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| From New Gods #7 (1971) by Jack Kirby with Mike Royer |
The ending of the seventh issue of Jack Kirby's original
New Gods series is the kind of thing that you might immortalize in a marble sculpture or an epic metal song.
A temporary peace is established between the warring planets New Genesis and Apokolips through a pact in which each world's leader agrees to raise the other's child. Orion, the son of the series' principle antagonist Darkseid, is sent to live with Highfather on New Genesis. The fiery Orion draws a smuggled knife from his boot and demands to see the father he's never met. Highfather is able to cool Orion's temper and set him on the path toward becoming the hero of New Genesis.
It's easy to draw the comparison between this issue and the revelation that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father. These days the internet is rife with articles about how these comics might have inspired it. Now if you've never read
New Gods, imagine watching
The Empire Strikes Back and never following it up with
Return of the Jedi. Imagine if the story never ends.
If you can't imagine it then I'm going to assume you didn't grow up reading superhero comics. It's a world where heroes are destined to fight the same villains over and over again.
New Gods ran for 11 issues but that last issue is just another episode. New Genesis and Apokolips are still at war. They always will be at war.
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| Darkseid appearing in The Legendary Super Powers Show (1984) |
Jack Kirby was eventually given the opportunity to revisit the
New Gods by the company that cancelled their title back in 1972, but only after the characters he created were part of a successful toy line and started appearing in the newest
Super Friends cartoons. Mark Evanier's afterword in the
Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus suggests that DC's new investment in this cast of characters prevented Kirby from producing the finale he had envisioned more than a decade earlier. Evanier avoids condemning
The Hunger Dogs, the graphic novel that served as the conclusion of Kirby's
New Gods stories. By reading between the lines he seems to imply that it's a lesser work than it could have or should have been.
I think Evanier is attempting to navigate the negative critical reputation of this work but let's be honest, we're not talking about how critics feel about this work. We're talking about the opinions of fans. Evanier points out that Kirby couldn't kill off any characters that DC might be able to profit from but why do these characters have to die to make a great story? Sure, fans know that Kirby draws great fights but why does this story have to end with hero punching villain like almost every other superhero story?
Looking back, Kirby cleverly incorporates those editorial mandates into one of the most powerful works of his career, easily as powerful as
The Pact from
New Gods #7.
The revival began in 1984
when
DC reprinted
New Gods on heavy baxter paper. Each issue of the reprint series collected two installments of the original series.The final issue containing a brand new story bridging the gap between the originals and
The Hunger Dogs. In 1984 it'd been twelve years since Kirby's last
New Gods story. At 66 years old his technical skills were different than at his perceived peak. Kirby in 1984 was working with a more raw, loose, and occasionally abstracted array of imagery.
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| From The Hunger Dogs (1985) |
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| From Even Gods Must Die (1984) |
Kirby is a cartoonist I associate with a certain visual clarity. When I imagine a comics page drawn by Jack Kirby I see a simple layout that is easy to read but that's not true of Kirby's work in these stories. These pages are very design heavy and it's not always obvious how they should be read, with Kirby occasionally relying on golden age style arrows to guide the reader's eyes. I don't think these are flaws. It makes this work stand out in his prolific career. Those design heavy pages are beautiful, often symmetrical, and shouldn't be too hard for a relatively comics literate reader to grasp.
In this new story, titled
Even Gods Must Die, Kirby brings back old favorites like the Female Furies but they're upset about how things have changed since we last saw them. Instead of being engaged in the kind of battles we/they remember, they're stuck at monitors displaying Darkseid's new high tech weapons. Perhaps Kirby felt a similar distance from these characters given that he hadn't interacted with them in more than a decade.
