Who Was Jack Kirby's Darkseid? (Part 1 - October 1970 to January 1971)

Darkseid; a detail of an unused New Gods page from 1971, as published in Mark Evanier's Kirby: King Of Comics.

1.

A string of undeniably memorable versions of Darkseid have appeared in the years since Jack Kirby's epochal Fourth World titles were cancelled. Several especially compelling takes come immediately to mind; Englehart and Roger's depiction in the 1977 reboot of Mister Miracle; the portrayal by Starlin and Mignola in 1988's Cosmic Odessey; Burnett, Timm, Dini et al's Lord Of Apokolips as developed for 2000's Superman: The Animated Series. Yet none have ever seemed to truly capture the essence of Kirby's original. That characters should develop over time is, of course, not only inevitable, but necessary. Yet with Darkseid, the issue is less that he's been interpreted differently and more that something essential has been accidentally left behind.

I've always thought this as strange as it's regrettable, and yet, I've never had the sense to try and figure out why - or indeed even if - this misinterpretation has occurred. Perhaps it's simply a question of my boyhood love for the New Gods. As a 9 year during the summer of 1972, I'd come across a copy of The Forever People #8 in a Portobello newsagent. It was without doubt the strangest comic I'd ever read, and a huge part of that was down to Darkseid. Brutish and courteous, sadistic and merciful, malevolent and rational, mighty and yet decisively thwarted, he was clearly a supervillain unlike any other I'd ever seen. No matter how interesting the teen-God members of the Forever People themselves were, it was Darkseid who compelled attention, drove the plot, and, eventually, resolved its conflicts.

A detail from the final page of February 1971's New Gods #1, inked, as is all but two of the following scans, by Vince Colletta

What follows is my attempt to work out the character of Kirby's Darkseid during those two wonderful years in the early 1970s, when DC Comics had handed The King four spaces in their publishing schedule and essentially trusted him to do as he pleased. (Disappointed at first by the sales figures, the company has since reaped untold riches through the exploitation of Kirby's world-building. Who knows what other Fourth World properties he might have created for the company, and what other profits DC might have secured, if only Carmine Infantino's administration had kept faith with Kirby?) In what follows, I'll discuss each of Kirby's New Gods titles from 1970 to 1985 and note, as best I can, how Darkseid was portrayed. It'll take awhile, of course, but what's a comics blog for? Future instalments will appear each Tuesday until the far-from-onerous task is done.

Darkseid's first appearance, from 1971's Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #134, by Jack Kirby with Vince Colletta

2.

It's almost 45 years since the first appearance of Jack Kirby's uber-supervillain Darkseid, who debuted in October 1970's Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #134. As an opening bow, it amounted to no more than a single run of the mill panel. Today, it's likely that the introduction of such an important character would be given a great deal more space. Yet Kirby allocated just a ninth of the page and its penultimate frame to Darkseid's initial appearance. (See above & below.) In it, Clark Kent's new boss Morgan Edge, the fiendish "President of the Galaxy Broadcasting system", reveals that he's far more than a souless media tycoon with a taste for hiring the assassins of Inter-Gang. As if attempting to have Clark Kent murdered wasn't henious enough, Kirby now revealed Edge to be the self-proclaimed "servant" of the previously unseen and never-before-mentioned Darkseid. To everyone else, Edge had played the role of the supremely confident entrepreneur, revelling in power and psychotically disconnected from any trace of conscience. But to Darkseid, Edge expressed absolute obedience. Gone was the middle-age hipster, his speech purged of the slimy faux-intimacies of "buddy" and "baby". Now Edge's sentences were  uncharacteristically pithy and obsequious. Whoever this grey-faced Darkseid was, his power was absolute and his rank unchallenged.  A king of sorts, and almost certainly alien too, "great Darkseid" appeared supremely assured. This, Kirby was telling us, was a man, or something in the shape of a man, who was used to being unthinkingly obeyed.

The final page of SPJO#134, with Darkseid debut in context. I've often wondered, was Kirby purposefully underplaying Darkseid's importance? Did he run out of space? Was Darkseid's introduction in this particular issue a last minute thought?

