Jack Kirby and The Houdini of the Real

In attempting to pay homage to Jack Kirby’s Mr. Miracle, Tom King and Mitch Gerards end up trapping themselves

by Jean Brigid-Prehn

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In his later days, the illusionist and escape artist Harry Houdini embarked on a crusade of debunking psychics and mediums, people who made a profit by feigning the ability to do the impossible. Outsiders saw this as something of a betrayal—the artist of the fantastic now trying to reveal the tricks of his peers. 

But Houdini’s belief wasn’t a concern of professional turf, but an ideological one. In his early days, he had characterized his practice as one of “mystification”. Yet after seeing how mediums played on a similar sense of the “mystifying” to take advantage of others’ grief and loss, Houdini dedicated himself to de–“mystifying their tricks. Houdini’s reaction puts his own craft in sharp relief to that of those who offended him: to borrow a characterization from Adam Phillips, “[i]n his insistence on man-made illusion rather than divine magic, [Houdini] was showing his audience, knowingly or unknowingly, that wants are as man- and woman-made as anything else.”

The figure of the escape artist is almost inherently transgressive, defying expectations and evading norms both figurative and literal; and so it’s little surprise that a figure as evasive and confounding as Jack Kirby would have found in it one of his most iconic characters: Mister Miracle, alias Scott Free, comics’ own “Super Escape Artist.” Free is a character that embodies not just Kirby himself but, ultimately, the same tension highlighted by Houdini, the question of whether our boxes are man-made or divine.

Debuted by Jack Kirby in 1971 as one of his New Gods, a corner of the DC universe Kirby was given carte blanche to populate with a mythology all his own, Scott is notable as the only character in that line to be given his own title. There’s something fantastically mercurial about Scott—born to a god, raised by his adversary, eventually both escapee and escape artist on Earth. This outsider quality left Scott with complicated relationships with the three major planes of Kirby’s DC work, relationships which help Kirby characterize these worlds as well as Scott. As the run continued, Scott formed relationships with misfits of both the world he escaped and his new home, finding love in his former pursuer Big Barda and a mentor in the falstaffian Oberon. 

There’s something fantastically mercurial about Scott—both escapee and escape artist on Earth.

As the newly-debuted escape artist found himself trying to make a new life on Earth, his nature came into conflict with the systematic rule of the worlds he left behind. Scott’s family appeared to deliver absolutes, whether it was Highfather’s belief in the “will of the source” or Darkseid’s proclamation that “Life at best is bittersweet!” To an escape artist, however, the inevitable sounds like just another challenge, and Kirby’s depiction of Scott defied one ingenious death trap after another, unsettling powers that demanded to be seen as absolute. In Kirby, King of Comics, Mark Evanier relates Scott’s profession not only to a past occupation of Kirby’s friend Jim Steranko, but also to Kirby’s own attempts to escape the frustrations he was encountering in comics. These frustrations trail behind Kirby in the annals of comics history, particularly his oft-quoted sentiment “Kid, comics will break your heart”.

It’s a pithy statement, and one which historians have used to conjure up the image of Kirby as a bitter artist, wary of the machinations of publishing, whether in the form of creative interference or the denial of his royalties. It’s worth noting, however, that for as palpable as the cynicism is in Kirby’s famous quote, we should be cautious of mistaking it for fatalism. Kirby also refused to accept that the industry necessarily had to break the hearts of those within it.

While his struggles were exhausting, lasting most of his life, they did have noticeable effects: Kirby’s battles with Marvel offered important precedents for securing royalties from notoriously stingy companies, and his final series published at Pacific Comics served as the vanguard of the creator-owned wave.

Kirby continually pressed against the boundaries of his industry, always trying to make it a better place. His life’s work was to stress that the boxes of labor exploitation that he watched the comics industry build around its artists and writers were still merely boxes, ones that might just as easily be escaped. That industry has, in turn, spent years trying to use his image as a means of mystifying its material conditions, with “comics will break your heart” becoming a sort of “que sera, sera” for the problems in the industry. And it’s a trend which, unfortunately, Tom King and Mitch Gerards continue in their take on Scott Free, 2018’s Mr. Miracle. 

