Free Comic Inside: Darkseid Shows Off His Slick Ride

I was going to do a Transformers mini-comic for this month’s Free Comic Inside until today’s Morning Article Link, which featured a Jack Kirby-penned story for the Super Powers Collection tie-in comic involving Darkseid’s failing to invade Earth because his minions were worried about attacking without Darkseid’s order. It made me wonder how the Super Powers Collection mini-comics used the lord of Apokolips. Turns out they used him to sell toys. Shocking, I know.

This comes from the second series of Super Powers comics. Thus far I think I’ve only been on the first set. So did they improve between sets?

As usual, no credits for these things.

Batman, Firestorm, and Red Tornado are testing out a new vehicle, the Delta Probe. Darkseid sees Red Tornado while spying on our heroes and decides he wants him, but not for the same reason he wanted Wonder Woman in the “Super Powers” years of Super Friends/Super Powers Team, which I only bring up because the Kenner comics use the Parademon design from that show (or vice versa, most likely) as well as replacing the boom tubes of the comics with the Star Gates of the TV show. That change I don’t understand. Why not use the actual transport method from the comics? I even understand the Parademons being changed to look like demons, and I’ll be honest I prefer their design over the ones in the comics. Although now I wonder what the design was in the aforementioned tie-in shelf comics.

Thus Darkseid breaks out his own toy vehicle, the Darkseid Destroyer…which sounds like the name you would use for something to destroy Darkseid but I digress. Darkseid wants to capture and replicate Red Tornado (and speaking of the show he was never in it…when he showed up in that Justice League Of America comic I had no idea who he was, and I watched Super Friends every Saturday morning I could and as much of the weekday syndicated reruns as I could catch. I don’t remember him being on there, but it’s been years since I’ve seen all of them. Anyway, the Darkseid Destroyer is a very “toyetic” vehicle. It has a center pod, two wing seats for the Parademons, and as we see later can shoot Darkseid’s chair out of the back. The Delta Probe, or Delta Probe One, was featured in the intro if not the actual episodes of Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians. Funny how the version everyone likes, even if they hated Super Friends, is the one that was a pure toy-selling series.

Darkseid attacks our heroes, and the Destroyer holds its own against Firestorm and Red Tornado, capturing them in a stasis field. Batman uses the Delta Probe’s “stun bomb” to immobilize the stasis ray and I’m not sure either weapon works that way. Also the “bomb” looks more like an energy weapon. Then things really get confusing. Darkseid decides to use his Omega Beams, the powerful energy from his eyes that in every version I’ve seen only Superman can stand against. Well, I guess the Delta Probe can as well because Batman says he’s deploy the Omega Shield. Except that I can’t tell from the art if it’s supposed to be a shield or a force field because the dialog mentions that the beams can track people, except it’s actually going in a straight line in this art.

They ended up in a cornfield.

Yep, Firestorm can apparently counter Darkseid’s Omega Beams. Sort of. They all end up in one of Darkseid’s prison dimensions, as Firestorm puts it, because of course Darkseid has a bunch of dimensions just to hold prisoners in. He’s frickin’ Darkseid! The Darkseid destroyer shows off the toy’s feature of the side seats and cockpit chair coming off of the main ship (which is now pilotless) to attack the heroes…although the Parademons can fly. Or maybe that was only the TV show and regular comics. We’ll find out in a future installment I guess. Red Tornado takes out one of the Parademons while Firestorm turns the other’s chair into a cage. Then Batman tells the others to let them all be hit with the Omega Beams again, which somehow sends them back to Earth, trapping Darkseid and the Parademons until he can blast himself with his own beams. Which considering how they work shouldn’t actually require a mirror as Firestorm jokes.

So this is better than some of the other stories? Yes, actually. While more interested in pushing the two vehicles than Darkseid’s action figure (the mini-comics are supposed to present scenarios that help kids create the adventures–which they’ll ignore in favor of their own ideas usually), it’s a a decent story. It does fall into the same trap as the others by being almost all-action, but it doesn’t feel as short. It feels like a short story still but it feels like a full adventure at least. That said, either the writer or the artist got some facts wrong. Boom Tubes, not Star Gates. I don’t know why the mini-comics or Super Friends/Super Powers Team changed that, cool as the Star Gate effect looked. The Omega Beams don’t act properly and since when can Firestorm’s powers do anything to the Omega Beams? Good job otherwise, though. NEXT time we’re doing the next Transformers: Armada mini-comic though.