Is creativity a form of shamanic communion with forces beyond our ordinary experience? Are there certain individuals who are able to tap into the deepest recesses of consciousness where the gods are waiting?
Does visionary experience allow one to see traces of reality unbound by time and space?
There are the questions that lie at the heart of my own work and have led me to obsess further on an already long-standing obsession- the American godfather of the modern superhero, Jack Kirby.
...or this startling depiction of a nuclear-armed jet slamming into a skyscraper 17 years before 9/11...
...or this prescient allegory of the Gulf Wars and the arrest of Saddam Hussein in OMAC (drawn 17 years before the Gulf War), written contemporaneously with a story about a Stargate in another Kirby comic, Kamandi.
Drawn 17 years before the Viking mission
Now, let me go on record as believing the Apollo landings were real (they were too ritually important not to be), though perhaps not quite what we saw on TV. However, there's another possibility here that the media is not shoving down your throat- the landings were real but some of the photos and film from them were faked.
Why? Possibly because the real nature of and equipment used in the Apollo missions are highly sensitive and not meant for public consumption...As as I said before, some researchers like Chris Everard believe that there are still active alien bases on the Moon.Then Jay Weidner posted a long article presenting his theory that Stanley Kubrick helped fake the Apollo mission footage to hide the true mission, which used Nazi saucer technology.
This project was worked on simultaneously with production of 2001:A Space Odyssey, according to Weidner. But in pondering the third option in the Apollo controversy, I asked this impertinent question about the Apollo 11 crew's quite bold pronouncements that NASA forget about the Moon and focus on Mars:
In 1976, Jack wrote and drew Captain America's Bicentennial Battles, in which Cap encounters a sorcerer named Mister Buda.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the strange explosions and flaming debris we've seen falling from the sky over the past few months or the fact that June began and ended with two jetliners mysteriously dropping into the sea.OK, to recap: Jack Kirby, Apollo 11 hoax controversy, Stanley Kubrick, war in space...
The mini-Magus sends Cap on a trip through time and space, revisiting some crucial moments in America's history such as the Civil War, the White Sands Atomic Test (the same date as the Apollo 11 launch, incidentally) and the Great Chicago Fire. Cap encounters notables such as Adolf Hitler, John Brown and Benjamin Franklin, and winds up in some pretty interesting locations...
But no sooner does he try to get a hold on what's happening than he ends up in one of Buda's psychic time portals. Kirby's description of Cap's voyage is almost identical to the language he'd use describing another astronaut's unexplained voyage...
...no, Cap goes from the unreported secret war on the Moon, through a Kubrickian Stargate, and straight into a movie studio.
...such as the Moon, where he discovers "it isn't as dead as it seems to be," and in fact is the setting for a major firefight...
...between forces Cap can't identify. "But this is impossible," Cap thinks to himself, he's heard nothing about this in the corporate media! How could it possibly be happening?
But no sooner does he try to get a hold on what's happening than he ends up in one of Buda's psychic time portals. Kirby's description of Cap's voyage is almost identical to the language he'd use describing another astronaut's unexplained voyage...
...in Jack's other 1976 Treasury Edition comic, his adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Just as with OMAC and Kamandi, another strange link between two contemporaneous Kirby comics.
Because sure enough, Cap finds himself back on Earth, smack dab in the sights of a camera lens. Given the You Are There conceit of Bicentennial Battles, it must for a newsreel, perhaps the Hindenberg disaster or something. After all, Astro-Cap is the "truth-seeker" in this story...
