Giant Gods musicians as Les Baxter, Martin Denny, and Arthur Lyman) as well as in television shows such as Adventures in Paradise (1959-1962) and Hawaiian Eye (1959-63). Though this trend began to wane in the late ’60s, and was almost completely dead within twenty years, by the mid-’90s various pop culture magazines like Juxtapoz and Tiki News—and affiliated “lowbrow” artists such as Shag and Doug Horne—began to revive the discarded Tiki obsession in their pop surrealist paintings, the style of which owe an obvious debt to comic book imagery of the 1950s and ’60s (a period during which, inarguably, Jack Kirby was the reigning king of comic books). One can’t help but notice, after studying many of the paintings that have recently sprung from this resurrected form of American kitsch, that the most common recurring image is that of the moia statues of Easter Island. The moia statues have held a hypnotic fascination for Americans for a very long time, mainly due to the mystery surrounding their construction. Although speculations and theories are rampant, no one—not even the self-proclaimed experts—know for certain how such monoliths were created by the primitive people who ostensibly lived on the island at the time of their construction. In this sense, the fascination that surrounds the moia statues is similar to the perennial enigmas surrounding Stonehenge in England, the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and UFOs.
The Extraterrestrial Tiki Art of Jack Kirby, by Robert Guffey
is not interested in science unless it comes wrapped in a rousing good story. While not skimping on the rigors of scientific research, Heyerdahl manages to combine a tale of romance and intrigue with prose that’s both graceful and literate. This was a unique approach at the time, perhaps even more so today. Most scientists are not able to arouse wonder while also following the rigors of pure research. It was this combination of the rational and the imaginative that aligned perfectly with the schizophrenic attitudes of postwar America. Heyerdahl’s first success was Kon-Tiki, his 1948 bestseller chronicling his journey to Polynesia in a makeshift raft in order to demonstrate that pre-Columbian South Americans were indeed capable of long sea voyages. Aku-Aku was his follow-up success. The evocative title, Aku-Aku, is a Polynesian word meaning “guardian spirit.” Though he begins the book by stating that he has no “aku-aku,” by the end of the book Heyerdahl is having a chapterlong conversation with his aku-aku while bathing beneath a waterfall on the island of Rapa Iti. Heyerdahl succeeds in maintaining his scientific skepticism in the face of the natives’ many superstitions; however, one can tell from the final chapter that Heyerdahl is now a little more willing to consider the possibilities of the native viewpoint with regard to the intersection of reality and legend. It’s this intersection that most fascinated Jack Kirby. If any single motif recurs throughout Kirby’s oeuvre it is the connection between the mundane and the divine. It’s this unique juxtaposition that defined the success of Marvel Comics in the 1960s. At the beginning of the 1960s DC Comics was still the most successful comic book company in the world. Their heroes, such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, were much larger than life. They were one-dimensional characters who lived in fictional cities several levels removed from the real world. Kirby’s early Marvel super-hero stories placed his modern gods in a recognizably authentic world—mostly New York City, where Kirby had lived and worked for much of his life, except for a minor interlude called World War II during which he served under General Patton’s Third Army, Fifth Division—and invested in them genuine human qualities and weaknesses. His gods all had Achilles’ heels, most of them of an emotional nature. The Silver Surfer (as he first appeared in The Fantastic Four, not as he was
“Let us imagine ourselves taking a ten-ton boxcar and turning it upside down, for the wheel was unknown in Polynesia. Next we capsize another boxcar alongside the first one, and tie the two firmly together. Then we drive twelve full-grown horses into the cars, and after them five large elephants. Now we have got our fifty tons and can begin to pull. We have not merely to move this weight, but drag it for two and a half miles over stony ground without the slightest injury being done to it. Is this impossible without machinery? If so, the oldest inhabitants of Easter Island mastered the impossible […]. Thor Heyerdahl, Aku-Aku, 1958
America’s relationship with the moia statues deepened considerably in 1958 with the publication of Thor Heyerdahl’s bestseller, Aku-Aku. Chapter One, entitled “Detective Off to the End of the World,” begins with the sentence, “I had no aku-aku,” which successfully establishes the sense of exotic mystery that permeates the entire book. Heyerdahl chronicles his real life expedition to Easter Island to uncover the enigmas surrounding not only the statues, but also the long lost people who built them. Newsweek called the book a “fascinating scientific whodunit.” Just from the title of Chapter One alone it is obvious that Heyerdahl is very aware of the pulp conventions of popular entertainment, and frames his story with these conventions in mind. His tale is one half detective story, à la Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and one half H. Rider Haggard lost civilization adventure story, à la King Solomon’s Mines or She. At some point or another Heyerdahl must have realized that the general population 17