The 2018 series begins by considering Scott Free’s life in the present day. The first issue opens with a spread of Scott Free’s suicide attempt, and proceds with King and Gerards slowly unraveling the series’ apparent premise: can Scott escape existential dread? Early on, Highfather (leader of the planet New Genesis, and Darkseid’s counterpart) reveals that Darkseid has obtained the all-powerful “anti-life equation”, and the lingering question of whether Darkseid has already used it to take over reality hovers over the rest of the series.

But outside of this high-concept framing, much of the series follows Scott Free in the quotidian day-to-day of his life as a minor celebrity and his more fantastical role as a general in the intensifying war on Darkseid’s planet Apokolips. From the jump, we get the feeling that things are off somehow: haunting captions, vague remarks, and the claustrophobia of the nine-panel grid feed the creeping implication that Scott’s life is itself a trap. As the comic progresses, Barda reveals her pregnancy, and we think we glimpse the design of this trap: will the violence done to Scott by his adoptive father Darkseid be passed down yet another generation? 

In the penultimate issue, Scott seemingly escapes the cycle, stabbing Darkseid. Once Darkseid falls, the all-knowing Metron appears to reveal yet another trap surrounds Scott: according to Metron, the dimension of this comic so far has been a “wrong” dimension, a false dimension spawned by Darkseid’s use of Anti-Life. Metron urges him to return to the “right” world, and in a double page spread we recognize this dimension as the world of bright tights, truth, and justice–the “canon” of DC comics. 

Despite Metron’s pleading, the next and final issue reveals that Scott rejects the volatile comic book universe in favor of the world we’ve spent the last 11 issues in. The final issue has Scott walking around in the world he’s chosen, confronted by the specters of various figures in his life who either chastise or comfort him on his choice. The issue is a genuinely unsettling one, as the consequences of Scott’s choice unfold – we learn that he’s having another child, that his marriage with Barda is thriving; we also learn that this reality means that Scott continues to fight a forever war against the forces of Apokolips.

Even revisiting it, I’m still struck by the how this last chapter unfolds, with Scott coming to understand that stabbing the embodiment of evil hasn’t fixed the state of the world; that, as his his lieutenant Forager tells him while watching the war in Apokalips rage on, “this devil came after the last one… and another devil comes after this one.” The questions raised here are all compelling ones and, to its credit, Mr. Miracle is willing to sit with them in these conversations.

There are some things that Tom King seems unable to consider changeable.

As the issue winds down, Scott goes into his workshop for one final conversation. In King’s comic, we’re informed that Mr. Miracle’s manager, Oberon––who Gerards draws with a marked resemblance to Jack Kirby––died months before the comic started. Scott and Barda Scott had an earlier encounter with his “ghost”, an early sign that this reality was not was it seemed, but otherwise remains out of sight, lurking in the background of the comic. When Scott finally comes to him, despairing in the possibility that he’s made the wrong choice. Oberon clasps his shoulders and comforts him, saying “This, all this, it’ll break your heart… you can’t escape that, but if you’re good, if you stay good, there’s someone who’ll help you put it back together.”

It’s a beat which, to some degree, puts Scott at ease. Our hero goes back to his wife and kid and rests assured that, “true” or not, this is the world he chose. Yet it’s a beat which leaves me considerably less comfortable with the work as a whole.

I’m not particularly concerned with whether Scott made the “right decision” choosing this world over another. The thesis of the comic points to the world he chose being analogous to our own; that Scott’s choice reflects a decision to live in a world with material consequences (his child, his developing marriage, etc.) rather than the fantastic and unchanging world of “comics”. No, what concerns me about this last chapter is what it’s saying about the world that he’s chosen—for as much as Scott’s choice is one that argues for the material, there are some things that King seems unable to consider changeable. 

It’s that last line–the paraphrase of Kirby’s “break your heart” line–that makes this most apparent. When Jack Kirby delivers his harsh pronouncement to a plucky youngster, he means an industry, something built on bones and oiled by heartbreak. Something we can bend in return. Something we can escape. And yet something about King’s Oberon means that the statement as it appears in his speech bubbles comes across as something altogether different, both more definitive and more pessimistic.

However Tom King approached writing a series about Scott Free, Kirby’s ghost would inevitably haunt the text. The escape artist was an essentially Kirbyesque idea, and while Scott has appeared in numerous ensembles in the decades since his creation, no one has been bold enough to restart a solo series about Mr. Miracle. King and Gerards were stepping into some big shoes, and their decision to make Kirby’s shadow part of the text is a clever one on a formal level, as an attempt to use the elephant in the room rather than trying to conceal it. Adopting Kirby’s voice is a bold move as well, and the implications of how it plays out in practice are troubling.

