Trivia / New Gods

• Acclaimed Flop: Despite being adored by the people who did read it, many were just confused and two of the three series were quickly cancelled, with the other not lasting much longer. Despite which, the setting has become quite popular in the decades since, with Darkseid in particular being one of the most popular villains in all of DC Comics.
• Applicability: The idea that the Fourth World was an "Allegory for The Vietnam War" was a common theme for a long time among critics (among other timely themes) but all specifics were more-or-less disavowed by Kirby, and there's no evidence he intended any specific Allegory beyond dramatizing his views on good and evil.
• Creator Backlash: Kirby regretted how harsh his usage of Funky Flashman to vent his frustrations with Stan Lee turned out. This doesn't necessarily mean that Jack had gotten over his issues with Stan, however.
• Creator-Driven Successor: To Kirby's earlier Tales of Asgard series. New Gods was originally supposed to be a direct sequel until Kirby jumped ship to DC. In one chapter, a wanderer on New Genesis finds the remains of the final battle from Tales including some broken weapons and armor.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Toward the end of The Forever People, DC editorial forced Kirby to include Deadman as a supporting character.
  • The Hunger Dogs. After being hired to give an end to the story of the New Gods but being forbidden to write the ending he had planned (with Orion and Darkseid dying), Kirby turned in a 24 page story called "On The Road To Armaghetto". The story (Orion goes to Apokolips to stop turncoat New God Esak from creating a new doomsday device for Darkseid) effectively gave no ending whatsoever to the storyline and was rejected. A deal was then struck to give Kirby a 64 page graphic novel to wrap up his story, but on top of the "No killing Orion and Darkseid" edict, DC also ordered Desaad, Kalibak, and Steppenwolf resurrected as they were to be included in the Super Powers toyline that was being released. Further complicating things was the decision by DC to make Kirby rework and incorporate the already finished pages of "On the Road To Armaghetto" into the graphic novel and then rearranged the page order, against Kirby's will.
    • Some of this is disputed by Mark Evanier in his afterword to Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Vol. 4. According to him, it was Kirby that didn't want to bring Darkseid and Orion Back for the Dead.
• Reality Subtext:
  • Mister Miracle and Big Barda's relationship is based on Jack's relationship with his beloved wife Roz.
  • Some have even suggested that the entirety of the New Gods were a metaphor for the Cold War and the Vietnam War.
• Revival by Commercialization: After Kirby's run, DC did try reviving the property to some degree. However, what really pushed the property into the big time was when the Kenner toy company decided to use it for the Super Powers toy line. To them, with Star Wars making grandiose space fantasy mainstream, Darkseid was perfect with him being essentially Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader rolled into one with enough power to challenge Superman and his friends believably any day. Furthermore, Darkseid's minions provided the collection of distinctive characters to make action figures out of while his Parademons are essentially the same as Star Wars' Stormtroopers.
• Technology Marches On: Averted considering Jack Kirby was visionary enough to create fantasy technology that often felt ahead of its time. The most obvious example are the Mother Boxes, handheld artificially intelligent computers that usually look like smartphones without a display screen. Vykin of the Forever People carries a larger boxlike version, but that is more for ease of handling considering the team must lay their hands on it to exchange places with the Infinite Man.
• What Could Have Been: On the one hand, see Writing by the Seat of Your Pants below. On the other hand, a scene near the end of Kirby's run on Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen where Superman meets Highfather was going to be a much larger story where Superman would be tempted to remain in Supertown - because there he's just a normal guy.
  • Reportedly Jack Kirby originally conceived the entire series for the Marvel universe when he still worked at Marvel before his falling out with Stan Lee - more specifically he envisioned the New Gods replacing The Mighty Thor and all his fellow Asgardians, who he intended to perish in Ragnarok or some other similar catastrophe, and there are some very strong similarities (perhaps most notably being Highfather's similarity to Odin). In fact, nothing changed when published at DC — Darkseid resided in the Marvel Universe after killing the Marvel Asgardians, which is why Boom Tubes were required to travel to Earth. This becomes Hilarious in Hindsight considering that Marvel's Thanos was based on Kirby's Darkseid.
  • In at least one version of the ending Kirby planned, he would’ve had Darkseid sacrifice himself to save Orion. He nixed the idea after the Star Wars films came out.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: The way Mark Evanier tells it, Kirby had a plan for his series... it's just that the details were liable to change at a moment's notice.
• Writing for the Trade: This was Jack Kirby's plan for his various New Gods titles in the 1970s, but that was at least a decade ahead of its time when it became a standard publishing practice and the DC editorship would not cooperate.
  • The comics industries relationship with trade paperbacks is actually Older than You Think, as DC had already worked with a couple of publishers to release collections of old Superman comics by the time Kirby started working for DC. What Jack was ahead of the curve on was doing this for new comics as an additional way of telling the story, whereas the books DC were releasing were closer to a characters "Greatest hits" collection. It wouldn't be until Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (1989) almost two decades later showed how viable this was from both a financial and critical perspective that Jack would be Vindicated by History.