Exploring Jack Kirby’s New Gods: A 1970 Milestone

In 1970, Jack Kirby left the House of Marvel, which he was instrumental in building, to work for DC Comics. It was there he launched his Fourth World series, first in the pages of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, and then kicking it off with The New Gods. He would also create the Forever People and Mister Miracle to round out this new universe. That all happened before I was born and was exposed to the amazing worlds of comic books.

As a lifelong fan of DC Comics, my first exposure to the New Gods probably came in 1984 via the Kenner Super-Powers toy line and the Hanna-Barbera cartoons. These toys were amazing and provided my brother and me with a physical link between our imaginations and the comics and cartoons that we loved so much. It was through the Super-Powers franchise that we met Darkseid, Kalibak, the Parademons, and the rest of the villainous characters from Apokolips. Soon after that came the Legends crossover event, in which Darkseid and G. Gordon Godfrey turned the world against the greatest heroes in the DCU.

It wasn’t until I was a young man and DC released black-and-white trade paperbacks of the Fourth World trilogy of comics that I actually read Kirby’s New Gods series. As a kid, I was aware of Kirby and his art, and at the time, I did not like or appreciate it. That all changed when I started reading these new collections. The pages were filled with square-jawed heroes and amazing villains. There was “Kirby-krackle” everywhere, and the writing was epic. It was “bigger” than anything I remember reading previously. It was all so grandiose, and all the characters I had come to know from other series were here. This is where they came from: Orion, Lightray, the Highfather, and Darkseid himself.

I pored through those black-and-white collections, but have yet to reread them all in color. I own the Omnibus and plan to pull it off the shelf this month for #KirbyComicsMonth, but that is not easy bedtime reading. Instead, that is why I started with the recent facsimile edition of New Gods #1. I’ll most likely never own an original copy of this comic, but just holding and reading the reproduction is good enough for me. Jack Kirby in all his 1970s DC glory is here, and that is a wonderful thing.

For those of you acquainted with the wonderful worlds of the New Gods, I’m curious to know your origin story. Were you there in the seventies, picking up those original Kirby issues from the newsstand? Or, like me, did your introduction come through the animated Super-Powers adventures, did you have the Kenner toys, or maybe another path entirely?