and too pat. But Rich and Alan both felt that we really needed to have that. MM: Were there any problems with Standards & Practices over Turpin’s death? BRUCE: Oh, yeah, definitely. Not even with just BS&P, but with DC Comics. Any time you kill off a character who existed in the comics, they get in there and say “Wait a minute.” This goes back to the very first conversation I had with Paul about Darkseid, when we came up with the idea of taking a hint from Kirby about the anti-life equation which Kirby never really gets around to defining in the comics. It was a cool sounding concept, and that’s Darkseid’s big motivation, but Kirby never really tells you what that is. So we took that to mean he’s kind of a psychic vampire; he feeds off the despair of others. It’s not enough to have a guy who wants to go conquer planets, there has to be
a reason why he wants to conquer planets. What he wants is to demean and debase and demoralize the people of each world and put them in abject misery so he can gain some level of power from their misery. While we were talking about that, I jumped ahead to the end of the story and went, “You know what? What he’s got to do is after Superman has defeated him, Darkseid has got to kill someone who is very close to Superman just out of pure spite.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was doing was channeling the end of the Galactus trilogy. That’s exactly what that is. It’s Galactus saying, “Well, you’ve defeated me, but since you’re not my herald anymore—bang!—you can’t ever leave this planet.” But the minute I said that, Paul said, “Yeah, that’s the way to go. So who’s he going to kill?” And I thought, “Who better? Ma and Pa Kent.” We mentioned that to DC
Previous Page Bottom: Leader of the Female Furies and servant of Darkseid— Lashina! Previous Page Top: Daily Planet funny page mock-up from “Mxyzpxylated.” Below: Superman squares off against Darkseid.
Darkseid, Lashina, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Superman and all related characters ™ and ©2004 DC Comics.