Mister Miracle #15-17--“The Real Big Barda”/”Super Trouble”/ “Murder Lodge”

WHEN NO ONE ELSE WOULD COME, SHILO, YOU ALWAYS CAME…

The transformation of Mister Miracle into a standard-issue DC superhero sort of worked, and sort of didn’t. In a sense, yeah, he fit in from the start—a relatively angst-free, iconic character surrounded by assitants and a faithful Girl Friday/unacknowledged love interest. Even the fact that he’s literally a “god” plays into the common perception of DC’s characters as mythological entities. And yet…this was still a Kirby book, and as a result it almost couldn’t help sticking out.

DC, in the 70s, was in a bit of an awkward spot. Despite what a lot of people assume, Marvel didn’t outpace DC in the sales department until the very end of the 60s; in fact, DC’s fatal flaw was in underestimating this upstart company. For most of this era, DC continued to grind out the kind of goofy, kid-oriented stories we associate with the Silver Age…and they were rewarded for it. Marvel’s audience skewed older and was more passionate about their product, whereas DC was a reliable publisher of ephemeral entertainment for young kids. In fact, I’ve actually heard it suggested that DC’s mistake was abandoning this kid’s stuff in the first place, that while Marvel’s growing popularity would have outstripped them anyway, DC could have continued to corner the younger kid’s market and thus weathered the storm up until the present day. Certainly, by the 80s, DC was regaining a bit of its luster by writing old-fashioned, optimistic, (mostly) kid-friendly superhero stories, thus distinguishing themselves from the increasingly “grim ‘n’ gritty” Marvel.

But in the 70s, it seemed that a change was needed, yet none of the top brass at this old-school, incredibly square publisher knew exactly what that was. Some interesting DC comics came out of this era, many of them involving Neal Adams, but it was the wrong time to launch new books; Marvel had had the advantage of being a small, scrappy publisher under the Aegis of an artist-friendly management during a time of relative economic stability, whereas DC was a conservative publisher with a fusty brand that hadn’t been updated in decades, hitting the skids during a time when a revolution in youth culture was affecting all areas of entertainment. They needed a new direction, but they couldn’t afford to stick with the new and more experimental books that might have carried them in the long term. And The Fourth World was a victim of that.

Still, it’s kind of weird to watch Mister Miracle regress to the point of gaining a kid sidekick--possibly the last superhero ever to try and use this schtick to appeal to new readers. I guess the fact that the kid in question was black was supposed to provide a new, hip take on the old formula, but it was still a bad idea, and I doubt it was Kirby’s. He may have been an old hand even then, but his work was all about looking to the future, not rehashing old, formerly-successful conceits.

At any rate, with issue #15 we meet Mister Miracle Jr., Shilo Norman. Incidentally, this issue doesn’t seem to have an official title, but it’s broken into chapter headings, one of which—“The Real Big Barda”—is referenced in the previous issue as the overall title, so that’s the one I’m going with. (Did that make sense? Because that title sure doesn’t.)

I mentioned earlier that I felt Kirby improved as a writer as he went on…but this particular issue sees him backsliding something awful into his “tell, don’t show” habits of the earlier issues. The first couple of chapters each open with a narration box that seems to pitch the concept of the story to us, like we were studio executives:

“Although this incident contains the bizarre elements that characterize the exploits of our hero, this is essentially a detective saga—the fast and thrilling attempt to stop a crime about to be committed in the wildest way with the wildest weapons.” (That’s all [sic]. Kirby has discovered periods.)

A police detective named Driver arrives, young Shilo in tow, at Mister M’ house as he rehearses his latest stunt: to escape from a metal cylinder before it’s crushed in a giant nutcracker wielded by Barda. And yes, the symbolism of Scott’s super-strong girlfriend wielding a nutcracker is not lost on me. By the way, Barda here is wearing an outfit that evokes her classic red metal bikini:



…But she changes back to street clothes pretty fast. Seriously, was this an editorial edict? An early example of “depowering the heroine so as not to make girl-fearing geeks nervous”?

Anyway, Scott escapes (yawn) and Driver, after dutifully registering his astonishment, explains why he’s here. Shilo is a witness to a murder—that of his own brother, as it turns out—and his testimony will be crucial in bringing down a local mobster named Mister Fez. Fez is clearly in with Intergang, though with the Fourth World stuff being played down as heavily as it was at this point, it’s never explicitly mentioned. Given Shilo’s importance, they obviously would like to rub him out, something they attempt to do almost immediately, with an anonymous hooded mobster chucking a grenade in through the window. Shilo shows his spunk by picking it up and throwing it back again, but the grenade doesn’t go off—Scott already neutralized it with his hidden gadgetry and blah blah blah. The point is, Shilo’s got spunk, and Scott and co. are obviously capable of protecting him.

Meanwhile, we meet Mr. Fez:



He’s building a gigantic gun that will “jam the brains” of the hotel residents next door, enabling him to loot their pockets while they’re unconscious. Shilo’s brother was one of their drivers, who saw too much of what they were doing—that’s why he had to be killed.

Back at Casa Del Free, Shilo is somewhat grumpily being put to bed, but Scott and Barda suspect something’s up, and wait outside his door. Sure enough, Shilo does the old tie-the-bedsheets-together dodge and escapes out the window, headed out to confront his brother’s murderers. Obviously this is a deliberate “don’t Narc to the police” moment, which is a nice bit of characterization, but it’s still pretty suicidal on Shilo’s part, even if we are hastily informed that he’s a Judo expert. Fortunately, Scott and Barda are on his tail, and pitch in to help him clean up the assortment of faceless hoods. Less fortunately, the heroic duo are promptly taken out by a smaller brain-jamming gun (Wielded by a guy named, um, Jammer) and Shilo is strapped across the barrel of the huge cannon. Oh no! They’re going to…brain-jam…his torso…to death!

Um, that part my not have been too well-thought-out.

At this point I don’t even have to mention that Scott and Barda were only pretending to be unconscious, do I? And Scott used his circuitry to block the brain-jamming? And that Barda saves the day by ripping up the cannon, while Scott disarms Mr. Fez? Oh yes indeed:



Yes, Scott. You’re special. You’re very, very special. Good for you.

Anyway, the cops arrive to mop up the scene, and despite some simmering resentment, Shilo sees that Mr. M and Barda saved his ass, so he agrees to be Scott’s apprentice and learn the escape arts… “Lieutenant Driver—I think you’ve bullied Shilo into a career!” proclaims Scott. And on that happy note, we end the issue.