Yet for all of that, Darkseid's direct dealings with Edge raised some beguiling questions. Why was a ruler of such apparent might dealing directly with a business mogul such as Morgan Edge? It was, in Darkseid's very first appearance, a sign of a quality that few of those who've used the character since Kirby have ever picked up on. For the Darkseid of the original Fourth World titles was as hands-on a despot as comics have ever seen. Yes, he controlled an entire planet of Gods, and, yes, he'd created a cadre of underlinings along with armies of savage warriors in order to further his ends. But Kirby's Darkseid was also given to directly managing all manner of schemes and any number of individuals, from apparently immortal behemoths to distinctly fragile human beings. In the months to come, we'd discover that all manner of relatively minor players in his empire, from hoodlums to businessmen and scientists, were able to contact him for on-the-spot direction. Today we might suspect that Darkseid was employing AI technology to simulate his presence and control his minions. But Kirby's meaning would swiftly become clear: Darkseid was constantly and intimately involved with the activities of a huge number of his followers. He was everywhere.

From Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #135

3.

The following month's issue of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen underscored both Darkseid's taste for micro-management and his insistence on absolute obedience. It also established that Darkseid controlled technology far in advance of Earth's, that he was bent on imposing some kind of domination upon the planet, and that he was determinedly attempting to keep his various and nefarious activities secret.

In The Evil Factory, Kirby also introduced the alien scientists Mokkari and Simyan, who've been experimenting upon the stolen cells of a number of American citizens including Superman and Jimmy Olsen. Their intention was to develop a variety of technologies to counter the threat that Superman poses to Darkseid's designs. (Hence, for example, the 'fine spray' of  'synthesised Kryptonite' along with a variety of "evil" genetic manipulations the two have developed.) In that, it seemed that Darkseid's preference for acting in the shadows was motivated by a fear of the last son of Krypton, although the situation would soon prove more eerily complicated.  Regarding themselves as "representatives" of Darkseid's "forces on Earth", Mokkari and Simyan's sense of mission combined with their obvious Otherness to establish Darkseid as far more than just the self-proclaimed liege of the likes of Morgan Edge.

From January 1974's Mister Miracle #18, as inked and lettered by Mike Royer. (See below.)

Kirby established Darkseid's lack of trust in his underlings through a scene in which he's shown to have been secretly monitoring Mokkari and Simyan's conversation prior to their contacting him. Luckily for them, they've expressed nothing that he doesn't approve of. It's here that Kirby gives us the first sense of Darkseid's personal philosophy of power. In response to Simyan's declaration that Darkseid is "stern (but) he rewards his loyal and efficient servitors", the latter declares that only fools work for "mere praise".  At this stage in his career, Darkseid is canny enough to know that he has to recompense his underlinings for their achievements. He is, in that as well as many other things, a distinctly pragmatic creature. So pragmatic is he, that he appears to have somehow acquired, studied and grasped the implications of Mokkari and Simyan's work even before they've fully grasped it themselves. They might not be aware that they've created "an uncontrollable organic murder machine!", but Darkseid most certainly is.

Darkseid's propensity for barking out soundbites of his personal beliefs would remain. (The penultimate panel of the last Kirby-helmed issue of Mister Miracle would find Darkseid proclaiming that "Life at best is bittersweet!" before bursting out in laughter at his own cruel profundity.)  A caring professional might imagine that he was, on some traumatised level, attempting to deny anyone or anything the authority to interpret events. By the same token, it's easy to imagine that a profoundly narcissistic Darkseid simply loved to lecture those around him. The two drives are, of course, hardly irreconcilable.

From Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #135

4.

