Mister Miracle is, on the face of it, one of the cheesiest of all costumed super-heroes. Created by Jack Kirby in 1971, he’s a gaudily dressed glint from the last gleaming of the Silver Age. Like the fictional ‘Escapist’ created by Michael Chabon in his Kirby-drenched Kavalier and Clay, Scott Free is part superhero and part vaudeville act — forever wriggling free from mountainous shackles or making nick-of-time exits from water-filled coffins or tea-crates in the paths of runaway trains.
But when we first meet him in this 12-issue trade paperback he’s slumped on the floor of a bathroom with a razor blade in the foreground, bleeding out from his slashed wrists. We follow him to a very ordinary LA hospital where his wife Big Barda (still in her Amazonian superhero get-up) waits head in hands in the waiting room as he’s revived. Leaving the hospital in hoodie and dark glasses he’s mobbed (‘Scott, talk to your fans’).
At home, he’s near catatonic. Barda frets about his dressings (‘Do they itch, Scott? Doctor said if they itch really bad we should call them.’) In a talkshow interview, back in full costume, he presents it as a progression of his act: ‘I was just thinking… you know, what can’t I escape from? What doesn’t anyone escape from? Death. No one escapes from death. So I killed myself.’ Hahahaha. Clap Clap Clap Clap. Scott’s sort-of catchphrase — ‘I can always escape’ — takes on a special resonance in the pages that are to come.
Scott’s backstory is wound deep into Kirby’s New Gods mythology: the warring twinned planets of New Genesis (nice) and Apokolips (not so nice) struck a truce when the leaders of each, Highfather and Darkseid, agreed to entrust their infant sons to the care of the other to raise.
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