The rise of these impersonal weapons where there had once been symbolic battles between archetypes also mirrors the way war evolved from the 20th into the 21st century. With characteristic prescience, Kirby criticizes the development of something like drone combat. Kirby saw war first hand as a soldier during World War II, one of the most gruesome collections of horrors strewn across the Earth. The war ended with a brand new horror, the atomic bomb. To optimistic hawks the bomb was a more "humane" form of warfare, as long as you can easily forget that your enemies are human. The architects of war were able to further distance those who commit violence from their victims by making war more similar to playing a video game. The myth that a future will come when wars are fought without troops on the ground isn't too dissimilar from the myth that modern war is less barbaric than those fought in our past. Kirby saw how ugly war's truth was up close. He was definitely suspicious of a war fought from a distance and possibly felt a certain weltschmerz about the honor we attach to old wars.
Even Gods Must Die ends with a confrontation between Orion and Darkseid. One might expect an epic battle but Kirby subverts that and we see Orion gunned down by enemy soldiers before his body falls into a pit of flame.
But the Gods are not dying this time. Orion is back for
The Hunger Dogs, screaming in pain while he recovers from those wounds in the home of Himon. Himon had previously appeared in the
Mister Miracle comics as an older resident of Apokolips's Armagetto. He rebelled against the laws of Darkseid and encouraged others to exercise their free will. In this story he appears to be preparing Orion for something like an ending.
The ending isn't a battle between gods. It's brought on by the uprising of the "Hunger Dogs" themselves, the disenfranchised residents of Armagetto. With his kingdom falling apart Darkseid makes his way through the chaos in an effort to kill Himon and Orion. He shoots the old man but instead of fighting Orion leaves with Himon's daughter. The last time we see Darkseid, he is alone. The bird's eye view makes him look small, and with the mortals he's ruled for so long overthrowing his power structure, he is smaller than he's ever been before.
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| From The Hunger Dogs by Jack Kirby with D. Bruce Berry, Mike Royer, and Greg Theakston |
For me it brings to mind
The Apocalypse of Adam, one of the ancient Gnostic manuscripts unearthed at Nag Hammadi in 1945. A 700 year old Adam (of Adam and Eve fame) reveals to his son Seth the knowledge that he and Eve obtained. They realize that they are greater and more powerful than the god of the bible, who is actually
the demiurge. They once had knowledge of the true god of the universe but they lost it when man and woman were separated by the demiurge. He tells Seth "After those days, the eternal knowledge of the God of
truth withdrew from me and your mother Eve. Since that time, we learned about dead things,
like men. Then we recognized the God who had created us. For we were not strangers to his
powers. And we served him in fear and slavery. And after these things, we became darkened
in our heart(s). Now I slept in the thought of my heart."* Adam goes on to describe an apocalyptic vision where after a great deal of destruction an "Illuminator of Knowledge" appears and asks the kingdoms of the Earth about where their false knowledge came from but only those without a king know the truth.
The Hunger Dogs is an effective ending for a powerful body of work but as I said before, these characters lives continued after Jack Kirby drew his last page. The mythology of the
Fourth World characters became a cornerstone of DC Comics and the universe where their stories take place. Aspects of those titles were absorbed into the relaunched
Superman books in the late 80's and Darkseid became just another villain for Superman and the Justice League.
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| Darkseid in Superman: The Animated Series (1996) |
That's how I became aware of these characters when I was a kid. Orion, Darkseid, and a few other Jack Kirby creations were recurring characters on
Superman: The Animated Series. I was not as big of a fan of that show as the
Batman cartoon from the same creators but the episode that introduced Orion really captured my imagination.They even included an abridged version of
The Pact. Unfortunately we didn't get to see an animated version of bloodthirsty baby Orion.
When I first saw that episode I immediately thought about
Star Wars. I loved
Star Wars but it
was different back then. It had already ended before I was born. Now we get a new
Star Wars movie every year. Darkseid, Darth Vader, and the rest are kept on life support as intellectual property. In the end, the old gods never die.
*
Apocalypse of Adam translation by George W. MacRae
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| Darkseid doing the "Basic Instinct" in DC Universe: Legacies #8 (2010) by Frank Quitely |
