Creation Story
Big Barda began when the October 1970 issue of Playboy arrived at the Kirby house with singer Lainie Kazan in it, “sans wardrobe” as Mark Evanier tells it, and the creation of Barda began that day. The design was complete within days. Evanier, who has told the story more than once, is careful about what Kazan did and did not contribute: a body type, nothing more. Kirby was not drawing her likeness, and he did not necessarily prefer a large, formidable woman over any other; he appreciated the beauty in that one.
The personality came from closer to home. The visual started with Kazan; everything else, all the personality and style, was by Evanier’s account one of the many ways Kirby viewed his wife, Roz, most of all in the scenes where Barda turns fiercely protective of Scott Free. The characterization ran largely, “though with tongue in cheek” as Evanier puts it, on the couple’s own interplay. Kirby, he adds, saw himself as Mister Miracle.
On the page, Kirby gave her a harder origin. Barda is a New God, born on Apokolips about 250 years ago and taken from her mother, Big Breeda, at an early age. Granny Goodness, who trains Darkseid’s soldiers, groomed Barda to lead the Female Furies, Apokolips’s elite strike force. Most of that backstory still lay ahead of her debut issue: the Furies did not reach print until Mister Miracle #6 (1972), and Barda’s break with Granny, turning her back on Apokolips and coming to Earth for the man she rescues in #4, plays out across the early issues of the Kirby run.
First Appearance: Mister Miracle #4
Mister Miracle #4 is cover-dated September-October 1971 (commonly catalogued as October 1971) and went on sale in July 1971. It is the fourth issue of the DC series Kirby was writing, pencilling, and editing himself inside his Fourth World line, early in the Bronze Age, and the first issue of the series in DC’s new 25-cent giant format. Twenty-five cents bought 52 pages, and the extra room arrived the same issue Barda did. The lead story, “The Closing Jaws of Death,” is inked by Vince Colletta; #3 and #4 were his final issues on the series.
The story picks up the cliffhanger Kirby left at the end of issue #3. Doctor Bedlam, introduced earlier in the run, has sealed Mister Miracle inside a trunk and dropped it down a stairwell at the Chandler Towers, the kind of trap the series was built on: a box, a fall, and no visible way out. Barda is who interrupts the fall.
She arrives on the opening splash page, a figure out of Scott’s Apokolips past, and immediately tries to talk him into letting her teleport them both out with her Mega-Rod. Scott finishes the escape his own way, and she stays in the fight beside him when Bedlam turns his fear-maddened crowds loose. She has the powers to back the entrance: Barda is a New God, with superhuman strength and durability on a list that runs to outright immortality. It is a full appearance by every measure Kirby could give it: the name, the entrance, the weapon, and the issue’s central rescue, with Barda still there at the climax. First enemy: Doctor Bedlam. First allies: Mister Miracle and his assistant Oberon. The Mega-Rod she offers him stays her signature weapon.
Collectors buy Mister Miracle #4 as one thing: the 1st appearance of Big Barda. No cameo precedes it and no rival issue splits the claim. The giant format gives the book a second footnote as the series’ first 25-cent issue, but the debut carries the key status. Three issues of setup preceded her; the 50yearoldcomics review calls her “the woman destined to be the Fourth World’s most fully realized, and popular, heroine.”
Two later issues anchor what follows. Mister Miracle #6 (1972) carries the first appearance of the Female Furies, the squad Barda led on Apokolips before her defection. And Mister Miracle #18, cover-dated Feb.-Mar. 1974, is the wedding issue: Scott and Barda marry, and Scott’s birth father, Highfather of New Genesis, performs the ceremony. Everything after runs through that pairing. When Scott joins the Justice League, Barda works several of its missions alongside him, and Oracle later recruits her as the heavy-hitter on the Birds of Prey. Death of the New Gods (2007) kills her in its first issue, with Infinity-Man later revealed as the killer, and she appears again in the Justice League ‘Darkseid War’ storyline (2015-2016) and the 12-issue Mister Miracle series Tom King and Mitch Gerads began in 2017, built with the marriage at its center.
