DC Comics: Darkseid Explained | Comics Explained

make sure to hit the subscribe button if you're enjoying the content that we're releasing and make sure to hit the like button if you're enjoying the video and yeah, let's start with what's going on guys, it's Rob and I'm just. I woke up a while ago, so bear with me, but in light of the Snyder cut of Justice League that's coming out, I thought we'd do a video explaining Darkseid, but here's the problem: the difficulty of solving him. I thought we could go back and do it from his first appearance in Well, Actually, The Forever People number one in 1970 and while it's a possibility, the problem has happened between then and now with the character of Darkseid, it's not.

It really is feasible to make a person an expert on a character like that in 25 minutes if we include all those things. The second thing is that what we see in the DC cinematic universe right now is largely based on the new 52 and a ton. There's been a lot going on with the dark side in the new 52, ​​so what I thought we'd do is break with tradition for this video and focus on a single era in Darkseid's history, which is basically the new 52's right to give you it sort of makes you an expert on the modern depiction of the dark side in DC

comics

, which is probably the only thing you really care about if you want to get into the character anyway, especially considering if you've been watching League of Legends. justice by zack snyder, the current version of

darkseid

originally appeared in justice league volume 2 issue three in 2011.

There are a few things you should know here. The first is that the reason it's called Justice League Volume 2 is because while the team has been around for an extremely long time. that the original Justice League comic was basically scrapped during the events of Crisis on Infinite Earth, a story that was written in the 1980s and was designed to basically reboot the entirety of DC

comics

, you know. , erase everything and start over and So when that happened, instead of getting the Justice League as we knew it, DC ended up creating what was called Justice League International and that was a completely Justice League concept. new.

It wasn't until the new 52 and the relaunch of DC Comics, so it was rebooted. Of the DC comics we actually got a return of the original Justice League roster, you got that with JLA by Grant Morrison back in the day, but DC doesn't really count that, right, they don't really count it as the Justice League. real Justice. comic book because at the time it was the justice league of america, it had a different name, so the important thing to understand here when it comes to this is that the comic book companies have what's called an annual summit, well, Basically they all go to a particular place. or everyone gets together and says this is what we're going to do over the next year, this is the brand we're going to relaunch next year or this is the direction we're going to take next year and it usually just works that way.

Now sometimes it turns out to be a multi-year effort and then they sit down and say, "Okay, this is the big plan we have for the next five years, but these are the things we're going to do." What we're doing this year to get closer to that five-year goal, so if you look at the Marvel comics and Secret Wars in 2015, that event took like four or five years to develop, they were just happening year after year. year and develop what direction the stories were going to go in to bring them into Secret Wars 2015. uh, and with this was a scenario where DC had basically sat down and said, well, we're going to reset our landscape, the problem and it's DC It was never fully

explained

to us why they did this, we just chalked it up to the idea that it was simply an initiative designed to make it easier to get into DC comics, but the idea was that DC was done. met at a summit and then essentially after the event of what was called the flashpoint story, where Flash came back to save his mother's life, he realized that he had created an alternate reality and then came back to Let her die so things would go back to normal.

DC said no, we're going to use that to reboot everything and that launched the new 52 in 2011. And although Darkseid appeared in the first volume of Justice League, a lot of it was pretty ambiguous as to why he was there. The only real indication we have is that he was looking for his daughter and that was true, the only real thing we knew is that Darkseid was looking for his daughter. That was something that wouldn't really become something significant until much later. line instead what you got was that DC did things two different ways, that dark side was presented to us the way it always had been as this multiversal, being correct in the sense that you have the entire multiverse but only there is a dark one.

The other part of this is that we knew that he had basically been traveling from world to world and seemingly conquering them, although that was his main goal, essentially conquering universes across the multiverse, all in search of the anti-life equation that also had done is shown on Earth as a side mission to find his daughter and, while the main Justice League story was going on, you also saw DC launch something called Earth 2. And historically speaking, Earth 2 was the universe of golden age superheroes, as well as Flash Jay Garrick and Green Lantern Alan Scott, some of those names you might be familiar with some of those names, you might not, but they're basically superheroes from bygone eras.

The upshot of this is that what we ended up having here was Steppenwolf showing up on Earth 2 essentially, as you know, since he was led by Darkseid and then he basically killed the Justice League, right, he literally killed them all like in the first issue, well technically Batman sacrificed his life, Superman turned into a couple of demons and then I guess he technically killed Wonder Woman by stabbing her in the back with a sword, regardless of the fact that all the main superheroes died in the first number, so the rest of Earth 2 essentially focused on a new generation of superheroes in that universe, but For Darkseid himself, Darkseid proper, his arrival here coincided with the Justice League actually meeting each other for the first time. time, because at the time the new 52 was released, superheroes had only been around for about five years, so if you sit down. and if you were to read the new 52 Superman, then that's about Superman in the present day, how do you know how he works in the city of Metropolis and works?

