I did the rundown on the history of parademons in my review of the Red Parademon, so I hope you’ll pardon me if I refer you to that article if you haven’t read it already. I could copy and paste the same information, but then I’d just look even lazier.

The Green Parademon variant is the one based on the original of the parademons in Kirby’s comics. In their green-and-yellow outfits and large numbers, they strongly resemble the shock troopers of Marvel’s HYDRA, who first appeared in Strange Tales #135 in 1965 and were created and designed by, yes, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. Kirby’s parademons (as one PGPoA reader pointed out in my Red Parademon review, possibly meant as a play on “paratroopers,” which Kirby would have been familiar with from his time in the army during WWII) were created a good six years after he designed the HYDRA goons. The two share similar roles in their respective organizations and share the same fashion sense when it comes to colors and goggles. But then, Kirby wasn’t above cribbing from previous designs on occasion–see Blastaar (Marvel, 1967) and Kalibak (DC, 1971). One wonders whether Kirby simply wanted the opportunity to use the characters he’d created his own way, rather than letting another write develop them. (more…)

Every dark lord needs his cannon fodder–someone to throw into the gaping jaws of death in order to fatigue, delay, or otherwise annoy his foes. Sauron has his orcs, Darth Vader has his stormtroopers, Ozzy Osbourne has his immediate family. Darkseid, Jack Kirby’s amalgam of Richard Nixon and Jack Palance who now serves as the DC Universe’s darkest lord, has his parademons.

What are parademons? Even after reading a good amount of New Gods comics, I’m not quite sure. I don’t think Kirby himself ever really got into their background much. The prefix “para-” suggests they’ve not quite graduated to being full demons. On the other hand, given Darkseid’s obsession with Anti-Life, perhaps parademons are simply the Apokoliptian equivalent of paramedics–they try to kill you rather than save you.

In the original New Gods comics, parademons were depicted as ugly gray-skinned humanoids in green-and-yellow outfits; they didn’t look anything like the classic Western conception of a demon. When Kenner and DC created the Super Powers toy line in the 1980s, they paid Kirby to redesign some of his characters (most notably the parademon and Mantis)–possibly just so he could be paid royalties for his work. Oddly enough, Kirby’s redesign of Mantis ended up looking much like the original parademon, while his new parademon looked a lot more like the classic pitchfork-bearing devil. Aside from the odd appearance in a DC comic (parademons are almost always depicted based on Kirby’s original green version), the only media this version of the parademon appeared in was the final season of the Super Friends cartoon.

Since the Four Horsemen and the designers and brand managers at Mattel are such fans of the original Super Powers line–and Kirby–it’s no surprise we got both the classic green parademon as well as this one. They’re available in equal 50/50 case ratios, although the comic-accurate green version is more popular with collectors. (more…)