DC Comics: Darkseid Explained | Comics Explained

make sure you guys hit the subscribe button if you guys are enjoying the content that we're throwing up and uh make sure you guys hit the like button if you enjoy the video and yeah let's begin what's going on guys this is rob and i just woke up a little bit ago so bear with me here but uh in light of the snyder cut of the justice league coming out i figured we'd make a video explaining darkseid but here's the rub right here was the difficulty in getting this sorted out one i kind of figured we could go back and do it from like his first appearance in well really the forever people number one back in 1970 and while it is a possibility the problem is so much happened between then and now with the character of darkseid it's not really feasible to turn a person into an expert on a character like that in 25 minutes if we include all that stuff the second thing is that what we see in the dc cinematic universe at the moment is largely just based on the new 52 and a ton of stuff has happened with dark side in the new 52 and so what i figured we'd do is kind of break away from tradition for this video and focus on one single era at darkseid's history which is basically the new 52 right to give you to kind of make you an expert on the modern depiction of dark side in dc comics which is probably all you really care about if you are wanting to get into the character anyway especially considering if you've been watching zack snyder's justice league the current version of darkseid originally appeared in justice league volume 2 issue number three back in 2011. there's a few things you need to know here the first is that the reason why it's called justice league volume 2 is that while the team has been around for an exceedingly long time that the original justice league comic book was basically axed during the events of crisis on infinite earth a story that was written back in the 1980s that was designed to basically reboot the entirety of dc comics kind of you know wipe everything clean and start over again and so when that happened instead of getting justice league as we had known it dc ended up creating what was called justice league international and that was a whole new justice league concept it wasn't until the new 52 and the relaunch of dc comics so the reboot of dc comics that we actually got a return of the original justice league roster you kind of got it with jla by grant morrison back in the day but dc doesn't really count that right they don't really count that as the actual justice league comic because at that point it was justice league of america it was a different name right and so the important thing to understand here when it comes to this is that comic book companies have what's called a yearly summit well they all basically go to a particular place or they all meet up and they say here's what we're going to do for the next year right this is the brand that we're going to relaunch in the next year or this is the direction we're going to be going in for the next year and it usually just works that way now sometimes it turns out to be a multi-year effort right they sit down and say okay like this is the big plan that we have for the next five years but these are the things we're gonna do this year to get us closer to that five-year goal right so like if you look at marvel comics and secret wars in 2015 that event was something like four or five years in the making they were just kind of going through year after year and fleshing out what direction stories were gonna go in to get them to secret wars 2015. uh and so with with this it was a scenario where dc had basically sat down and said okay we're gonna reboot our landscape the problem and and it's never really been fully explained by dc as to why they did this we just kind of chalk it up to the idea that it was just it was an initiative designed to just make it easier to get into dc comics but uh the idea was that dc ended up meeting at a summit and then essentially after the event of what was called the flashpoint storyline where the flash went back to save his mom's life realized he created an alternate reality and then went back to let her die in order to set things back to normal dc said no we're going to use that to reboot everything and that launched the new 52 in 2011. and so while while darkseid did appear in the first volume of the justice league a lot of it was pretty ambiguous as to why he was there the only real indication we got is that he was hunting for his daughter and that was it right that's the only real thing that we knew is that darkseid's hunting for his daughter uh that was something that would not really become something significant until much later on down the line instead what you got was dc sort of doing things in two different ways that dark side was presented to us the way he kind of always had been as this multiversal being right in the sense that you have the entire multiverse but there's only one dark side out there the other part of this is that we knew he had basically been traveling from world to world and seemingly conquering it that while that was his main goal was to essentially conquer universes across the multiverse all in search of the anti-life equation that what he'd also done is shown up to earth as a secondary mission to find his daughter and so 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 the universe of golden age superheroes right so like the flash jay garrick and the green lantern alan scott some of those names you might be familiar with some of those names you may not but they are basically superheroes from from ages gone by the result of this is that what we ended up having here was steppenwolf showing up on earth 2 essentially as you know as he was directed by darkseid and then basically killing the justice league right he literally killed them all in like the first issue well technically batman sacrificed his life superman was turned into a pair demon and then i guess he technically killed wonder woman by stabbing her to the back with a sword regardless all the the main superheroes died in the first issue and so the rest of earth 2 focused on essentially 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 very first time right because at the time that the new 52 was launched superheroes had only been around for about five years and so that's why if you sit down and you were to read the new 52 superman then that deals with superman in the modern day right how you know how he functions in the city of metropolis and works the