Superman isn't boring, he's just incredibly annoying. You can't sit there and give one superhero a dozen powers to work with, then have him struggle against random enemies. That's bullshit, and we all know it.
His name is Darkseid and he literally represents the dark side of humanity, all the selfishness and hatred and willful ignorance that we all have inside us to overcome. He can never really be defeated because dealing with that stuff is never something you finish. It’s always in there, your own personal Darkseid, trying to get you to give in. There’s not a lot of subtlety in that, Kirby says right in the name who he is and what he does, and that’s before you get to the part where he’s an eight foot-tall rock monster from space in a sleeveless mini dress. At that point, subtlety is out the window. Or at least, you’d think it would be.
In practice, Darkseid is all about subtlety, exactly because he’s drawing on those impulses that we all wish we didn’t have. Darkseid, for all his grand posturing, doesn’t always arrive with the crashing thunder of a Boom Tube and an army of parademons to conquer the planet; he sometimes shows up in your house, sitting in your favorite chair, a calm and casual reminder that there’s nowhere you can go to get away from the evil that he represents, because it’s already inside you. Seriously, it’s kind of his signature move.
And when he does send an army, it’s not always a race of alien conquerors from the far-off planet of Apokolips showing up, toppling monuments and blowing things up. Sometimes it’s the Justifiers, ordinary human beings who have allowed themselves to be taken over by their own base, petty hatreds and fears because they’ve found something that allows them to justify — there’s that lack of metaphor again — what they’re doing. Despite its name, the Anti-Life Equation, the McGuffin that he’s been looking for since 1971, is not about killing anyone. It’s about taking away their ability to choose anything other than to listen to that dark side that’s within us all, a choice that, at one point or another, we’ve all made already.
That’s how Darkseid works, and that’s what makes him so compelling and genuinely frightening — because it feels so real. Kirby was, after all, someone who had seen his share of evil in the real world, and with Darkseid, he figured out how to take those ideas and condense them into a single person. He’s the “tiger force,” the part of us that’s horrifying because we know it’s in there somewhere.
On paper, that makes him the perfect foil for Superman. Ask anybody who loves him, and they’ll tell you that Superman’s greatest power isn’t flight or heat vision, it’s the ability to inspire good in others through his example. It’s why scenes like the message carved into the moon in “The Last Days of Superman” or the talk with Regan in its modern-age equivalent are so emotionally resonant. They’re about how Superman, and by extension how superheroes as a whole, can inspire us to be better. We might not have the luxury of being fictional characters who can always get it right, but they’re always there to lead by example. If Darkseid’s the worst of us, then Superman’s the best of us, and when you see them next to each other, it makes it easy to pick a side.
