Jack Kirby stands among the most influential visual artists of the twentieth century, and The New Gods represents his most ambitious cosmological vision. After creating or co-creating Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and dozens of other characters for Marvel Comics, Kirby moved to DC and launched the Fourth World saga, an interconnected epic spanning multiple titles. The New Gods depicts the war between New Genesis, a paradise of light, and Apokolips, a hellish world ruled by the tyrant Darkseid, who seeks the Anti-Life Equation that would give him control over all sentient beings. Kirby drew on mythology, religion, and his experiences as a combat infantryman in World War II to create a science fiction cosmos grappling with ultimate questions about freedom and tyranny, faith and despair. His visual imagination exploded off the page in crackling energy and impossible machinery. The New Gods introduced concepts and characters that would influence comics for decades: Darkseid became one of the great villains of the DC Universe, while the theme of cosmic conflict between freedom and control echoed through countless subsequent stories. Kirby's work was ahead of its time, cancelled before he could complete his vision, but the Fourth World remains a monument to one artist's ambition to make superhero comics into modern mythology.