daily planet does all that stuff but if you were to read you know new 52 action comics that focuses on the past stories and then eventually they kind of merge in the middle right they basically you know action comics basically catches up to the main superman time period so the the the present day and then they just kind of go forward trading off stories at that point in time and so the cool thing about this is that with darkseid showing up batman superman uh wonder woman the green lantern uh you know hal jordan aquaman cyborg all these guys had met for the very first time and there was a little bit of distrust there but the story was exceedingly good the way it was done 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 one heck of a way to open the story right it was just an amazing way to to really initiate the launch of justice league by having them face off against darkseid and that was the important thing is because as soon as he was introduced by jeff johns in the new 52 the first things jeff johns established here was a dark side was no slouch and even with all the vaunted powers that the justice league had darkseid was a guy they couldn't take out on their own they ultimately had to force him back but they couldn't actually kill him because he was just too powerful for them to handle right it was a last-ditch effort it was a plan of batman to force him back to his own universe and then to force him back to his own place and then kind of lock him away now the cool thing about this is that following that dc about two years later launched something that was called villains month and villains month was a genius idea by dc comics the whole idea is 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 villains right so with the justice league for example as pertains to darkseid you had justice league issue number 23 then you had 23.1 and 23.1 was a one shot that gave us the origin of darkseid in the new 52 era now the origin of dark side as it was given to us here was actually a lot different than the origin that we that we'd previously seen in ages before the events of the new 52 but the way it's established here is a dark side it was originally a guy named yuksas and they lived on this desolate world that really rough and it really sucked but they it was essentially kind of ruled by what we're called the old gods and the idea behind this was that the old gods were only really able to sustain and bolster their existence by feeding essentially on the prayers of the people that inhabited this world and that uk sas was really one of the first and really only people who looked at the idea of the old gods and said why do we care about them right like you know sure like they require our sustenance in order to survive right they feed on our prayers but they abuse us they destroy our land they they force us to live in this harsh barren environment where there's never really any rain or anything like they don't make life easy on us right they basically make life as hard on us as they possibly can why do we pray to these guys for a large portion of society it was just because it's always been that way there wasn't really anybody kind of questioning whether or not they should it's that it's always this way right and that's that that was a crazy thing because it wasn't even just a matter of the fact that like the the environment was harsh like these old gods would actually get into fights with each other and when they did like they would start tearing apart the land right so they would destroy people's homes they would ruin their crops all that kind of stuff they really didn't care anything about the people who were keeping them alive and so in his frustration and in his anger ux basically concocted this plan to destroy the old gods right to essentially get rid of them and then usurp their power right and so what he ended up doing was sneaking into the realm of the old gods when they slept and then basically whispering in their ear right whispering lies things along those lines to convince them that all the others were trying to destroy them to effectively instigate civil war among the old gods and when that happened they basically ended up eradicating themselves and the crazy thing was that when you had one of the old gods left and and he really asked you know you sass like pray to me right give me a prayer so that i can survive and then you know i will give you all that you desire right like i will give you everything you possibly want the reality is that you sass didn't care and so what he ends up doing is going through and systematically killing every single one of the old gods and then starts the process of absorbing the power into himself and then went forward as darkseid and so what you had in addition to that were some of the other old gods who'd survived and then gave their power to his brother and when they gave their power to his brother he ultimately became what we know as high father now the problem with this initial origin as it was told is that while the two of these guys got into conflict and and while you had uk sas and then you had iksaya who was who eventually became high father while they waged against each other and fought the truth was that all we're told is that like after this big battle that ultimately darkseid created the apocalypse for himself as a planet of torment and suffering and that highfather created new genesis as a place of enlightenment and peace and they've just kind of been like that ever 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 and so what you end up getting is a few follow-up issues right the first one comes by way of what was called the infinity man and the forever people and this one was covered in issue number five and what we end up learning is that in the aftermath of this fight or at least when this fight initially started between uxas and anexia when they were facing off against the old gods and basically destroyed them that you ended up having yuga khan who also joined the fray and yuga khan was the biological father of darkseid right he was the guy who literally sired this dude and so when that happened because the power that they had was so intense yuka khan saw it as a uh an affront against the old gods to destroy him and led a war against his sons ultimately he was destroyed as well or not necessarily destroyed he was actually locked away in the source wall which for those of you guys who don't know is basically this wall that surrounds every universe and then it also surrounds the multiverse there's like two iterations of the