Comic books have been cultural tastemakers for a long time, long before the current crop of live-action superhero flicks began to dominate the box office, and the influence of superhero comics can be found throughout pop culture all around the world. That’s why it’s not too much of a surprise that the upcoming season of Fargo starring Chris Rock takes more than a few pages from Jack Kirby’s New Gods. While that may seem surprising at first, it actually makes a lot of sense when you look at the kind of story the new season seems to be telling and the genius mind behind the anthology crime drama.

The Pact

The original Fargo was a 1996 crime-thriller written and direct by Joel and Ethan Coen, in which a a car salesman played by William H. Macy hires two men to kidnap his wife in order to ransom her to his father-in-law, and a pregnant small-town cop played by Frances McDormand who is the only person that suspects him.

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The first season of the Fargo television show debuted in 2014 and was influenced by the film more than it was a direct sequel. Each season of the Fargo television show has been its own self-contained story with loose connections between the larger world of the show, and has starred a number of well-known A-List actors like Billy Bob Thornton, Kirsten Dunst and Ewan McGregor. The upcoming season of Fargo is set to star Chris Rock as a gang leader, and according to its description, it seem somewhat influenced by a classic Jack Kirby story.

“Described as a story of “immigration and assimilation and the things we do for money,” season 4 of “Fargo” is set in 1950 in Kansas City, Missouri, where two criminal syndicates — one Italian, one African-American — have struck an uneasy peace. To cement their peace, the heads of both families have traded their eldest sons. Rock will play the head of one of the syndicates, who has surrendered his son to his enemy, and who must raise his son’s enemy as his own. But then the head of the Kansas City mafia goes into the hospital for routine surgery and dies — and everything changes.”

If you’re a fan of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World stories, you’ll notice that this sounds a lot like The Pact, the deal made between Darkseid of Apokolips and Highfather of New Genesis to bring peace between their worlds.

The story of “The Pact” was told in 1972’s New Gods #7 by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer and Ben Oda, and showed just how brutal the war was between the two worlds of gods, as each side lost family members close to them that led to revenge plots which led to even more drastic casualties. Ultimately, Highfather discovered The Source which led to him suggesting The Pact, a deal to bring the war to an end.

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It was decided that the two leaders of their worlds would exchange sons and raise them as their own on their own worlds, with Orion of Apokolips sent to New Genesis, and Highfather’s unnamed son sent to be raised by Darkseid. Orion grew up to be one of New Genesis’ greatest heroes, despite his internal struggle with his potential for evil and Highfather’s son became Scott Free aka Mister Miracle, the heroic escape artist who broke free from Apokolips to find a new life on Earth and love in the form of Big Barda.

The Pact is a story about how good always wins against evil, and if you know anything about Noah Hawley, the creator of the Fargo television show, you’ll see why that’s such an appealing storyline.

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21st Century Pact

Aside from his work on Fargo, Noah Hawley is probably best known for being the mind behind FX’s Legion, the psychotropic mind-bending drama starring David Haller, the son of Charles Xavier. Legion is unlike any comic book adaptation in film or television, closer to an art-film than blockbuster action movie and has set the bar for adaptations which move far beyond their source material while maintaining true to its spirit.

Hawley has also been attached to a Doctor Doom film for Fox, but with the sale of 20th Century Fox to Disney, it’s likely that adaptation will be one of the many in development that gets quietly shut down. Regardless, along with his auteur reputation, Noah Hawley has some serious comic book chops, and it wouldn’t be too much of stretch for him to be a fan of Kirby’s cosmic opera.

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2018 seems to be the year of The Pact, as comic creators Tom King and Mitch Gerads have updated the concept in some heartbreaking ways. In the pages of the current Mister Miracle series, Scott Free is now leading the forces of New Genesis after the deaths of Highfather and Orion, and has become a father with Big Barda during this war. In recent issues, Darkseid has suggested a way to end the war between New Genesis and Apokolips, and that’s for Scott to hand over his son Jacob in exchange for a truce.

Scott has found himself caught between saving the lives of potentially millions of New Genesisians, and sending his son to literal hell. Scott grew up in Apokolips and made it out okay, but Barda is less sure of their new child's survival odds, and therefore doesn’t want to put her son through the same upbringing his father had.

Fargo’s adaptation of The Pact seems to come from a much more grey area than Jack Kirby’s original telling, which was all about the forces of good and evil. Fargo, both the film and the television series, has always been about people on the edge between both and how easily it is to get nudged to one side or the other. With both sides of the deal in Fargo season four being criminal gangs to start with, it’ll be interesting to see how the children are raised and how their upbringings in different cultures affect them and how much of an adaptation of The Pact it ends up being.