“A big guy with wings”

Zauriel was meant to be Hawkman or at least that was Grant Morrison’s plan when he took over the reigns of the 1990s Justice League. DC would not let Morrison use Katar Hol, the previous Hawkman, as that character had become the poster-child for continuity-hell and it was felt that the name should be left fallow for a few years. Yet Morrison still wanted “a big guy with wings” in the Justice League so Zauriel descended upon the world in JLA #6 (June 1997) with full-blown theological back story and epic possibilities.

Grant Morrison's initial sketch of Zauriel from JLA: The Deluxe Edition Vol. 2.

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In the first part of this series we looked at the publication background of the character and in the second part we looked at the template character, the Kingdom Come Magog of Earth-22. In part-three we took a moment to look at the various humans who have claimed the name Gog. Now, in this last part of or profile we at last get to the New Earth Magog, the JSA and JSA All-Star’s David Reid.

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There have been three distinct humans who have claimed the name Gog. The first two were child survivors of very different tragedies in Kansas on separate parallel Earths. The first was a survivor of the Kansas Holocaust on Earth-22 that was precipitated by that world’s Magog. The second was a survivor of an alien attack on Topeka during the Imperiex War. Each of them began by worshipping Superman, but became disillusioned with him and came to see him as an anti-christ. Permutations of history have removed these men from existence, but  echoes of them remain in a third man who was driven insane as the harbinger of true Gog.

The disastrous events on Earth-22 were felt throughout the Multiverse. One potential future of Earth-22, beyond even the events of Kingdom Come, saw one of the few survivors of the Kansas Holocaust grow up to become Superman’s most devoted disciple. Minister William worshipped Superman as a saviour. He helped people in hospital, schooled them, and took on the duties of any good pastor. His faith was driven by the belief that Superman was a god who had sent the Kansas tragedy to test the world and to redeem it. William believed he was special because Superman had “spared him” from the tragedy. In a manner it was William’s way of dealing with the horrors he had seen and to try to give a meaning to the senseless deaths around him.

Eventually Clark Kent (who had left behind the Superman costume) was forced to explain to William that he wasn’t a god and that he really should do something else with his life. Matthew’s philosophy was shattered. He torched his church and stumbled through the streets asking people, begging people “Tell me what to  believe!” He was found by the Phantom Stranger who delivered a scroll from a council of cosmic beings called the Quintessence (Ganthet, Zeus, Shazam, and Highfather). The Quintessence gave him power and knowledge of time travel so that he could precipitate the Kansas Holocaust early thus allowing them to manipulate the course of history on Earth-22.

The power unhinged Matthew’s  mind and transformed him into the a demigod monster called Gog. He  murdered the Clark Kent that had just spoken to him and then travelled back in time to the previous day and killed him all over again. He repeat the process day and after day as he slowly worked his way back through time killing Supermen as he went (New Years Evil: Gog #1). Gog’s actions of killing younger and younger versions of Clark Kent should have ripped the time-line apart, but it exposed the existence of something previously unknown to the Linear Men (the guardians of Linear Time). A phenomena called Hypertime that allowed for the existence of multiple, contradictory realities. In essence Gog was jumping between a ladder of universes that were almost identical to Earth-22.

Gog rampaged across Hypertime killing consecutively earlier and earlier Supermen until he reached the Kingdom Come era of Earth-22 and discovered that this Superman had a child by Wonder Woman. Gog kidnapped the child and journeyed to Earth-0 where he hoped to recreate the Kansas Holocaust by killing Captain Atom. It took the joint efforts of the Supermen, Wonder Women and Batmen from both Earth-0 and Earth-22 with the help of Rip Hunter and the grown Jonathan Kent II (the kidnapped child) to stop Gog (The Kingdom #1-2).  Today the events of Gog’s rampage, and even his existence, appears to have been forgotten. The Infinite Crisis reordered the Multiverse and while Earth-22 still exists the Crisis did erased the duplicate Earth-22s whose Supermen Gog had killed.

