Apokolips DC: Darkseid in an Era of Political Crassness

Jack Kirby’s iconic villain struggles for relevance in a time bereft of scheming and subtlety.

by Will Riley

Darkseid, despotic ruler of the planet Apokalips and one-time “big bad” of the DC Universe, has a problem. And not just any problem, but one that spells disaster for most villains: he’s become corny.

He has become the vanilla ice cream of villainy, a mere villain of writerly convenience best suited for crossovers, easily portrayed with general evil and deviousness but lacking any specific definition or nuance. Worse still, he’s been relegated to the role of a villain quite easily dispatched by the heroes, a quick and easy jobber for whatever story a writer wants. No longer does he terrify the universe: now he might be defeated by an inexperienced New 52 Justice League one moment, then outright obliterated and rather humiliatingly resurrected as a baby in the next, the humiliation compounded by it happening in an event named Darkseid War.

What happened?

It would be easy enough to blame the decline of the character on an equal decline in the quality of writing. Sure enough, even modern writers may well tell you “they don’t make ‘em like they used to.” As far as sheer bombast is concerned, few people now working in comics could stand up to a comparison with someone as historically influential as Jack Kirby, who created the character in 1970 as part of his “Fourth World” concept. But a significant part of the problem lies not in the individual writing, but rather in how Darkseid was originally designed. With Darkseid, Kirby’s intent was not just to create a memorable character but to comment on the world outside the text. And for better or for worse, Kirby’s world is no longer the world in which we find ourselves— and it’s a world which is becoming harder and harder to encompass in the Fourth World’s allegorical language.

As the capitalist state has progressed, we’ve slipped further and further from the era of Nixon and Vietnam that Kirby was working within. And whereas previous governments were concerned with being covert with their offenses against the underclass, we now inhabit a strangely “mask-off” phase of politics characterized by the Trump administration’s willingness to be openly brutal on matters of both policy and messaging.

And so a character that was designed to be all about this covertness—about the mask worn by our rulers—struggles to remain poignant and relevant as that mask slips. We’re left with a villain who is in some sense “written” better than the ones we now have in the real world.

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If you were to condense what makes Kirby’s Darkseid special as a villain into a single kernel, it would be that he represents a unique alignment of domination through soft power and through hard power, in the global politics sense. By way of the Fourth World’s allegorical structure, in fact, many instances of direct violence, depicted with all of Kirby’s trademark crackle, actually stand in for representations of soft power coercion. Before he was DC’s Satan, Darkseid was its Nixon and its Kissinger, an avatar of the insidious power systems of the era Kirby wrote in as depicted through the superheroic trappings of his Fourth World storyline. That allegory is given an epic scope by the mythic qualities of the New Gods’ universe, and made more immediately threatening by Darkseid’s Hitlerian aesthetic. But despite that aesthetic evocation, Darkseid himself is not necessarily a direct embodiment of the outwardly violent and dictatorial ruling style which marked the first half of the 20^th Century. Instead, Kirby makes Darkseid the direct inheritor of its legacy, a villain who attempts to accomplish those same goals in a fundamentally different  way.

Before he was DC’s Satan, Darkseid was its Nixon and its Kissinger. 

“The Pact” is chronologically Kirby’s earliest New Gods story, and it details the first war between Apokalips and New Genesis—almost assuredly drawing from World War 2. Kirby establishes Darkseid’s key attributes to the reader by juxtaposing him with older modes of authoritarian rule, as embodied by Steppenwolf, his uncle and commanding superior. Steppenwolf—not unlike an early 20th Century dictator—is an open brute, relishing in the pain and fear he elicits from his victims. Darkseid, while he is also a killer, is totally neutral on the act of killing itself, taking life swiftly and dispassionately. This distinction doesn’t go unnoticed by his uncle, who at one point declares, “I don’t like you! You’re clever and cunning—and a plotter!!” 

Yet it is Darkseid’s ability to plot and to manipulate systems of power to his own ends that allows him to eventually come to rule over all Apokalips. The rulers who had lived by the sword begin to die by the sword, Steppenwolf included. Meanwhile, instead of obliterating his opponents, “cool and wise” Darkseid operates more like a bureaucrat, winning through leverage and negotiation far away from the front lines. He convinces Metron, a neutral observer, to provide Apokalips with teleportation technology in exchange for a new element—all despite the open hatred Metron has for him. He then brokers an end to the war entirely through the titular pact of the story, trading his son Orion for Scott Free, the future Mister Miracle.

