Secret City Saga - The Secret City

The Secret City

The Secret City Saga chronicled the adventures of three heroes, Captain Glory, Nightglider, and Bombast. As revealed in Jack Kirby's Secret City Saga #0 (April 1993), at some point in pre-recorded history "fifteen millennia before our own", there existed a race of beings known as "the Ninth Men". Apparently, "Ninth Men" is a term used to denote that, as part of Kirby's fictional concept, civilized human society tends to repeat itself in cycles, starting off in a primitive state and later evolving and advancing in intelligence and technology until factors such as greed and arrogance then lead to said society's collapse and destruction...only to be replaced later by another race of humanoids, who tend to repeat the mistakes (unknowingly) of the prior society. This is also a theme that Kirby touched upon briefly in his more popular Fourth World books published by DC Comics in the early 1970s.

The Ninth Men populated Gazra, a society which advanced to the point in which it was harvesting the full potential of an integrated community, with its technological advancements having been made with an organic theme, instead of machine based. Yet, their environment itself seemed to turn against them, huge nearly planet-wide storms destroying all in their path. As a contingency, the scientific and military leaders of Gazra placed three of their citizens into hibernation, with hopes that these three would survive "The Great Catastrophe" (a term used for these planet-wide storms) to spread the ideals of the society of the Ninth Men onto the next age of Man....which is revealed to be us, present-day humankind.

The three citizens were:

Keltan, a captain in Gazra's Science Team security forces, who upon awakening would assume the name Captain Glory. Glida, who upon release from hibernation would assume the name Nightglider. As indicated in Secret City Saga #0, this may have been an "official" term for her and/or her kin during her days in Gazra, for she possesses bodily modification that would foster the abilities of flight, such as a hollow bone structure. Bombast, who seems to have been a member of Gazra's military, possibly of some sort of demolitions or heavy ordnance team, whose official term seems to have been "hurlers". Skilled at ballistics and explosives.