Review: New Gods Book One: Bloodlines trade paperback (DC Comics)

[A series on post-Jack Kirby New Gods titles by guest reviewer Zach King. Zach writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]

“DC started this series with another writer … So right there you have six issues where no one was at the wheel … I was so mired in the wrong direction I didn’t know how to get out of it. It was not a very good comic, and I deserve a pretty good share of the blame.” - Mark Evanier

In hindsight, we can look back at the conditions that drove Jack Kirby away from DC Comics in the 1970s and back into the arms of his erstwhile employer Marvel and think, “Were they crazy?” If you have the King working for you, wouldn’t you do anything to keep him? And if you’re going to resurrect his most earnest creative property - the New Gods of the Fourth World - wouldn’t you want him to do it?

My last reviews took stock of the post-Kirby New Gods revivals and found them, more or less, wanting. Without Kirby’s breakneck enthusiasm or editorial support, those series puttered along until cancellation, ending on cliffhangers and finales that didn’t gel with Kirby’s intended direction. Today, we’re jumping into attempts to bring the New Gods into the unified continuity borne out of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and who better to helm such a revival than Kirby’s own apprentice, Mark Evanier?

Kirby had come back to DC in 1985 with The Hunger Dogs, ostensibly a concluding chapter to his Fourth World Saga, but in the post-Crisis world, the door was open to reintroduce those characters into a new landscape. Marv Wolfman and John Byrne did some work reconnecting their well-received Superman reboot to the likes of Mister Miracle and Darkseid, and Byrne continued in that vein with Len Wein and John Ostrander on the line-wide crossover Legends (1986), which posited Darkseid as the ur-schemer of DC’s villains. Meanwhile, Jim Starlin and Mike Mignola brought us Cosmic Odyssey (1988), in which Darkseid teamed with DC’s best and brightest to fight the Anti-Life Entity.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

So it was that Evanier and co-writer/penciller Paris Cullins took over the mantle of the New Gods, the beginning of which is collected in New Gods Book One: Bloodlines, with Starlin stepping in to write three of the first four issues. I don’t think Evanier is entirely fair to his work, because Bloodlines isn’t as bad as he claims. It’s not Kirby, and it spins its wheels rather ponderously for a while, but it starts to approach some of the tone of the original Kirby comics. Put another way, it’s a decent enough cover band, reminding one often enough of what one liked about the original.

Bloodlines collects the first fourteen issues of the 1989 New Gods volume, exactly half of the run. We get three story arcs - Orion’s burial of Forager following the events of Cosmic Odyssey, Orion’s quest to rescue his mother Tigra from Apokolips, and the innocent New Yorkers caught up in Darkseid’s search for the Anti-Life Equation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Evanier spends most of his time with Orion and Darkseid, though the likes of Lightray, Metron, and Kalibak are also threaded into the book. Here, Evanier sticks mostly to Kirby’s characterization - “playing the hits,” as it were - scoring his most dramatic notes in the titular “Bloodline Saga,” which sees Orion wrestle with his own dark paternity.

Of the characters at Evanier’s disposal, he diverges significantly from Kirby’s Kalibak, casting Darkseid’s firstborn as more than just a brute. Instead, Evanier posits Kalibak as a tragic figure, spurned by his father’s disinterest and eager to prove himself against his half-brother Orion. All the while, though, Kalibak wrestles with his own nascent tenderness for living things, as in one memorable moment when he cares for a small creature; when he’s caught out by one of his soldiers, however, Kalibak squashes the furry critter in his fist, refusing to show gentility. Just as Orion cannot accept the darker parts of himself, neither can Kalibak embrace the warmth and compassion within himself. It’s a clever bit of inversion, fueled by Kalibak’s desire to feel his father’s love.

There’s a fourth storyline woven through this volume, and it’s a surprising bit of political intrigue for a cosmic title like New Gods. While the gods continue to war, Highfather finds himself the unlikely victim of a military coup, led by the Commander. (Evanier has lost none of Kirby’s blunt naming conventions!) The Commander declares that Highfather has made New Genesis weak by seeking peace, advocating instead for direct war with Apokolips. It’s the sort of allegorical storytelling Kirby did best in his Fourth World Saga, though Evanier takes a little too long to get to the point: despite Highfather’s anxiety about the Commander, Highfather wins easily in an election. “Throughout New Genesis, only the candidates are surprised,” Evanier narrates; “though the incitement of the Commander has been heard by all, few have accepted such a change of foundation.”

There is nothing to fear, the book promises; things will not change that much. Indeed, the biggest change is Paris Cullins doing the art instead of Jack Kirby, and Cullins acquits himself mightily in the King’s footsteps. Having cut his teeth at DC on Blue Beetle and Blue Devil, Cullins’s proportions are a little more realistic than Kirby’s, but he brings a similar sense of heightened exaggeration. His figures seldom seem static or at rest, often perching on the verge of action, ready to bound forward. We haven’t seen much from Cullins lately, and I’m not sure why that is, but Bloodlines makes a strong case for someone to put Cullins on a new book.

But as clear as Cullins’s pencils are, the storytelling in Bloodlines is occasionally more obtuse. As true to form as his obsession with his parentage might be, Orion dithers for fourteen issues on the same point, questioning whether he is truly his father’s son. Meanwhile, Metron and Highfather relitigate the Pact more than once, implying that there is more to the story but leaving Lightray (and the reader) baffled as to what’s being left unsaid. Perhaps the answers are to come in Book Two, Advent of Darkness, but Bloodlines instead concludes with a coda focused on the New York characters who have joined the story, including Eve Donner, the suicidal writer who falls for Lightray.

Just when the characterization gets going, though, Evanier and Cullins throw a giant monster into the plot. In the final two issues, it’s the Reflektorr, a phantasmic being that appears as its beholder’s greatest fear (cop Dave Lincoln sees a dinosaur, while Orion sees a mutated version of himself). In this sense, Evanier and Cullins are truest to Kirby’s spirit, creating new characters and creatures with every issue; I lost count very quickly in Bloodlines but was surprised to see that only one, the female Forager, has had any sort of continuity afterlife (in the ill-remembered Countdown to Final Crisis). What I have always loved about the New Gods is their larger-than-life cast and even bigger allegorical aspirations, and on that count Bloodlines is a roaring success. But at fourteen issues, one can’t help but think the King might have done a leaner job of it.

Up next, there came a time when the old gods … lived?! We’ll see if it all makes sense in New Gods, Book Two: Advent of Darkness.