Desaad
1066 - Desaad 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. Desaad is a brilliant young man on New Genesis.
1107 - Desaad is regularly visited by Uxas who slowly corrupts him. He leaves New Genesis for Apokolips to become Drax's key scientist, secretly working for Uxas.
1157 - Desaad sabotages Drax's attempt to take control the Omega Effect, helping Uxas become Darkseid.
1161- Desaad designs the Killing-Gloves for Darkseid, a tool to instigate war with New Genesis by leaving Izaya alive.
1167 - Desaad poisons Heggra for Darkseid, launching his coup. He becomes the new regime's head spymaster & torturer. He creates Brimstone as a weapon of mass destruction.
1451 - Desaad's daughter Bernadeth is born. He gives her over to Granny Goodness and the Terror Orphanages, guaranteeing her a place among the Female Furies.
9 years ago - Desaad creates the Shock Boots Granny Goodness uses to torture and kill Auralie, secretly knowing it would spur Scott Free to escape. He competes with Doctor Bedlam for Darkseid's favor, deliberately setting him up to become responsible for recapturing Free.
8 years ago - Desaad keeps Killroy's attempt to kill Scott Free secret, forcing him to do his bidding.
6 years ago - Desaad contacts Bruno Mannheim of Intergang on Earth at the command of Darkseid to seed the planet with his technology to prepare for an invasion.
2 years ago - Desaad attempts to brainwash Supergirl for Granny Goodness. She destroys his labs.
Darkseid might be the big bad of the New Gods, but Desaad is absolutely the engine that makes the entire narrative of the Fourth World function. Part of what I have always loved about Jack Kirby's work is the way he effortlessly builds up casts of characters inside every idea he constructs. He has an intuitive understanding of group dynamics in comics, which is definitely evident in almost all of his most famous works, but a smaller example is definitely at play in the way he built the villains of the Fourth World. Desaad filled a role in their machinations that expanded the reach and effectiveness of Darksied to a practically immeasurable degree, and that is very cool.
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Desaad's Comic HistoryOn the surface level, Desaad's role seemed to be as Darkseid's sycophant, groveling at his heels for his approval, begging for his mercy, and just generally being his main henchman. Even in his earliest appearances, however, there were subtle clues that there was more going on with this twisted horror movie character. Desaad appeared for the first time in New Gods #2, just one of many named henchmen of Darkseid striking at Orion on his behalf. It's in the pages of Forever People where he really started to reveal his sinister nature, devising all sorts of psychological tortures for the heroes while captured and displaying a penchant for siphoning negative emotions through his weird technology. We would eventually learn that Desaad was instrumental in the poising death of Darkseid's original wife Suli at his mother's Heggras command, and then poisoning Heggra for Darkseid himself.
These were the basic principals laid out for the character moving forward, but so many writers have found so many ways to involve this scheming backstabber in the intrigue of Apokolips. He's even appeared in plenty of non-Fourth World comics, capturing other characters and subjecting them to his torture chambers. |
Our Desaad StoryIt's kind of incredible just how much storytelling comes across with the relatively simple reveal of Desaad's role in those two poisoning deaths. First just the fact that he is a poisoner at all, which says so much about his methods and his role in this world full of people punching each other so hard surrounding buildings explode, but also the fact that he was poisoning family members for other family members, all secretly, behind each other's backs. He's not just facilitating other people's murders, he's facilitating other people's matricide, such a dark and twisted world of intrigue that he is deeply immersed within, without any of it actually being HIS.
This is actually taken to a really compelling extreme in a single issue of Eclipso, where Darkseid reveals that one of his earliest corruptions was of Desaad as a young, handsome lad of New Genesis that he twisted to one day turn him into his most trusted follower. The implications of this story are pretty wild; that Desaad isn't originally a denizen of Apokolips, but a corrupted New Genesian, means that he wouldn't have ANY connections on Apokolips at all (we've changed Bernadeth, who is traditionally his sister, to his daughter). We've also worked to make him a near-constant presence in practically all of the dealings of Apokolips, subtly manipulating virtually everything that happens, up to and including Scott Free's actual escape. The idea that he might have some underhanded plan at play even in this chaos feels entirely appropriate for this monster. |
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