A second Gog, this time one native to Earth-0 (the foundation Earth), was also the survivor of a tragedy in Kansas. But, this Gog was one of the survivors of the destruction of Topeka during the opening stages of the Imperiex War. He was saved by Superman who said he’d find the boy’s parents, but they were already dead. In the chaos and confusion it was the boy who found their bodies. The knowledge of his saviour and his inability to save his parents would haunt the boy for the rest of his life (Action Comics #813). As an adult he devoted his life to the study of time travel with the intention of saving the rest of his family who had been killed during the Imperiex War. It took him over thirty years, but he eventually discovered a method of time travel.

Cruelly he found that his method would only take him back a short distance in time, not even far enough back to save his parents. He made thousands of attempts over the next two hundred years, but all resulted in failure. Eventually his motivation changed from idolisation of Superman into hatred for his inability to save his parents. In search of revenge he rewrote his own history, imprinting on his child self a new compulsion – kill Superman! (Action Comics #825).

This Gog, or another version of him, appeared in Smallville to ambush Superboy (Conner Kent, a teenage clone of Superman) and his Teen Titan friends in a feint to draw Superman’s attention. Their battle tore through the historic centre of the town with Superman and Superboy drawing Gog’s fire while Kid Flash and Wonder Girl got the civilians to safety. Gog’s teleporting kept Superman and Superboy off-balance and they both took a pounding. Gog cut Superman with his trident and injected liquefied kryptonite into the wound. He then beat Superman until he believed he was dead and then vanished (Action Comics #815-816).

Next Gog recruited a mild-mannered repo-man called Jesse and turned him into a monster which fought the slowly weakening Superman (Action Comics #822-823). The Kryptonite poison caused Superman to become weaker and weaker. After fighting the Kandorian zealot Preus (another of Gog’s lieutenants) Superman was exhausted, but he was confronted by a legion of duplicated Gogs. The future Gog had used his time travel expertise to duplicate himself into an army (Action Comics #824).

Superman’s saviour that day came in the unlikely form of the monster that had once saved him. Doomsday, newly sentient, refused to allow anybody else to kill Superman and waded into Gog’s legions. Even after Gog appeared to capture Superman Doomsday remained in the field. It was inspired by Superman’s courage to mend its ways and to adopt Superman’s colours. Doomsday’s League of Superman battled the Army of Gogs in a single battle that ranged for a century. The prime Gog eventually grew weary and withdrew from the battle to amused himself by torturing his captive Superman. However, even that grew tiresome after two centuries.

Superman and Gog grew old together. For five hundred years the two white-haired enemies were locked in a seemingly eternal game of resolve – the shackled Superman and the inquisitional Gog. With his last breadth Superman shamed Gog and dispelled his hatred. A moment later Doomsday breached Gog’s defences. He could have killed Gog, but the old man convinced him that together they could undo the future they had created. They travelled back in time and undid the actions of their past selves, nullifying their own existence as history was over written (Action Comics #825).

The history of Earth-0 healed itself and erased the multiple paradoxes created by the many Gog and Doomsday time duplicates. A Gog still existed, but he only had fractured memories of what had gone before.

The new Gog was William Matthews, an American missionary to Zaire who disappeared for several years after discovering an ancient temple buried deep in the Congo. Inside it he found the remains of the true Gog (a dormant Old God from the Third World which had come before New Gods’ Fourth World) Matthew’s took Gog’s name and staff and sought to kill the false gods who claimed to protect the Earth. Through Gog’s power Matthews glimpsed the Kansas Tragedy of Earth-22 and believed that only Gog could prevent it.  He claimed “I believe that the unification of good and evil will lead to the future. ” and sought to pave the way for the true Gog’s emergence. He used his new superpowers to attacked Superman before vanishing again (a retcon of the Action Comics plotline)

After being driven away by Superman Matthews began hunting super criminals who claimed to be gods or demigods. His murder of the Teen Titan’s villain Goth caught the attention of the new JSA. Starman tried to put out the fire caused by Goth’s death by creating a miniature black hole. In doing so he accidentally created a wormhole between Brooklyn on Earth-0 and the instability created by the explosion on Earth-22 that had killed the majority of its superhumans. The Superman of Earth-22 was pulled through the wormhole and arrived on Earth-0 without any knowledge of how the war on his Earth had ended (Justice Society of America (vol. 2) #9).