The Daily Planet does all that, but if you read, you'd know the new 52 action comics that focus on past stories and then eventually merge in the middle, basically, you know, action comics basically catch up with the period main Superman, so they arrive at the present and then just move on exchanging stories. at that time and the good thing about this is that with the appearance of

darkseid

batman superman uh wonder woman the green lantern uh you know hal jordan aquaman cyborg all these guys had met for the first time and there was a little bit of mistrust there, but the story was extremely good as made by jeff johns, ultimately it took the combined efforts of the justice league specifically using cyborg to control a mother box and open a boom tube to force darkseid back, but he was ultimately defeated , but It was a great way to start the story off right, it was just an amazing way to really kick off the launch of the Justice League by pitting them against Darkseid and that was the important thing because as soon as Jeff Johns introduced it.

In the new 52, ​​the first thing Jeff Johns established here was that the dark side was no slouch and even with all the vaunted powers the Justice League had, Darkseid was a guy they couldn't defeat on their own, In the end they had to force him to return. but they couldn't actually kill him because he was too powerful for them to handle properly. It was a last effort. It was a plan by Batman to force him to return to his own universe and then force him to return to his own place. and then lock him up now, the cool thing about this is that after DC, about two years later, came out with something called Villain Month and Villain Month was a great idea from DC Comics, the general idea is that they were going to take existing titles. and then introduce a one-shot as part of that existing title to basically tell the origins and stories of the villains, so with justice league, for example, in regards to darkseid, you had issue #23 of the Justice League, then you had 23.1 and 23.1 was a one-shot. that gave us the origin of darkseid in the new age 52 now the origin of the dark side as it was given to us here was actually very different from the origin we had previously seen in centuries before the events of the new 52 but the way it was establishes here is a dark side.

Originally it was a guy called yuksas and they lived in this desolate world that was really harsh and really sucked, but essentially they were ruled by what we call the old gods and the The idea behind it was that the old gods were only really able to hold and reinforce its existence by essentially feeding off the prayers of the people who inhabited this world and that uk sas was really one of the first and really only people who considered the idea. of the old gods and said why do we care about them, as you know, sure, they require our sustenance to survive, they feed on our prayers, but they abuse us, they destroy our land, they force us to live in this harsh and barren land. environment where it never rains or anything like that, they don't make our lives easy, right, they basically make our lives as difficult as possible, why do we pray to these guys for a large part of society?

It was just because it's always been that way, there wasn't really anyone questioning whether they should do it or not, it's just that it's always that way and that was crazy because it wasn't even a question of the fact that he likes the environment. It was harsh, like these old gods were really fighting each other and when they wanted to they would start tearing up the land to destroy people's homes, ruin their crops, all that kind of stuff, they didn't really care at all. about the people who were keeping them alive and so in his frustration and in his anger, ux basically made up this plan to destroy the old gods, essentially to get rid of them and then usurp their power, so what he ended up doing was sneak into the realm of the Old Gods when they were sleeping and then basically whisper in their ears, whisper lies, things like that to convince them that everyone else was trying to destroy them to effectively instigate a civil war between the Old Gods and when that happened, they basically ended up being eradicated and the crazy thing was when you were left with one of the old gods and he actually asked you, you know, you like to pray to me, give me a prayer so I can survive and then you know I'll give you everything you want, just like I will give you everything you could ever want, the reality is that you didn't care and what he ends up doing is systematically killing each of the old gods and then begins the process of absorbing the power into himself and then moved on as Darkseid and what he had on top of that were some of the other old gods that had survived and then they gave their power to his brother and when they gave their power to his brother, he finally became what we know as high father, now the problem with this initial origin, as stated, is that while these two guys came into conflict and while you had uk sas and then you had iksaya who eventually became father superior while they turned on each other and fought, the truth is that all we are told is that after this great battle, Darkseid finally created the apocalypse for himself as a planet of torment and suffering and that great father created a new genesis as a place of enlightenment and peace. and they've been like that since it wasn't really a complete origin, right?