source wall more or less those individuals who try to leave the multiverse and enter the source if they're not of sufficient power or their mind simply can't handle it they end up getting trapped inside the source wall and so that's what ended up happening to yuga khan right he was basically trapped inside the source wall following his defeat and so this was given to us as a kind of immediate aftermath between ixaya and uh and his brother youth sacks basically killing the old gods and then taking the power for themselves now following this you go into what's called uh the godhead storyline and the godhead storyline was a great story it was part of the the jeff john's green lantern run even though this particular story was not actually written by jeff johns in fact this story was a a cumulative effort right it was written by like van ginson and it was written by robert vendetti and charles soule and colin bun it was written by like four or five different people but there was a lot of a lot of involvement here but what we're basically told is that in the aftermath of iksaya becoming high father and uh and uxas becoming darkseid that they created their own respective realms to kind of represent what they stood for that darkseid believed in always and continually hunting for the anti-life equation this equation that if a person were to attain it and were to solve it would allow them to dominate the wills of all things seemingly across the multiverse that there'd be nobody who would be able to stand against them and there's only really been one instance in the history of dc comics when we've seen darkseid successfully attain the anti-life equation and actually use it and that was during the story final crisis which i'll have a link to down in the description that you're welcome to check out it's it's it's a little out there just for you guys who are who are new to comics it's a little out there just kind of go into that expecting it right it's a little wild but uh hi father as kind of a being not necessarily a perfect piece high father's kind of a dick more often than not but as a being who stands as the antithesis to dark side that new genesis basically exists above the former realm of the old gods to constantly remind them of what happens when a being attains such extreme power and then goes awry right and so his place is really more of of what at least what passes for a place of peace i would say it's highly militaristic and really more totalitarian even if it is an enlightened totalitarian government that's still what it is right it's still a dictatorship just one where he doesn't force people to live in like you know destitution and squalor like what darkseid does and so dc basically established as they had in years gone by that dark side and high father are constantly warring against each other right like they're they're constantly fighting amongst each other and so because of the fact that it was recognized that if they were to really engage in like a knock down drag out war and they were to really start killing each other in the most extreme way right using the full totality of their power then it would actually lead to the destruction of the multiverse which is something that was presented in grant morrison's final crisis which is again a pretty crazy story but the important thing here is that in order to keep this from happening what you had was a new god named metron and metron was really more of a chronicler if you're familiar with the the notion of the watchers from marvel comics that's basically what metron is right he travels across the universe and is in what's called his mobius chair which will explain what that means here in a little while and essentially just observes everything right and everything that he observes gets chronicled in the mobius chair it's like a chair that's a giant library that stores everything that he sees and so realizing what would happen if the new gods went to war with each other that it would destroy all existence a piece was brokered between the two and so what you got was the son of high father who was named scot-free who was sent to live on the planet apocalypse and then you had the son of dark side named orion who was sent to live on the the planet of new genesis and so because godfrey was the son of of high father and because neither wanted to see their sons die that while scot-free was constantly forced to live in like prisons and just treated like crap he ended up becoming mr miracle in the sense that he gained the ability to basically crack any lock anywhere in the multiverse so no prison can ever really hold him which might not sound that great but it's actually awesome because he's in effect a multiversal escape artist so he always has a way out of any situation and then you had orion who normally would have become like a terrible horrible person because he lived on apocalypse ended up becoming what was in effect a new god hero right so following that the peace being brokered it basically allowed you know really high father and his guys to always just wait for the day when darkseid would just say the heck with it and just wage war against him and it allowed darkseid to continue his campaign of always hunting for the anti-life equation now wrapping back around to earth 2 this kind of became what was considered to be the secret obsession of darkseid in dc comics in the sense that with the idea of darkseid having lost to the hero 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 bolstering his forces for the purpose of returning to earth zero somewhere along the line but with earth 2 having been defeated and really taken over by steppenwolf in the name of darkseid the dark side in turn after having suffered a massive defeat against what were called the daxomites who were basically kryptonians that had broken off and then just you know took up residence on a different planet somewhere else uh that he ended up going into the heart of apocalypse itself and basically consuming the heart of the planet in order to heal himself is essentially what happened what this meant was that while the traditional planet of apocalypse would end up being destroyed the idea was to effectively take over earth 2 wipe out all life that was there and then turn that into a new apocalypse now the reason why people view and really state that the new 52 earth 2 storyline was so great was quite literally because of this story right because of the really the new generation of heroes trying to fend the earth off against darkseid and then ultimately being unsuccessful right