinosaur also jumped off the rack at me at that time. Among the first comics I remember, for that matter.
I remember reading OMAC as a kid. It just blew me away.
This was cyberpunk before cyberpunk.
Was my favorite comic. Lead up the Kanmdi.
That cover looks more like something Ditko would have come up with. I love Kirby’s DC stuff
Westworld with Yul Brynner came out the year before OMAC did. Jack had his eye out for unusual concepts to filter them through the Kirbyesque. But I’m sure Michael Crichton was doing the same thing in terms of his own concepts, having been influenced by PKD’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which had been published in 1968. Ridley Scott and David Peoples would take PKD’s novel to the next level and then some by adapting it into Blade Runner (1982). What they’re all getting into is the spooky psychology of how puppets and dolls affect people. Right now there are robot engineers and scientists working to create a flawless reproduction of humanity. One that will eventually fool us humans into thinking they’re really human. The awful beauty of Blade Runner is that Dekkard has no idea he’s a replicant too. If there was a plague that killed all the animals, how could humans have survived it?
I always thought the mohawk was reminiscent of the Roman helmet crests, like on the USC Trojans mascot.
My dad knew Don Eagle too.
I have this run and is one of the best by King Kirby. Wow! 40k subs, congrats.
Great video and a great subject....thanks for posting....Long Live King Kirby
The 1960’s were a brilliant era for science fiction. I suspect authors like Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Philip K. Dick and others may have inspired Kirby a lot. Their writing dealt with a lot of thought-provoking concepts that were ahead of their time. It wasn’t until the success of films like Star Wars that science fiction became dumbed down.
Love your commentary on this issue, Jim!
I had that issue. I liked OMAC. I loved Kirby's art
Just got the Byrne mini off Ebay. Will work on the Kirby stuff shortly.
Are you guys ever going to do a tribute to Jack Kirby’s The Demon? Maybe you have already. I haven’t caught up with every episode of your podcast yet. Entrigan may very well be the precursor to Hellboy.
Buddy Blank is somewhat of a recycle of the concept for Captain America. Steve Rogers is a wimp who becomes a super soldier. Then Kirby uses that character in a new concept of a future world.
just in time for the brazilian tpb compilation launch !
Omac is so underrated
That's crazy! I just bought that today
Y'all should review the recent 'True Believer' Stan Lee bio
Dude Jim, sell that Contra piece as a poster!
Meet someone noboby likes `hello` =D
I love the concepts but this series was one of the hardest books to read I got bored. I prefer his kamandi and the losers.
West World was 1973, OMAC was 1974