OK, this is a really weird one. Shilo is getting his first lesson in escape artistry when he sees, well, this:



…When did Scott become such a prick? “Yeah, yeah, Shilo. Giant insect-man, standing right behind me. You crazy murder-witnessing ghetto kids are always having elaborate hallucinations, aren’t you? Ha ha! But it’s nothing I can’t casually dismiss for no particular reason, despite all the insanely weird stuff I’ve encountered over the course of my brief career.”

As is required by this kind of scenario, none of the others believe Shilo, either. The insect-thing materializes and dematerializes several times, and Shilo gets so frustrated that he…somehow escapes from the hand-shackles Scott had put him in. Distracted momentarily by his success, Shilo forgets what jerks the others are being…until the bug materializes again and ropes in Barda and Oberon before disappearing. With them gone, Scott starts to take Shilo a little more seriously. Playing a hunch, he activates some circuitry in his glove and detects some nearby “infinitely tiny footprints”—you see, the bug-thing is rapidly growing and shrinking, rather than teleporting, and it’s shrunk Oberon and Barda down to near-microscopic size.

Wait…Scott got all that on a “hunch”? After not believing a word of it a moment ago? That’s some hunch!

The next time the insect appears, Shilo jumps him and is shrunk down alongside him. He manages to overpower the bug with his patented, Austin Powers-style Judo CHOP, but it gets away and now Shilo’s lost in a subterranean world of bug-people.

Um…I’ll spare you the gory details. Shilo uses his various newly-acquired gadgets to fight off various bug-monsters, until he comes face to face with this guy:



Yes, a tiny mad scientist who’s breeding bug people is the culprit. Of course.

He traps Shilo by the novel trick of enlarging him until he’s pinned by the tunnel, unable to move. Professor Egg then steals his superior molecules to use in another one of his insectile creations, one which hatches looking like this:



Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be an Afro.

You can see how this is going to play out, right? Shilo escapes and vanquishes the bug that kinda looks like him, thereby demonstrating his worth as a budding escape artist and overcoming his symbolic shadow-self. Right?

Well, no. What actually happens is that…it all turns out to be a dream.

Yes. Seriously. He banged his head on some crates while he was leaping around, chasing the giant bug, and everything since has just been a dream. But wait—if that part was all in Shilo’s head, what about the giant bug itself?

Oh, you’re not going to believe this. Turns out they have a visitor:



So…he thought the polite thing to do would be to torment Shilo with visions of giant insects before they’d even been properly introduced? And how did Shilo see him in his visions before they’d even met? Or was the whole dream part of Professor “Exe”’s little gag as well? Because that’s one elaborately nasty prank to pull on a kid. And is that supposed to explain why Scott and co. were all blowing him off before? Damn, Shilo, you were right to run away from home last issue.

Another interesting point—again we have elements of the Fourth World showing up without being acknowledged as such. In this case, it’s the Evil Factory/Brigadoom all over again, except this time it’s a totally different evil scientist creating genetic horrors in a microscopic hideout. And, leave us not forget, this time it’s just a dream. Never forget that.



Think that was contrived? Would you believe that the next issue is even more so? Albeit in a hilarious, rather than infuriating, way?

The series seemed to be regressing as it went, to the point where Kirby’s now swiping from Abbot and Costello movies. Mister Miracle, Barda and Shilo once again blunder into danger, this time while their car breaks down in the middle of a tour. Of course this happens in a backwoods somewhere, and of course it’s run by this guy:



He’s just a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania.

Shilo makes the connection that widow’s peak + heavy eyebrows + devil beard + rubbing hands together in anticipation = EEEEEEEEEEVIL, but Barda admonishes him for judging people by their appearance. Ah, yes, but Barda, you’re in a comic book. Of course people who look evil turn out to be evil. By the way, note the classic “if we have the characters point out how clichéd this is, it’s not clichéd anymore!” trope.

In fact, no sooner have they laid down in their beds than Barda is electrocuted and Scott is dumped down a chute. Shilo, who with his RAMPANT PARANOIA avoided getting into bed right away, is spared long enough for the sinister dude—his name’s Peppi, believe it or not—to come barging in and start swiping at him with a sledgehammer. Shilo puts him out with a judo CHOP and then finds himself running a gamut of traps, proving that he finally did learn something about escape artistry. Finally, he’s thrown into the “Inferno Room”, which is basically a gigantic, fiery oven, by Peppi’s hulking assistant, Mungo. Shilo escapes, unconvincingly, by using his jet boots to instantly put out the roaring inferno (somehow he’s not troubled by the metal walls, which must have been white-hot even after the flames went out). He escapes and frees Scott and Barda.

Meanwhile, we check in with Peppi and Mungo, and we learn exactly what’s going on here. See, they run this motor lodge as a trap for runaway mob informants, and they kill them and collect the contracts the crime syndicates put out on them (so they’re Intergang agents, again, sort of). But…the motor lodge is said to be in the middle of nowhere. I can’t imagine sitting there in the middle of nowhere, hoping that people who are wanted by the mob will just happen to blunder in, was a particularly lucrative business until now. But if you think coincidences are starting to lay a little thick on the ground, wait until you see this:



Yes. Seriously. You saw that.

Peppi and Mungo were actually angling for a criminal gang who just happen to consist of an Amazonian brunette, an African-American dwarf, and a bandaged guy who sort of resembles Mr. Miracle. Unbelievable. It’s more and more clear to me that Kirby was using plots he’d conceived of before the order came down to prune the Fourth World elements, because just having Peppi and Mungo be Intergang agents would have allowed them to try and whack Mr. M, no further explanation necessary.

But then, of course, this issue wouldn’t have been anywhere near as gloriously insane.

Mister Miracle and his coterie burst in, Peppi puts out the lights, and a three-way battle ensues, involving a lot of blind firing with tommy-guns. Mister M. gets to do the only thing that comes close to an actual escape by dodging “Mad Merkin”’s bullets and rounding up Peppi (and Mungo, off panel). Shilo socks Little Bullets, and Barda takes on Della with a filing cabinet:



Thus it is that the police arrive to find “a festival of felons!” tied up and ready to be imprisoned. And they would have got away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!

…

As you can see, Shilo pretty much took over the book for these three issues. Again, I suspect this was an example of the editors flailing around a bit desperately—“Marvel has all these hip books with kid protagonists! Do that!” Although that doesn’t really explain why the teen-oriented Forever People were cancelled—but maybe their whole flower power schtick was seen as out-of-date in ‘73. At any rate, even with only three issues of a failing book, Shilo became an established figure in the DCU, popping up here and there over the years. Most recently, in Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers miniseries, Shilo has actually become the new Mister Miracle and is a huge, worldwide celebrity, while Scott and the other New Gods have all mysteriously gone missing (which is thematically appropriate, given Shilo’s role in the original series). Like many other Fourth World elements, Shilo’s apparently playing a major role in the current “Final Crisis”.