it's a story where the heroes essentially lost and it was awesome the the way that it went down but what this did is it allowed darkseid to continue kind of bolstering his forces and then going forward with the intention of launching an attack against against the main dc universe again now something else that i want to point out here between the time that apocalypse was originally formed and going to his first appearance in justice league right when he faced off against the main justice league team there are things that took place but we're not really given a chronological timeline as to when they happened all we know is just that somewhere along the line they took place the formation of the furies for example is when that took place so if you guys when you guys were watching snyder's run towards the end of the movie and you saw that that older woman right that woman off to the side they don't really reference her and you wouldn't know it unless you knew who she was by all standards of measurement that looks like grainy goodness and granny goodness is basically the de facto leader of the female furies now there are male furies but imagine if wonder woman was a bad guy and she worked for darkseid and there was a team of her that's basically what the female theories are one of those is actually a woman named barda who basically took uh you know ended up going against the female furies and then basically became like a superhero who ended up marrying scot-free right man ended up marrying uh the son of high father who was on who was on uh apocalypse right so one of the other things that darkseid had done is he had basically managed to capture what was called an aspect of the black racer and the black racer is basically the representation of death as it appears to the new gods but with darkseid capturing it and then basically being able to control it the only way to really force the black racer to bend the dark side's will was if it was bonded to a living hoax and that'll become something important here in a little bit once we talk about dark side war but the cool thing about this is that following this you saw a few little moments with darkseid things like uh like convergence where he appeared there his power was bolstered and it was increased beyond what we traditionally sought when we initially saw him appear in the justice league story um you ended up seeing things like divergence which actually introduced his daughter grail and kind of established that she is the really the daughter of darkseid and then an amazonian woman from an alternate reality so you saw these these really cool introductions that existed there but it was all done towards the purpose or at least believed to have been done towards the purpose of bolstering and going towards this definitive concept the problem with this was that the longer the new 52 went on the more the continuity errors became apparent and the more the lack of planning became obvious and so the result was that for new fans the new 52 was an awesome concept at first that became more confusing and even a little lackluster as time went on for existing fans depending on who you talked to they were just wholly pissed off that it even happened in the first place because all the continuity that they had been raised with when they had been reading comics ever since they were younger was effectively just wiped away right just in the blink of an eye and so what you saw dc doing was trying to rework this with something called dcu where there wasn't really any continuity in their storytelling it was just telling stories for the sake of storytelling but nobody really liked it because people like to know that things happen in a particular order which is especially important if you're somebody who's getting into comics and you're trying to make sense of it right because we as people just naturally enjoy order and structure we like to know a leads to b leads to c all the way down to z and so in the aftermath of what was considered to be a lackluster response to the new 52 combined with an even worse response to stories like convergence and dcu that dc led up to the story rebirth and rebirth was basically just wiping all that stuff away and in effect 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 from before the new 52 and then blended with what the new 52 ended up being right with the new concepts and teams and the changes that people actually enjoyed and so in an effort to go into the new 52 they basically needed a story to kind of catapult all this and so what we ended up getting was the dark side war event and the dark side war event brought in two characters that we were really one that we were familiar with but have been changed and the other we knew virtually nothing about right the first one was grail the daughter of darkseid the second one was the anti-monitor and to kind of break away from this for a second the anti-monitor is is a lot of you guys have probably heard of even if you don't really know the ins and outs of his character and it has been changed more recently in years the anti-monitor was was basically this this guy who was responsible for wiping out the multiverse during the events of crisis on infinite earth now ultimately he was brought back during things like sinestro core war things along those lines but the important takeaway from all this is that he was totally changed up during the events of dark side war now i've got this story down in the description so we won't go super in depth here but the idea behind dark side war was in effect that before he became the anti-monitor that guy was a person named mobius and he was curious about you know the nature of the universe and its origin and all that kind of stuff but he had come from a place called the anti-matter universe and so in his experiments and because of his curiosity he unwittingly unleashed something called the anti-life equation and the anti-life equation as we stated previously is basically this mathematical proof that if you're able to master it you can dominate the wills of everybody in existence basically take away their own free will and they become servants to you they become slaves to you just whatever it is that you want them to do and so with with that coming into existence mobius had kind of been tainted by this right and he was ultimately 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 uh so again you know that you kind of see that for what it was at the time but that's not the exact standard that we operate now the important thing behind all this is that the