Darkseid is ... the ultimate evil, after all
2017 saw Jack Kirby’s characters starring in a multi-Eisner-award winning miniseries, while a big screen adaptation from director Ava Duvernay hovers tantalizingly on the horizon of potential. It feels as though the Fourth World is inching towards a true mainstream breakout, and DC’s new Female Furies, written by Cecil Castellucci and drawn by Adrian Melo (Plastic Man), is another inch forward.
Castellucci cut her teeth at DC on the trippy Shade, the Changing Girl, a modern revamp of an old DC/Vertigo standby, Shade, the Changing Man. Her Shade filtered the anxiety and rebellion of teenager-hood through alien body-swapping and cosmic poets, and Female Furies is about another kind rebellion: A fight for gender equality in a system where everyone is subservient to the caprices of the DC Universe’s biggest villain.
Female Furies #1, out on Feb. 6, tells the story of Granny Goodness and the Female Furies, the greatest fighting force in the armies of the dread Darkseid — and how even they are underestimated and objectified by the men who outrank them.
What threads did you want to pick up to bring into Female Furies?
Castellucci: When you’re reading Kirby’s version, you really see how the Female Furies are treated as second class citizens. Even though they are very important and vital and Granny is really important. I mean, there’s a reason why Barda leaves.
..when you dig deeper and you start to piece together all the things with the Female Furies, you really see that Granny Goodness, while she’s in the inner circle, she’s on the outside. And she’s in charge of the orphanage, which is woman’s work. She has this female fighting force, but [when] you see a lot of the other guards or arrow troopers or whatever talk to Barda or Guillotina or Lashina, it’s very misogynist. And I don’t think that that’s Kirby being misogynist, that’s a reflection of the time and also of the brutality of that world, that everything is pushed to 100.
It makes a horrible kind of sense that Darkseid, who is this ultimate evil character, would truly use every tool at his disposal to take power. Do you see his coercive sexual relationship with Granny in this issue as him wielding power, or him just responding to desire?
Castellucci: I think it’s a little bit of both. I mean, I also think about Darkseid being a younger man, a younger person at that time. Do you know what I mean? Just like Granny is. And I feel like that’s a different thing. I don’t know what Darkseid — I don’t know that he — I’m sure that it’s different [laughs] as anybody grows up. Things change and evolve and stuff.
I think it’s wrapped up in a lot of things, right? Like powerful men, the things that they do and the appetites that they have, and the prices that people pay for that. It’s everywhere in the news. So really it was pulled from the headlines, it just seems sort of obvious. And it seems obvious, too, that he would have a very different relationship with Granny than he would with his cronies, with the boys. Because there is that extra dynamic that is there.
Is there anything else you want people to know about the book going in?
Castellucci: I guess I would just like people to know that this is a story that’s just telling it from another point of view. It’s telling a Kirby story, but from another point of view. And that all the characters can withstand any harsh light thrown on them. I’m trying to remain as true as possible to the characters as Kirby set down.