But back to 1973. With only one issue of Mister Miracle left, it would seem the whole enterprise was about to end with a whimper rather than a bang. Fortunately, Kirby was able to give his characters something resembling a proper send-off…

Mister Miracle #12-14--"Mystivac"/"The Dictator's Dungeon"/"The Quick and the Dead!"

WELL, NOW IT'S JUST ANOTHER COMIC ABOUT TALKING POLYNESIAN IDOLS AND GOOGLE-EYED SATANISTS.

So here it is: the beginning of Mr. Miracle’s ignominious descent into (gasp) (choke) working for a living.

The comic lasted another seven issues beyond The New Gods and The Forever People, but it took a distinctly different tack. From this point on—except for the final issue—Mister Miracle was transformed into a far more conventional superhero book. And a DC superhero book, no less. That means less sprawling continuity, angst, and edginess and more arbitrary standalone adventures involving Scott foiling the schemes of bizarre but solidly terrestrial supervillains. Oh, and a teen sidekick. But we’ll get to that.

Since the Fourth World doesn’t play much of a role in these next six issues, I’m going to run through them fairly quickly. That’s not to say they’re totally devoid of interest, though. Take issue 12, “Mystivac”. It seems to have just as much to say about where Kirby was at this point in his life as many other Fourth World stories…which, with his most personal project slowly withering on the vine, was not a good place. So it’s not surprising that here, for the first time, we get a villain who actually hatches a credible scheme to defeat Scott Free. “Credible” in comic book terms, of course.

The issue starts with Scott escaping from a torpedo before it impacts its target, as shown on the cover. As usual, Oberon and everyone else makes a lot of worried noise before Scott turns up, safe and sound, in the water. Yawn. What’s more interesting is that Ted Brown, Mr. M’s new manager, has apparently persuaded an entire naval base to participate in this publicity stunt. What the hell, the Vietnam war just ended, it’s not like they had anything better to do, right?

Also as usual, Mr. Miracle is being observed by a hostile presence—in this case, supremely rich sportsman and gambler named Colonel Darby. You know he’s rich and nefarious, because he’s a colonel. He has a butler and a limo. He wears a monocle.

Even in 1972, this strikes me as some incredibly clichéd and lazy characterization. However, to give Kirby credit, I have a sneaking suspicion that Darby was a last-minute replacement for Funky Flashman. Like Darby, Flashman has a loyal manservant, is fanatically greedy, comes up with crackpot schemes, and probably has it out for Scott specifically after what happened last time. But, like I say, Mr. Miracle seemed to be sloughing off its existing continuity to be more “commercial”, so no Funky. Normally I’d bemoan this, but one dose of Funky is probably all any of us ever needed.

So anyway, Colonel Darby’s plan is simple: now that Scott’s making a name for himself as an infallible escape artist, he’s going to place a substantial wager against him and fix one of his escapes. How is he going to do this? Via Mystivac:



Before we can learn more about this bizarre being, we have a bit of low comedy back on the base—seems that the Female Furies are busily mopping up the sailors for making passes at them:



Waaah-waaaah.

Now it’s time for the Colonel to put his plan into operation, by having Mystivac place a phone call:



Yes, Mystivac has the power to command people with his voice. Again, there’s a possible thematic link to earlier issues that’s been severed: Mystivac’s power seems an awful lot like the Anti-Life Equation. What’s more, he’s using it against Scott, the very symbol of freedom and irrepressibility, and subconsiously implanting within him a death wish—which for once gives us reason to think Scott might actually flub an escape. Indeed, during his next rehearsal with the Furies, Scott moves so sluggishly that he would have been crushed by a boulder if Barda hadn’t leapt in to block it with her body.



What I want to know is, given how many times they’ve been convinced Scott was done for, how did Barda know that THIS time was the one where she had to intervene? Though, thinking about it, Barda always tended to have faith in Scott before…so actually, I guess that’s a nice bit of characterization. On a side note, notice how Barda’s wearing civvies here? For some reason, she’s abandoned her bikini/armour combo, and never wears it again for the length of the series. Apparently another aspect of Mr. Miracle’s “New direction” was an attempt to conceal that Barda was a superhero, too, downgrading her to Scott’s girlfriend and assistant. She still has her super-strength, though, so I’m not sure what the point is.

Anyway, Colonel Darby makes his deal with Ted Brown, then places he and Scott’s other pals under his power. Scott escapes, but he’s still got that lingering death wish slowing him down as Mystivac attacks. By the way, check out this panel:



Not only does he have Wolverine’s claws, they make almost the same noise! John Byrne must have been reading this series…

Anyway, Scott fights back, mentally, with the help of Motherbox, and defeats Mystivac, leading to the bizarre revelation that he’s a tiny alien in an exosuit, like that Men in Black guy:



Darby attempts to cheat once more and knock off Scott via a handgun, but Scott gets the drop on him, and all ends well. Ted actually decides to turn down their winnings, since it left such a bad taste in all their mouths—even though it seems like they well and truly earned it.

You’d think that this battle for Scott’s subconscious would be a bigger deal, thematically—and in fact, I wonder if Kirby had something like this planned as a dramatic climax later on. But here, it becomes a symbolic struggle for Kirby’s own soul. Replace “death wish” with a desire to sell out (a theme referenced throughout the book as it is) and you realize that the real point is Scott attempting to retain his own identity in the face of pressure from the people who control the purse strings. Is Scott and Ted’s decision to turn down the money Kirby’s way of declaring his independence? Or is it an example of letting his characters remain pure in a way that just wasn’t possible in real life?



Issue 13, “The Dictator’s Dungeon”, sees Ted abducted by a hovering vehicle right in the middle of one of Scott’s escapes. He and Barda manage to come along for the ride, overpowering the ape-like pilots with oddly Oriental clothing. These, you see, are sentient Yetis from a lost kingdom in Tibet, ruled by one King Komodo, who has taken an interest in Ted for reasons unknown. Scott and Barda are ejected from the plane, but manage to land safely and make their way to the distant palace:



That panel is kind of baffling to me. As you may know, the Swastika actually originates in south Asia, where it’s a simple good-luck charm; the Nazis are the ones who appropriated it to their own ends. In other words, an oriental temple is a pretty likely place to find a Swastika, all things considered. I’d call this an example of ignorance on Kirby’s part, except it’s hard not to think that this issue was inspired by him glimpsing Swastika’s in some South Asian temple in the first place! But then why would he talk about how unusual it is to see them in Tibet? Did Kirby see a picture and just assume there were a bunch of escaped Nazi war criminals hiding in the Himalayas? …Or should I say…HIMMLER-LAYAS?!?

