Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle

Picking a Kirby story is hard enough, let alone a Kirby character. For me, his New Gods space opera for DC will always be the quintessential King. It’s Kirby at his most expressive and free as you see the love put into every page and character. The story is simple: two planets full of gods have been at war since they split. One, New Genesis, is the beautiful unsullied world of the nice gods while the other, Apokolips, is the hellhole nightmare world run by a tyrant. The rulers decide to a truce by sending their sons to the other planet which cues the birth of my favorite character, Scott Free aka Mister Miracle.

As a depressed teen listening to the Smiths, Scott was one of the people I identified with the most. He hated the world he was raised in and all the surroundings so you know what he did? He said to hell with everything and became the universe’s greatest escape artist taking on the stage name Mister Miracle. He was everything I wanted to be, the way he’d find a way out of any situation, despite his horrible surroundings. He made his depression into a drive to become better and help everyone escape. I also like to to think Kirby put a lot of himself into Scott because he had just left Marvel where he had been royally screwed. So he decided to say fuck it and became a Mister Miracle himself. To me, Mister Miracle and Kirby are two people we can always look up to and try to emulate.