Casualties of Editorial Malpractice IV: The Forever People

A lot of superheroes get the axe when their books fail to produce the sales figures necessary to justify, from a commercial standpoint, their continued publication. From the evidence of subsequent rehabilitation of these heroes as secondary characters in other series, this need not affect the long-term prospects of such creations.

Yet the Forever People, faced with a premature cancellation - at least in terms of story, since the tales were still vital when DC pulled the plug on them - didn't get the option of casually retiring and ending up here and there over subsequent decades, with the possible incorporation of members in (say) some incarnation of a Keith Giffen JLA. Instead, in a single-issue that foreclosed everything and resolved nothing, the Forever People put themselves in a kind of limbo from which they could no longer interact with the broader environs of the DC universe and in which they would not act at all. They wouldn't continue in their own series - cancellation decided this; and the ending of this series set up circumstances to prevent their appearance anywhere else.

Comics series end for a variety of reasons and end in a variety of ways. Some, such as Doom Patrol, ended with the death of the principal characters, in a way that resolved most ongoing issues until such time as DC sought to recreate the team in the 1970s; the recent and lamented Hourman ended at a stopping point in the plot that took the main character away from the setting of the book, but not in a way (owing to the nature of a time traveling superhero) that need foreclose future options in general; and some comics end suddenly, in mid-tale or at the end of a story arc, to continue as a feature in other magazines (such as Green Lantern / Green Arrow) or to disappear, awaiting oblivion or some future interest in the concepts.

Failed books can come back. Consider that Marvel Comics came to rely heavily on its X-books as selling pieces, even though in the seventies they cancelled the title for poor performance. And this suggests that euthanizing a concept because of the cancellation of a book represents a kind of editorial malpractice.

The Premise

One could crudely simplify the concept of the Forever People by labeling them as "super-powered space hippies from another planet," at the cost of doing some injustice to the concept. Tweak the idea a bit, though, and you reach something like their essence.

Perhaps these three, unfortunate syllables - "space hippies" - elicit groans when you see them. Memories of a similarly-themed and ultimately doomed body of characters on a dubious episode of Star Trek might bring on winces of deja vu; or, instead, thinking of fifty-year-old panhandlers somehow convinced that 1970 never came might take the joy from the concept. However, Kirby, if we look at the context, meant nothing negative or ironic in the idea. We might need to do a bit of reverse engineering on the idea as he intended it before we judge too harshly.

First, detach from the term "hippie" its pejorative elements; remove the implied immorality and decadence some have come to attach to the cultural label; strip away the concept of "aging perpetual adolescents who fail to realize that the decade of their youth has passed;" and, most of all, lose the suspicion that these folks represent a crowd of surly adolescents who cultivate a countercultural uniform in order to annoy the parents who ruined their lives by making them take out the trash. Kirby intended none of this negative baggage to attach to the concept.

Instead, consider the positive aspects that Kirby brought out in the concept, based on an optimistic view of American youth circa 1970 as viewed by a man born in 1917. Combine youth and beauty - for any clique-culture schtick loses its appeal when someone not genetically gifted appropriates its wardrobe - with a detachment from the vices of the past, imagination, and benevolence and then you can understand this particular crowd of super-powered space hippies.

From here, we can integrate other elements of the concept. The context of the warring worlds of New Genesis and Apokolips provided the backdrop for these itinerant superheroes with a connection to a place called Supertown. Furthermore, collectively they had the ability to combine into a single, much more powerful hero called Infinity Man through a calling ritual which they would evoke when the odds turned too far against them.

Pulling the Plug: The Why and How

DC Comics initially heralded the arrival of Jack Kirby to their company as a kind of Great Step Forward, based on his reputation and achievements at Marvel Comics. However, this failed to materialize all that DC had hoped, to some degree because of bad faith on DC's part; one could not expect Kirby to do great things for DC Comics in a scenario where that company restricted his work to the point that they brought in Al Plastino to redraw Superman's face in certain pieces where Kirby books included that character. DC gave him a loose rein for some new properties he would create himself, and essentially kept him away from established properties (even where Kirby probably had no intentions of reworking them).