Sorry, I promise I won’t do that again.

Anyway, as it turns out, Scott’s right to be suspicious, as they then come across a Hindu-ized statue of Hitler as a god named “Dafura” (get it?). Ted confirms this when they catch up to him, though they’re then immediately knocked unconscious by some kind of force blast. Waking up in a tiny cell, Ted explains their predicament: “King Komodo” is in fact a Nazi war criminal named Albert Von Killowitz, who’s managed to use his technical genius to take over this remote valley and enslave the Yetis. “Dictator Komodo, is probably closer to the truth!” rages Scott, hilariously. Yeah, the nerve of this guy, portraying himself as a kindly, democracy-loving king when he’s really a murderous tyrant.

Von Killowitz attempts to kill them all by dumping acid from the ceiling of the cell, but Scott saves them by holding up his cape, which is treated to be acid-proof. Komodo/Killowitz decides to have some fun with Scott, and promises freedom for him and his friends if he can survive a series of escapes. Naturally Scott doesn’t expect him to keep his word, but he volunteers anyway, because, hey, he’s Mister Miracle.

The first trap comes while Scott is walking down a cylindrical corridor, only to dscover…HE’S IN A GIANT GUN!



Scott escapes, supposedly, by cutting through the barrel with his boot-lasers again, but come on!!! That’s a bullet in that panel, streaking towards him, about two inches away, and he hasn’t even begun to escape! “The timing must be faster than lightning!” thinks Scott as he wiggles free. Yeah, you’d think.

Scott next dodges a pendulum-axe before getting sick of this game and using his telepathy.



Wait…telepathy?!? Freaking telepathy?!? And it works, too, enslaving King Komodo to his will and allowing them all to leave abruptly, the now-passive Von Killowitz in tow. Seriously, what the hell, Kirby? I know your heart wasn’t in it at this point, but this is just insulting!

The issue wraps up with an even more abrupt explanation for why Von Killowitz wanted Ted—he had been in Korea (in the army, apparently) when he had been separated from his patrol, wound up in the Himalayas, and saved by a band of Mongols. Uh…Kirby apparently thought that Asia was about the size of Ireland for all those elements to exist within walking distance of each other. Anyway, the leader of the Mongols turned out to be Von Killowitz, who Ted immediately recognized. No doubt he had the “Nazi war criminal trading cards” as a kid. Von Killowitz, Herr Murderstein, Doktor Professor Stabenfunfel…collect ‘em all!

Anyway, Ted escaped somehow—we never find out how, because we’re out of pages—but Killowitz decided to track him down and eliminate him just to be on the safe side. Despite the fact that Ted hadn’t mentioned anything about his experience to anyone until now, and it was venturing forth that ended up getting him caught. Ah, the irony.

There’s some talk about how a weight has been lifted from Ted’s shoulders now that this affair is over. So apparently this is what’s been haunting him since he appeared. Uh, again, Ted, you could have just informed the authorities that there was a Nazi war criminal at large in Tibet at any time and spared yourself the angst. Oh well.




Finally, issue 14, a story which prompted one of my favourite lines ever from a comics review, from The Savage Critic’s Jeff Lester: “The whole thing is a bit like someone had tricked Fellini into directing an episode of Scooby-Doo.”

Like most issues of Mister Miracle from this late era, it begins with the characters simply blundering into some kind of nefarious plot, or having it come to them (I guess most of Mister Miracle’s enemies in the earlier issues came to him, as well, but there was a reason for that.) In this case, it’s a dude with a piñata for a head, running frantically away from a mob of creeps in robes and masks, who dogpile on the piñata guy and then basically ask Mister Miracle “What’re you looking at?” I love that they’re offended that anyone could find this bizarre in any way, shape or form.

One of the berobed types, this one not wearing a mask but incredibly creepy-looking anyway, throws a capsule (?) at MM and Obie, knocking them unconscious. Mister Miracle actually avoided the capsule’s effects, however, and just decided to lie on the ground watching them leave until Oberon came around. That’s what he says, anyway.

At any rate, the cult’s lair (because, naturally, it’s a cult of Satanists we’re talking about) turns out to be “only yards away”. Mister M’s approached is watched by the freaky dude from earlier and an even freakier woman with a terrible haircut. The designs here are incredibly creepy.

“Madame Evil Eyes”, as we shortly learn her name to be, greets Mister M. at the door with…laser beams that shoot from her eyes. These incapacitate Mr. M long enough to put him in, you guessed it, a deathtrap. He’s handed over to the grip of a gigantic stone idol…unless it’s actually supposed to be a living demon? It breathes fire on him, Mister Miracle gets out of it, blah blah blah. Though Mme. Evil Eyes’ gloating is pretty funny:



Yeah, Satan has such a good track record. And I love the sheer dowdiness of Mrs. EE. This whole thing is starting to remind me of this.

As a side note—what was it with comics and Satan in the 70s? It’s like comics had been holding their breath for a decade and a half, just waiting for a chance to get back to demons and skulls and grotesques they’d been indulging in before the comics code came down on them like a ton of bricks. I mean, I know The Exorcist was a hugely popular movie, and there were other devil-oriented movies both before and after, and that trend was bound to filter into comics, but there was so much enthusiasm for it. Heck, Kirby himself was already doing “The Demon” as a separate series at this point, which made it seem like an editorial mandate or something.

Escaping, MM and Obie stumble on the guy they originally saw trying to get away from the cult; Oberon has just enough time to recognize him as “’Ears’ Watson!--A top hood!” before a hand emerges from a secret panel and zap Ears with a freeze ray. Comics Code!

Some more uninteresting deathtrap shenanigans ensue before Mister Miracle gets the drop on Mrs. EE and unveil her as the head of a smuggling ring, with the satanic cult thing just a cover. Because nothing deflects the attention of the authorities like pretending to be a satanic cult. But uh-oh, the “Evil Eyes” gimmick is real, and the Madame isn’t going to refrain from using it on them:



You’ll be astonished to learn that Scott is able to combat this psychic attack with his usual array of gadgetry, and the two of them leave the supine Madame Evil Eyes to the authorities, as Scott thinks wistfully of Barda.