The Earth-22 Superman saw the JSA’s world as a Heaven where their efforts to reach out to the younger superheroes was in stark contrast to his own actions on Earth-22. He believed his world had been destroyed and tried to make a place for himself with the JSA (Justice Society of America (vol. 2) #10). Mister America was brought in by the FBI to investigate Gog’s murders. The media had called him the “Heartbreak Slayer”, but Mister America eventually discovered the name of the real killer. The Earth-22 Superman instantly recognised the similarity of the name with his own Magog. His suspicions were confirmed when he and the Earth-0 Superman saved Hercules from Gog’s attack (Justice Society of America (vol. 2) #13).

The Earth-22 Superman and the JSA tracked Matthews/Gog to the Congo, but he attacked them in their headquarters before they could mobilise. The JSA fought the crazed Matthews back to the Gog Temple in the Congo. They watched as Matthews dissolved into energy and was absorbed by a giant Gog head.

Seconds later the head came to life and ripped itself and its body out of the ground. The now awake golden giant told the stunned JSA “People of Earth. I come in pease.” (Justice Society of America vol. 2 #10-15, “Thy Kindgom Come”).

Each of the three human Gogs were driven to an almost insane hatred of Superman by the power they possessed. Yet none of them except Matthew Williams even suspected the true origins of the their name or knew of the entity that had inspired them.

Next: The true Gog.

Last time we examined the publishing history of Magog and the differing ideas of his creators. Now we look at the template character, the Magog of the Kingdom Come universe. Magog is a compelling character in Kingdom Come. He has a pathos that many of the younger characters lack. He obviously has history with Superman, but a lot of that back story and the details of about him after his capture are left out of the mini-series. Therefore I’ve included notes and quotes from the KC novelization to flesh out the details on this Magog.

There are is a continuum of parallel universes that vibrate along each other like the strings of a musial scale. Each universe contains an alternative version of the Earth and its inhabitants. In the foundation universe, Universe Designate-0 by the Monitors’ counting, Magog is David Reid – a veteran soldier, the great-grandson of a US President, and the avatar of the Gog entity. However, his destiny is forever tied to the fatal actions of an older Magog from a parallel universe.

Universe Designate-22 was a universe whose history ran approximately 20-30 years ahead of David Reid’s Universe. The history of its Earth, Earth-22, diverged from Earth-0 when the original Justice League and Society failed to provide adequate inspiration and leadership for the newest generation of superhumans. Their children and grand-children grew up as super-powered delinquents and amoral vigilantes. It was the Magog of Earth-22 who served as their figure-head and role model. The first real confrontation between these generations came when the Joker murdered the entire Daily Planet staff.

Elliot S. Maggin’s novelization of Kingdom Come goes into more detail about Magog and the Joker’s attack on the Daily Planet. Like Superman, Magog operated in Metropolis and was a particular target for Lois Lane’s investigative journalism. Magog had been inspired by Superman, but came to see himself as Superman’s heir and grew frustrated with Superman’s reluctance to step aside.

Lois died not when the Joker attacked the Daily Planet’s news room, but during his escape – she gave her life to prevent him escaping. Superman captured the Joker and handed him over to the authorities. It was while the police were moving the Joker that Magog attacked him. Many commentators found it ironic that his man who had been so often the target of Lois Lane’s ire would be the man who avenged her murder.

Magog’s ascension had as much to do with the lack of Lois Lane’s constant inquisition as it did with Superman’s absence.

Magog killed the Joker moments before Superman got to him. Superman arrested Magog for the Joker’s murder, but public opinion was on his side and the courts acquitted Magog of any wrong doing. Superman was horrified and withdrew from public life leaving the protection of the public to their new blood thirsty champion. Superman’s disappearance left Magog as his de facto successor.

Ten years later, Magog was the leader of a group called the Justice Battalion made up of the Peasemaker, Nightshade, Captain Atom, Alloy (a gestalt of the Metal Men), Judomaster, and Peter Cannon. They fought the Parasite from St Louis to the corn fields of Kansas in a brawl they should have won easily. It ended violently when the Parasite ripped open Captain Atom causing a nuclear explosion that killed a million civilians and left the Kansas heartland an erradiated wilderness.

