Forager
23 years ago - Forager is born among the Bugs of New Genesis.
18 years ago - 5-year-old Forager is one of the few to perceive the change in New Genesis as Glorious Godfrey begins his campaign to stir conflict among the Bugs .
6 years ago - 17-year-old Forager discovers Glorious Godfrey building his regime among the controlled Bugs. He barely escapes, managing to steal a mother box and boom tube to the most distant destination he can find, Earth. He finds Scott Free and Big Barda, and brings him to New Genesis with the Justice League. They fight Godfrey minions, freeing the Bugs, but Forager is killed. Highfather and the New Gods descend from Supertown, and save him, elevating him to godhood.
4 years ago - Forager and the New Gods, alerted to the Parademon wave invasion by Jimmy Olsen, travel to Earth to extend their pact to include Earth.
While a huge part of the Fourth World is its epic setting and mythic scale, Jack Kirby was very much a classic Marvel creator in that he didn't aggressively pre-plan his plots, but let them come together as he drew them. His design sensibility is among the greatest in the history of the genre, of course, but that does mean that sometimes, some of his New Gods characters can be accused of being a little more form than substance, being more about their look than about telling a distinct-to-that-character story.
That is absolutely NOT the case with Forager. As standout as his design is, Forager clearly hit the ground running with a truly epic tale all his own, so much so that I wonder if Forager and the Bugs might have been the next new Fourth World series, had the imprint been successful. Forager is not a character with a lot of appearances, but there is so much fun potential within the stories that do exist, we get to carve a cool little narrative for him and give him a role to play in the lives of the rest of the New Gods.
That is absolutely NOT the case with Forager. As standout as his design is, Forager clearly hit the ground running with a truly epic tale all his own, so much so that I wonder if Forager and the Bugs might have been the next new Fourth World series, had the imprint been successful. Forager is not a character with a lot of appearances, but there is so much fun potential within the stories that do exist, we get to carve a cool little narrative for him and give him a role to play in the lives of the rest of the New Gods.
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Forager's Comic HistoryForager's first appearance marked a sudden unexpected change of tone in the original New Gods series. His story was featured in issue #9, a sudden shift for the series that had, up until that point, featured the adventures of Orion. Forager was a Bug, a race a humanoids from the surface of New Genesis that had evolved from insects and who lived underground in colonies, coming to the surface to steal food. We'd previously met another Bug, Mantis, who had been empowered by Darkseid to fight the Forever People over in their series. Forager, however, was different than the other Bugs; he had an inquisitive mind and questioned the ways of the colony.
When Mantis came to drag the colony into the war between the gods, Forager was the lone survivor, fleeing to Earth to find Orion. The series was canceled shortly afterward, but I think it's clear that Forager was meant to become a fun addition to Orion's cohort on Earth, especially as he learned that he was in fact a New God who had been raised among the Bugs (a truth he vehemently rejected). |
Our Forager StoryForager has made a number of fun appearances across many Fourth World stories, but none of them are quite as great as the 1988 4-issue miniseries Cosmic Odyssey, by the auteur of all things Cosmic at Marvel, Jim Starlin, and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. It's a fantastic comic pretty much across the board, and one of its great moments is giving Forager a wonderful heroic sacrifice, saving both Batman and the universe.
We're basically emulating the rough beats of this story in our version of Forager's timeline, along with details from his original New Gods story. The crux of it is specifically that this is the story where human superheroes from Earth, the Justice League, are actually brought back to New Genesis (crossing over into the New Gods higher dimension, letting them perceive their worlds the same way the New Gods do) and assist Forager in freeing his colony from a threat from Apokolips. Because in our story, at this point Scott Free and Barda have been unable to reconnect with New Genesis, this is their opportunity to finally return. We also wanted to include Forager's heroic sacrifice, but use it as the reason the Gods of New Genesis finally descend from their floating city of Supertown and join the battle. We even got to have Highfather save Forager and elevate him to Godhood, creating a bridge between Supertown and the Bugs, and letting Forager be a part of all the New Gods stories moving forward. |
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