Clever

can be so cruel.

The everything man,

from the anyverse.

We gotta party on the left, a party on the right.

We gotta party for our motherfucking right to fight.

The struggle between what I intended

and what I did not intend.

Thinking in terms of ideas

destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

For all his intimidating physicality,

Darkseid is very rarely seen in "action." He doesn't punch through a wall and start trading haymakers with Superman, his actions are geared towards conditioning people to embrace and exploit their own base hatred and fear. That's how he wins and remakes the world in his own image, by dividing humanity and spreading the evil of hate, fear and ignorance, allowing them to believe that they can justify believing that someone else is somehow less of a person.

Unlike most villains, Darkseid's ultimate goal doesn't really involve killing anyone. He's devoted not to death but to Anti-Life -- described by Walter Simonson "the outside control of all living thought," a slavery that masquerades as freedom by allowing its victims to give in to the dark side of humanity. Again: No subtlety whatsoever.

But it's what he does. In Forever People, it takes the form of an amusement park where the exhibits are his victims, conditioning people to ignore the suffering of their fellow man, terrifying the children who realize what's happening while the adults become more an more jaded. In Mr. Miracle, he commissions a trap for the world's greatest escape artist that doesn't involve ropes, chains, or locks, but rather a building full of people who have been convinced that Mr. Miracle isn't one of them, that he's something other, something that isn't a person and is therefore there to be destroyed.

It might not be subtle, but at the same time, it's hardly the grandstanding form of blow-up-the-world evil that comic books have a reputation of portraying. This is a villain who exploits the small selfishness that we all see, experience, and even commit on a daily basis and shows how it all adds up to towering evil, and that makes him one of the most genuinely terrifying villains in comics. Darkseid's not real, but the evil he dabbles in is.

Why bother to compete

with the universe?

The struggle of his own littleness

to grasp the infinite.

Nature might stand up,

And say to all the world, 'This was a man!'

Relies, like an overgrown infant,

on always being forgiven.