That’s actually the most memorable thing about this issue—there was a brief sequence I didn’t mention where we saw Barda examining her feelings for Scott, and now we see Scott reciprocating. Now, you may be saying, “Duh, of course they’re going to get together” but what’s funny is the way Kirby didn’t seem to have much interest in uniting the two romantically up until this point. It sure seems like he was headed in that direction eventually, and obviously the two had chemistry, but it was that kinda Mulder-Scully thing where it seemed like it was going to be more powerful for being unacknowledged by the characters. And it’s strange that we don’t have the two falling into a clinch until after the book devolved into a typical superhero yarn.

Mister Miracle #11--"The Greatest Show Off Earth!!"

MISTER MIRACLE SELLS OUT

So one of the things that I keep fixating on, when discussing Mr. Miracle, is the fact that we never seem to have any idea of just how he operates, on a professional level. Is he world-famous? Is he still making a name for himself? Does he shun the limelight? He certainly seems to prefer to do his escaping far from any potential audience, but there have also been throwaway references to charity events and so on. As I mentioned way back when, I get the distinct impression that Kirby was trying to make Scott as anti-materialistic as possible, in keeping with the counterculture vibe of the Fourth World. On the other hand, it also seems that he’s trying to make himself into a symbol, opposing the forces of Apokolips. Hence his bizarre, self-contradicting career of calling himself a performer while simultaneously keeping all his performances secret.

However, things are different now; as you may recall, Scott’s mentor Thaddeus Brown turned out to have spawned a son, Ted, who showed up on Scott’s doorstep last issue, hat in hand, planning to set himself up as his manager. His radical idea is to have Scott give “performances” to “audiences” in exchange for “money”.

What’s funny about this is that it corresponds with the slow decline of the Fourth World saga, and seems to represent, on some level, Kirby selling out his ideals. The Forever People also recently got jobs. Even Kirby was obviously figuring out that the 60s were over, and the materialistic 70s had begun. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened to overlap with the period in which Kirby started backing away from the more personal aspects of Mr. Miracle, turning it into “just another superhero book”. So it’s ironic that this is one element that actually improves the book, or at least causes it to make more sense.

At any rate, Ted Brown’s slick promotional idea is to make a demo tape of Mr. M doing his thing—along with Scott’s merry band of helpers, who have apparently officially expanded to include not only Ted, Oberon and Barda but the rest of the Female Furies, as well. They all get in on this act, which consists of Barda hefting a very tall pole with Scott balanced on top in restraints, Burnadeth igniting a pool of gasoline at its base, Lashina cracking the pole, Stompa kicking it over, and Ted taping the whole thing. While Mad Harriet, um, stands off to the side and cackles. Oh, and Oberon gets to wear a ridiculous costume and do his usual vital routine of yelling, “Work, Scott, work! Escape from that deathtrap! By which I mean, the thing which is in immediate danger of killing you!” And he gets to jabber on and on in this fashion via the magic of comics, in which huge word balloons can be crammed into a panel that realistically portrays the second or two it takes Scott to escape. Chris Claremont knows it! Now, so do you!

There’s the usual utterly predictable moment where all the characters think Scott’s bought it in his latest escape, but no, he’s still alive, yay, how surprising. What is nice is how Barda is the one character who has total faith in Scott’s ability to survive, even if she does lose track of him for a moment. “You kept your eye on the fire—instead of me!” winks Scott as he swings down from a nearby tree branch. “Nonsense! My eyes never left you!” retorts Barda. Oooh, methinks I detect a hint of romantic frisson between these two crazy kids.

In the meantime, though, Scott is being watched by an enemy, in the second most common trope of this series. In this case, it’s Doctor Bedlam again, or more precisely, one of his “animates”, the faceless robots which he uses as shells for his consciousness. I already mentioned how disappointing it is to me that the supposedly soulless and personality-less animates talk of their own volition, even when Bedlam’s not around, but hey, I think I’ll do it again. It’s the very embodiment of Kirby’s unfortunate tendency, which I assume he picked up from Stan Lee, to over-explain everything via text. (By the way, to skip ahead a little, Kirby does eventually grow out of this tendency…too bad it takes him over a decade.)

Anyway, again a single animate is seated and becomes the vessel for the Doctor, with much unnecessary exposition. He and his crew then immediately reveal the gigantic pseudo-UFO they’ve got hidden in the underbrush. “The Ceri-skiff!” Bedlam calls it. “Made to snare and kill Mister Miracle!!”

Meanwhile, Oberon is relaxing from his latest Mother Hen panic attack by admiring himself in the mirror:



Suddenly, his image turns ghastly…um, ghastlier, that is…and he finds himself in the grip of terrifying illusions once more. Scott rushes him and saves him by remaining calm and naming their visitor, at which point he withdraws. Um…I’m not sure why the Doctor bothered to attack Oberon, since the only thing he accomplished was to alert them to his presence. But I guess it’s a point of honour sorta thing…I mean, being a supervillain obviously isn’t about winning, so I guess it’s more to do with making an entrance.

Anyway, the Animates come bursting in and a fight ensues, one in which even Oberon gets to dismantle one of them—naturally the Furies make short work of them as a group. And once more, the Animates just can’t shut the hell up, announcing loudly their intention to destroy Scott’s Mother Box before actually doing so. He does get off a shot at Scott’s shoulder and seems to fry MB, though immediately afterward Barda throws him out the window.

So now—you guessed it—Scott’s decided to once again head out and walk right into the bad guy’s trap. Of course, at this point it feels a lot more like simple, and well-placed, confidence that he’ll be able to get out of anything, but he sure doesn’t go out of his way to give his archnemeses a hard time, does he? For good measure, he insists that Barda not follow him. Mr. M is a cocky bastard, isn’t he?

Anyway, a few panels later he’s strolling on board the Ceri-Skiff to confront the Doctor:



“Despite the fact that we’re sworn enemies, I don’t take setbacks lightly!” adds Bedlam, vying for the coveted Non Sequitur Award (villainous speech division). Scott responds properly by punching him in the face, but of course he’s jumped out of the body, leaving behind an empty animate (albeit one which keeps the Doctor’s clothing, for some reason.) Then the doors to the skiff slam shut, and it rockets into space, immediately throwing itself into a meteor swarm and convincingly bashing Scott around, hardly leaving Scott the time to move, let alone escape. I guess, for a guy who gives Scott plenty of warning that he’s about to try and kill him and practically dares him to escape—which is something that, if you haven’t been paying attention, he always does--the Doctor doesn’t mess around once the actual deathtrap has been sprung.

