Mister Miracle #10--"The Mister Miracle To Be"

TO BE? OR NOT TO BE? THAT IS THE QUESTION.

The fourth and final volume of the Fourth World Omnibus collection kicks off, appropriately enough, with Mister Miracle—appropriate, because he’ll be dominating the first 2/3rds of this collection. That is, before we leap forward 15 years and Orion takes center stage again. But more on that as it comes.

If you’ll cast your mind back a couple of issues, you’ll recall that Scott and Barda had returned to Apokolips for some cathartic foiling of Granny Goodness’s plans…though he still hasn’t quite managed to defeat her for good, so I’m not really sure what the point was. But she’s definitely been weakened by virtue of the fact that the Female Furies have seemingly all gone over to Barda’s side, and in fact the “big four”—Stompa, Lashina, Mad Harriet, and Burnadeth—are all returning to Earth with her and Scott as this story opens.

Unfortunately, it seems that (apparently for the first time ever) they’ve miscalculated and sent a Boom Tube to the wrong place—a bland-looking grassy plain that the Furies immediately proclaim to be a dump. Scott, more sensibly, points out that it’s an improvement on Apokolips…which is, of course, a cue for the explosions and ammo. While Barda dodges the fire of an automated machine gun, Scott crawls underneath it and disables it just in time. The other Furies, conveniently, hang back off panel while this is happening.

No sooner has Scott succeeded than a sinister bld fellow in Khakis and his array of goons pop up, guns trained on Scott. “You ’all-nation’ agents are getting increasingly ingenious!” he proclaims. Despite Scott’s proclamations of innocence, the guy prepares to open fire, and Scott is once again forced to kick, dodge, and scurry his way out of the gunfire as he takes out the agents, spouting limp one-liners like “I get a kick out of meeting people I don’t like!” Even Scott admits to himself that this is a horrible cliché once the guys are all rendered unconscious. I guess either Kirby was becoming aware of his limitations as a writer—there are more and more of these self-criticizing moments as the series goes on—or else someone else was poking him about it.

At any rate, the Furies, Barda included, have run off somewhere, and Scott somehow decides that they preceded him down into the hatch from which Baldy emerged. Um, yeah, no doubt, Scott. Just be glad there isn’t a killer on the loose, because that whole “splitting up to wander off down a dark corridor alone” routine tends not to work so well in those situations. Actually, they usually lead to trouble in superhero comics, too.

And indeed, no sooner has Scott emerged from the elevator than he’s greated by…a disembodied head. The Head of the World Protective League, as he calls himself. In classic villain fashion, he proceeds to show Scott around his “Tinker’s Shop”, as he calls it, where his men are preparing an “orbital plague bomb” with which they plan to hold the world for ransom. Yes, that “protective” moniker applies in the sense of “protection racket”. This is standard supervillain stuff, of course, but adding that little flourish is a clever touch. Actually I think it would have been even neater if we’d started off by assuming that they were a bunch of good guys, and then the play on words had shifted our perceptions.

At any rate, the Head has been labouring under the assumption that Scott and the Furies are a bunch of secret agents, sent to disrupt their plans. Because secret agents have a tendency to show up in flamboyant, brightly coloured costumes and set off your evil lair’s defenses, don’t you know. At any rate, Scott helpfully waits until the Head is ready to hit him with a brain beam that renders him unconscious.

Meanwhile, the Furies are waking up in a cell, enclosed by foot-thick glass. Apparently the Head saw fit to render them all unconscious and take them prisoner, while allowing Scott to wander right up to him. Well, you’ve got to give props to the head: he recognized that the Furies are a lot more of a physical threat than Scott. What he failed to notice is that Mad Harriet has secret “power spikes” secreted in her knuckles…



Whoa, “Snikk”? And this was two years before a certain Canucklehead burst onto the superhero comics scene. Oh Kirby, is there anything in comics you didn’t anticipate?

Mad Harriet carves a hole in the glass, and Stomp kicks it out, freeing the Furies and knocking out the guard. Across the room, the Furies find another prisoner, one who starts smarmily demanding they free him. Turns out he’s “Mike McKracken of the All-Nations Agency!”, super-spy and secret agent (though not so super that he can avoid getting captured, it seems.) He immediately pours on the Neanderthal charm with Barda, which gets her to rip the bars out of his cell, at least, though only for the purpose of wringing his neck. McCracken, in case it isn’t obvious, is a parody of the numerous 60s-era superspies with out-of-control libidos who worked for vague UN-like international organizations; pairing him with the Furies is an amusing bit of snarkiness on Kirby’s part. While Kirbs wasn’t immune to sexism himself from time to time, this whole storyline is undeniably a shot fired at the rampant chauvinism of the previous, supposedly enlightened decade.

At any rate, before the Furies can get sufficiently angry at McCracken to polish him off, security shows up, leading to a standard slugfest, with the Furies making short work of the flunkies. Uh, I guess the Head was too busy to knock them out again long-distance?

Specifically, he was busy with Phase Two of the Generic Supervillain Five-Year Plan: put your hero in an elaborate deathtrap instead of just shooting him. This is often sort of elided over in Mister Miracle because the villains have heard of his fame and want to see if he’s Really That Good, but The Head has no idea who he is, so why bother?



