Girl Power on Apokolips: Ngozi Ukazu's "Barda"

 The YA graphic novel Barda by Ngozi Ukazu is a solid introduction to Jack Kirby's New Gods mythos via female-centered first romance, albeit one suitably distorted for a protagonist raised on a planet suitably named Apokalips. The graphic novel, first locally promoted on Free Comic Book Day, aroused some skepticism on how such heavy matters could be adapted for a younger audience in a world of sensitivity readers. One would hope that the name of the planet, Apokolips, would be a sufficient clue to the unpleasantness to come!

The first line of the graphic novel honors the epic tradition of immediately establishing the topic of the tale; at the end, both the first and the last sentence are true, Each Female Fury, the elite force of Apokolips under Granny Goodness, herself under her lord and master Darkseid, illustrates a different aspect of the continual abuse Apokalips offers. Mad Harriet's experience in the X-Pit has broken her mind entirely; she laughs loudly and inappropriately. Stompa, the "big guy" of the group, is driven by anger and sorrow fed into anger from the loss of a sibling who did not survive the X-pit. Bernadeth, the sister of Darkseid's lieutenant Desaad, has channeled her love of learning into the service of her tyrant; she can learn new things, but only inside a narrow field. Even here, much of her love of learning must have been extinguished, since Stompa is functionally illiterate and the rest of the Furies do not read the mission papers. Lashina is not from an Apokalips, but rather from a world conquered by Darkseid; this is colonialist trauma, reflected in Lashina's non-white skin, which contrasts with Kirby's original model. Auralie, the acrobat, indulges her kinetic freedom by secretly dancing.

Barda, although the most emotionally stable of thegroup, is not free from trauma. Her upbringing on Apokalips in the orphanage of Granny Goodness, whose own traumas are not the focus of this work, has warped her understanding of the world.

This graphic novel is a tale of trauma and war, and therefore at least one of the band must die; in a world called Apokalips, it will not be a pleasant death. The doomed member perishes here in a more effective way than in her original post-mortem appearance.

Barda, the protagonist - almost entirely avoiding the epithet "Big," although there are plenty of panels contrasting her size with the diminutive Granny Goodness - undergoes substantial emotional growth as the plot continues. Since the ending point was preestablished, the starting point is different from the Kirby run; or maybe not, since Barda's point of view was not centered there and she first appeared on Earth in her beau's book. Barda is the New Gods graphic novel equivalent of the feminist updates of Classical Mythology such as Circe or Stoned, a well0written companion to the male-focused original presentation.