The ship rises up into the atmosphere and heats up to incredible degrees, yet, somehow, conveniently, Scott survives. “I can sense your presence, Doctor Bedlam!” he announces. “And, also—your failure to kill me!” Well, yeah, you generally would sense that you hadn’t been killed. Perceptive of you, Scott.

Now it’s up, up, up into deep space, and a killing chill sets in…yeesh, don’t people bother to insulate their spaceships these days? As Scott wraps himself in his cape to fight the cold, the Doctor returns to the Animate to drink in what he believes will be Scott’s final moments, and to be a big stupid lame-o who sows the seeds of his own defeat because Kirby needed to wrap things up conveniently. Ahem, sorry. At any rate, he knows Scott’s about to crash into the moon and die, but suddenly a pinging comes from…Scott’s head. And before Bedlam can make a move, a beam from Scott’s forehead has woven an “electro-web of micro-cosmic atoms” around the Doctor, from which his consciousness can’t escape.

A web.

Morbo?



“MIND TRANSFERENCE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!!!”

You guessed it—Bedlam ends up trapped in the Animate as it crashes into the moon, dazzling onlookers back on Earth. Hey, thanks for the free promotion, Doc! Come clean, you’re not really a super-villain at all, aren’t you? You’re just bashful. You really just want to help Scott any way you can, don’t you?

And of course…Scott then teleports back to Earth. You know, teleportation? The thing which he swore he wouldn’t do in previous issues, because it was cheating?

And if you think that’s bad—



He duplicated Mother Box’s circuits into his hood. Without giving us any indication or setup. LAME. DUMB. DEUS EX MACHINA.

This issue is classic Fourth World, in that it’s a pretty good concept that’s executed in a way that seems calculated to annoy with its awkwardness and inconsistency. There really, really needs to be more set up, and more consistant rules, for the wondrous devices Scott pulls out of his butt in a given issue.

Fortunately…or unfortunately…it’s not really a concern for the rest of the series. Mister Miracle continues, but the Fourth World more or less vanishes for most of it, and with it all Scott’s annoying gadgets. I tend to peg the sudden decline of Kirby’s storytelling in this issue to his knowledge that his baby was being ruthlessly pared down, and the attendant cooling of passion for the project. As it turns out, though, the Fourth World would endure…though we’ll have to wade through some crap before we get to glimpse it again.

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….

Mister Miracle #9--"Himon!"

CONSIDER YOURSELF! AT HOME! CONSIDER YOURSELF! PART OF THE FURNITURE!

When I began this project, I’d read pretty much all of The New Gods and a healthy chunk of Kirby’s Jimmy Olsen. I knew of Mister Miracle from a handful of other sources, and The Forever People were mostly a blank to me. As a result, I started mentally filling in the blanks on both of these two characters before I actually got around to reading up to the end of their respective series. The FPs are and were pretty straightforward (though it’s a bit of a shame that we never get a direct recounting of how they ran off to Earth from New Genesis), but my take on Mister Miracle’s backstory ended up being quite off-base; I’d assumed the guy ran off from Granny’s orphanage, which no doubt resembled a high-tech prison/brainwashing centre, when he was quite young, and spent years kicking around Earth before meeting up with Thaddeus Brown.

This issue proves me quite wrong. I’d already gotten a pretty fair inkling, over the course of the first two omnibi, that Apokolips was quite different from how I’d assumed it to be thanks to the brief glimpse in the first issue of The New Gods. Thanks partly to Kirby’s constant evocation of 1984 and Adolf Hitler, combined with the degree to which the Fourth World inspired George Lucas, I’d been picturing a regimented hellscape of constant military discipline and repressive authority figures, under the unforgiving boot of the ultimate totalitarian, Darkseid. And while this is partly correct—it’s a hellscape alright, and Darkseid loves both his militarism and his authority—Apokolips turned out to be something a lot weirder. As I’ve noted before, there’s a surprising amount of personal liberty of Apokolips, extending even to the military recruits. This makes it far more interesting than a lot of “evil empires” we’ve seen in comics, yet it still enforces Kirby’s ideas of control and freedom in surprising ways. The Apokaliptians are brainwashed in early life, and then turned free more or less to do as they please—as long as what they please is basically in line with Darkseid’s plan. Otherwise, they seem to be free to fight with each other or develop their own “personalities”—most of which seem to be Granny’s mockery of the very idea of individualism rather than a true expression of self-worth.

For now, though, let’s dive into this issue that recounts Mister Miracle’s past, and reveals that the inspiration for Apokalips owes more to Dickens than to Orwell.

We open with a gang of Darkseid’s thugs landing in “Armagetto”, one of the slum-like mining stations on the edge of those blazing, continent-sized fire pits scattered across the face of the planet. A lavish double-page spread (which I’m not going to scan in because it’s too awkward) gives a terrific sense of proportion, showing the Cyclopean architecture towering over the tiny residents, and in turn, the gigantic hellfires blazing away behind them, filling the horizon. Quite an awesome shot here.

This is where the “Lowlies” toil in the service of Darkseid, mining and refining the raw materials to build the weapons and tools Darkseid requires. The goon squad, looking more Lucasian than ever, pours forth at the behest of their superior, “district protector” Wonderful Willik (in classic Kirby fashion, as noted in the last entry, the henchmen are basically interchangeable, but Willik gets a distinctive uniform.)



Willik’s come to track down a known dissident and troublemaker known as Himon, who they believe they’ve managed to trap in this section. The mewling hordes are indoctrinated in the creed of Apokolips—“Die for Darkseid!”—and thus grovel willingly, begging to be able to finish Himon themselves, but Willik’s more of a “Kill everyone and let Darkseid sort ‘em out” kinda guy…and that’s just what he does, ordering his men to take flamthrowers to the mob. As the flames roar up (despite the lack of bodies, this is a pretty brutal scene for a Comics Code approved entertainment!) a single, blurry figure, protected by a forcefield, stands amongst the flames. This is Himon, who, like Mister M. is a technology-powered master of escape, and Willik suspected that he’d be able to survive the flames. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have thought too far ahead, as he now can’t reach Himon without stepping into the fire, and a “dyna-blast” simply ricochets back on him, allowing Himon to make his escape.