Commentators would justifiably call the incident the “Kansas Holocaust.” It was finally enough to drag Superman out from his retirement, but his attempt to rebuild the Justice League was too late. They eventually found Magog haunted and solitary wandering the Kansas wastes.

He told Superman,

“Your fault… you bastard. The world changed… but you wouldn’t. So they chose me. They chose the man who would kill over the man who wouldn’t… and now they’re dead. A million ghosts. Punish me. Lock me away. Kill me. Just make the ghosts go away.”

Events moved quickly after that Magog’s capture. Superman’s Justice League creating a Gulag to contain the younger heroes and villains who would not join them. The superhuman community split into three factions – Superman’s increasingly authortarian League, Lex Luthor’s villains, and Batman’s non-aligned outsiders.

And one day, from out of the desert wandered Magog, helmet in hand. He knocked politely on a pillar of the enormous Gulag structure. No one heard him knock, but he stood there quietly and decorously until a monitor alarmed Captain Comet to his presence.

Comet knew immediately that Magog was there, but, so help him, he hesitated to go down and greet the felon. “Where’s he been?” Comet barked into his Justice League communications Link.

“Colorado,” said the Living Doll, from the New Oa satellite. She scanned through a file and found the reference. “A previously abandoned federal prison in Golden, Colarado.”

“Well, he’s not there now,” Comet said. “He’s here. He escaped. Isn’t Superman monitoring him?”

“I’m sure he is.”

“Was,” Comet said.

“Is,” the Living Doll repeated.

And from the doorway of Captain Comet’s command centre Superman’s voice said, “I saw him leave. I knew he was coming here. Let him in.”

Eventually Comet walked up behind Magog in the shadow of the Gulag. Magog turned and smiled lightly, putting his helmet and energy spear on the ground as the older man approached.

“We’ve not met,” Comet said. “I’m Adam Blake,” and he extended a hand.

“I’m Magog”, the caller said. He extended his own hand to take Comet’s, the first-time someone had shaken his hand in years, he thought. “I need a place to think. I need a place out of the sun. I understand that this is the village of the damned. I understand that this is a place where I might be welcome.”

“Yes,” Comet said. “Come in. We’ll find you a room.”

Kindom Come novelization (Elliot S. Maggin), page 212

Magog was content to remain in the Gulag in quite penance, but war came to them all when the others prisoners revolted. The League arrived to quell the uprising, but Luthor’s mind controlled Captain Marvel broke the Gulag open starting a massive superhuman melee. Batman’s forces interceded to help, but it was too late. Superman alone may had been able to contain the battle, but he was held in check by the mind controlled Captain Marvel. Through the melee with only see glimpses of Magog. He’s stands at the centre of the action, but it looks like he’s refusing to take sides. He is now just an observer to the war that he helped spawn.

It was ultimately the human authorities who took the decision to drop an atomic bomb on the super-humans – a last desperate attempt to stop the melee before it consumed the entire world. Superman again could have stopped the bomb, but in a last moment of clarity Captain Marvel realised that stopping the bomb would doom the world. He pushed Superman aside and detonated the bomb himself.

Magog was one of the few survivors of the explosion. He helped pull a few others including Tokyo Rose behind Green Lantern’s shields before the blast hit. He was also with the suvivors when Superman addressed the United Nations and when Wonder Woman was restored to her position on Paradise Island. From what little was shown of him he appeared quite repentant. Magog is shown several times carrying or caring for Tokyo Rose so she may have been somebody close to him. The novelization says that be became a dean of students at a new colony/school on Paradise Island for those arcane men and women who sought to retreat from the mortal world. Magog was also show having a quiet drink in a scene in The Kingdom: Offspring #1.

This Magog, the Magog of Earth-22, was not a super villain. He was a man of convictions and strong beliefs who thought that lethal force could be justified. The destruction that was wrought upon that Earth was not solely his fault. When Superman stood down he implicitly, whether intentional or otherwise, signalled to everybody that Magog was right.

