Darkseid
Jack Kirby's original concept art for Darkseid
1066 - Uxas and the New Gods come into being on a higher plane of existence on the twin planets of Apokolips and New Genesis after Ragnarök, the fall of Asgard. Uxas is the son of Yuga Khan, the god of evil and ruler of Apokolips, and Heggra, the goddess of malice. His brother is Drax.
1107 - Uxas regularly visits Desaad on New Genesis, corrupting him until he leaves for Apokolips to become Drax's key scientist, secretly working for Uxas.
1157 - Uxas's ally Desaad sabotages Drax's attempt to take control of the Omega Effect after his father Yuga Khan is absorbed into the source wall. Uxas kills him to claim the effect for himself, becoming Darkseid..
1161- Darkseid accompanies Steppenwolf on a hunt to New Genesis, where he manipulates his uncle to kill Avia, the wife of Izaya the Inheritor. He uses an invention of Desaad's, the Killing-Gloves, to incapacitate Izaya so he appears dead, but leave him alive, instigating the war between planets, which lasts until Izaya becomes Highfather and leads his people to peace.
1164 - Darkseid selects Suli for his laboratories. He falls in love with her, and she bears his son Kalibak. His mother Heggra has Suli poisoned by Desaad, and instead arranges his marriage with Tigra.
1166 - Darkseid and Killroy are stranded on an alien planet, stalked by Doomsday. Darkseid defeats their attacker and launches it into space, earning Killroy's loyalty.
1167 - Darkseid stages a coup. Desaad poisons Heggra, and Darkseid becomes the new ruler of Apokolips, escalating the long antagonism with New Genesis into endless absolute war, giving control of the armies of Apokolips to Killroy, and making Desaad the head spymaster & torturer. He strips his wife Tigra of her rank and imprisons her. He unleashes Brimstone on the battlefield against New Genesis.
1222 - Darkseid is amused by the Hound Goodness who is brought before him for discipline after killing her commander, defending her choice saying that her dog Mercy would always be loyal to him, and he tests her by commanding the dog to attack her. Impressed, he places Goodness in command of the Shock Troops and Terror Orphanages.
1752 - Darkseid accepts a pact of non-aggression with Highfather of New Genesis, ending 600 years of shed godblood. He makes the exchange of their sons, a cornerstone of the pact, both to torture Highfather and to poison the pact. He trades his son Orion, leaving Tigra seething with unending rage, and gives control of Highfather's son to Granny Goodness to raise in the Terror Orphanages, tasking her to give him twice the torturous training of her other charges. She gives him the mocking name Scott Free.
1806 - Darkseid's follower Glorious Godfrey displays his ability to manipulate people with Anti-Life. Seeing the power as the path to control all of creation, he sends Godfrey into the material world to test it.
23 years ago - Darkseid learns the results of Glorious Godfrey's experiments, that he believes an Anti-Life Equation is on Earth, because of their capacity to perceive and ultimately reject the effects of Anti-Life.
9 years ago - Darkseid is certain that Scott Free will not find the will to survive as he and Metron watch him bombarded with Mass-Gravity. Although he achieves his freedom through a boom tube to Earth, Darkseid has no capacity to accept that Scott has, in fact, escaped his domain. He tasks Doctor Bedlam with tracking and capturing him.
7 years ago - Darkseid's son Kalibak travels to Earth to defeat Scott Free on his own to earn the approval of his father, but returns to Apokolips in shame. He strips Doctor Bedlam of his task on Earth, and instead assigns it to Granny Goodness, who sends her Female Furies.
6 years ago - Darkseid commands Desaad to make contacts on Earth, using Bruno Manheim and Intergang to seed the planet with his technology to prepare for an invasion.
4 years ago - Darkseid leads the Parademon wave invasion of Earth, where he kills Dan Turpin. They are held off by Superman and the Justice League until the arrival of Highfather and the Gods of New Genesis, who name Earth their protectorate, making the invasion a violation of the non-aggression pact. Doctor Bedlam is brought back to Apokolips to suffer his wrath. He is forced to concede his ownership of Scott Free and Big Barda when they return to Apokolips and win their freedom in combat against Brimstone.
We've received more comments asking about Darkseid than practically any other character. We chose very early on to wait until we'd passed certain benchmarks before we dove into the Fourth World, and for most of those characters, that was fine, but Darkseid is WAY more than just part of Jack Kirby's Fourth World. In the intervening decades, he's grown in influence over the entire DC universe to an almost impossible degree, until he is generally considered the MAIN bad guy of the entire brand. (To say nothing of the fact that Jim Starlin's 'homage' to Darkseid, Thanos, has gone on to be THE main bad guy in the most influential comic movie franchise of all time, which you COULD interpret to mean that Darkseid is kind of the big bad of BOTH of the big comic companies... but we won't try to imply that here.)