Or just barely. Himon nearly teleports into a wall, but is pulled to safety by the young Scott Free, who, we learn, has become his protégé. I should mention at this point that there were a number of little short stories in the back of prior Mr. Miracle issues that detailed Scott’s life in Granny’s orphanage, bucking authority and being contacted by Metron, who basically tended to pop in and taunt Scott, forcing him to question his existence. We now learn, rather abruptly, that this quest eventually led him to Himon, almost in spite of himself. Kirby has a thing for shifting ephiphanies and major decisions offstage at times, and this is one of the big ones.

Still, Scott’s far from convinced by Himon’s ragtag band of orphans, who he’s put to work building and maintaining the gadgets he uses to slip through the fingers of Darkseid’s goons.



Here’s where Kirby’s stated “Oliver Twist” influence comes in, with Himon as a benevolent Fagin amongst the hellish industrial slums. Himon also bears a curious resemblance to Kirby himself, and since Kirby was reportedly very engaged in mentoring the new generation at this point, it’s not hard to see where all this comes from.

Here we get an interesting insight into Mother Boxes. We were told a while back that not just anyone can use one, and that’s confirmed here with one of Himon’s charges, the subtly named Kreetin, who can’t get the Mother Box he just constructed to work, even though “every gadget it needs is in it!” Himon tells him, rather patronizingly, that the Mother Box doesn’t work “because you don’t work! What is there about you that doesn’t work, Kreetin?”

Also among the orphans is Auralie, an escapee from the Female Furie training division, and it’s this that blows their cover. A young Big Barda, wearing a simpler version of her familiar costume, comes bursting in, following a tracker in Auralie’s uniform. To her credit, though, she just wants Auralie back, and in fact doesn’t want her to get in trouble with Granny, which means she’s not going to squeal on Himon. In spite of this, she and Scott can’t help blustering at each other a little, with Barda twisting a metal pipe around his neck, and Scott blasting it to pieces with his sonic disruptors. This sublimated display of affection is interrupted by yet another gang of intruders blasting through the door (yeesh, Himon’s not actually that good at concealing himself, is he? He must move around a lot!) This time it’s a mob, and they want Himon’s head. The orphans fade out en masse, but Himon’s forced to stay behind to help Kreetin, and is captured.

Kreetin is let go by the mob, and immediately scuttles off. Metron immediately shows up. In his noncommittal, passive-aggressive way, he prods Kreetin about his cowardice, but Kreetin is a pure pragmatist, happy to let his mentor be killed if it means he gets away. Metron, despite his implicit contempt, remains noncommittal and doesn’t try to force Kreetin into anything—which isn’t surprising, really, because Metron’s not one to be judging anyone after that crap he pulled with helping Darkseid invade New Genesis. I like to think he’s learned his lesson, and that’s why he doesn’t interfere directly but does try to nudge people in the right direction.

There follows an odd two-page montage of Darkseid’s troops trying over and over again to execute Himon via a ridiculous series of traps, much like Scott regularly puts himself through; and like Scott, Himon escapes, over and over again. Finally, we cut to Himon meeting with Metron on the outskirts of town. Metron greets Himon as “master of theories!!” and Himon declares Metron to be “master of elements!!”—with Metron revealing that Himon basically designed all the technology Metron uses, including the Mother Box, Boom Tube and Mobius Chair. Man, that’s quite the resume. It also seems sort of backward—I would have said Himon is the earthbound master builder, and Metron’s the “idea man” who floats freely about the cosmos, but whatever. The two are apparently conspiring to help Scott escape, despite knowing that this will wreck the truce between New Genesis and Apokolips, but also knowing Scott needs to make the decision himself.

Now it’s suddenly time for the obligatory “traitor turns them all over to the villains” scene, and yes, the traitor in question is Kreetin. He’s executed by Willik for his trouble, and then we abruptly see the various young apprentices of Himon, literally “hung out to dry”, their dead bodies suspended from a “Magna-ring”. We, the audience, see them dead even before Scott and Barda do; Barda’s been summoned to attend the death of Auralie (we glimpse part of her dead body, electrocuted in a massive device, which again seems a little gruesome for this era of comics). Barda is horrified, and obviously this lays the groundwork for her eventual about-face. As for Scott, Willik is apparently leery of putting to death a member of the military hierarchy, despite Scott’s suspicious behaviour of late, and has them dragged off by his waiter. Yes, his waiter. That’s after the guy’s brought in his dinner, of course. Oddly, Scott and Barda go peacefully, and Willik tucks in his napkin to enjoy his meal—



Yes, the next panel is a large explosion.

The waiter was Himon, of course, and he leads them off with a rousing pep talk, revealing the secret of his Mother Boxes: they’re a direct link with The Source. In other words, they’re spiritual computers, and only someone with higher aspirations can use them. Scott, meanwhile, is vaguely remembering his mother, and bursting into tears in Himon’s arms.

An unspecified amount of time later, Scott escapes, having been “stripped of this rank! His mechanisms taken!” Boy, talk about compressed storytelling. Scott dodges Parademons and dog cavalry all the way to the edge of Armagetto, where he’s suddenly saved by Barda and the Furies (who apparently don’t hesitate to commit treason against Darkseid if Barda commands it.) Barda takes out a hovering vehicle with a thrown pile of wreckage. As they pass beyond the borders, Scott and Barda suddenly find their bodes growing heavy due to the area being saturated with “mass-gravity atoms!”. In spite of this, Himon and Metron are waiting for him over the next rise, standing on either side of a Boom Tube, offering him a chance to escape to safety. Not only that, but even Darkseid is there, standing behind Scott, booming, “I’ll not stop him now! If courage and bravery took him here!—Some of it was MINE!” It’s the most overtly stylized and symbolic sequence we’ve seen in this book so far, with Himon, Metron and Darkseid all seemingly taking the form of symbolic figures, chattering in Scott’s head, but taking no action to help or hinder him.

DARKSEID: If he leaves Darkseid, he’ll still find Death!
HIMON: If he leaves Apokolips, he’ll find the universe!!!
SCOTT: Let me be Scott Free—and find MYSELF!

And with that, he’s through the Boom Tube, Darkseid’s war with New Genesis is triggered, and Darkseid gets to do his usual speechifying before we fade out.

Evanier reports that Kirby was starting to realize his books were about to come to a screeching halt as DC prepared to drop the axe, so it’s not surprising this book seems a little rushed; as mentioned, there were a series of little “Young Scott Free” back up features throughout the comic, and I assume that the events of this issue would have been seen in that format had the book been allowed to continue. But the writing was on the wall, and Kirby knew it, so he obviously felt the need to get this info out of the way. It’s too bad that we miss out on a few revelations (like exactly how Metron led Scott to Himon), but it’s still pretty well done, all things considered.