Kingdom Come

The names Gog and Magog spring up time and again in the writing of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Whether they are people, nations, or monsters isn’t entirely clear and shifts from case to case. That hasn’t stopped people claiming them as the ancestors of the Goths, Irish, Finns, or a host of other ethnic groups. There are also English stories that claim the British Isles were settled by survivors of the Trojan Wars led by Brutus of Troy. Brutus had to pacify the giants that already lived on the islands and a particularly gnarly one called Gogmagog. Two wooden giants called Gog and Magog have been part of the parade of the Lord Mayor City of London for over six hundred years.

The name Magog was adopted by Mark Waid and Alex Ross for one of the protagonists in their Kingdom Come series. According to the Kingdom Come Companion the golden armour worn by Magog was designed to resemble the golden calf that the Israelites worshipped whilst Moses’ back was turned. Their Magog became the false god that a younger generation turned to during Superman’s absence. It is telling that Ross used same the person as the figure model for both Superman and Magog – the Christ and Anti-Christ figures.

When I came up with the design for Magog, I was only parodying Rob Liefeld and his design for Cable, and it wound up being a strangely attractive design despite my efforts to make it as ugly as possible. It felt like there was an element of Kirby in it, even thought it was this gross distortion of the history of superhero design.

Alex Ross, Kingdom Come Companion, page 243

The identity of Magog and the unseen Gog was not revealed in Kingdom Come. Magog was a cypher figure, a plot device that served to force Superman into retirement and then to bring him back again.

This is what a post-Liefeld Cable drawn by Leifeld looked like:

The resemblance between Cable and Magog now becomes quite obvious. However, Magog wasn’t even mentioned in Alex Ross’s original proposal for the Heroic Age (the project that became Kingdom Come). Ross told CBR that Magog was originally Mark Waid’s idea:

Now, wasn’t Magog a character created as a response to all those characters that were popping up in the early ’90s?

Yeah. That’s a character that Mark Waid invented that was really just put to me like come up with the most God awful, Rob Liefeld sort of design that you can. What I was stealing from was – really only two key designs of Rob’s – the design of Cable. I hated it. I felt like it looked like they just threw up everything on the character – the scars, the thing going on with his eye, the arm, and what’s with all the guns? But the thing is, when I put those elements together with the helmet of Shatterstar — I think that was his name — well, the ram horns and the gold, suddenly it held together as one of the designs that I felt happiest with in the entire series.

Really?

Yeah. I don’t think it ended up looking like a buffoonish character. In a way, that gold rams head affect took it to a new level of almost biblical metaphor that had a nice little touch to it. It’s the kind of thing I should have been striving, but it was much more accidental.

Waid’s Gog Vs Ross’s Gog

During the 90s a Kingdom Come spin-off series was planned called the Kingdom. It would have been set in the present day, but the ongoing series fell through leaving Waid and Ross with their own versions of Magog and Gog. Waid got to tell his version of the story first with a one-shot called New Years Evil: Gog #1. It introduced a mentally unstable survivor of the Kansas tragedy who was elevated to near godhood by a group of cosmic beings. This Gog came to see Superman as the anti-Christ and sought to turn the world against him.

Mark Waid described this Gog’s connection to Superman:

It [the first issue of the aborted Kindgom series] was the story of how Magog came to be, the story of how Gog showed up in the present-day DC Universe and transformed a young man – who was, as we would learn, the sidekick that Superman had for about six months during his first couple of years as a defender of truth, justice and the American way – the untold, forgotten story of a kid who used to be under Superman’s wing and was adopted by Gog.

Mark Waid, Kingdom Come Companion, page 226

However, the Kingdom became something different and they never got to the Magog part. Waid’s Gog later appeared a couple of times as a Superman villain.

Meanwhile, Alex Ross has meditated on his own vision of who Gog was. Even before Waid’s Kingdom mini-series was published Ross has a solid idea of connecting Magog back to the Kirby influence he had felt come through in his design. The battles in Kingdom Come have a parallel with the war of the Old Gods in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythology so Ross’s idea was that Gog was one of the Old Gods, a survivor of the world that split in two to become New Genesis and Apokolips.

