Through fire and rain, free

Take my voice, take my heart, take my guts, I will still rise above you and defeat you. Scott Free as Mister Miracle in Mister Miracle # 2 (May – June 1971), published 50 years ago today, 16 March, 1971, invites death to rip him open, defiant in his vulnerability, like Jesus in red tights. His escapes are like executions, as he places himself on the Whipping Post, re-experiencing all the emotions of an abused Apokoliptian child, the desperation, the helplessness, the inverted sense of responsibility, welcoming death as a peace offering.

‘Sometimes I feel, sometimes I feel,
Like I've been tied to the whippin' post.
Tied to the whippin' post, tied to the whippin' post.
Good Lord, I feel like I'm dyin'…’

(Whipping Post, Allman Brothers on Live at the Fillmore East, live version recorded 13.3.1971)

Scott pushes the boundaries to their sharpest edge because he knows that the evil he faces will not rest until it has exploited every last facet of his personality, every chink, every kindness, to defeat him. He must be ready, he must be his strongest, his most active, the ‘madness’ of his more and more dangerous training is as much about building inner resilience, belief, love, as it is about creating technical skills. He’ll need everything because he is up against Granny.

Granny Goodness, in her debut, is a reptilian, lizard-mother dominatrix with her sickly, frightening bug-eyed toy boys.  She ostensibly hunts Scott because he was the first, and at this stage only, escapee from her terror orphanage. The deeper reason is that Granny is angry with Scott because he does not love her with the kind of distorted devotion that abusive tyrants prize, based on a degraded form of loyalty, bowing down to the one who hurts you, losing control of yourself, sacrificed to the unquenchable ego of someone to whom too much is never enough. Like the March 1971 debut Album from Alice Cooper, Granny Goodness’ key performance indicator, is Love It To Death.¹

Oberon asks Scott about his past and Scott tells the small Kirby avatar how he escaped, through the cosmic womb of the Boomtube and the Mother Mary Motherbox, birthed into a much better world than the Apokiliptic one he left: “…it can be a way of escape! – And I took it! I had to survive as an individual – as myself!’’

So much of Mister Miracle is the individual’s journey, the creation of an identity that is resilient, that will stay in shape, that will not buckle under intense pressure. Like a comics version of James Taylor, Scott has been through extremes of experience, been pushed mentally and emotionally far beyond normal limits, through fire and rain, from an abyss to a place of strength in serenity, in gentleness but with a lived-in, purposeful vision that comes from knowing himself at a young age when all seemed lost. Scott, like Taylor ‘….references roads travelled and untravelled, to fears spoken and left unsaid – reaches a level of both intimacy and emotion rarely achieved….”²

Kirby’s hero reflects the changing concerns of the times and the way these concerns were expressed in popular culture. The braggadocio of loud guitar-dominated group Rock, the mass demonstrations of the Movement to End the War in Vietnam, the overwhelming explosion of different voices, is gradually replaced by the individual needing the time and space to process what just happened. To hear their own voice, distinct from what Old Mole called  an increasingly shrill ‘more-left-than-thou’ ideological group-think.³

The question is not ‘where are we now?’ but ‘where am I?’ 

For Scott that is down in the X-Pit, the technological torture chamber as he and Oberon seem destined for defeat by Granny. He triumphs (of course!) because throughout his ordeals, he backs himself, his knowledge of the machine and his faith in transforming negative forces to positive, anti-life to life. He stops what seems to be a huge and overwhelming evil and makes it small.

Scott Free is on a mission of kindness, of victory over death, of beauty from pain. He wants to free himself and others from the ultimate trap, not the external evil of villainous death machines created by his enemies but the self-imposed doubts and fears that come from within. Pour out your love, pour out your belief, pour out your hope. You will be your own miracle.

‘Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain

I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you again.’

(Fire and Rain, James Taylor, from the Album Sweet Baby James, released 1 February, 1970)

Footnotes:

¹Love it To Death was released on March 9, 1971. Pictured below is the original cover which features Cooper using his thumb to appear like a penis. Warners later censored this in later pressings of the album.

²From Time Magazine, March 1, 1971, pg 34. James Taylor may have made sweet-sounding music but it came from a lot of pain. He lost a friend to suicide, became a heroin addict and ended up in a mental hospital, by the time he was 20.

³From Uncovering the Sixties, pg 256. Writers at the counter-cultural Old Mole magazine, lamented the balkanisation of the Movement, saying in a November1970 issue, “As long as we are caught in the competitive cycle of being ‘more left than thou’, we will keep getting further out and more unable to communicate with most Americans.”

Research this article: 

Comics:

-Comics Journal # 134, February 1990 (Jack Kirby interview by Gary Groth).

-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website

-The Indispensable Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows).

Popular culture:

-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)

-Time Magazine, March 1, 1971

-Uncovering the Sixties (Abe Peck, Pantheon, 1985) .

Michael Mead is a 54-year-old New Zealand comic book collector, who likes to think he can do "contextual" commentary reviews of old comics, asking: "where does this story come from?", looking at the social, political, cultural times it came from, the state of the comics industry, the personal and creative journey of the writer or artist, the personal journey of the reader as a child and as an adult. 

As part of this, he is vain enough to think he can bring new insights into Kirby's Fourth World comics and so, on the 50th anniversary of publication of each issue of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, Forever People, New Gods and Mister Miracle, he will publish a contextual commentary. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!