Jack Kirby*s Fourth World Omnibus, Vol. 4

After co-creating comic book heroes including The Fantastic Four, The Hulk and The X-Men, legendary writer/artist Jack Kirby came to DC Comics in 1970 to publish his magnum opus: four interlocked adventures series that were known collectively as "The Fourth World."

This fourth and final volume collects the remaining issues of these four classic series -- THE NEW GODS, THE FOREVER PEOPLE, MISTER MIRACLE and SUPERMAN'S PAL JIMMY OLSEN -- in chronological order as they originally appeared. Also included in this volume are Kirby's sequel to THE NEW GODS, plus the graphic novel THE HUNGER DOGS and rarely seen Kirby art from DC's WHO'S WHO series, all from the mid-1980s.

In 1972, just two years after luring Kirby away from competitor Marvel, DC pulled the plug on his magnum opus, the ambitious Fourth World saga, depicting a cosmic struggle between good and evil waged by the godlike inhabitants of the planets New Genesis and Apokolips. Fans immediately mourned the loss. Kirby’s dialogue was frequently overblown, and his characterizations blunt, but his conceptual imagination was never more unfettered, and his emotion-laden artwork never more viscerally powerful. More than a decade later, a new DC management team asked Kirby to conclude the truncated story line. Hampered by health problems and limited space, Kirby hastily, less-than-satisfactorily wrapped it up, thereby resolving, however imperfectly, the resolution of what is now seen as one of comics’ most ambitious projects, the concepts and characters of which populate the DC universe to this day. The fourth and final volume collecting the whole thing includes that too-little, too-late conclusion, though restored to rectify editorial tampering, as well as the last few issues of the comic’s original run. --Gordon Flagg