It wasn't really a complete story in terms of how we got from point a to point b, so what you end up getting is a few tracking numbers, the first one comes through what was called the infinite man and the forever people and this one was covered in issue five and what we end up learning is that after this fight or at least when this fight initially started between Uxas and Anexia when They faced the old gods and basically destroyed them. You ended up having Yuga Khan, who also joined the fray and Yuga Khan was Darkseid's biological father. this guy and when that happened because the power they had was so intense, yuka khan saw it as an affront against the old gods to destroy him and led a war against his children, eventually he was destroyed as well or not necessarily destroyed. he was actually locked in the source wall, which for those of you who don't know, is basically this wall that surrounds each universe and then also surrounds the multiverse.

There are like two iterations of the source wall, more or less those individuals who try to abandon themultiverse and they enter the fountain, if they don't have enough power or their mind just can't handle it, they end up trapped inside the wall of the fountain and that's what ended up happening with Yuga Khan, who was basically trapped inside the fountain. wall of origin after his defeat, so this was given to us as sort of an immediate consequence between ixaya and uh and his brother, the youth sacks basically kill the old gods and then take power for themselves .

Now after this you get into what is called uh the story of divinity and the story of divinity was a great story, it was part of Jeff John's green lantern run, although this particular story was not written by jeff johns actually this story was a cumulative effort right, it was written by someone like van ginson and it was written by robert vendetti and charles soule and colin bun it was written by four or five different people but there was a lot of involvement here but what they basically tell us is that after iksaya becoming a great father and uh and uxas becoming darkseid that they created their own respective kingdoms to represent what they represented, that darkseid believed in always and continually searching for the anti-life equation, this equation that if one person reached it and was Resolve it would allow them to dominate the wills of all things seemingly in the entire multiverse, so there would be no one who could stand against them and there has only been one case in the history of DC comics in the one where we have seen Darkseid. to successfully pull off the anti-life equation and actually use it and that was during the final crisis of the story, which I will have a link to in the description that you can check out, it's kind of available just for you guys who are new to the comics it's a bit off, just go into it hoping it's right, it's a bit wild, but hey dad, as a kind of being, not necessarily a perfect piece, most of the time, dad's kind of idiot, but as a being who stands as the antithesis of the dark side, who basically exists a new genesis above the ancient realm of the ancient gods to constantly remind them of what happens when a being reaches such extreme power and then goes wrong, so that their place is really more than what at least passes for a place of peace, I would say that it is highly militaristic and really more totalitarian, even if it is an enlightened totalitarian government that is still what is right, it is still a dictatorship in the that it doesn't force people to live in as if you know destitution and misery like what darkseid does and so it basically established itself as they had in years past, that dark side and the highfather are constantly at war each other, as if they were constantly fighting each other and So, due to the fact that it was recognized that if they really got involved in a protracted war and really started killing each other in the most extreme way, using the entirety of their power, so it would actually lead to the destruction of the multiverse, which is something that was introduced in Grant Morrison's final crisis, which again is a pretty crazy story, but the important thing here is that to prevent this from happening, what you had was a new god called metron and metron. he was actually more of a chronicler if you're familiar with the notion of Marvel comics observers, that's basically what Metron is right, he travels through the universe and is in what's called his Mobius chair, which will explain what What that means here in a moment. while essentially he just observes everything correctly and everything he observes is recorded in the Mobius chair, it is like a chair that is a giant library that stores everything he sees and realizes what would happen if the new gods went to war each other. would destroy all existence, a piece was negotiated between the two and then what you got was the son of the great father who was named free of scots and was sent to live on the planet apocalypse and then you had the son of the dark side called orion who was sent to live on the planet of the new genesis, and because Godfrey was the son of a great father and because none of them wanted to see their children die, while scot-free was constantly forced to live in similar prisons and simply treated like shit , he ended up becoming Mr.

Miracle in the sense that he gained the ability to basically break any lock anywhere in the multiverse so that no prison can hold him, which may not sound that great, but it's actually amazing because In fact, he's a multiversal escape artist, so he always has a way out of any situation and then there was Orion, who normally would have become a terrible, horrible person because he lived in the apocalypse and ended up becoming what he was, in fact. He knew very well that Father and his boys would always wait for the day when Darkseid would just say "hell" and just declare war on him and that allowed him Darkseid continues his campaign of always searching for the anti-life equation that is now returning.

