New Gods
fictional race appearing in the New Gods comic book series
The New Gods are a fictional extraterrestrial species appearing in the eponymous comic book series published by DC Comics, as well as in other DC titles. Created and designed by Jack Kirby, they first appeared in February 1971 in New Gods #1.
Publication history
Volume 1 (1971)
The New Gods are natives of the twin planets of New Genesis and Apokolips. New Genesis is an idyllic planet filled with unspoiled forests, mountains, and rivers and ruled by the benevolent Highfather, while Apokolips is a nightmarish, polluted dystopia filled with machinery and fire pits, ruled by the tyrannical Darkseid. The two planets were once part of the same world, a planet called Urgrund (German for "primeval ground"), but it was split apart millennia ago after the death of the Old Gods during Ragnarök.
The characters associated with the New Gods are often collectively referred to as "Jack Kirby's Fourth World". Unhappy with Marvel Comics at the time, as he had created or co-created a plethora of characters without having copyright or creative custody of them, he turned to rival publisher DC Comics, with his sketches and designs for a new group of heroes and villains. According to Marc Flores, who writes under the pen name Ronin Ro:
The 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. He wanted to have two planets at war and end with Ragnarok, the battle that would kill Thor's lucrative pantheon. Instead, he tried the idea in his Inhumans stories.
The public source identifies “New Gods” as fictional race appearing in the New Gods comic book series. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Gods, fictional and race.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1784409. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “New Gods” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.