SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Mister Miracle #6 by Tom King, Mitch Gerads and Clayton Cowles, on sale now.


Darkseid Is. It’s a saying that we’ve heard a lot throughout the first half of Mister Miracle, but now we can say that Darkseid is here. Mister Miracle #6 ended with Scott Free finding the dead body of his “brother” Orion and Darkseid say in the throne of New Genesis, responsible for the murder of his own son. It’s a one panel appearance, but in that one panel the creative team have proven that they understand Darkseid in a way that most comic creators often don’t. Their Darkseid is cold, unflinching and unmoved. He’s a force of nature you can’t stop, and most of the time in superhero comics that translates to “good at punching” but that misses the point of the character all together. Darkseid is so much more than another big bad that the Justice League needs to rally together and defeat through force, Darkseid is referred to as the God of All Evil for a reason, because he’s so much more of a concept than a character.

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Here’s the thing everyone gets wrong about Darkseid: He’s not Thanos, he’s not Doomsday, and he’s not Doctor Doom, although he’s usually written as a combination of the three. Yeah, he’s big and imposing, he looks like he’s made of stone and he can go toe-to-toe with Superman if wants to, but the important thing is, he doesn’t. He doesn’t because he doesn’t need to.

King and Gerads’ Mister Miracle has hammered this point home throughout these six issues with the black “Darkseid is.” panels — a phrase first used in Grant Morrison and Howard Porter’s JLA story “Rock of Ages” — because there’s nothing you can do to stop Darkseid, the same way there’s nothing you can do to stop bigotry, hatred and violence. Darkseid is a concept bigger than a mortal shell; he is the revelation, the tiger force at the core of all things. When you cry out in your dreams, it is Darkseid that you see.

Darkseid doesn’t need to fight, because in his mind, he’s already won. His quest for the Anti-Life Equation is his quest for mathematical proof Darkseid is the most powerful force in the universe. He doesn’t need to invade Earth with an army of Parademons, he can just sit on Apokolips and let other people do that for him. Darkseid’s greatest power isn’t his Omega Beams, its his effective delegation; he has Kalibak to lead his armies into war, he has Desaad to torture his prisoners, he has Granny Goodness to break the will of the innocent, he has Kanto as his personal assassin. Darkseid’s got better things to do than get in a dust-up with superheroes because they’re so far below his notice that they’re not worth his time.

Grant Morrison understood what Kirby was going for, and put his own spin on the concept by literally making Darkseid a concept bigger than a mortal shell in Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle and Final Crisis. In these stories, Darkseid is forced to inhabit human hosts but his pure evil rots them from the inside, slowly killing them until he’s forced to find another host. When he’s not inhabiting a physical body, he’s depicted as something incomprehensible, a pattern beyond the understanding of mortal minds, something you can’t defeat by punching it a lot of times before it leaves to lick its wounds. When Superman and Darkseid finally face off in Final Crisis, Darkseid is ultimately defeated by music, something that represents creativity and hope, everything that Darkseid isn’t.

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It’s something that the New 52 incarnation of Darkseid missed the boat on massively. Darkseid by way of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee is a big dude who arrives on the battlefield in a wave of bombast and gets into fights with the Justice League. He wants to destroy every Earth in the Multiverse — succeeding with Earth-2, but his motivations are shallow and undefined. He’s might as well be an empty white space stamped “bad guy” because there was nothing about him that resembled Jack Kirby’s Darkseid and unfortunately that was the take on the character we got for the next six years, and is likely the take on the character that’s going to influence his DCEU incarnation.

The scariest thing about Darkseid isn’t what he can do to you physically -- it’s the creeping dread up your back that you can’t shake. It’s become a bit of a meme, but there’s a reason why there’s so many panels of people coming home to find Darkseid sat in their favorite chair. Darkseid is already in your home, in your mind and in your heart, waiting for you to notice him. This is what King and Gerads get so right about Darkseid. Even though this is the first time we’ve physically seen him in the comic, his presence has permeated throughout the series, manifesting as Scott Free’s darkest fears and anxieties. It’s no surprise that when we first see him in the flesh, he’s in a chair that isn’t his — Highfather’s throne — the issue ends with Scott Free occupying that chair, potentially as the new Highfather of New Genesis, but Darkseid is still in his head.

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The way to beat Darkseid is to be Good, a core theme of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World. Just look at Mister Miracle and Orion; the son of God was sent to Hell and came back good while the son of the Devil was sent to Heaven and also came back good. Jack Kirby had a fondness for the wisdom and idealism of youth, represented in the Forever People and in the council of the young on New Genesis; children in the Fourth World are treated as wise and worth listening to because they haven’t yet been sullied with ideas of what the world should be like. Good wins in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, but not without a fight and while Mister Miracle might be trapped in his most inescapable trap yet — his own depression — its going to be by being better than Darkseid and setting an example that he’s going to win.