After wandering long and lost in the dark, Scott Free’s life is a transcendent journey, step by step, towards grace and the truest version of himself. He possesses a core strength ‘that survives the worst that life can bring’ and ‘emerges with sudden splendour in the face of death’, like his creator Jack Kirby.¹
In Mister Miracle # 5 (December, 1971), published 50 years ago today, 16 September, 1971, the King of Comics rises up against the malign forces of Apokolips, transported in the Fourth World character he most identified with and offers us quiet strength, hope and the smiling, impish optimism of someone who doesn’t know when to quit. This is the America Jack Kirby knew.
Characteristically, Mister Miracle # 5 begins with someone other than Mister Miracle, his companion, paramour and fellow Granny Goodness orphan, Big Barda. Scott Free is no alpha male, he lives and breathes through others, through an old man, through a powerful yet vulnerable warrior woman of Apokolips.
In a memorable sequence, the gorgeous, muscular, feminine, no-nonsense Barda helps Scott with preparation for his escape act, by hoisting a giant Civil War cannon over one shoulder with one hand, as if it were a suit of clothes or a rucksack with her lunch in it. Along the way she puts a group of leering, unimaginative male ciphers in their place, dismissive of their weak sexism. Barda is all action, heal to toe, elegant power, amplified by the distinct, hand-crafted inking line of Mike Royer.
In a later sequence, she is eventually captured by the villain of the issue, Baron Vundabar and his dog soldiers. As she stands in the tranquil surrounds of a quiet pool before the battle, she decides to leave Apokolips and takes a moment to enjoy the cooling touch of healing waters, throwing her head back and closing her eyes. We see her, just for a second, like the Queen on holiday, a woman free of any roles or expectations or any man’s eyes, even as the dog soldiers approach behind her. Soon that serenity is shattered and her royal instinct transforms her for war.
Kirby lets us see behind the masks. He gives all his characters the freedom to say who they are, all of who they are, particularly people on the edges of the culture, the people who don’t count, to buck stereotypes and stuff it all back in their critics’ faces. Like Barda, the undersized Oberon is the odd one out. The relationship of old man Oberon and young man Scott Free is like that of father to son but Kirby reverses it. The younger Scott is the one who speaks wisdom to the older assistant.
Mister Miracle needs all the people in his life, his miraculous community, to escape. In a chilling back-up story, the early life of Scott Free, he is trapped in Granny Goodness’ terror orphanage, surrounded by the ‘brute randomness of death’², mercilessly tortured by the vicious Granny and hazed by ‘children of the same foul spirit.’³ They seek to punish him on the throne of truth, ‘Scott Free must be freed of lies!!’ The story is the first real glimpse of the apocalyptic world of conflict and death, of carnage and sirens that shaped Scott and that he must escape. Through it all, he refuses to break and is the ‘face of hope and mercy in dark places'⁴, to the prisoner, to the tormented, to slaves who look like us.
Mister Miracle draws on this defiant, constant belief as he willingly allows himself to be put in a death trap by Baron Vundabar to rescue Barda. Vundabar throws everything at him, encasing him in an impenetrable coffin, smashing him with steel fists, shocking him with huge electrodes, incinerating him in a ‘controlled atom blast’ and then finally corroding his apparently lifeless form in acid.
Vundabar’s mistake is not his technology. It’s his inability to understand that Scott has been through all of this a child. He’s been enslaved, he’s been beaten, he’s been shocked, his personality pounded but he has not dissolved. Scott’s adult life has been about becoming immune from pain by making himself vulnerable and helpless from a position of strength.
Escaping traps is how he feels the power of his own salvation, power he only dreamt of as a child. It’s akin to the impossible, fearsome, murderous traps Jack Kirby would have been in on the front lines of World War II. He wanted to come home to Roz, a survivor of the murder machine of war, not cleaned and pressed in a coffin.
Mister Miracle wins of course. He triumphs like a smiling G.I. in Paris as he watches on as Vundabar and his cronies laugh in apparent victory. Scott’s escape is due to both American ingenuity and his own knowledge and belief. “I’m familiar with this type of structure, Vundabar!! I knew where to go! What to do! Now, I’m here!’ Scott could be describing the arc of his own life as much as his understanding of Apokoliptian engineering.
With the villains vanquished, Scott holds Barda in his arms, the proud female warrior says, ‘Scott!! Scott!—Forgive me!! I was afraid! –For us! I—a warrior!’. Scott replies, ‘You’re better than that, Barda. You’re a woman.’ There is no sense here that a stereotypical man is saving a diminutive, helpless woman. Barda and Scott are equals, they both ‘instinctively grab a neighbor’s hand and rally to the cause of one another.’⁵ They have been through the worst and now give each other their best. They help each other become their truest selves. This is the miracle they know, from sea to shining sea.
‘O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!’
(America the Beautiful, 1911 version)
¹In this commentary I draw from former United States
President George W. Bush’s 9.11.21 speech at the Flight 93, 20th
anniversary, memorial service.
²Ibid.
³Ibid.
⁴Ibid.
⁵Ibid.
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)
-The equally indispensable Old Gods, New Gods (Jack Kirby
Collector # 80: TwoMorrows)
Popular culture:
-Former United States President George W. Bush’s speech
at the Flight 93 memorial service, 9.11.2021. From the CNN
transcript
-Helter Skelter, the True Story of the Manson Murders
(Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, W.W. Norton, 1994)
-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)
-Uncovering the Sixties (Abe Peck, Pantheon, 1985) .
Michael Mead is a 55-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. This is his 25th
of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries (I’m more than halfway!:). Check
out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so
pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!