Darkseid doesn’t get what he wants by destroying the people in his way: instead, he shrewdly games the system to promise “peace” with them—but it’s always “peace” on his terms. While he may not be as openly violent and brutish as his forebears, Darkseid is just as dangerous if not moreso. In the same way that WWII gave way to the Cold War’s many supposedly “smaller” conflicts, the subsequent fights between the New Gods and Apokalips—which make up the bulk of the series—are secretive proxy wars, with the denizens of Earth caught in the crossfire. 

Compare this to today, an era in which there is no great power for the US to achieve détente with. Less developed nations are still constant victims of U.S. aggression through drone strikes, yes, but there is no illusion of peace—since 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a sense of constantly being in open war. The U.S. remains trapped in a cycle of sabre-rattling even against people where there is no open conflict to begin with. Even the modern day Democratic party adopted a wartime posture while out of power ,speculating endlessly about Russian influence in U.S. affairs and debating how best to “send a message” to would-be meddlers. Even if they benefit from the systems put in place by the “Darkseids” of previous years, it is the Steppenwolfs who rule this era of foreign policy.

Darkseid doesn’t get what he wants by destroying the people in his way: he games the system to promise “peace” with them. 

Right after making his pact, Darkseid vows that he will not only eventually seize power, but also “re-define” it. This re-definition does not rely directly on open and straightforward violence. Instead, through various means, Darkseid’s plans throughout Kirby’s run depict an attempt to make subjects accept and consent to being ruled, despite it being clearly against their own interests. He wages what is effectively an ideological war, where the seizure of the masses’ minds and perception precedes the seizure of anything else. 

In Forever People #4, Kirby manifests ideological warfare into his comics’ material world via “Happyland,” a torture camp disguised as a popular amusement park, constructed by one of Darkseid’s flunkies. The entire park is decked with special windows and microphones connected to a “Master Scrambler”, changing what is seen through them to its moral opposite: prisoners crying for help look to regular park-goers like they are laughing and enjoying themselves. The protagonists’ forms of captivity are transmogrified one by one  into spectacle, banal “source[s] of curiosity and amusement,” their psychological pain intensified by the fact that ordinary passers-by either ignore them or unwittingly participate in their torture. New Gods member Mark Moonrider looks like a hokey skeleton to the patrons enjoying a log flume ride, and his calls for help are ignored. Big Bear is made to look like a target in a shooting gallery and is riddled with blasts from electric pulse rifles. Inversely, Beautiful Dreamer is tortured by visions of monsters, unaware that all she is seeing are the distorted images of ordinary people. 

The effects of these images and sounds are so powerful on their viewers that when Darkseid himself walks undisguised among the humans, the adult park-goers simply assume he’s an employee in a suit. Darkseid is not a villain known to engage in clichéd evil laughter when a plan succeeds, but the fact that he can clarify to a park-goer that he is “the real thing” and receive only a confused look in return elicits peals of laughter from him. Kirby’s Darkseid doesn’t get his greatest sense of success when his deeds evoke fear, but rather when they are totally absorbed and accepted. He feels he’s won when his role can’t be perceived or articulated. “When you cry out in your dreams,” he boasts, “it is Darkseid that you see!”

Kirby presents Happyland as a single location, but he has constructed a metaphor for a real-life Master Scrambler in every house: the television. By the time Kirby was writing the Happyland storyline, it was eminently clear that most reports of the Vietnam War were distortions and lies. Much like Darkseid’s super-science devices, the power of television to manufacture consent had convinced its viewers that normal people were monsters, that victims were having a great time, and that living, breathing humans were little more than targets. 

An allegory like this, however, presents a real challenge in the present day. For one, Happyland distortional effect more closely resembles the business model of televised news in Kirby’s era, a time in which  networks still attempted to attract as wide an audience as possible by presenting themselves as “objective” and non-partisan, even while still holding a deep and unquestioned ideological thrust.

Television had convinced its viewers that normal people were monsters and living, breathing humans were little more than targets. 

