ISSUE SEVEN: THE NEW SEED

Colored by George Roussos

 

Instead of a story that leads to the birth of a New Seed, we begin with astronaut Gordon Pruett wandering dazed and alone in a space suit in what appears to be his native Colorado.  His suit changes into comfortable clothes and Pruett lies in the grass to age rapidly, then to metamorphosize into a New Seed.  The new-born being quickly zooms into the universe to witness myriad wonders, to race comets and meteors, and to visit planets where life doesn’t exist, or where it has formed into promising, but simple creatures, or where the lifeforms have grown beyond their very star systems.

     He visits one planet that is destroying itself.  He studies the rag tag survivors as they continue to kill each other in a devastating war, even as their own time on this mortal coil is coming swiftly to an end.  They kill even as they die in a final stand of violence that will leave this planet a lifeless hulk.

     But amid this bestial warfare the New Seed witnesses love between a woman staving off attack and her soldier lover who risks all to save her from the clutches of a marauding band.  As the lovers embrace, one of the marauders with his dying breath guns them both down.

     With life extinguished on this world, the New Seed extracts the dead lovers’ energy forces and takes the “great golden glow of free-wheeling atoms” to a promising new-born world that has yet to feel the spark of life.  There, he deposits the energy that had been life and love on another world to let it create life and test fate as it sees fit.

     Although the series ran for another three issues, this is really the last of the 2001 stories and the best since the first issue.  It is solemn, grandiose, a bit poetic and far more serious in tone and intention than the previous two-parter featuring Norton and his comic book-ravaged mind.  This was truly the last gasp for the series which then became just another comic book being used as a pilot vehicle for another superhero.  It is a shame that Kirby went in this direction, because more could have been done with the inherent concept of time-hopping through various eras that could have led to at least a concept of what the New Seeds are for, just what their plan is, and how it would affect the universe, or at least the human race.  A tall order, sure.  But comics are the perfect medium to take on such a task.  Unfortunately, that was not to be.