And this, after nearly two months of blogging, is the end of Kirby’s Fourth World saga. While I’ve lamented many ends over the past couple weeks, it’s when Jack was finally able to come back to DC in the 80s to wrap-up as many of the loose-ends as he could in a single graphic novel. But, luckily, even Kirby trying to end things means we can get the promise for something more afterward. Even if that afterward never came, The Hunger Dogs graphic novel and the “Even Gods Must Die” and “Road to Armagetto” stories provide us with the kind of coda only Kirby could deliver.

Where we left last was with the revelation of Orion’s paternal mystery and the death of Kalibak, his half-brother. Where we begin with our new stories is Orion’s siege of Apokolips to rescue his mother before being shot to death by Darkseid’s elite guard. While we may believe that even gods must die, we snap into Orion awakening in the opening pages of The Hunger Dogs, riddled with holes, but very much alive. The efforts of Himon and Mother Box have healed his wounds, but Apokolips plots with new machines and devices that have made it easy to destroy New Genesis with a single button press—one that’s pressed just as the floating city of Supertown takes off into the stars to find a new home free from the shadow of Darkseid.

And so it ends. The wellspring of all that was, is, and could be was closed before it could find its more proper ending in the initial run. But maybe this was for the better. We had been promised over issues and issues that we would see the final apocalyptic battle between Orion and Darkseid—but son and father failed to kill the other. The destruction comes, though, but not in the way we’re expecting. We’d been conditioned over decades to expect the galactic-scale slug-fest between these literal gods, but the end of their story is much quieter, while being all the more devastating. Orion wins simply by leaving. He exits the story with his new love, Bekka, and his mother, Tigra. He no longer needs to follow the prophecy of death that has loomed over his entire life by slaying his father in the slums of Armagetto, but he defeats Darkseid by simply being alive and happy.

While it’s the end of the Fourth World, it never does feel quite like the end. Orion is free from his prophecy, Highfather is guiding Supertown further into space to find a new home, and Apokolips is in its death throes. While providing us with an ending, Kirby still finds a way to leave the door open to explore further. Kirby understood the medium well and knew what he was creating. Comics and mythology each take the foundations of what had come before and build on it further with new voices, perspectives, and ideas. And there were always more ideas to find in Jack’s work.

Get excited. Get talking.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.