What's Apokolips?

What's This? Darkseid's world.
The facts: In Jack Kirby's Fourth World series, Apokolips is the world from which the evil New Gods hail. It is ruled by Darkseid, and it's where Mister Miracle escaped from. Its elite tend to run operations on Earth, often via Intergang, high-tech organized crime perpetrated by crooks who don't necessarily know they're the pawns of alien beings. It's a real stink hole. First appearance in New Gods #1 (March 1971), though it was technically mentioned in the Jan 71 issue of Jimmy Olsen (#135) before that.
How you could have heard of it: Pretty ubiquitous these days, even in spin-off media, Apokolips was a big part of Superman's animated adventures in the 1990s, bleeding into the Justice League series, and it's behind the bigger schemes brewing in the DCEU.
Example story: The New Gods #1 (March 1971) by Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta
Let's just start at the beginning. As you can see, Who's Who was just taking its text directly from Kirby's original myth. Apokolips is born in the shadow of New Genesis, both worlds spinning out of the destruction of the world of the Old Gods. While New Genesis is a radiant world of light, bright costumes, and pristine nature (with the one city floating above it so as not to blemish it), Apokolips is industrialized to the point of devastation, drawing its power from enormous fire pits since it apparently gets to sunlight. In the first issue of New Gods, Orion makes a trip to the world he doesn't know birthed him, and we get a sense of what it's like.
I mean, how big are those pits, or is the planet smaller than Earth? Well, still. We're still in the text repeated in Who's Who here, so let's move it along to an attack by Parademons. Nota bene: The original comics were colored differently and played less on natural contrasts. The Omnibus and trades are completely recolored, turning the original Parademons from blue to their trademark green. They're the ones who can fly, but these pages are full of different soldiers. What they have in common is that they fear Darkseid to the point of not approaching even a statue of him.
As the alarm spreads, Orion is faced with more threats. War dogs, for example!
He finally makes him way into Darkseid's fortress itself and finds it deserted. Everybody's getting their orders from a "mass-director unit", or "just another crazy design from the King", if you like.
Oh, and Kalibak is there. Two things come to mind, especially when you know a little about the Fourth World. First, all the name bad guys from Apokolips are absent and therefore on Earth. Gives me that certain frisson. Second, Darkseid's son, Kalibak, didn't make the cut, which is hilarious. You keep an eye on things at home, son, and also, this machine's gonna make all the decisions. And he doesn't even realize how humiliating that is.

Metron eventually shows up to explain the plot, which involves Darkseid having kidnapped Earth people to dig through their brains for the Anti-Life Equation.
Taking these folks home through a Boom Tube is a little like rescuing souls out of hell, isn't it? Those are the kinds of thoughts that come to mind when you look at Apokolips as a mythical underworld ruled by demons. And Satan just done broke his treaty with Heaven by taking people to hell before they died.

So all in all, a good primer for Apokolips without spilling all the beans. Plan B was to use The Hunger Dogs graphic novel as an example, but decided I wanted to read it in sequence and I never finished my Fourth World Omnibi. Have started over from volume 1 since I started writing this article. Kirby power!!!

Who're Next?
A couple of kids who get along swimmingly.

Comments