Panel time - worshiping the machine
I'll confess: I've been a sucker for comic books since the convenience store spinner rack days. It's a versatile medium - it can be both a pure expression of a lonely sicko with a pen (most of yr indie comics), or, these days, it can be the ineffable by-product of a production line grind that makes no sense - a writer, penciller, inker, letter & colourist on a monthly grind to ship 20 or so pages of wonderful slop for little pay to a small audience (it's me).
This panel straddles both worlds. It's from a Jack Kirby comic called Forever People, and was produced at a time where Kirby was writing and drawing four comics a month for the Distinguished Competition. By this point in his career he'd been making comics for over three decades, and it's 1970. He's 53, he's got a wife and 4 kids to feed, and he does it by hunching over a drawing board every day. It's a time of huge social and cultural change, but he's the son of Jewish immigrants and he's served as a fucking scout in Normandy during World War 2. I'd imagine a person like that could look at the hippy subculture with a healthy amount of disdain, but Kirby embraces it. His work of this time is a heady and hallucinatory mix of mythology, science fiction, and pop culture that advocates for an end to all war, and champions collective efforts against fascist regimes. I think about his work at the time, and it reminds me of the importance of being open to the world, and not shutting out things that you don't understand.
In this panel, the Forever People - hippies from a future utopia - are convening with something called a mother box, which is a computer they rely on for guidance, transportation, and summoning forth a being from the infinite. A bunch of kids worshipping a machine, with exclamation marks flying everywhere. It's rad.