For Earth 2, this became what was considered Darkseid's secret obsession in the DC comics in that with the idea that Darkseid had lost to the hero it is what was called Earth Prime or Earth Zero in the DC landscape, which is basically The main DC Comics universe, the dark side, began the process of strengthening its forces with the purpose of returning to Earth Zero at some point down the line, but with Earth 2 having been defeated and actually taken by Steppenwolf on behalf of Darkseid, the dark side in turn. having suffered a massive defeat against the so-called Daxomites, who were basically Kryptonians who had broken away and then, you know, settled on a different planet somewhere else, he ended up going to the heart of the apocalypse itself and basically consuming the heart of the planet to be able to heal himself is essentially what happened, what this meant is that while the traditional apocalypse planet would end up being destroyed, the idea was to effectively take over Earth 2, wipe out all the life that was there, and then turn it into a new apocalypse now, the reason why people see and actually claim that the new 52 Earth 2 story was so great was literally because of this story, because really the new generation of heroes try to defend the Earth from Darkseid and ultimately not succeeding, it's a story where the heroes essentially lost and it was incredible the way it happened, but what it did was it allowed Darkseid to continue to build up his forces and then move forward with the intention of launch an attack against against.

The main DC universe again now, something else I want to point out here between the time Apocalypse was originally formed and his first appearance in the Justice League, right when he faced off against the main Justice League team, there are things that happened, but we don't really have a chronological timeline on when they happened, all we know is that at some point the formation of the furies took place, for example, that's when that took place, so if you guys were watching the race Snyder. Towards the end of the movie and you saw that older woman cast that woman aside, they don't really reference her and you wouldn't know unless you knew who she was by all standards of measurement, that seems like grainy goodness. and grandma goodness is basically the de facto leader of the female furies, now there are male furies, but imagine if wonder woman was a bad person and she worked for darkseid and there was a team of her, that's basically what the female furies are . actually a woman called barda who basically took, you know, ended up going against the female furies and then basically became a superhero who ended up marrying the right man and free of scots, ended up marrying the son of the great father that was in who was in uh.

Apocalypse, so one of the other things that Darkseid had done is that he had basically managed to capture what was called an aspect of the black corridor and the black corridor is basically the representation of death as it appears before the new gods, but with Darkseid capturing her. and then basically being able to control it, the only way to really force the black runner to bend the will of the dark side was if he was linked to a living deception and that will become a big thing here in a moment, once Let's talk about the dark side. war, but the good thing about this is that after this you saw some little moments with Darkseid things like uh like convergence where he appeared there, his power was reinforced and increased beyond what we were traditionally looking for when we initially saw him appear in the justice. league history, um, you ended up seeing things like divergence which actually introduced his daughter Grail and sort of established that she's really Darkseid's daughter and then an Amazonian woman from an alternate reality, so you saw these really cool introductions that existed there, but everything was done with the purpose or at least it was believed that it had been done with the purpose of reinforcing and moving towards this definitive concept.

The problem with this was that the longer the new 52 lasted, the more the continuity errors became evident and the more the lack of planning became obvious and the result was that for new fans, the new 52 was an incredible concept at first, but it became more confusing and even a little lackluster as time went on, for existing fans, depending on who you talked to, were completely pissed. I guess it even happened in the first place because all the continuity that they had been raised with when they had been reading comics since they were younger was effectively erased in the blink of an eye, and so what you saw DC doing was trying to rework this with something called dcu where there really wasn't any continuity to its storytelling, it was just telling stories for the sake of telling stories, but no one really liked it because people like to know that things happen in a particular order, which is especially important if You're someone who's getting into comics and you're trying to make sense of it because we as people naturally enjoy order and structure, we like to know that a leads to b leads to c to z, etc.

In the wake of what was considered a mediocre response to the new 52 combined with an even worse response to stories like convergence and dcu that dc led to the story renaissance and rebirth was basically just erasing all of those things and in fact in the eyes of jeff johns and the people who spearheaded the event doing what dc should have done in the first place, which was keep everything that worked before the new 52 and then combine it with what the new 52 ended up being right with the new concepts and equipment and changes that people really enjoyed and in an effort to get into the new 52 they basically needed a story to catapult all of this and what we ended up getting was the dark side war event and the dark side war event brought in two characters that we really were, one that we were familiar with but that had been changed and the other that we knew practically nothing about, the first was the grail, the daughter of darkseid, the second was the anti-monitor and to break with For a second, many of you have probably heard of this, the anti-monitor, even if you don't really know the ins and outs of his character and he's changed the most recently in years, the anti-monitor was basically this guy who was responsible for annihilating the multiverse during the crisis events on Infinite Earth and now ultimately returned during things like the central Sinestro war, things along those lines, but the important thing about all of this is that it completely changed during The events of Dark Side War now I have this story in the description, so we won't go into too much depth here, but the idea behind Dark Side War was, in effect, that before he became the anti-monitor, that guy was a person. called Mobius and he was curious about the nature of the universe and its origin and all that kind of stuff, but he had come from a place called the antimatter universe and so in his experiments and because of his curiosity, he unknowingly unleashed something. called the anti-life equation and the anti-life equation as we said before is basically this mathematical proof that if you are able to master it you can dominate the wills of everyone who exists, you basically take away their own free will and they become servants. to you, they become slaves to you, whatever you want them to do, and with that birth, Mobius had become tainted by this right and finally transformed into the anti-monitor, now the whole idea behind that. was completely changed by Scott Snyder during his run on Justice League, specifically going into what was called death metal, so again you know you see that as what it was at the time, but that's not the exact standard with the that we operate now, the important thing.