The idea of bringing in a work’s creator in order to underscore the authority of the work is an old one. Jacobean masques would conclude with the actors sent to mingle with the audience, while the wealthy donor gave the order to have the stage deconstructed. The effect of this, as David Norbrook describes in his essay on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was “the physical concreteness of the manifestation of honour, so that its destruction was all the more potent a sign of the donor’s greatness.” This too is a kind of mystification, the donor blending the world of the play with the one that produced it, as if to say “all the world’s a stage—now watch what I can do to it.”

Norbrook points out how The Tempest subverts this trend, consistently denying Prospero a masque that would properly instantiate his power. This struggle culminates in the play’s closing soliloquy, in which Prospero (often read as a representation of Shakespeare himself) rejects his instruments of magic and pleads for the audience’s indulgence. Reading it in the context of the traditional masque, however, Norbrook notes that the moment takes on an additional resonance: in this last speech, rather than reaffirming the power of the playwright or donor as in a traditional masque, “authority is transferred to the process of dramatic production in which the company collaborates with the audience – or the reader.” 

Which is to say, it matters how you introduce a creator figure within the world of the work. The way that characters like this talk about the world is inherently tied into a statement about the world itself. King’s use of Kirby’s likeness as a model for Oberon here acts as the appearance of the host into a masque, the appearance of the creator standing as an implicit testimony to the concrecity of “all this.”

The trap of “heartbreak” Kirby originally referred to was the result of exploitative labor practices he spent his professional life struggling to dismantle and escape. Yet in the mouth of King’s Oberon, it comes off as “just the way the world works.” King himself described the line as a bit on the nose, conceding its patness while at the same time justifying it as a means of encouraging those going through a hard time. Yet the sentiment behind the line – that we live in an inescapable system of pain made bearable by those we love – is shot through King’s ouvre. However much his characters struggle, King is seemingly unable to depict a world in which their participation in a heartbreaking machine is anything other than inevitable. 

While the other conversations in the issue are presented as various interpretations of Scott’s situation, King lends a clear prominence to Oberon’s speech by placing it at the issue’s climax. Read in the lineage of creators being brought into the work, Oberon’s description of Scott’s situation has an undeniable authority. The emotional core of Mr. Miracle lies with Scott and Barda, and Oberon’s words here work insofar as they vindicate Scott’s commitment to that relationship despite the day-to-day struggle to be a better person.

Yet when Scott comes to Oberon, his concerns are about more than just his relationship, and King places this story beat in a position to address more than it can bear. Watching as Barda duels a general of Apokolips, Scott’s friend and fellow soldier Forager claims that Scott’s role as general in an unending war is part of what his choice to stay in this life means. For as much as Scott’s journey resonated with me on a first reading – and it did resonate—I find this last scene has left my feelings on the work as a whole to curdle over time. Oberon’s “all that” is talking about not just the struggle to be a good father, but the willingness to accept that this war is inevitable and to continue to participate in it as a general—to accept that part of this reality is the slaughter of the forever war going on around you. 

The argument that Oberon here is talking merely about the regular anguishes of being a person in the world falls flat when read directly after Forager’s speech – the reader is being asked to accept a war with no end in sight as if it’s an axiom of this universe. This violence we take part in is something unavoidable. And while Oberon’s speech does promise that good family will help us patch up, the participation in a heartbreaking world is still considered fait accompli. 

This is not to deny the unavoidable. An escape artist who, like Houdini or Mr. Miracle, survives a hanging doesn’t disprove the law of gravity—he does, however, disprove the law of the noose. To write a book like Mr. Miracle, then, is, much like the art of escaping, to delineate between which of our reasons for heartbreak are in fact inevitable. To make clear how many of our wants are “man-made.” And for most of the book, this tension feels like a driving force in the book, as King and Gerards work to convey the texture of a world in which the violences of capital, war, and industry are made to feel as natural as gravity, despite their material causes being so painfully visible. 

Yet by pairing Kirby’s likeness with Oberon’s speech, King’s series ultimately surrounds material struggles with an air of mysticism. In doing so, King solidifies the inequities of an industry which remains deeply exploitative into just a fact of life. While Mr. Miracle may wear Kirby’s face, it lacks his ability to imagine a better world.