anti-monitor believed that if he were to kill darkseid it would free him from this kind of taint that he has on himself and so that's what led to the instigation of the of the dark side war and so ultimately what you ended up having was dark side and anti-monitor going to war against each other fighting each other and then ultimately darkseid was killed right darkseid was basically destroyed and that was the end of his character now what we ended up finding out later on is that grail had actually resurrected darkseid more or less you know brought him back to life that he was initially kind of reborn as a baby aged up by grail to face off against the justice league a second time and then ultimately he was defeated and then reverted back into a baby again the big problem with all this is that everybody and really the way that dc was building it grail was going to be like this next huge villain that was on par with darkseid she wasn't right like she was a character that appeared for a story and then dc just never did anything with her after that right she had like a little bit of an introduction when it spun off into justice league odyssey but that was basically it the important thing behind all this is that following really the the end of dark side war and going into the events of what was in effect dc rebirth that darkseid was effectively reborn now the funny thing about this is that darkseid did return in the pages of wonder woman but not initially initially when wonder woman rebirth was launched it was this ridiculously amazing story by greg rucka it's it's it's probably one of the best wonder woman stories ever told if you've never had a chance to read it i highly suggest you pick it up but the whole idea behind that was to basically establish the notion that wonder woman had never actually returned to themschira even though we'd seen her show up to themselves that it never actually happened now as to the reason for that i will not spoil here you should go buy it and read it on your own the revelation is just mind-blowing it's it's cool but the long and short of this is that darkseid is basically taken by grail they travel around to these various gods that exist across the dc universe and kill them right so one of the first to fall is hercules which basically transforms dark side into a teenager and then following that is zeus who basically transformed darkseid into his current form now after that grail is ultimately defeated and essentially just removed from the dc landscape and this goes directly into dan admits justice league odyssey now with with darkseid existing in the justice league odyssey event this was coinciding with what scott snyder was doing with regards to his justice league run the idea of the totality the return of perpetua who had created the existing multiverse intended to basically wipe it all clean and then recreate it in her own image while dc will not necessarily point to the events of snyder's justice league and death metal event as being a reboot by all standards of measurement it was but as for darkseid his whole goal in justice league odyssey over the course of the run was basically this revelation that he intended to sidestep perpetua that what he intended to do was to amass enough power to one wipe her from existence and then two recreate the multiverse in his own image now ultimately the downside to this of course is that it never came to fruition right darkseid was never able to achieve his goal but more so than that justice league odyssey was ultimately cancelled due to what were in effect lackluster sales the longer the series went on the truth about it is that it's a sad state of affairs because justice league odyssey was amazing i did the first video here and then the more i read it the more i was like i'm just gonna do this for me like i'm just gonna read it for myself i'm just not gonna make videos on it because i like it and i just i want to keep things for myself and so ultimately darkseid just kind of vanished from the dc landscape yet again uh and that really goes into what's happening right now in dc comics which is called the new frontier and this basically brings into really brings into play the notion of true form dark side and true form dark side was a really a fan concept that was created uh following or really during the depiction of darkseid by grant morrison and it was a way to kind of reconcile and answer the question if darkseid had died previously or been killed previously then why wasn't his death or why didn't his death have the same consequence that it did during final crisis when his death basically led to the destruction of the multiverse and fans basically rationalized or or kind of created the logic and saying that well those versions of dark side that we saw were simply just avatars right they were facsimiles of the true form dark side and that when true form dark side was killed that's what happened during final crisis and that's why the multiverse was starting to collapse because true form dark side was just that powerful that when he died the multiverse essentially started to go with him right and so uh with true form darkside showing up during infinite frontier number one we don't know what the play of his character is gonna be like he literally just showed back up maybe three weeks ago right so we don't know what his what is full on plan is going to be presumably it'll be something nefarious and the pursuit of the anti-life equation right i mean the guy is obnoxiously powerful uh but we don't really know what is what his grand scheme is going to be so with that being said guys hopefully this gets you guys caught up makes you guys an expert on at least the newest iteration of darkseid as he exists right now but if you guys are new here to comments explain make sure you guys hit the sub button to become part of the rob core if you guys enjoyed this video make sure you drop a like and i will catch you all later peace [Music] you

Channel: Comics Explained

Views: 584,067

Keywords: comics explained, comicsexplained, marvel explained, fluidic beats, comics, comic books, marvel, dc, infinity gauntlet, world breaker hulk, crisis on infinite earths, comic explained, infinity war, the batman who laughs, doomsday clock, Darkseid, Justice League, Justice League of America, The New 52, New 52, Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Grail, Darkseid War, Justice League Odyssey, Earth 2, Anti-Life Equasion, Zack Synder's Justice League, The Snyder Cut

Id: SJHj_XVsZ-E

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021