Mister Miracle

Tom King is a marvelous writer. He is a perfect practitioner of post-modern meta-fictional super-hero deconstruction. This has been in fashion since Watchmen, and King does it more subtly and personally than most such takes. But King is even more interested in writing novels about his characters crises with family and intimacy and identity even as they deal with the external plot threats. He did the same thing for Marvel in 2016’s Vision limited series. King makes these characters completely accessible to us by writing them with an utterly plebian, quotidian side. These super-heros are in part friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and families from our own mundane lives, without losing any of their interest as characters of high fantasy.

Mitch Gerads’ art is superb, a blend of realism, surrealism and cartooning for emotional effect. Unmasked, his characters are realistic, emotions clearly readable. Masked they can vary at need from abstract beauty to frightening intensity to comic Saturday morning cartoonish distortion (is this a technique borrowed from the deformed and super-deformed miniatures in Manga and Anime art? Or has it always been part of American comics vernacular?) The comic is drawn in strict nine-panel format. The rigid discipline supports the stylistic variation, making the whole uniform. (Thematically, the rigid discipline reflect the many layers of plot and emotional dysfunction that trap the characters.) Some action sequences are delicate and perfectly choreographed, working like Eadweard Muybridge motion studies; others look like video game frames with dashed lines indicating motion and lolcat sound effects (‘kik kik. fite fite.’) And Gerads’ taste is superb: his choice of technique always matches the need and mood of the story perfectly, with humour serving to intensify tension, gore and violence to immerse us in the trauma his characters are experiencing.

The story is ambiguous. I don’t know what is really happening, and I don’t know what to make of the ending. I know what I need it to mean, but you may need something different. King has said in an interview that he knows what he intended, but isn’t going to tell. He wants his readers to engage with it themselves.

I know Kirby’s New Gods fairly well (though I have not read all of the original Mr. Miracle run) so the plot of the series read as a (very fresh) variation on familiar stories. I imagine this is how the great classic Athenian tragedies would have felt to their original audiences. And it is full of marvelous Easter Eggs, subtle surprises and references for those who know the canon more deeply. I would like to know how this story works for one new come to Kirby’s Fourth World mythology.