“Jack, being a Depression-era kid, hated the idea of anyone being fired. So he asked for a book that was currently without a regular writer and artist.”

[...]

“So Jack, mustering as much enthusiasm as he could for a comic he didn’t especially want to do, took over Jimmy Olsen.”

http://www.povonline.com/jackfaq/JackFaq5.htm

It was the fourth New Gods cycle title and the series where Darkseid’s first appearance lay.

My old Phil. of Sci. teacher used to hand out hypercompressed essay questions all the time, and allot us 2,000 words with which to answer them. The genius of this was that it always looked like such an easy job at first, but then it swiftly became very demanding — because the questions were extremely straightforward, but the topics they addressed were extremely complex, and so there was nothing you could do but unpack them fully if you wanted to get to a place where you could cram some kind of legitimate answer into a mere 2,000 words. Which, I should add, always came back to you with about eight hundred words of his notes attached, so don’t think he was being a jerk: he was committed to answering his questions too.

Anyway…

So Darkseid looks like an easy question, but he isn’t — and the other Fourth World characters aren’t easy questions either, but Darkseid’s the one that seems to offer the greatest phony simplicity, precisely because he’s the Big Bad. Comics fans love villains with illusory depth, villains with their “own twisted code of honour” and all that rot…the villain as a species of easy, comforting understanding both for the hero and for the reader. But of course there’s nothing worse in all the world than a villain with his own twisted code of honour…heck, there’s hardly anything as bad as a person with his own twisted code of honour!…and so we overlook a lot, we are cushioned from a lot, when we accept these villainous conventions.

So basically…it was Andrew’s politics that made me ask him to write something on Darkseid, because to me it seems natural to suggest that the themes and characters of the Fourth World were deeply sourced in Kirby’s experience of WWII, and I believe the reason Kirby didn’t make Darkseid just to be a Big Bad, is because he didn’t want him to be very comforting at all. Doctor Doom is comforting, even the Red Skull is comforting — not that either of these characters were supposed to be temperate in their villainy, but Darkseid threatens the reader (or more accurately the reader’s reading), and not just the hero. I mean, you certainly could find comfort in Darkseid if you wished to! But I think you’d be saying something about yourself if you did, eh?

That’s all pretty complicated, though!

And of course Andrew’s surprised me by taking it all in a completely different — but 100% related — direction, so I think…

Yeah. It’s going well. Woo-hoo!

Kirby’s stuff was never like other comics. That’s why he’s remembered as an innovator.