I don’t know what it is but I can’t seem to get on with anything by Tom King outside of his Batman, which I love. Though critically acclaimed, The Vision and Omega Men both left me unimpressed – and so it goes with Mister Miracle, at least if this first issue is anything to go by.
Mister Miracle is your typical latter-day Jack Kirby creation from the phase of his career when he was creating more convoluted and silly, and therefore unsurprisingly less well-known, characters. Not being a fan of Kirby’s writing, I’m sure I’m in the same boat as most readers coming to this series who won’t know the first thing about Mister Miracle.
He’s the son of a New/Old/whatever God from Apokolips but he’s human – or human-looking at least – and he’s a superhero whose day job is an escape artist… ok. No idea what his powers are, what his story is, what his motivations are, and you won’t get much help from King in this comic – you either know your Mister Miracle lore or you don’t! Or maybe we’ll find out later in the series, which is possible.
His girlfriend is Barda, whose name vaguely rings a bell, and he’s suffering from some kind of amnesia… Darkseid’s figured out the Anti-Life Equation and he and Barda have to boom over to New Genesis to join the resistance against Darkseid – but not before getting slapped around by some dude called Orion? It’s not difficult for me to see why I had such a tough time getting to grips with this comic when there’s barely anything sensical to cling on to!
King’s reunited with his Sheriff of Babylon (another King title I didn’t click with) artist Mitch Gerads. I’ve never been a fan of Gerads’ art style which, though creative and interesting, comes off here as messy and unnecessarily complicated. I like though that they’re using the traditional 9 panel grid layout for this book, which was used very effectively in Omega Men.
I see the glimmer of an idea that’s appealing – King playing with concepts of time and reality, did Mister Miracle perform the ultimate escape trick and escape death or is he dead and is this the afterlife? – and it might be fun to see him take on Darkseid. But, especially considering the praise and awards this series has gotten, I’m a bit disappointed and definitely not loving what I saw in this first issue. I’ll stick with it though - fingers crossed it reads better as a collected trade!
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