Scans_Daily

Just to be clear, "Terrible" Turpin was NOT intended as a self-insert character. Nor was he intended to be Brooklyn from the Boy Commandos as an adult. Both of these are later fan inventions but they were not at all what Kirby had in mind.

Kirby's idea for Turpin was that he had been an adult policeman in the 1930s who fought racketeers and mobsters like the ones seen in Kirby's black-and-white magazine sized comic In The Days Of The Mob. One of the criminals from that book shows up working for Darkseid in New Gods issue 4. Kirby hated mobsters and Turpin's presence here is to underscore that the evil of the mob and the evil of Apokolips are fundamentally the same thing.

(Kirby did do some self-insertion in the Fourth World when he got Orion together with Bekka, based on his own wife, who is the daughter of Himon, who in turn is based on his own father-in-law. Which makes Orion the real self-insert character...)