Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Mister Miracle

The first issue of Tom King's Mister Miracle maxiseries is out, and it is everything I could have hoped for. It's a meditation on depression and alienation, with the same lyrical beauty as King's Vision series. Mitch Gerads' art is perfect. It freels very different in different scenes, in very appropriate ways, while also feeling unified. I'm terrible at art-talking, but I will single out his portrayal of Orion, where his mask almost looks like it was pasted over another drawing, creating a feeling of the mask obscuring something much different and darker than the super-hero costume. Which is, of course, perfect for Orion.

I've read some online reviews, which are of course uniformly stellar. I disagree with one that tried to describe Scott Free as a Christ figure, something I don't really see in the comic. The opening tableau could easily have taken on Christ imagery if that was the intent, but it was framed in such a way that there really isn't any.

i don't want to get into many specifics, since the main point of this post is to encourage anyone who isn't already planning on picking it up to do so. Not that I think a lot of you need much pushing, as this is a hottly anticipated book in these parts.

I bought it digitally. The art really stands out as a unique "voice" in today's market. I appreciated how different each panel was - the ways that "seeing" was distorted on the page (that's the best description I have of it).

The story is definitely there to intrigue. There's not a linear approach. I mean, I think I know what's going on, but I could be wrong. And I don't mind that at all.

I appreciated the balance of background characters. And I really hope that _____ is not really dead.

When King introduced a suicide attempt for young Bruce Wayne over in Batman, it left me cold and I couldn't buy into the narrative or reaction at all. This though, this is something altogether different that's it's hard to believe it was the same writer. Definitely a return to form on the level of Vision with the maturity and craft. I'm still conflicted, as Scott has always been a beacon of hope despite the horrors he's endured and escaped, but maybe that makes him the perfect character to show that depression, trauma and your own demons can impact the best of us. It was deeply affecting and unsettling. The use of Godfrey and Orion were both brilliant, as was the oppression of Darkseid staring at you on every page, while he doesn't "appear" once. Certainly a must-read book.

Barda explicitly calls him the "Son of God" at one point (not just Son of Highfather, or son of "a" god), and heir to the Throne of Heaven. Hard not to take that and make certain leaps. it also adds to the crushing weight of expectation on Scott. He's not ready for war, but even Barda pushes him. Lots of ways to read it and guess at what's "really" happening.

My CBS was out today when I went. It was my fault as I had never thought I'd want it on my pull until I read all the positive reviews. I told him to save me the inevitable 2nd printing and put me down for the remainder. If it's this good, I don't wanna trade-wait.

Okay, clearly my mind skipped right past those cues, which are pretty hard to argue with. I guess I just don't see a lot of it in the story as a whole, but this is clearly a book that invites us to interpret it through a lens of our own viewpoints, and I guess the issues it stirs up in me just aren't very religious in nature, despite it being a book about gods.

Here is a piece that is less review then critical analysis. It is heavy on spoilers, so I wouldn't recommend it unless you have already read the book, or don't care about detailed spoilers.

http://www.cbr.com/mister-miracle-tom-king-mitch-gerads/

Here's a couple of good King Interviews on the series:

http://www.cbr.com/interview-tom-king-tackles-new-gods-mythology-in-mister-miracle/

http://nerdist.com/tom-king-mister-miracle-interview/

Haven't read it yet but I had a feeling this was going to be awesome. King is MUST-READ right now and I'm thrilled he's getting the room he needs to show his stuff on some Kirby material. I've mentioned this before, but DC lately has been on fire with its miniseries and maxiseries. They've almost all been excellent.

Lardy, I recommend you pre-order anything King for the forseeable future!

Apparently the shops around town are OUT of Mister Miracle (at least the two I walked into) ... That's kind of cool

They weren't bought, you know. They just managed to escape on their own...




Watch as thoth lad tries to escape the baying mob from this thread...ouch! that's got to hurt...

Did they print like 100 copies? I got the digital issue from Comixology and, like many others, signed up for the rest of the series. It really looks captivating and there was a lot of substance in the first issue; even the unadorned "Darkseid is" panels contributed to the sense of a growing threat. And I hope a certain somebody isn't really dead, but everything changes.

The Son of g(G)od comment surprised me, but come to think of it, Jesus was the ultimate escape artist when it came to death, so perhaps it's more comparative than religious.

Issue #2 was excellent as Scott and Barda are pushed to exhaustion in the non-stop war, then given a suspect task by Orion, who's methods and demeanor don't sit well with Scott. He is once again forced to question not only what is really happening, but where his loyalties lie, as he begins to realise he really might love his Granny after all. Won't give away too much more, but I disagree with the early reviews saying the plot this time out is much more straightforward. That's a very surface reading of the issue, as there's a lot going on beneath the surface that King and Gerads quite brilliantly hide in plain sight. Really liked it.

Just to warn you, this post is probably going to be 10% discussing Mister Miracle #2, and 90% about the personal issues it dredged up for me.

