Comic Book Review – Mister Miracle by Jack Kirby

Mister Miracle by Jack Kirby (2017)
Reprints Mister Miracle #1-18
Written by Jack Kirby
Art by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, and Vince Colletta

Of all Jack Kirby’s DC Comics creations, Mister Miracle (along with Darkseid) has resonated the most with fans and those who would write the comics in the future. It makes sense because Mister Miracle’s comic was the most straightforward superhero book of all the titles Kirby wrote & drew for the company. The character’s design is familiar to capes & tights fans with its use of primary and secondary colors (red, yellow, green) but also different, particularly with the face mask and high-collared cape and clasps. Mister Miracle’s premise is new but feels entirely authentic for the genre, a super escape artist. It’s one of those “of course, why didn’t I think of that” ideas. Kirby does one better, though, and links this character to his grand mythos so that Mister Miracle both stands independently and operates as part of the space opera. 

The first issue of Mister Miracle sees the title character dying, but that’s a trick. A strange young man named Scott Free happens upon the veteran escape artist Thaddeus Brown aka Mister Miracle practicing a routine with his little person assistant Oberon. Scott is impressed but has to step in when members of Intergang show up to harass Brown. The stage magician invites Scott to his estate and learns about the microtechnology his young visitor has brought from wherever he comes from. Brown is murdered by Intergang during another round of practice, and Scott takes up the mantle of Mister Miracle to get revenge. While connections between Scott Free and The Fourth World mythos were evident initially, Kirby slowly trickles out information to keep us hooked.

Issue two introduces us to one of my favorite Kirby creations of all time, Granny Goodness. Granny runs the orphanage in the despot world of Apokolips. Unlike orphanages here (or maybe more like them than we would like to admit), she is tasked with brutalizing these young people until they become compliant foot soldiers to the dread Darkseid. Scott’s successful escape from her clutches has made him enemy number one, a constant reminder of her failure to her lord. She becomes a recurring villain, eventually bringing her Female Furies into the mix, a cadre of women, each bearing their own violent gimmick, who serve at the behest of Granny. One of the Furies’ ranks comes to a breaking point and switches sides. She’s Big Barda, the woman who, to this day, is still Scott’s loving and take-no-shit wife.

Kirby has never been what I would consider a “cheesecake” artist, a colloquial American term for erotic pin-up art. However, with Barda, he appears to make an exception because this lady frequently just hangs out in an alien-styled bikini, making her battle armor appear only when needed. Barda’s physical appearance was based on actress & model Lainie Kazan, who, especially for the time, had an unconventional body type for showing up in publications like Playboy. She was broad-shouldered, wide-hipped, and very tall. It fits the straightforward warrior persona of Barda perfectly. The banter between Scott & Barda was apparently based on Kirby and his wife Roz’s personal interplay, one of the few Kirby characters (aside from maybe The Thing) inspired by things in the artist’s life.

Another of Scott’s foes would be Doctor Bedlam, an entity of pure psionic energy who transfers this immaterial form into android constructs so he can interact with the physical realm. His primary way of causing trouble for Scott is via his Paranoid Pill, a chemical weapon that induces violent hallucinations in humans. His first appearance in the pages of Mister Miracle has him turning an entire highrise building into one massive death trap for Scott as its denizens lose their minds and fall into mob violence. 

Kirby introduced many of his lieutenants to Darkseid in Mister Miracle, which makes sense as it was the most popular of his books. Virman Vundabar, an Apokoliptian who models his appearance after a member of the Prussian military, is dispatched by his Granny to take out Scott but ultimately fails, as they all do. Kanto shows up when Scott & Barda return to Apokolips to tie up some loose threads left behind after their initial escape. Kanto styles himself after a Renaissance-era Italian nobleman and is Darkseid’s chief assassin, thrown at Scott as one of many obstacles he faces during his homecoming. This is all part of a really entertaining story that provides the reader with flashbacks to Scott’s childhood and explains how he became the person he is when we met him. Additionally, if you were a reader of New Gods, Scott’s origins would continue the back story that was started when the truth behind Orion’s parentage was revealed. Interestingly, these two characters, Scott Free and Orion, have no direct interactions during the Kirby period despite their entangled histories.

One character, not really an antagonist but an annoyance, introduced by Kirby speaks to some of the comic creator’s personal anger about his time at Marvel. Funky Flashman is introduced in Mister Miracle #6 as a huckster who finds willing saps and exploits them out of their money. Flashman comes across a flier for a Mister Miracle show and believes this is his next opportunity. This character is heavily based on Kirby’s former collaborator Stan Lee. It was a long-running disagreement with Lee’s credit and compensation that led Kirby to leave Marvel, and you can read here that he was still very hot about it all. Flashman is shown to be a phony on multiple fronts, even donning a toupee and fake beard to appear “hip,” something Lee had done to his own physical appearance as Marvel grew in popularity in the 1960s, dropping his “square normie” look for something more in keeping with the times.

Unlike the other books under The Fourth World banner, Mister Miracle ran for a year and a half; the others were canceled after a year. Kirby’s tenure at DC can be marked in two “waves.” The first wave from 1970 to 1972 consisted of Jimmy Olsen, New Gods, The Forever People, and Mister Miracle. Some other bits of work, short-running, were either assignments or passion projects, as is the case of In the Days of the Mob. By mid-1972, these Fourth World books were winding down, but Kirby launched several new titles. These were The Demon and Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth. Kamandi would lead to a spin-off OMAC (One-Man Army Corps), but by 1975, he had started working for Marvel again. 

Mister Miracle would continue for seven more issues until the book was canceled (only to be revived without Kirby in the late 1970s). This remaining time with the character dramatically shifts away from the Fourth World mythos, and Scott becomes a fairly standard superhero character but with the Kirby twist on villains and their designs. Doctor Bedlam surfaces again, but the rest of the foes he faces aren’t derived from Darkseid’s power. There’s an attempt to incorporate Ted Brown, the son of the original Mister Miracle, but I didn’t find him to be a compelling character. 

The most dramatic change in this last third of the series was the introduction of Shilo Norman, a Black youth whose brother is killed by a gang. Scott & Barda vow to protect the boy who stays on and becomes the protege to our title hero. Shilo is prominently featured on Mister Miracle #15-17 covers, but I was perplexed about what Kirby intended to do with the character. He took focus away from Scott, so the story may have had Shilo becoming Mister Miracle. That is the direction later writers have taken, and in the present DC continuity, both men appear to be Mister Miracle at the same time but have not directly interacted in decades, making the nature of the relationship pretty confusing. 

Mister Miracle #18 was published after a three-month hiatus and was Kirby’s final issue on the title. The plot is centered around the wedding of Scott Free & Barda, which gets interrupted by Darkseid. The characters from New Gods appear (Orion, Lightray, Metron, and Highfather), with the latter, Scott’s biological father, officiating the wedding. The story ends with our couple being transported off-Earth leaving behind Shilo, Oberon, and Ted Brown. A final panel states: “The Mister Miracle series will not be continued…Its new and thrilling successor will soon be on sale! Look for it! Thank you – Jack Kirby.” 

I’m still not clear what the successor was. One of the other titles Kirby wrote & drew that had no connection to this character? A planned title with all the Fourth World elements brought together? Despite Kirby’s writing Scott out of being on Earth, Mister Miracle would continue popping up in DC Comics throughout the 1970s. He teamed up with Batman three separate times in the pages of The Brave & The Bold, with his ongoing title being revived with issue 19 in 1977 under a new creative team. Perhaps we’ll get to that and the New Gods revival that occurred around the same time in a future review.