Secret City Saga is a concept and collection of various comic book titles created by American writer and artist Jack Kirby, and published by the short-lived Topps Comics, an offshoot of the Topps Trading Card company. Beginning in April 1993, the Secret City Saga books consisted of three four-issue miniseries (Jack Kirby's Secret City Saga, Satan's Six, TeenAgents) and three one-shot specials (Captain Glory, Nightglider, and Bombast), which were all preceded by the one-shot promotional giveaway, Jack Kirby's Secret City Saga #0. The concept itself saw Topps lease Kirby's name alongside the characters, and saw the line referred to as "The Kirbyverse". All the characters resided in the same shared universe, and the deal also presented the final time that Kirby had complete creative control over any of the many properties that he had created in his career. It was initially seen as a creative and financial failure. The line consisted of leftover concepts Kirby had developed years prior, and generated low sales and minimal reader interest, finding a niche only with hard-core Kirby fans. 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". "Ninth Men" is part of Kirby's fictional concept that 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 in the form of 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