15 Facts About New Gods

1.

New Gods are a fictional extraterrestrial race appearing in the eponymous comic book series published by DC Comics, as well as selected other DC titles.

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2.

New Gods are natives of the twin planets of New Genesis and Apokolips.

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3.

New Gods Genesis is an idyllic planet filled with unspoiled forests, mountains, and rivers that is ruled by the benevolent Highfather, while Apokolips is a nightmarish, polluted, and ruined dystopia filled with machinery and fire pits that is ruled by the tyrannical Darkseid.

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4.

The characters associated with the New Gods are often collectively referred to as "Jack Kirby's Fourth World".

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5.

Idea of the New Gods had come to Jack years earlier, when he was plotting 90 percent of the "Tales of Asgard" stories in Thor.

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6.

New Gods wanted to have two planets at war and end with Ragnarok, the battle that would kill Thor's lucrative pantheon.

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7.

The first page of Orion of the New Gods showed the same scenes from Thor—a planet torn in half and armored gods holding swords and dying on a fiery battleground.

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8.

In 1976, the New Gods were featured in the last issue of 1st Issue Special, written by Gerry Conway and Dennis O'Neil and pencilled by Mike Vosburg.

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9.

The New Gods series relaunched in July 1977, and with 1st Issue Special still a relatively recent publication, it picked up where the storyline of that issue left off.

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10.

The project was mired in controversy over Kirby's insistence that the series should end with the deaths of the New Gods, which clashed with DC's demands that the New Gods could not be killed off.

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11.

Walt Simonson's Orion series, which continued to host the backup feature "Tales of the New Gods", began in Byrne's Jack Kirby's Fourth World and served as an extension of it.

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12.

Darkseid acquires the powers of the Anti-Life Equation and capitalizes on the deaths of the New Gods by using the human Jimmy Olsen as a "soul-catcher" for the Gods, from which he can claim all their powers and recreate the universe in his own image, but he is killed when the Source is able to send Darkseid's resurrected son, Orion, to rip out his heart.

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13.

One by one, the Old New Gods were destroyed by Darkseid, who became more horrific in turn as he leeched their essence from them.

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14.

All of the New Gods possess superhuman abilities of various kinds and differing degrees, including superhuman strength, stamina, reflexes, invulnerability and speed.

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15.

Writer Rachel Pollack introduced the idea in "Sacrifice of the Gods" in 1996 that the New Gods were giants and that the Boom Tube would shrink them as they traveled to normal time and space or enlarge beings who traveled to the Fourth World realm.

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