Kirby Review: OMAC

To conclude our series on Jack Kirby we take a look at OMAC. <Editor's Note: We lost this blog that should have run at the end of the summer. Dov Smiley's review of Jack Kirby's legacy was a big hit for us this year, and with the return of OMAC in DC's New 52, the misplacing of this blog is even more embarrassing. We hope that Dov will forgive our confusion, and present....>

The Smiley Spot's Kirby Review: OMAC

Fair warning: Here’s where things get weird.

The genesis of OMAC was the idea of putting Captain America, the indomitable spirit of the American soldier, into a dystopia. It’s a far-out, smart concept that can create some great stories. And at the end of his DC tenure he was given the chance to create his dystopian story, called The World That’s Coming.

But what the fans didn’t realize: They had never seen a Jack Kirby dystopia, and it was something else.

What makes the world of OMAC so frightening and strange is that it fuses a dystopia with a weird, sex-driven society. All of the exploitation in this new culture revolves around being sexually appealing. In the first issue we confront a Build-A-Friend, a folded up beautiful woman that uses her sex appeal to manipulate others for nefarious ends. As the story builds, OMAC deals with youth farms where the older generation is literally taking away the youth of the younger generation. The artist who created the new heroic age of heroes was now showing a world so hopeless and sexualized that no character is redeemable. For his fans at the time, it was an unreal shift.

As for the mighty hero, OMAC is not a real person. He is a computer program from the Brother Eye satellite that projects the ideal physical man onto the weak body of Buddy Blank. As OMAC solves the problems of the global peace agency, an organization where no one is allowed to see anyone else’s ethnicity or appearance, Buddy is forgotten and ignored. Regardless of the superhuman achievements of OMAC and Brother Eye, the human spirit is destroyed. In every aspect of this world that’s coming, the individual is gone.

What makes OMAC so compelling is that Kirby, the man who shows the ultimate humans in everything he does, the strongest heroes and bravest soldiers, can also show the greatest evils in our own society. Kirby is still a force in comics because he understands how to bring these huge ideas to the comic world. If you let Kirby tell his story, he will create a tale epic enough to let you see the real world that much clearer.

Kirby will always be the king of comics. Those who work in comics will always aspire to create stories and ideas that live up to those he gave us.