Hitting the Wall IV: Orion

While many Kirby creations seem set up on such solid ground that they practically write themselves, one of his creations frequently requires more of writers than they can deliver. Some Kirby concepts vanished because of DC's revised continuity, post-Crisis - for instance, Kamandi or OMAC. Others thrive as the bedrock for Marvel's comics line - for instance, the Fantastic Four, who just entered their fourth post-Kirby decade of continuous publication. But others, like Orion, seem to depend upon the availability of just the right hand to make them work. Some fundamental limitation of this character seems to make him unworkable in all but a very few hands.

For a character with an eminent pedigree - he burst from the fevered brow of Jack Kirby during one of that talent's more creative periods - Orion seems one of the more troubled characters, in terms of the inability of other writers to make him work.

The Original Synthesis

Orion began as a hero doomed by his very nature to perpetual warring, a role he loved even as it damned him. As the "Dog of War," he saw and regretted the necessity of the role he had to play even as sometimes the specific conflicts left him in a joyful frenzy of violence.

Orion suffered a dual nature as the product of a vile and bellicose world - the sinister Apokolips - who had enjoyed an upbringing on the enlightened and less warlike New Genesis. This left him with the courage and anger of a congenital soldier, combined with the purpose and moral outrage of a high-minded and philosophical people.

Orion stood as karma, with the conquering violence in his soul turned back against its source, Orion's father Darkseid.

This definition provided a great deal of tension, and therefore motion, in Jack Kirby's New Gods, but it would fail, in the long run, to provide the character a lasting place in the DC universe. Instead, Orion would appear intermittently in various places, either recharacterized in a fashion somewhat foreign to his original concept, or dumbed down and injected into an inappropriate context.

After Kirby, DC would find very little success in making the character work.

The Oedipal Orion

In Orion's original, brief career in the title New Gods at the dawn of the seventies, he played the role of soldier and questor against the machinations of the evil Darkseid, concealing a secret past that connected him by blood to his enemy as Darkseid's son.

In the short run, meaning ongoing story arcs lasting a year or two, this theme can provide considerable motion through tension, but it seems limited in the long run. Had DC not cancelled New God and the other Fourth World titles, how long could stories have played out this theme before the Oedipal conflict exhausted itself? In the real world, children who feud with their parents either come to a kind of truce with the enemy, or move on outside of the environment where the disputes occur, or wait until old age or death remove key players from the conflict.

Orion, however, remained tied to an essential Oedipal crisis. Though Orion's reappearance in a regular title involved considerable redefinition of the character - Don Newton's version seemed positively elegant compared to the blunt force of Kirby's original - in the mid-seventies book Return of the New Gods, the onetime Dog of War seemed to owe more to Hamlet, with Darkseid playing the role of Claudius. Better yet, we had in this Orion an Oedipus perpetually striving to cope with the father/enemy Laius.

This series, like the first, did not long endure, with its story arc outlasting the actual title (Adventure Comics carried the tale's ending). Without delving too far into sales figures or other trivia, we may note that the conflict of son versus father has a self-limiting character. One party must win, or the disputants must reconcile, or one player must die, or the reader must lose interest. It seems that the last case describes what happened here.

Drifting in JLA

Enthusiasm for Kirby concepts often overwhelms the common sense of comics creators and occasionally inclines them to attempt to revive either entire books or specific characters he created, even where no particular indication suggests that such an approach will work or do justice to these concepts and characters.

As an example, we can leap ahead from the dawn of the eighties (and the ending of Return of the New Gods to the close of the nineties, when a membership shakeup in the Justice League of America resulted in a lineup that contained no less than two Fourth World characters, Orion and Barda.

Here, Orion served no particular purpose. Half of the JLA could do things he could do in terms of sheer physical performance, and the personality Grant Morrison attached to him seemed conspicuously redundant; Orion's scowl had to compete for panel space with those of Batman and Aquaman. He seemed present mainly to provide some comic relief through the vehicle of Plastic Man making faces imitating him behind his back.

Orion might work in some as-yet-undecided Justice League lineup, but not one where one third of the members can lift tanks and pound through walls; in that context, he becomes nothing remarkable, since Orion's salient traits require some contrast with those characters with whom he interacts. He requires a distance in both personality and ability from supporting characters, neither of which his stint in JLA would allow him.

New Promise

By 2000, Orion would appear in another series, Walt Simonson's Orion. Of the various talents who have attempted to treat the character in the thirty years since he first appeared in DC books, Simonson seems best able to grasp the character's essence.

However, if Simonson succeeds where others fail to work the character properly, much of this involves considerable rehashing of old ground. In essence, Simonson makes Orion work by resetting him to factory settings.

Can this work in the long run? If anyone can make Orion succeed, Simonson can - he has both the experience with Fourth World concepts and the correct vision for the characters. But the conceptual wall hasn't vanished, and we still have an Orion struggling with his father, even if this latest conflict seems to center around Orion's quest for the truth about origins cast into doubt by his mother, Tigra.

It stands for the future to see if Simonson's talent can overwhelm the built-in limitations of the character. If not, we can expect a storytelling stalemate, even if Orion does manage, once again, to prevail over his father Darkseid. But it much commends Walt Simonson that he would even make the gamble of working with a character who seems able to leave a trail of defeated writers behind him, bringing down ruin on them like so many parademons.