Plans were then made to expand The Horde into a series of books to fully explore the complex socio-economic themes Kirby was trying to communicate. That was in 2001. Instead, the original novel’s few remaining copies spent the next twenty years stored in boxes waiting for someone to cash in on the Marvel hype. While that might explain while the legendary Kirby novel took so long to get published, it also answers a more important question: should it? Probably not. If the people who worked on it are to be believed, Kirby’s novel is a brilliant story wrapped into a problematic mess of a novel.
Like Berliner, author Tom King once described Kirby’s writing as possessing “not the subtlety of Hemingway but the scream of myth.” If that’s the case, the myth The Horde seems to scream is typically muffled by a pointy hood: white genocide. After all, the novel combines all of white people’s worst fears about Yellow Peril, Red Scare, and Black Power, combines them into an un-American Voltron, and warns of an impending future where capitalist caucasian culture will have to play endless games of whack-a-migrant to preserve its way of life.
That surface-level xenophobia isn’t helped by another sixties sci-fi trend the book adopts, that of the Uber-white author adopting the voices and cultures of non-white characters. Kirby really leans in on the ‘vernacular,’ making Asian characters sound like Charlie Chan rejects while black characters get the urban treatment with lines like “I kin sure use some mo’a dat good booze,” all while sprinkling in more N-words than the liner notes of an NWA album. Now, implying that concentration camp liberating, civil rights marching Jack Kirby was a white supremacist wouldn’t just make him spin in his grave — it’d make him roll up his ghost sleeves, take the elevator down from heaven and come kick my ass.
Jack Kirby's Unpublishable, Eyebrow Arching Novel Has Reappeared
Source: Pinoy Daily News
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