What's behind all of this is that the anti-monitor believed that if he killed Darkseid he would free him from this type of stain that he has on himself and that is what led to the instigation of the dark side war and , inUltimately what you ended up having was the dark side and the anti-monitor going to war with each other fighting each other and then eventually Darkseid was killed, right, Darkseid was basically destroyed and that was the end of his character. Now what we ended up finding out later is that grail had actually resurrected darkseid more or less, you know, brought him back to life he was initially reborn as a baby aged by the grail to take on the justice league a second time and then finally he was defeated and then reversed. in a baby again the big problem with all of this is that everyone and really the way DC was building the grail was going to be like the next big villain that was on par with darkseid she wasn't okay like she was a character that appeared. for a story and then DC just never did anything with her after that, true, she had kind of an introduction when she became Justice League Odyssey, but that was basically the important thing behind all of this is to really follow through. the end. of the dark side war and delve into the events of what was in effect drebirth that darkseid was indeed reborn now the curious thing about this is that darkseid returned in the pages of wonder woman, but not initially when woman rebirth was released wonder was this ridiculously amazing story by greg rucka is probably one of the best Wonder Woman Stories ever told, if you've never had a chance to read them I suggest you read them, but the idea behind it was basically to establish the notion that Wonder Woman had never returned to them even though we had seen her show themselves that it never actually happened now as to why I won't spoil it here, you should go buy it and read it for yourself the reveal is just mind blowing it's cool but in short this is that darkseid is basically taken by the grail they travel to these various gods that exist throughout the dc universe and kill them so one of the first to fall is hercules who basically transforms the dark side into a teenager and then follows zeus who basically transformed darkseid into his current form now after the grail is finally defeated and essentially removed from the dc landscape and this goes straight to dan admits the odyssey of the justice league now with darkseid existing in the justice league odyssey event, this matched what scott snyder was What he is doing regarding his justice league executes the idea of ​​the entirety of the return of Perpetual, who had created the existing multiverse, intending to basically erase everything and then recreate it in his own image, while DC won't necessarily point out the events of Snyder's Justice.

League and Death Metal as a reboot by all standards of measurement, it was, but as for Darkseid, his entire goal in Justice League Odyssey over the course of the run was basically this revelation that he intended to perpetually elude him. What he intended to do was accumulate enough power to erase her from existence and then recreate the multiverse in his own image. Now ultimately the downside to this, of course, is that it never came to fruition. Darkseid could never achieve his goal, but even more than that justice. League Odyssey was eventually canceled due to what were actually mediocre sales the longer the series ran, it's a sad situation to be honest because Justice League Odyssey was amazing.

I made the first video here and then the more I read it. The more I thought, "I'm going to do this for me, like I'm going to read it for myself. I'm just not going to make videos about it because I like it and I just want to keep things to myself." Ultimately, Darkseid just disappeared from the DC landscape once again, and that really ties into what's happening right now in DC comics, which is called the new frontier and this basically brings into play the notion of the way true, the dark side and the true form.

The dark side was actually a fan concept that was created after or actually during Grant Morrison's portrayal of Darkseid and was a way to reconcile and answer the question of if Darkseid had previously died or been previously killed, then why No? his death or why his death didn't have the same consequences as it did during the final crisis when his death basically led to the destruction of the multiverse and the fans basically rationalized or created the logic and said that, well, those versions of the dark side. that we saw were simply avatars, right, they were facsimiles of the dark side of the true form and that when the dark side of the true form was killed, that's what happened during the final crisis and that's why the multiverse was starting to collapse. because the dark side of the true form was that powerful. that when he died, the multiverse essentially started going with him, so, with the dark side's true form appearing during infinite frontier number one, we don't know what his character's game will be, since he literally just showed up again, such time three. weeks ago, so we don't know what his full plan will be, presumably it will be something nefarious and the search for the anti-life equation, right, I mean, the guy is disgustingly powerful, uh, but we don't know.

I really know what his big plan will be. That being said, guys, I hope this grabs you and makes you an expert on at least the newest version of Darkseid as it exists right now, but if you're new here. to the comments please explain, be sure to hit the right button to become part of Rob's core. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to leave a like and I'll see you all later, peace.