New Mister Miracle Comic Will Explore The Tragic Irony Of Jack Kirby’s Escape Artist Jesus

New Mister Miracle Comic Will Explore The Tragic Irony Of Jack Kirby’s Escape Artist Jesus

One of Jack Kirby’s most iconic (and weirdest) creations is returning to DC Comics, and bringing an equally mindbending creative team with him: Tom King — the man who wrote some of the best superhero comics in recent history in The Vision and The Omega Men — and Sheriff of Babylon‘s superstar artist Mitch Gerads.

Image: DC Comics.

Announced by Paste today, King and Gerads’ new Mister Miracle series will see the return of Scott Free, escape artist and heir to the New Gods homeworld of New Genesis in Kirby’s classic sci-fi “Fourth World” comic book canon. Although details specifically about the new series are still being kept under wraps, according to King, the book will play with the neo-Christian mythology of Kirby’s Fourth World stories, and explore the tragic irony of Mister Miracle as a legendary escape artist failing to escape his own past growing up on the hellish world of Apokolips:

When I first started doing this project, I started talking with creators like Mark Waid and one of the things I came across was people saying, you didn’t know Mister Miracle was Jack Kirby’s Jesus? He’s Jesus as an escape artist. That’s utterly ridiculous, but the writer in you is like I get to play with Jesus as an escape artist. On the other side of that you have Darkseid, who’s the horrible evil that walks. There are religious themes in this, but it’s all inspired by Kirby. He was drawing on Old Testament and the New Testament to make a kids adventure. That’s why it worked — he’s telling old stories in new ways. So now we’re going to try the old Jack Kirby stories in new ways. We’re going to go as deep as we can.

In series like Vision and Omega Men, King has already well and truly proved he can put great, gripping spins on classic comics material to create chilling and deep new series. Mister Miracle sounds like it’s another attempt at doing just that — but now that both King and Gerads have the playground of Kirby’s vast, fantastical cosmos to play with, this could be one of the comic series to watch out for this year.

Mister Miracle is set to kick off a 12-issue series this August.


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