The troops have rallied, and disquisitions on Darkseid – of the Jack Kirby flavour rather than the Keith Giffen – are rolling out of the blog factory. I’m uneasy, not least because I’m really exposing my comic geek side here, but also because my exposure to Darkseid was strictly post-Kirby. However it’s mainly because Darkseid seems to resist easy descriptions – which is probably just the way that Jack Kirby intended. Which is to say, Darkseid Isn’t.
Darkseid isn’t a superhero. Yeah, I know, pretty obvious – he’s a supervillain, right? Always trying to take over the world, the universe, whatever. That’s not what I mean, though – I’m talking about his aesthetic, not his morals. Look at the colourful clowns he goes up against on a regular basis, and then look at his duds. He’s as close to monochrome as the four-color medium can stand. This makes him almost unique in the big leagues, as far as I can tell – almost as if he doesn’t belong in a superhero comic at all.
Darkseid isn’t an action hero. I can’t help it if this seems obvious as well, but bear with me – my emphasis is on the action part, not the hero part. Darkseid is positively inert. His favoured pose is legs akimbo, hands clasped behind him, stomach in and shoulders back. (He’s something of an endomorph – well built but not exactly buff – so this helps to make his gut less visible.) He has an ideological opposition to taking action himself, almost seems resentful when forced into “action” – and even then he lets his Omega Effect do the walking, rather than doing any walking himself.
Darkseid isn’t a villain. The problem with most DC villains is that they know that they’re villains. They don’t have many illusions about what they’re doing – they’re wrong ‘uns. The apotheosis of this is the Flash’s Rogues Gallery, where not only are the bad guys aware that they’re bad guys, they actually club together for… I don’t know why, union representation? Darkseid doesn’t fall into this category. He clearly doesn’t see himself as an evil-doer – in fact it’s questionable whether he sees the concept of evil at all, although given his track record he must have Mitchell and Webb moments of self-doubt.
Darkseid isn’t a hero. Too obvious. Although Darkseid doesn’t think of himself as a villain, he isn’t the other extreme of supervillainy – the guy who thinks what he’s doing is right, either for himself (Lex Luthor?) or for the world (Superboy-Prime?). Darkseid doesn’t think of himself at all in that sense, which might be the source of his pathology: he seeks to turn the whole world into a reflection of himself so he can get a good view of himself for the first time.
Darkseid isn’t an anti-hero. He isn’t a hero tragically hobbled by his own flaws, or a guy who does the right thing for the wrong reasons, or the wrong thing for the right reasons. He achieves what he achieves because he’s a force of nature rather than because he has force of personality. He has no personality to speak of; that’s why he surrounds himself with such outlandish creatures of pure imaginative force such as Granny Goodness, Vermin von Vundabar and Kalibak, whose personalities are so strong that even their names are infected by their madness.1
Darkseid is the Anti Hero. Everything that you want from a comics character, Darkseid isn’t it. That’s why Keith Giffen’s parody works so effectively – Darkseid serving MacDonalds is inherently funny not because it’s MacDonald’s but because Darkseid doesn’t *do* anything. Darkseid just is. The final appearance of Darkseid in Giffen’s Ambush Bug miniseries sums up Darkseid’s final fate – as a cardboard cut-out whose (in)action lends nothing to the plot but whose mere appearance lends it a sense of gravitas.
Oh, and a note to Plok: the header is the ferry between Kamenari and Lepetane, of course.
- This gives us a clue why Darkseid appeals to Grant Morrison – because Darkseid represents a complete lack of imagination, the one thing that Morrison can’t bear. [↩]