For long-time comics fans, Jack Kirby‘s New Gods are a truly iconic creation: part of a sprawling mythology that sits somewhat apart from the rest of the DC universe and which is the home to characters such as Highfather, Orion, and Mister Miracle. The titles that make up Kirby’s shared Fourth World (primarily The New Gods, but also The Forever People, and Mister Miracle) left a huge mark on comics, with both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison citing them as key inspirations on their own work. And yet, for many readers, they’re sometimes seen as slightly obscure. Sure, they’ll certainly have crossed paths with characters from the Fourth World, such as the infamous Darkseid, but there hasn’t been an actual ongoing New Gods comic since 1997.
That changes this December with the launch of The New Gods, from writer Ram V – hot off a terrific and widely-acclaimed run on Detective Comics – and artist Evan Cagle. The new New Gods is set to be a pivotal title in DC’s recent relaunch, acting as the lynchpin between both the core DC titles and the new Absolute Universe. Newsarama sat down with Ram V to find out more about the comic, how Darkseid’s death changes everything, and the challenges facing Mister Miracle…
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Newsarama: This is a big, expansive, really cosmic comic book that also has a very human heart. How would you tease the arc for the first few issues?
Ram V: Darkseid is gone and the entire cosmos is thrown into chaos because of it. The Source makes a prophecy that tells of the coming of a new New God, a child who shall awaken on Earth. New Genesis, believes this child is going to upset the status quo, and Apokolips thinks this child is going to be the second coming of Darkseid. This sets back into motion the conflict of New Genesis versus Apokolips, although this time, that conflict is kind of turned on its head. It’s also seen in a microcosm between Orion and Mister Miracle when Orion is tasked with finding and neutralizing this new threat. Orion really doesn’t want to kill a child, so he goes to Mister Miracle and says, “I’ve never disobeyed Highfather’s orders, and if I find this child, I am going to have to neutralize him, so I ask you to find this child and run.” And that sort of sets in motion the character drama underneath it all.
How does that impact Mister Miracle, Big Barda and their young family?
This [Mister Miracle] is a person whose experiences in life have taught him that whenever things get tough, you have to escape. He’s been trained to do this ever since he was young, but now he’s at a point in his life where the challenge for him is that he and Big Barda have a child. He has to be a father and it’s something he knows nothing about. And then along comes Orion, who says, “Actually, I need you to leave all of this behind and go on an adventure to save this kid.” We’ll see that play out in interesting ways, whether he chooses to leave his family behind, and whether his family chooses to let him leave them behind.
How did your first get involved with this project? What made you want to take on The New Gods?
I think the first conversation was at a San Diego Comic Con where I was talking to Ben Abernathy, who was DC’s editor-in-chief at the time. He had asked me what my plans were following Detective Comics, and I said that having worked on Batman the next thing I wanted to do was go the complete other way and work on characters that hadn’t been seen in a very long time. I wouldn’t say the New Gods are obscure, as such, but they haven’t had an ongoing book since the ’90s. And so I said, “Give me the toys nobody else wants to play with, I want to tell a story in that corner!”
I also felt like it was time to do something big and expansive. We had the entire Fourth World just sitting there, and no one had done anything with it for a while. So I said this was an opportunity for me to come in and potentially reinvent, potentially revitalize it.
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How do you go about reintroducing readers to characters like this who aren’t as well known as, say, Batman? Was that a different challenge for you as a writer coming off the back of Detective Comics?
I think with Detective you’re really trying to subvert expectations, because the moment you say, “Hey, I’m doing a Batman book,” there are expectations, right? So the joy there is doing interesting things with it. But with New Gods, honestly, it’s a much more innocent way for me to approach it because I don’t have a huge history with Kirby. I found his work because Alan Moore had said at some point that he had been very excited by Kirby’s New Gods. When I read them I had the same sort of brain expanding experience that Alan probably did, so my approach is to just take that childlike enthusiasm and imagination and bring that to the way I tell stories.
In terms of people who haven’t seen these characters before… Well, it’s like any other story. It doesn’t matter if you already know the characters. What matters is whether they are engaging, whether you invest in their struggles, whether you care about the things that they care about.
What made Evan Cagle the right artist for The New Gods?
Kirby was amazing because he was an atypical artist for his time, nobody else was doing anything like him in periodical comics. And I feel like nobody else’s work looks like Evan’s in periodical comics now. Kirby was also amazing at transmitting scale and the sense of a spectacle on his page and Evan [also] instinctively gets the difference between the big and the small, what has to look expansive. He can do giant planet-sized spaceships on one page, and then on the next page he can draw a scene of two people sitting on a park bench talking to each other and make it feel like both of those things have equal weight. That’s very rare and that’s part of why I was like, “Look, it has to be Evan because such a cosmic story told with intimate characteristics needs an artist who understands that.”
You’re also working with Jorge Fornés on the first issue, and you’re going to have other guest artists in this first 12-issue run. Can you say who those are yet?
Yeah. Evan is doing something that is very contemporary, but we also wanted to pay homage to what came before without being too nostalgic. So the guest artists that we’ve invited are those that we feel carry that Kirby influence deep within their veins, but are doing new, interesting, contemporary things on their own. Jorge, obviously, is one of those. Jesse Lonergan is doing a four page sequence in issue two. Jesse’s work is tremendous and he’s a huge New Gods fan as well. Issue three has Riccardo Federici drawing a significant chunk of it. And then somewhere down the line we’re hoping to get Ian Bertram and I’ve had conversations with Tradd Moore about possibly jumping in. We’ll see what schedules work out.
This is a really exciting time to be reading DC comics with the recently launched Absolute Universe and the main range becoming DC All In. How does New Gods fit into this new DC ecosystem?
Very centrally. Part of The New Gods pitch was that Darkseid’s absence is going to create the Absolute Universe. The New Gods have always been in a position where they were outside of the multiversal drama of DC, they sort of sat at the conflux of all of these multiverses. Even though the multiverse is kind of closed off, the New Gods have access to both the All In universe and the Absolute Universe, though they may not know it yet. And so they actually connect the two universes in interesting ways. Darkseid, also being a New God, his eventual fate is very much tied to what will happen in this book also.
And then, not only that, but this was pitched as a story that finally unifies the Fourth World and the mainstream DCU. So about halfway through this run, we’re going to see New Gods on Earth: Green Lanterns getting involved, Superman getting involved, and Wonder Woman getting involved. So all of that is to come.
The New Gods #1 is published by DC on December 18.
Eager to learn more about Jack Kirby’s Fourth World? Start here.