And there will be a god, one of the old gods from that planet, who survived. He will be here on Earth, and he will be called Gog. [...] He winds up looking like this giant Kirbyesque character who has big, gold horns and a metallic body, and he in effect is this very large character who somewhat looks like the ancient ancestor of both Highfather and Darkseid mixed into one. He’s going to be foreshadowing, by his actions, the future of Kingdom Come, and Magog will be this young guy, a parody of a Rob Liefeld young superhero wanna-be, who somehow gets linked up with Gog. Gog would have been, as we were discussing when Mark and I finally got into conference over this, martyred to a degree by Magog; Magog would be driven to the point of killing him. We didn’t have a reason for why this happened, but we were taking every single thing that we could think of from Kingdom Come and trying to throw it into this to make it work.

Alex Ross, Kingdom Come Companion, page 243

That quote from Alex Ross was published in 1998 and is really close to the story that eventually showed up in Justice Society of America. The JSA title was relaunched after the Infinite Crisis and Alex Ross came on board as a cover artist and occasional co-plotter with Geoff Johns. An accident propelled the Kingdom Come Superman into the normal DC Universe where he was an observer of, and commenter on, events that led to the creation of this universe’s Magog.

The Magog Series

Johns’s JSA supplied the context of Gog’s arrival that had been missing in Ross’s original plotline. A long JSA arc dealt with the introduction of a list of new characters including Lance Corporal David Reid. Reid was the metahuman great-grandson of President Roosevelt. He was to be the “young superhero wanna-be” which Gog turned into his herald Magog.

The introduction of such an already well-known character to the DC Universe prompted DC to launch Magog in his own ongoing series written by Keith Giffen and with art by Howard Porter. Giffen told Newsarama on its launch that:

Like most comic fans, I had limited access to the character. I knew his role in Kingdom Come and the Gog story that Geoff told. But what struck me was that, underlying all the glitz and the armor and all, this guy is still a soldier. He’s David Reid, lance corporal. So I thought about how I could apply a real hardcore military mindset to a superhero and get into his head. Most, if not all, of the captions in the book are Magog’s narration, so you can really get into his head. And dealing with a hero whose moral parameters are much wider than, say, Superman’s kind of became fun.

It’s nice to play around with a hero who’s more protagonist than most heroes, maybe even antagonist. And he’s willing to do what needs to be done to get the job done. He’s not exactly Jack Bauer, and he doesn’t have that faux toughness that comes with Wolverine, but he’s definitely somebody who gets things done in his own unique and sometimes incredibly violent way. And I’ve been having a ball. I love this character. And honestly? No one is more surprised than I.

Unfortunately Magog’s series only lasted twelve issues. The series was to have been taken over by Scott Kollins with issue #10, but his multi-part arc entitled “Blown to Kingdom Come” had to be truncated to two-parts. Nevertheless, Kollins told CBR what he thought was Magog’s vital character:

I am a big fan of the “Kingdom Come” series. I felt very much the same way as the main characters and it was a great topic to put in a heroic story. I also think there were some basic concepts in that series that made Magog such an interesting character. It made him a character that we are still trying to tell stories about all these years later, similar to the recent story arc of Magog getting kicked out of the Justice Society of America. Magog works best if rubbing people the wrong way. It’s just his nature. Or his fate?

Even before Magog’s series had launched DC had been playing with the notion that he would eventually go bad and would need to be stopped. Brave and the Bold #23 featured a confrontation between Booster Gold and Magog which made the time travelling Booster aware that something about Magog’s future wasn’t right. Even his appearances in the Justice Society were bout foreshadowing how the main DC Universe was or was not diverging from the Kingdom Come possible future.

This approach was something that dated back to the original Kindgom series. In 1998 Alex Ross commented:

Truth be told, I was actually trying to lead the Kingdom storyline to the point where it actually nullified the future possibility of Kindgom Come; we’d see a glimpse of it and then we’d actually find out that it’s going to get circumvented so that it doesn’t happen.

Alex Ross, Kingdom Come Companion, page 243

That possibility has been picked up in Justice League: Generation Lost where it appears that Maxwell Lord is fated to kill Magog in order to prevent him from causing the war foreseen by Kingdom Come.