That’s a far cry from the highly targeted approach of today’s 24-hour news, where the ideological thrust is the selling point—viewers aren’t fooled into a certain way of thinking by supposedly objective news, but rather select their own preferred form of ideological “objectivity.” More distressingly, not even undistorted images and events can break through our individual ideological filters. In Kirby’s day, images of migrant children in cages on U.S. soil would have needed to be recontextualized, partially excused or even concealed in the media to maintain the perceived legitimacy of U.S. institutions. Today, a significant portion ofAmericans simply  say that doing this is actually necessary and good. No recontextualization needed.

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The ultimate encapsulation of Darkseid’s true nature is represented by his ultimate goal: harnessing Anti-Life, the ethereal essence of control over others and Kirby’s key symbol for a hopeless total internalization of ideology. While Anti-Life can be instilled through various diluted means, if Darkseid ever gained access to its purest form he would be able to subsume anyone’s individual will with a word, rendering any weapons he has now obsolete. Just as Darkseid’s pact presents the war that states wage in nominal peacetime, the ideological false consciousness of Anti-Life represents the totalitarianism that constructs itself in nominal democracies. 

This is seen most prominently in Darkseid’s agent Glorious Godfrey (modeled after the evangelist Billy Graham,) who indoctrinates people with Anti-Life through pseudo-religious sermonizing and “inventive selling.” Even though Godfrey’s converts are letting themselves be subjugated to the mental confines of Anti-Life, he has been able to convince them that they have achieved a twisted sort of freedom as the holders of a “Cosmic Hunting License”: “Judge others! Enslave others! Kill others! Anti-life will give you the right!” In the idealist space that Kirby has constructed, the justification of violence via ideology is treated as equal and simultaneous with violence itself: Godfrey’s army of holy warriors are even named the “Justifiers.” 

Godfrey is a character more easily modifiable to fit with the current-day political right; modern depictions simply swap his occupation from evangelist to a Fox News-ish tv commentator, reflecting the slightly more secular trappings of the new right’s chief ideologues. But can anything done by the commentators or evangelists of today really be said to “justify” anything to anyone other than the already converted?

The character of Godfrey suffers from the same problems in the Trump era that political satire does: the work of revealing something as cruel, stupid, or evil is far less helpful once that stops being hidden in the first place. Godfrey, portrayed as evangelist, evokes religious beliefs and morals being used to mask a sadistic streak. The “justification” comes from the idea of some greater power or aim that necessitates the cruelty, an illusion which Kirby tries to dispel by revealing it as the “hunting license” it really is.

What use is justification of cruelty when the arc words of the last few years are “the cruelty is the point?” 

 Yet, what “greater” belief or power could possibly be served by the immediate and enthusiastic defense of police violence and extralegal killings by right-wing counter-protestors? What use is justification of cruelty when the arc words of the last few years are “the cruelty is the point?” While both old and new right-wing ideological constructions have relied on in-groups and out-groups, any sense of desire to convert or even be seen as legitimate by the out-group seems to have evaporated—and as the amount of people needed to consent to and perpetuate state violence shrinks, so too does the size of the in-group.

In Kirby’s imagining, Anti-Life’s purest form is supposedly an equation, divorced not only from direct violence but even the artistry of Godfrey’s preaching. For domination to be lasting, it must be perceived by its subject as not just ordinary, but wholly logical, as an equation is. While this allegory still holds water in some ways (just look at the malign influence that algorithms have had in so much of our lives, and how jealously those equations are guarded) governments now see little importance in how one perceives their domination at all, so long as submission is swift. 

Darkseid sought Anti-Life because purveying death was not sufficient for his aims of re-defining power. This generation of leaders has ultimately decided that it is; wielding power through raw force seems to do the trick. Darkseid was once what we saw when we cried out in our dreams—the result of our knowing that something was wrong with the world, but not being able to articulate what, because its causes hid themselves so effectively during our waking life. Now the nightmare fuel is out in the open and staring right at us, but none of us know what to do—not even the people whose job is to put it into comic books.

Not too long ago, the “Snyder cut” of the Justice League film has revealed the DCEU’s rendition of Darkseid: he’s a big guy with a big axe. That seems to be about it.

As much as that irritates me personally, if Zack Snyder is attempting to capture what a villain looks like in the current era, he has it right: the malefactors of the modern day aren’t wielding scalpels anymore: it turns out an axe will work just as well.

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