Darkseid is boring.
Yet for some reason, he gets all the glamour, gets to be behind every villainous plot, gets to be the universal Big Bad in the DC Universe.
But heck, he's not even Jack Kirby's best villain.
No, that would be the sadly forgotten Victor Volcanum!!
Whom, you might ask?
Start with a wonderfully Edgar Rice Burroughsian pastiche of an origin:
Thus begins the career of...Victor Volcanum, the most interesting villain alive!
He's even kind to his robot servants!!!
Volcanum wasn't heard from again until he was rebooted for the 90's Superboy series, where he died (again...or for the first time, or...). He had one cameo post-Infinite Crisis, but was easily beaten in a Darkseid story, so that was just obvious pro-Apokoliptian propaganda.
No, enough with the Darkseid already. We, the people of Earth, demand that if we are to conquered, desire our benevolent overlord to be...Victor Volcanum, the most interesting villain in the world!!
From Jimmy Olsen #148 (1972)
These excerpts remind me how odd was Jack Kirby's choice of words to put in boldface.
ReplyDeleteThe boldface highlights the words you would stress when declaiming the narration and dialogue orally. I just read the examples above aloud to myself and the bolded words pretty much lined up with the ones I would stress as an actor if I were performing this as part of a stage script.
ReplyDeletedngillikin, saying the dialogue aloud is what (to me) makes certain boldface words seem odd. I've no problem with lines like, "I found myself MAROONED in a hellish underworld" or "There shall be an ARMY of them!" On the other hand, in "But RESOURCEFUL Victor Volcanum did NOT die!" doesn't scan. If anything I'd expect VV to stress his name: "But resourceful VICTOR VOLCANUM did NOT die!" Similarly, "...life-giving extracts from the FIERY energies about him" sounds better as "the FIERY ENERGIES about him" because stressing just the adjective makes it sound like Vic is differentiating fiery energies from non-fiery energies. In that same sentence the "life-giving extracts" seems a better choice than "distill."
ReplyDeleteBut I guess this is just a matter of opinion, depending upon how the reader hears the words in his or her head. One thing I've noticed about Kirby is that he almost always boldfaced NOT whatever the context. Paul S. Newman had a similar quirk; he invariably boldfaced DON'T even if it threw off the rhythm of the dialogue.
I often think the easiest way to get rid of some of these "I want to rule the world" types is to let them win.
ReplyDeleteMind, I'm not talking about monsters like Darkseid, but rather those like Victor here who woke up one morning and said, "Hey, I'm better and smarter than anyone else - I should rule!"
A couple of days into the job and they'd realise how thankless, non-stop and boring the job was and they'd quietly abdicate.
So Victor Volcanum finds himself stranded in a volcano - what are the chances of that, eh? Good thing his name wasn't Stefan Sewerum, or Cyril Cesspitum!
ReplyDeleteAnd at the risk of sounding picky, if he's stuck inside a volcano, how does he get anywhere near things washed up from shipwrecks?
B.--His post-Crisis incarnation in Superboy established that their was a hidden cache of Apokoliptan tech hidden there...
ReplyDelete