The sales figures for Kirby's Fourth World pieces hovered just below what DC, in those days, saw as a margin for cancellation, and they chose that option (although perhaps they should have first considered consolidation as they would later for pieces like the Superman-themed books like Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, which they rolled together into Superman Family). As yet, we do not encounter what would qualify as editorial malpractice.

Nor does cancellation itself qualify. No, we have to go into territory where writers and/or editors (who should rein in writers anyway) did or do needless harm to a concept, devoid of a particular purpose. And, in this case, the forensics trail points back to no less than Jack Kirby himself, although some might deem it rather blasphemous to question the doings of the Patron Saint of Superhero Comics.

However, with Kirby as writer of credit on this series - with some input from associated talents like Mark Evanier - we must lay things at the feet of the Great Man himself. At a point in the plot which had the Infinity Man locked in some limbo universe and the Forever People in trouble in the wider world(s), Kirby had something like a single issue to resolve ongoing material.

As with body-trading superheroes such as Marvel's Captain Marvel, the heroes who exchanged places alternated between the story setting and generic but impossibly distant locations (limbo, the Negative Zone, the Microverse, or whatever serves as a convenient, yet occasionally dangerous, warehouse for the disused character(s) until their turn to appear on-panel returns). And, at a crisis point in the last issue, the Forever People entered the limbo that had trapped the Infinity Man, understanding that they might never leave.

In the fantasies of children, and some fairy tales, sending characters away to some land from which they can never return and which does not communicate with our own, familiar, world, often serves as a storytelling euphemism for death. In this case, as well, we can consider Kirby as having done in his own characters once DC removed the title which served as a vehicle for them to appear in.

In a continuity-respecting shared universe, this meant ongoing consequences for the characters. Though the other featured cast of Kirby's Fourth World books would return or remain in print - in the seventies, Mister Miracle, the New Gods, and Jimmy Olsen had a post-Kirby existence, however little some fans might think of this material - the heel of their creator had ground the Forever People into the ground, making it essentially impossible to use them until a number of years had passed. Harsh storytelling decisions do not endure forever, but sometimes they have to live out a half-life before a self-respecting writer can undo them.

Eventual Recovery

The plotline Kirby ended the series Forever People with essentially foreclosed subsequent use of these youthful superheroes, but not so extremely that a dedicated writer might not attempt to open the escape hatch inherent in trapping a set of characters on another world, in another dimension, or some place roughly equivalent to "very far away" once one strips it of the technical, conceptual baggage.

Thus, we need not consider as too shocking or too unlikely that the Forever People would reappear in a miniseries in the years between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Zero Hour: Crisis in Time.

A recent, albeit somewhat silly, issue of Young Justice shows that the Forever People do enjoy some kind of recurring role in DC Comics pieces, even if no one can particularly conceive an ongoing purpose for the characters. They have, however, inherited certain problematic aspects of their concept and their history. With the "hippie" subculture only approximated by a later generation of pretenders to the role, their concept reflects less current events and more a kind of camp or kitsch; furthermore, having already played the card that related to their connection to the Anti-Life Equation, their relationship to Apokolips and New Genesis needs some reworking to have much relevance or meaning.

Devoid of a meaningful definition - a place bad editorial decisions can leave characters for decades at a time - these characters therefore find themselves doing things like playing comic relief to a semi-comedic title like Young Justice, helping to shed light on the absurdity of the principal characters, or, alternately, using the principals of that book to highlight the silly aspects of their own design. In this sense, we find their use rather similar to that of the de-aged Lobo, a character with no especial purpose in the DC Universe; and, in this, we can see a sufficient condition for diagnosing editorial malpractice.

Where writers or editors do things to characters that reduce them to the utility of nuisance or comic relief, like Lobo, the editorial malpractice alarm bells must begin to ring.

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Column 239. Completed 15-Mar-2001.