Darkseid Is

Chris Maka over at the Howling Curmudgeons just doesn't like Darkseid, the cosmic dictator created by comics legend Jack Kirby.   Filtering through all the talk about "Fanboy Blasphemy" and the preemptive dread of a backlash--and accepting that the more a blogger talks about the heresy of their views, the more orthodox they probably are--Chris makes a good point about the relative paucity of great Darkseid stories.

He does cite three notable exceptions (the Legion's Great Darkness Saga, Kirby's original Fourth World comics, and the Superman animated series), and to be fair, they comprise thirty or forty great comics and a couple years of a fantastic television series; every character should be so lucky.  After that, though, the pickings do begin to thin out, and Darkseid has certainly had more than his share of lousy appearances (see "Byrne, John").

But any character can be ruined by overexposure.  Look what's happened to the Joker--a couple of great stories from the seventies have stretched out into a thirty-year bloodbath that's made him all but impossible to accept as a recurring character.  However, that's mostly due to hack writers turning to a homicidal Joker for shock value (or because they can't think of anything else that month).  Darkseid poses a different problem.  A great many superhero writers and artists are fans of Jack Kirby (if they aren't, they may be in the wrong line of work) and they all want to take their own shot at writing his greatest creations, but most of them just aren't up to the task.  They may derive a certain thrill from writing their versions of Darkseid but that rarely translates to the readers.

I can think of at least two more classic Darkseid appearances that Chris overlooks: the X-Men/Teen Titans crossover (it's all about his calm poise--hands clasped behind his back--as he faces down Dark Phoenix) and Rock of Ages in JLA.  Maybe it's not a coincidence that both of those stories end with his apparent death.  Darkseid is a character who was supposed to have a finite arc, an ending, before DC denied Kirby the opportunity to bring his story to a close, and some of his most memorable stories try to supply it.

Of course, so do many of his least memorable ones.  My first exposure to Darkseid was probably Justice League of America #185, the last part of a JLA/JSA/New Gods crossover and one of the first JLA issues drawn by George Perez right after veteran JLA artist Dick Dillin died.  Looking back it's a thoroughly generic comic, with one of the obviously impermanent deaths that often cap off Darkseid's appearances, although I was too young to know that at the time.  I don't recall what Darkseid said or did in this run-of-the-mill story that caught my attention--maybe it was just the hubris of this grandiose villain getting destroyed by his own Omega Effect--but it must have carried some tiny spark of his original power.

Darkseid is one of the great archetypal characters, and one of the last to arrive in comics.  Most of them were created back in the thirties or forties; the next wave came with Marvel in the sixties; most of today's young turks are still middle-aged grouches from the seventies like Frank Castle or Wolverine.  But just before the creativity ended Kirby gave us Darkseid, the stone-faced tyrant from outer space who inspired one highly successful copy (Jim Starlin's Thanos) and a less successful copy of a copy (Jim Starlin's Mongul, now routinely used as a punching bag to show how tough some johnny-come-lately is) as well as any number of more fleeting and forgettable imitators.  The best of these characters aren't just antagonists in any particular plot, they are fascism personified, its means and desires incarnated in humanoid form.  Thanos lays bare its psychosexual death drive, and brilliantly, but Darkseid is a more mature, more psychologically stable, and therefore far more threatening figure:  imagine a Hitler who's both physically intimidating and not the slightest bit insane.  Darkseid is what Hitler wanted to be, the visions he sold to himself in his sleep made real.  A walking dream, or nightmare, of total control.

His control is so total that it even transcends interpretation.  Grant Morrison, one of the few Kirby epigones to really understand the Fourth World characters, gave him the perfect slogan in Rock of Ages:  "Darkseid is."  The implication being that he's so powerful, so all-controlling, that he doesn't need to say what he is.  Eventually he's everything, or the only thing, and even in our world, where he mercifully remains just a comic book supervillain in a weird little miniskirt and thigh boots, his authoritarian drive is so primal and so pure that he doesn't have to symbolize anything to generate meaning, he just is.

And while he has the gift of smack-talk that comes with all the great Kirby characters...

I like you, Glorious Godfrey!  You're a shallow, precious, child--the revelationist--happy with the sweeping sound of words!  But I AM THE REVELATION!

...he joins it to a bracing honesty that regularly deflates the rhetoric of both his sycophantic followers (he's dressing down his own propagandist up there, shoving him squarely back in his place) and his young, frequently naive opponents.  (And yes, I'm polishing up a comment to a previous Chris Maka post here.)  It's an old chestnut that the greatest villains--Magneto, Doom, Luthor when he's not wearing the Kingpin's hand-me-downs--don't think they're villains, even see themselves as the heroes of their own stories. Darkseid is all the more chilling for knowing exactly what he is and what he's doing, and not feeling the slightest remorse.

He even knows that a piece of him persists into the young heroes who battle him, especially the two he can claim as his sons.  In one of the shortest and best bits of Kirby smack-talk in the Fourth World saga, Darkseid appears as Scott Free (soon to become Mister Miracle) crawls through a mass-gravity field towards a Boom Tube that will take him away from dismal Apokolips to a fragile sanctuary on Earth.  But Darkseid does nothing to stop him.  In part it's because he's arranged this event, he wants Scott to escape so he can break his pact with New Genesis and resume his war, but there's more at stake than cosmopolitics as he screams

HE CAN TAKE IT!  I'll not stop him now!  If courage and bravery took him here--some of it was MINE!

