Barda | Review

Barda
Writer/artist: Ngozi Ukazu
DC Comics; $16.99
Publisher’s age recommendation: 13-17 years

In 1970, famed comics artist Jack Kirby, who had by that point in his prolific career already created or co-created much of the Marvel Comics universe of characters, joined DC Comics. There he launched an ambitious three-book suite of comics telling the story of the New Gods, centered on a war between two rival cosmic superhero pantheons of his own creation. Cartoonist Ngozi Ukazu takes one strand of Kirby’s saga and uses it to weave a striking love story, and a potent portrait of a once-supporting character, in her new book Barda.

Big Barda first appeared in a 1971 issue of Mister Miracle, starring super-escape artist Scott Free, where she became his ally, love interest, and, eventually, his wife. Since then, both characters have been mainstays in the DC Universe, like a handful of other New Gods characters.

For her original graphic novel, Ukazu (creator of Check, Please! and Bunt!) makes Barda the protagonist, while telling the same essential story that Kirby did in his comics. Somewhat unusually for one of DC’s young reader focused original graphic novels, then, this isn’t any sort of radical reinvention of a character or concept, so much as a remixing and a refinement, one that honors the source material while telling a fresh story from a new perspective.

Barda lives on Apokolips, the bad-guy planet in Kirby’s mythology. An Orwellian, dystopian hellscape, it is ruled over by Darkseid, the god of evil. Raised by his lieutenant Granny Goodness, Barda is now the leader of the Female Furies, an elite squad of women warriors who are here engaged in searching the universe for “variables” for Darkseid (Ukazu doesn’t get into this here, but this is apparently part of his quest to find the Anti-Life Equation).

Though she has a position of power, Barda’s spirit is not quite as broken as Granny seems to think it is. She secretly reads from a book about an allegory of love she found on the battlefield (“A very popular book among the radicals of Apokolips,” rebel leader Himon tells her at one point).

From it, she learns a little of love and seems intrigued by the concept, believing herself to be in love with Orion, a fierce warrior from New Genesis (the good-guy planet) that she frequently meets in battle. She doesn’t really know what real love is just yet, but she will soon learn.

Proud of Barda’s recent accomplishments, Granny gives her a special task: To torture and break the will of a particularly stubborn prisoner, who is being kept in the X-Pit, an inescapable prison with an ever-changing maze. What’s so special about this prisoner? Well, for one, he keeps trying to escape and seems to get remarkably far in his efforts.

Also, his name is Scott Free.

Barda’s interactions with him awaken things within her—her lifelong appreciation of beauty, her sympathy for those weaker than her, her sense of justice and, of course, this vague idea of love she’s been wrestling with. Before long, it is not Barda who breaks Scott, but Scott who helps heal Barda, and the once-model soldier for Darkseid becomes a rebel herself, helping Scott escape Apokolips for the faraway place known as Earth and standing up to Granny and battling her own Furies (albeit in disguise; though Barda has become a new person, she hasn’t escaped Apokolips herself…at least not yet).

It’s always interesting to see how other, later artists tackle Kirby’s New Gods character designs, and that is especially the case here. Barda was originally outfitted in an elaborate headdress and suit of armor that was positively baroque by super-comics standards. Ukazu definitely simplifies many of the designs, specifically that of Barda, whose costuming is here reflective of Kirby’s original choices but is stripped down and somewhat abstracted, not unlike what often happens when filmmakers try to translate superhero costumes into live-action (although here the armor isn’t so much made to be more practical, one imagines, but to be easier to draw repeatedly over the course of scores of pages…and to better fit into Ukazu’s own style).

As for the characters themselves, they are all big-eyed and cartoonishly expressive, the better to reveal their inner thoughts and emotions without the need for superfluous dialogue or narration.

Like the story, then, Ukazu’s designs are Kirby-based but made her own, feeling true to the characters and their histories while also being something new and unique to this story.

A love story set on a world without love, with a sort of cosmic Romeo and Juliet (with a far happier ending) at its plot’s center, Barda is a magnificent superhero comic that reads like YA sci-fi, and it finds a rich, fascinating inner life in a character who has spent decades in the shadow of her husband or her teammates.

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