Oh. Right. Floating Heads always have an array of random mental powers, so I should have figured on plot-convenient telepathy, too. At any rate, is there really a lot of suspense in seeing Mister Miracle bound hand and foot and thrust into a hyperbaric chamber that is promptly flooded with “death gas”? To no one (outside the comic)’s surprise, the chamber is opened and the empty shackles fall out…and when the thugs peer in, baffled, Mister Miracle comes flying out feet-first into them. Scott grabs the head and takes it hostage, as the villains stand agape at Scott’s ability to overcome his mental powers. The Head, however, has at least figured out Mister M.’s use of hidden gadgets, and calls a penalty in the form of a huge psychic blast that puts Scott out again.

This time, it’s the arrival of the Furies that saves him, particularly Lashina, but the Head still manages to get away…dragging Scott’s limp body behind him on a magnetic tractor beam. Before the Furies can catch up, the Head has arrived at the launch site and throws Scott into the germ-carrying rocket.

Hmmm. This is starting to look a little familiar. Fortunately, there’s a twist at this point: a magnetic pull drags the Head towards the rocket’s hull and affixes it there as the rocket takes up…then explodes in the upper atmosphere.

Damn, Scott, that’s cold. I mean, yeah, he was insane and evil and a threat to the world, but that doesn’t usually stop superheroes from sparing their enemies’ lives. The traditional out is for the villain to somehow be foiled by his own devices and fall down a pit, or be eaten by his own monster, or something. But that was Scott just flat-out executing the guy. Also, I kinda hope that rocket got high enough before exploding that the germs aren’t going to trickle down to Earth and infect everyone.

The Furies catch up to find Scott waiting calmly in the control room, ready to deliver one of his patented expositional speeches about how he escaped (in brief: by using his usual assortment of Deus Ex Machina Gadgets.) Surprisingly, though—possibly because Kirby suddenly realized he had five pages left—we get a little additional drama as they track down Barda’s missing mega-rod, which is in the hands of a leprechaun:



…Or an evil research scientist, whatever.

They catch up with him pretty easily—boy, that was gripping—and, after taking back the Mega-Rod, give him four hours to evacuate the base. Then McCracken sabotages the base to explode and Barda whisks the batch of them away.

But there’s still some pages left, and they’re given over to an epilogue in which we check on the long-absent Oberon. Or rather, the left-behind-for-three-issues Oberon. Left to rattle around Thad-now-Scott’s old house, Obie’s going a bit stir-crazy, so he’s delighted to receive a visitor: Thaddeus Brown’s son, Ted, who is only just now bothering to show up. Seems he’s been walking the Earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, trying to find himself, and possibly running away from his father’s long shadow. However, having received a letter from Oberon some time back, he’s finally realized his calling in life: to be a PR man.

Yeah, I thought that was a little anticlimactic too.

It’s especially ironic given the whole counterculture tone of the Fourth World Saga up until this point…but then, change was in the air for Kirby when he produced this issue. Let me note briefly that Scott, Barda, and the Furies arrive home with impeccable timing, and Ted promptly decides he’d love to help promote their act, thus ending the issue with a new phase in Mr. Miracle’s life about to begin.

Anyway…it’s about this time that Kirby apparently started to learn that the Fourth World books weren’t selling that well. Combined with the brewing economic times affecting America in general and the comic industry in particular during the 70s, Kirby seems to have suddenly realized that the good times of (relative) experimental freedom and personal expression that he’d enjoyed for a decade were about to grind to a halt. DC wanted concepts out of him that could compete with Marvels’ for the burgeoning fanboy dollar, but they weren’t really willing to let the King stretch his creative muscles in a way that would really accomplish this. For their purposes, they were getting Kirby at his least commercial—or at least, that’s how it must have seemed then. As I’ve argued before, I think Kirby was right on the cutting edge at Marvel, but here he was too far ahead of his time. By the late 70s, the cosmic vision of the Fourth World would have been completely suited to comics and pop culture in general, but at the time it was still a slowly-budding market.

That wasn’t good enough for DC, which was only just starting to lose its grip on the #1 spot in the comic book market. A lot of people don’t realize this—for all Marvel’s passionate fans throughout the 60s, they were a pretty small segment of the market compared to that of DC and some of the other giants, like Dell. It wasn’t until after Kirby left that Marvel started to overtake them, and the explosion of fanboy fervour which has been associated with comics ever since has distorted the historical view. It was unfortunate timing on Kirby’s part; he’d been part of a team of underdogs on their way up, but now he was suddenly allied with an industry leader starting to enter a decline. It was the worst of both worlds: he got a nervous, conservative boss that hated to take chances, without the commensurate money and readership that might have counterbalanced it. Though I should note that some blame corporate backstabbing rather than genuinely low numbers for the cancellation of the Fourth World—but more on that later.

The long and the short of it is, Kirby could probably sense that the game was winding down, as this comic not only sets the stage for the future of Mister Miracle, it also seems to reflect a listlessness and a growing lack of interest on Kirby’s part. The next phase of the Fourth World saga is a little depressing, but it does have something that at least vaguely resembles a happy ending….