Darkseid knows, and Kirby knows, that the drives he embodies--for control, for power, for domination--are part of all of us.  Even Scott Free can never fully escape Darkseid.  None of us can.  That's what makes him so terrifying.

That's what makes him so great.

Comments

[Chris M.]

"...and accepting that the more a blogger talks about the heresy of their views, the more orthodox they probably are..."

Hey, I don't think "Darkseid is mostly lame" is fanboy orthodoxy -- the rest of comics blogland can't stop lovin' on the guy. But that said, I'll endeavor to tune down the preemptive dread next time (and in most instances you're probably right about the orthodoxy effect).

You make a good case for Darkseid, but I think you hit it on the head with your Joker comparison -- he's just been used too often and poorly. If you used Darkseid to his full effect once or twice a decade, he'd be the stuff of legend -- I just don't think he works as well as a traditional regularly-occurring supervillain. I also think you're right that he's a villain who probably works better as part of a more traditional, contained narrative where he can have a proper ending.

[Mark Simmons]

In addition to Thanos and Mongul, there are a couple other of those "more fleeting and forgettable imitators" who come to mind. I don't know much about the X-Men villain Apocalypse, but he sure looks the part, and the name rings a bell too. And then there's Baron Karza from the old Micronauts comic, which in hindsight was just chock-full of New Gods homages.

Anyways, thanks for the nice Darkseid thoughts. Like any great comics character he can be cheapened by overexposure, but his best moments are pretty fab. :-)

[Marc]

I knew there were other Darkseid knockoffs, but they proved so fleeting and forgettable that I couldn't recall any of them. At least Starlin crafted some memorable ones.

[Mark Schepp]

The definitive Darkseid quote:

"I have taken way their confusion and replaced it with obediance. I have taken away their fear of themselves and given them a fear of Darkseid. I have liberated them from the chaos of indecision. I have given them one straight path! One purpose! One goal: TO DIE FOR DARKSEID!"

From Morrison's Rock of Ages storyline.

-Mark

[Dave Van Domelen]

I think another reason why Darkseid is so often ill-used is that writers just don't GET the idea of the Anti-Life Equation. It's not about death, or about annihilation, or nullification. It's about the subsumation of the wills of all under the will of one. The Nietzschean Will To Life being snuffed out, while the biological processes continue to run.

The Anti-Life Equation would not make Darkseid or anyone else cease to be (a minor flaw in the JLU finale). It would make all wills DARKSEID'S will. Which is a far darker form of anti-life than mere death, for it can not in any sense be considered an escape.

[Marc]

Thanks for the spoiler warning, Dave! It's almost two months old, I know, but I missed the finale while we were up here working on the house... I knew I should have emailed Pete weeks ago... fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Dave Van Domelen, you're my Anti-Life Equation!

Getting back to Ol' Stone Face, I think Walt Simonson understood the Anti-Life Equation pretty well, though I didn't especially care for the execution of that Orion story. I seem to recall Rick Veitch handling it well in Swamp Thing. And Morrison has gotten it right a couple of times, most recently in Seven Soldiers.

[David Van Domelen]

Oops, sorry. Does this mean I get to control your will?

Anyway, yeah, Simonson did seem to get the ALE reasonably well too, but the series in general was pretty lackluster.

[Marc]

Does this mean I get to control your will?

Or you've snuffed out my will to live. Or I need to find you before the son I bartered away to my greatest enemy kills me. It's complicated.

[Dave Intermittent]

Don't forget Starlin's Dreadstar baddie, the High Lord Papal; the more civilized of his large-browed Darkseid analogues.

[David Van Domelen]

I considered bringing Papal up, but he's gotten too diluted. He doesn't really have the sort of hook that Darkseid or Thanos have. He's just an ambitious politician who's managed to claw his way to the top at the expense of his soul (maybe). He even turns kinda good later on (albeit in Peter David's hands, a generation after the original series).

"She's not stupid, she's not a cow, and *I'll* unhand you."

[Garth "gwalla" Wallace]

Mongul at least had his moment, in Alan Moore's "What Do You Get For the Man Who Has Everything?". Two moments, if you count the JLU adaptation of that story. But two moments aren't much.

Darkseid is basically what every sociopath thinks of himself as. And yeah, the Anti-Life Equation is control (a lot of people have interpreted it as chaos, which seems to be far from what Kirby was getting at—Darkseid uses chaos, but it isn't his goal—or, worse, as making things go 'splode).

Sure he's been overused, and used poorly. But he manages to be intimidating even while wearing a vinyl miniskirt. You have to respect a guy who can pull that off.

[Josh]

"Darkseid is a character who was supposed to have a finite arc, an ending . . . " I remember having very much liked "The Quiet Darkness" (TMB Legion) for just that reason.

[alex orzeck-byrnes]

no darth vader?

[Marc]

Already being covered.