I think of all the permutations of parent/child relationships, mother/son gets the least attention, especially if you ignore the creepy evo psych or oedipal stuff. Father/son the most, mother/daughter and father/daughter far behind, but still a sizeable body of works, and like I said, mother/son last.

Since most of my leftover childhood baggage deals with my mother, the dearth of things that speak to that has always struck me. Some father/son stuff is still applicable, but nothing that ever made me think "Yes! That is EXACTLY what I feel!"

Until this issue. I can't express how deeply Scott's relationship with Granny resonated. The awful memories mixed with the memories of genuine maternal love, the coming back as an adult and finding a mother who wants to pretend you've got a magically perfect relationship, and especially watching your mother think she can start treating you well while treating everyone else the same, and that the two things are unrelated.

My sister killed herself several years ago, and my mother decided to blame my sister's boyfriend because they had had an argument that led to the suicide. Never mind the multiple suicide attempts before she ever met him, or the severe emotional problems she'd had throughout her adult life.

I hadn't spoken to my mother in several years at this point, and we were having some awkward approaches in the aftermath. Then she got access to my sister's facebook page and unfriended the boyfriend. She couldn't seem to grasp that even if she was being gentle with me, doing exactly the kind of crap she did to us to this other guy showed that she hadn't fundamentally changed at all, and seemed shocked when I cut her off again.

I couldn't help but think of that incident when watching Granny talk about wonderful childhood memories with Scott and Barda while a man she was starving to death sat at the table. The mixture of maternal affection and the kind of cruelty that's carefully thought out to specifically push buttons left me with a feeling that finally, someone else out there Got It.

The amount of time I spent thinking about my own issues makes it a little harder than last issue to step back and really talk about the issue. I did like the single use of "Darkseid is." this issue. It keeps the theme alive without making it overbearing. I'm going to have to start paying attention to when these occur, and if there's some meaning to it. This issue, it seemed to be at the point that he stopped following the plan, and started obeying Granny's instructions again as he did in his youth. But that may be reading too much into it; he was still just going numbly through the motions, he was just obeying someone different than he had been in the earlier part of the issue.

I know last issue Barda was adamant that Orion was not Darkseid's son, but he sure felt like it this issue.

And I notice that neither Scott nor Barda tried, or even thought about, trying to rescue Stormforge.

So sorry for your loss and the resultant and lingering pain BFOB.

This issue also drew out some extremely personal reactions and certainly built on the previous issue.

King brilliantly runs three conflicts simultaneously and interwoven: Scott/Granny, Scott/Orion, Scott/Barda. The last one is obviously going to be the most painful as this whole thing unfolds. From the shower, to the throne room, to the climax, the subtle differences between Barda and Scott are becoming more noticeable and more complicated. They've always had interesting dynamic, fueled by their shared experience raised by Granny, but King keys in on the interesting notion that maybe they had very different experiences afterall. Barda was raised to be a Warrior and a Fury, while Scott was raised purely for subjugation and humiliation (supposedly). Their reactions and feelings are markedly different because of this and while they obviously love each other, their programming is creating a larger and larger gulf between them. She doesn't know how to handle his fragility, and he won't long tolerate her submissiveness to her warrior's pragmatism. The throne room scene was a brilliant examination, not just of Scott's defiance of Orion, but of his dynamic with Barda.

That's a sad and dark story BFOB; that this "comic" evoked those memories speaks to the power of King's writing.

This is a grim yet compelling issue. This is the quiet darkness. We don't see a lot of action, just the horror of the circumstances. New Genesis seems to have become a perversion of itself, which is perhaps inevitable when engaging in war. One of the brightest New Gods, Lightray, is a toady for Orion.

The difference between Scott and Barda is painful.

I really had a sense of Scott being trapped, trapped beyond hope. The many unresolved questions and mysteries about motives and identity make this story a real maze - and I sort of wish I could read all 12 issues now.

I'm trying to decide how good of a book this would be to loan non-comics friends. It's hard to figure out how much it relies on a lifetime of Fourth World knowledge. There's a lot left unsaid. Some is unimportant (you don't really need to know what a parademon is), but some seems really important. Would someone not versed in the lore understand why there is confusion over who is whose father, and why people refer to Orion as his brother, which he denies? I suppose that will be a difficult answer to give until the series is over.

Also, I reread both issues again. It wouldn't suprise me if I wind up rereading the whole thing each month when a new issue comes out.

Something else else I thought about during the first issue but didn't bring up: To what degree is the anti-life equation already being used? When Scott didn't know XXXX was dead, or asked when Barda's eyes changed color, is this due to the equation in some way? I know the nature of the anti-life equation has shifted under different writers, but King has Highfather describe it as the ability to change reality, and men's minds. Could this insidious feeling of wrongness that permeates the book stem at least in part from that, either Darkseid changing the world or simply Scott's mind?