It's frequently said that Kirby's inspiration for Darkseid was Adolf Hitler. That's evidently true, and yet, it's a point that's often taken far too literally in the blogosphere beyond the lairs of learned Kirby scholars. Of course, Jack Kirby's loathing for the Third Reich is matter of record. He co-created Captain America in order to express it, he fought against the Nazis in the Republic's army during the Second World War, and his art frequently returned to those years and events in the decades that followed. But in truth, there's little of Hitler himself as an individual to be seen in Darkseid. Rather, Darkseid embodies many of the lessons that can be learned not just from the self-proclaimed Fuhrer's career, but from despots of all stripes. (Of course, the same principles can be seen at work in democracies too, as Kirby had the demagogue Glorious Godfrey express in 1971's Forever People #3.) Unlike Hitler, Kirby's Darkseid shows not the slightest trace of any ambition beyond absolute power. Not for him, for example, the likes of senseless, despicable theories of racial conflict. Rather, as Kirby would quickly establish, Darkseid was determined to acquire the "Anti-Life Equation" and extinguish the individual consciousnesses of every living sentient creature. In that, Darkseid is Hitler's insane lust for power abstracted to the purest degree. It is, if you like, a Fascism of one. Darkseid's vision of perfect order is one in which he and only he is capable of individual thought and action. If he has to continue to motivate his servants through a fusion of fear and reward for the while, Darkseid's ideal is a reality that's devoid of anyone's voice but his own.

From July 1965's Tales Of Suspense #67, by Kirby, Lee, Ray et al.

Kirby clearly didn't see Darkseid as any straight-forward representation of Hitler, who'd he previously pictured as a manic, repellent tyrant, powerful in his will, dangerous in his scheming, and yet little but pathetic and contemptible. Whether  in his 1940s work with Joe Simon or that with Stan Lee in the 1960s, Kirby's comicbook take on Hitler had little in common with his depiction of Darkseid. By comparison, Darkseid rarely expresses any extreme of emotion, let alone a hysterical mania, while he poses by contrast a deeply intimidating physical presence. In short, Darkseid was highly unlikely to ever be flattened from a single blow by Captain America or frightened by the unexpected appearance of the Red Skull. If Darkseid was in any way Hitler, then he was also Stalin, Mao and any number of their despicable ilk. As such, the character's apparent omnipresence evokes the terrifying capacity of the totalitarian state to dissolve away the barriers between a public and a private existence. Wherever good folks are attempting to live free and independent lives, there's Darkseid directing his assassins, or monitoring perhaps a million conversations, or organising the theft of the noblest citizen's very D.N.A.  In his brief opening bows, Darkseid functioned as autocrat and aphorism-spouting propagandist, military officer and bureaucratic overseer. He'd even soon turn up in poor Dave Lincoln's soon-to-be demolished front room, to enjoy a gloat and organise a punch-up, as occured in New Gods #2.

None of this was an accident of Kirby's storytelling. He obviously knew very well what he intended Darkseid to represent. In Forever People #2, from the May of 1971, Kirby had the tyrant declare that "Darkseid never rests! His shadow falls everywhere". As such, he expresses a variety of truths about dictatorship, rather than any specific biographical details about this or that historical individual.

Perhaps the most imposing take of Hitler that Kirby ever contributed to, as appeared in December 1963's The Fantastic Four #21, with script by Stan Lee & inks by George Bell. Yet even here, there's doubt that the figure is Hitler at all, while the character has spent the preceeding pages disguised as the Hate Monger; whether this Hitler would have been so substantial an opponent without a mask to hide behind is left open to debate.

5.

The philosophy that Darkseid began to express in Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #135 is recognisably that of a sociopathic political operator. "A great lie can smash truth!", Kirby has his creation declare in SPJO #135. In those words, Darkseid embodies the threat posed by the power-hungry as they manipulate the most dangerously irrational aspects of human psychology. Not for him the sentimental belief that "good" will inevitably overcome "evil". As Darkseid declares, "Death can eclipse life!". Thinking that they'll advance their own causes by serving Darkseid's ruthless ends, the likes of Mokkari and Simyan are only helping to ensure that they'll ultimately cease to exist as individuals at all.

In only Darkseid's second appearance, Kirby had established the character as a fearsome tyrant who believed he'd reduced the business of governing to a science. Without even showing anything of the character bar his head and shoulders, Kirby had established Darkseid as the most intriguing and intimidating new superbook villain in years.

This look at Jack Kirby's Darkseid is continued here;