With all of this character's scope and influence, I'm sure he has a massive cadre of fans all over the world... so we sincerely hope no one will be disappointed here. We don't want our version of the DC timeline to feel like one story, with one bad guy at the center of everything, nor do we want the New Gods to be constantly interacting with the heroes of Earth. We want it to be messier, rarer, and more in keeping with the esoteric storytelling for which Darkseid was originally conceived. We hope you like it!
With all of this character's scope and influence, I'm sure he has a massive cadre of fans all over the world... so we sincerely hope no one will be disappointed here. We don't want our version of the DC timeline to feel like one story, with one bad guy at the center of everything, nor do we want the New Gods to be constantly interacting with the heroes of Earth. We want it to be messier, rarer, and more in keeping with the esoteric storytelling for which Darkseid was originally conceived. We hope you like it!
Darkseid's Comic HistoryJack Kirby's first work with DC actually wasn't in his own books, but was instead in the pages of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen in 1970. It's only at the end of his second issue that it is revealed who the first arc's main villain, Morgan Edge, was taking his orders from; a mysterious figure called Darkseid whose (pink) face appears on a monitor in his office.
Darkseid would start to appear much more often in Kirby's own series, where he quickly attained his traditional grey coloring, and would loom in the background of every adventure as an insurmountable threat, even though he was far more present in some of these stories than modern readers might expect, continuing to direct human agents on Earth in the pages of Miracle Man, or appearing in the middle of a normal living room waiting for Orion and his companions to arrive. It's really over in the Forever People where Darkseid starts to look like the overwhelmingly powerful entity that he would become, effortlessly unsummoning the Infinity Man or unleashing his Omega Effect. |
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We really start to see the lore of Darkseid developed in the flashback issues of New Gods and Mister Miracle, seeing his underhanded manipulation of the events leading to the war between Apokolips and New Genesis, and the creation of the non-aggression pact that was sealed with the abominable act of demanding Highfather give up his son. Perhaps even more, the idea of a whole planet giving up their whole sense of self in favor of their devotion to Darkseid truly built the concept of this character into the stuff of nightmare.
Still, one concept about Darkseid held true through all of Jack's depictions of the character. His desire for ultimate control was always, ultimately, fruitless. He was always destined to fail because the things he wanted didn't truly exist. Moreover, Darkseid himself was subject to the reality that pure evil is simply not sustainable. Jack said about his biggest villain; Darkseid is the epitome of all evil. He wanted to own everybody's mind and completely run the universe, but he couldn't control his own son who became his worst enemy, and there was nothing he could do about it. He was continually frustrated. Darkseid continued to have a presence in DC at large after Jack's New Gods series, but it was really the Super Powers toy line and Challenge of the Super Friends cartoon that reimagined him as a villain for ALL of DC and for the Justice League in general, a role that would continue to evolve for decades, and is still ongoing today. |
Our Darkseid StoryI do want to acknowledge that there is a LOT of content for Darkseid that expands him beyond the role established in the original Jack Kirby Fourth World. Obviously in the other New Gods series from John Byrne, Rachell Pollack, Mark Evanier, Walt Simonson and Jim Starlin, but also as a major Justice League villain in all the new 52 work of Geoff Johns. Modern Darkseid is understood to be a single entity threatening the entire multiverse, and Grant Morrison used the New Gods, and Darkseid in particular, to explore concepts of higher dimensions, making him fully exist outside of our ability to truly perceive or understand.
All of this content is PACKED into Darkseid... and we're kind of just choosing to set it aside. The lore of the original New Gods tales is SO good, told using these classic punch-up comics through layers of abstract metaphor, and that's really the version we want to focus on. Lots of writers have expanded the lore in ways that adhere closer to the original themes, making Darkseid less of an omnipresent, universe-spanning CONCEPT and more of a scheming, Machiavellian god with immense power who is nonetheless ultimately defeated by the inevitable fallibility of his own hubris. His timeline is still MASSIVE, loaded with so many stories built up from every corner of the Fourth World, but we just think he feels better as a CHARACTER than a plot device. |
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Darkseid's FutureTruly, one of the best things about the New Gods is that it feels like a real mythology, something that grew and expanded over centuries of oral tradition. Kirby's interest in the lore of Gods is evident across his career, and the New Gods is obviously his most personal work, built out of what is clearly a lifetime interest. Like any good mythology, the New Gods have an inherent end built into their story... It is understood that Darkseid, so often called the lord of holocaust, will attempt a true, apocalyptic final solution that will destroy New Genesis and possibly also Apokolips. It will ultimately come down to a final battle between Darkseid and his son Orion... which will either destroy both of them, or will leave Orion the new ruler of Apokolips.
This has actually happened a number of times in canon with varying results, but part of the nature of the lore of gods is that often these cataclysmic endings are repeated over and over. In our project, however, we've established that Ragnarök itself, the fall of Asgard, is an event that actually happened, once, and led to the creation of the New Gods, so in our timeline the pending battle between father and son is something that will absolutely happen, once, upending the powers of the Fourth World (perhaps even leading to a yet-unformed Fifth World), and leading to a whole new generation of Gods. Some writer is going to have a lot of fun someday. |
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