And I feel that Metron's warning about how Scott must not know the face of god must tie somehow into the story from the first issue about the kid who drew God in class, so that everyone then knew what he looked like.

I think it might be somewhat confusing for someone unfamiliar with the Fourth World relationships. The biggest drawback, however, is whether the story would have the same emotional punch. If I didn't know what these characters were like before, when there was relative peace or balance between New Genesis and Apokolips, I doubt I'd be as struck by how much things have changed - or be as curious as to what's truth and what's possibly fakery/deception.

Went back and re-read as well. This issue has so many cool moments, especially pushing a lot of the dark humour into bleak situations (like the Family Circus parody of sneaklign though the camp).

One other thing that struck me was how Granny connected to Barda better than Scott does. When an exhausted Barda laments she's too tall, Scott says she's beautiful and perfect, which is true from his point of view (and pretty much objectively true). but it's not what she needs to hear. Granny, on the other hand, immediately says something sympathetic but not seemingly condescending or dismissive. It was another great little moment, made ironic by Barda's later actions.

Issue #3 has arrived and it seems like it's going to be mostly an aftermath issue regarding the explosive events last time around, but as usual, things never turn out as expected. Granny's corpse is beheaded for orion's trophy and Scott and Barda are given some down time, where we get a pretty good demonstration that Scott's not getting better. To make matters worse, Forager shows up and asks Scott to overthrow Orion before he gets millions more Bugs killed, before Lightray arrives and seemingly executes him. This barely phases Scott, who treats it as blasély as he does his spilt milk.

Scott does another stunt "to pay the bills" and he and Barda try to have a normal lunch that fails completely. It all ends with Scott confronting Orion with his suspicion they've both been compromised by Anti-Life, where Orion promptly turns on him and shows in the True Face of God (Orion's own) that Metron warned against.

I was surprised how quickly the Orion/Scott conflict came to a head. I figured we'd get this drawn out to be a major climax of the series, but King surprises and brings it about 3 issues in, meaning that his grand plan for the series has far greater ambitions. The bookend hyperbolic throwback text doesn't seem to match this issue as Baron Bedlam is nowhere to be seen (but he could always be animating any automaton - a clue perhaps), but it does a great job of contrasting the despair and Hell Scott's going through. The use of Funky Flashman as Orion's flunky was interesting too, highlighting his already apparent transformation into tyrant.

This book is brilliant, if terribly depressing so far, but this issue felt very much like a transition and setup until the very end, which is fine as the beat in a larger story, but it's murder waiting a month between chapters.

I've given the book one read through. Like I predicted before, I will probably reread all three together. I agree that this issue felt transitional. It didn't have the visceral punch of the first two, but narrative and thematic tissue has to exist for the whole to come together, so I'm okay with it.

It gave me a chance to focus on the plot more, as well. I've suspected that Scott was under the influence of the equation, so it's nice to see him question it as well. It never occurred to me that Orion might be as well. I just thought he was an ass.

I don't think the closing scene is what Metron was referring to. In the first issue, Orion claimed to be the Son of Darkseid, and Barda told him forcefully that he wasn't. In the second, he claimed to be Highfather when he clearly wasn't. Now this issue, he claims to be the face of God. I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is another grandiose fantasy of his that he can't live up to. Considering that he keeps trying to claim titles that would more properly belong to Scott, it may well be Scott's own face that he isn't to know. That, or Darkseid's face has been notably absent so far.

And the Forager appearance makes it pretty clear that this and Bug! are not in the same continuity. Between those two and whatever is going on in Rebirth titles like Superman, there are clearly three different versions of the New Gods being published simultaneously.

And that's an interesting thought about Baron Bedlam. I'll have to keep an eye out when I reread.

Two other things I noted on the re-read:

1) Granny's story is a great parallel to Scott's predicament: Like Sven, he's says the right thing to the wrong people and gets buried for it.

2) Secondly the final Face of God page has so many meanings because it's Orion who already has two faces, and it's always a struggle to find which is "True". The nine panels progress from his Mother Box created face in the first panel, to his birth face in the dead middle of the page to a horrible jumble of the two by the end of the sequence, heightened by the TV distortion effect we've been seeing whenever Scott's unsure of his reality. There's a lot of ways to unpack that even before you roll in the possible presence of Darkseid or Bedlam.

A lot to unpack in issue #4. It builds to a pretty intense finish, with Orion unhinging Scott with devastating effectiveness, to even Orion's surprise. A lot of what Scott's going through hits really close to home and will resonate with a lot of people I suspect. I'm beginning to think Mr. King's not a very happy person (or that comics writing is the best therapy ever).

Haven't read it yet, but your comments reminded me of a thought I had reading his Kamandi issue: his work has always had a very dark edge, but lately it's been in a very specific way. In Batman, Mister Miracle and Kamandi they have all attempted suicide, or at least been suicidal. I'm wondering if we should worry.