Mister Miracle #8--"The Battle Of The Id!"

HE'S LUMP! HE'S LUMP! HE'S IN MY HEAD!

I’ve already talked a bit about the subtext of the Fourth World, but it’s a little funny how inconsistent it is. Sometimes the saga is as superficial and broad as any other comic of the time; more often than not, though, the sheer power of Kirby’s stream-of-consciousness storytelling creates something resonant and fascinating. And I don’t mean to say that all the interesting stuff in the Fourth World is there by accident, either; it just seems like a lot of it comes straight from Kirby’s subconscious, without a lot of filtering. Kirby was uniquely capable of channeling his imagination directly onto the page, without necessarily trying to force an authorial interpretation; that’s one of his greatest strengths.

Still, it’s clear that sometimes he did have a specific idea for what he was trying to say, beyond a simple allegory (and he almost never slipped into straight sermonizing). Those are the times when the Fourth World is at its most fascinating, and this issue is one of those times.

The issue opens with Barda making her way back to the Female Fury barracks, leaving a trail of beat-up henchmen in her wake. “You ‘kill-crazy’ she-wolf!” Grunts one. “You’ll pay for this!” First of all, on Apokolips, isn’t being called “Kill-crazy” kind of a compliment? And secondly, she hasn’t really killed anyone. Maybe that’s what “Kill-crazy” means here. “You’re so crazy, you won’t kill!”

Perhaps I’m overthinking this.

The next pages are one of the very best two-page spreads in the entire saga—the interior of the Female Fury barracks, where the Furies are fighting (still?) over who gets to be the new leader now that Barda’s gone. Kirby seems to have blown through a whole bunch of designs here, all of them pretty great, in that distinctly Kirby “too-much-is-not-enough” way. I especially like the pirate chick:



But the girl with the two-foot-long steel finger, the green ersatz Catwoman, and the girl with mind-bogglingly enormous wing-flaps are all pretty cool too. It’s like a van full of hippies, a bunch of S & M enthusiasts, and a group of mythological Valkyries all collided and got their costumes mixed up.

Anyway, Barda shows up and reasserts herself: “I’m still in command! Make no mistake about that!!!” she announces, tossing several random Furies around. Wait, so she defected for several months so she could consort with Apokolips’ Public Enemy #2, and she’s still in command?!? Apokolips has a more flexible approach to military discipline than I would have thought. But then, given that they still haven’t chosen a new leader in all that time, maybe it just comes down to whoever can beat everyone up.

There’s some more extremely nice art—Kirby was on a roll—as we see the captured Mr. M crossing a bridge over a steaming, noisome pit somewhere deep within the fabled Section Zero. Turns out the pit is full of malformed, pathetic creatures (“whinning [sic] freaks” as the guard calls them) who are apparently there as punishment. What’s odd is that they’re never actually explained, but the implication is that these are what’s left of those who failed the challenge that Scott’s about to face.

The instant he enters the room, Scott’s knocked out by a tranq gun (so…Mr. World’s Greatest Escape Artist couldn’t get away from a couple of guys with sticks?) and some creepy ninja technicians prepare him for “‘psycho-merge!’--the ‘mind hook-up!’” “—with the Lump!” “Yeah! The Lump just loves intruders—in his world!” (That was sarcasm.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is all being done for the sake of Granny Goodness’s amusement. Scott and The Lump will battle to the death—but not in any conventional arena:



Granny enters with her typical bravado, and along with her come two familiar faces: her pupil Virman Vundabar, and the ever-ambiguous Kanto. “I was dropped into a deep pit!!” says Virman, clicking his heels as he bows to Granny. “But Virman Vundabar, with the proper tools, was out of there in record time, Granny!” Um…is that supposed to impress us? The fact that he climbed out of a pit? Someone’s pretty desperate to curry favour with the boss. Kanto, meanwhile, elides Granny’s questioning by claiming that, when he had Scott within his sights, he “merely chose not to succeed” because he knew Scott was on his way to this arena. “Bully for you!” sneers Granny Goodness, clearly as unconvinced as the rest of us are. “Get this show on the road!!”

But before that can happen, there’s one more audience member to arrive—who the guards describe as a person of high rank, but who “bears the status of ‘non-being!’” “This can be none other than the infamous ‘mystery prisoner’ of Section Zero!” thinks Virman. Who do you think it is? Go on, guess.



Yep, it’s Tigra, who, as you may recall, happens to be Darkseid’s wife. I’m not quite sure what the deal is—are they divorced? Because I’m not really sure why Darkseid didn’t just do away with her, if he found her so embarrassing. Could it be that ol’ Stoney Lonesome actually bears a spark of human feeling for her?

Oh yeah, and that son of hers, of course, is Orion, who she’s never met and has no idea who his real parents are. But Tigra seems to know that fate will drive them together eventually. It always does, doesn’t it?

But now it’s time to start the show. Mister Miracle awakens in a vast plain inside the mind of The Lump, observed by Granny and her compeers. A panel later, he’s knocked out by a familiar pink arm. “You’re the Lump!!” observes a quick-on-the-uptake Scott. “B-but not like you were on that table!” You know, I hate to nitpick, but technically Scott didn’t see him on the table…

The long and the short of it is, The Lump occupies a mental realm of his own devising—apparently on a permanent basis, which isn’t surprising, considering that he’s basically a useless wad of flesh in the real world. Whereas here, he’s a useful wad of flesh. “Life without form”, he calls himself. He can shift both his own shape and the landscape around him, though curiously he never alters his own self-image to something more pleasing to the eye. He can, however, transform his physique into pure muscle, grow or shrink, spout spines, breathe fire, or change—



Um, yes. Anyway, the point is that The Lump hates company, and he controls the mental realm in which Scott finds himself, so he’s seriously outmatched. Scott attempts to make peace and calm down the raging sac of pink goo, but the Lump is on a serious ego trip, and he’s not big on conversation.

The battle rages for a while, and it’s a corker—Kirby embraces the possibility of a shape-shifting warrior to its fullest. But Scott, of course, is an escape artist, so you know it’s only a matter of time before he finds a way out.

Meanwhile, Barda’s been busy, apparently having won over the trust of the Female Fury Brigade once more. I guess that whole business of Stompa, Lashina, Mad Harriet and Burnadeth trying to kill her a few issues ago is all in the past, huh? Anyway, the sexy Gilotina manages to do the old “seduce the guard” trick (made more plausible by the fact that these two know each other, and he’s been hitting on her for weeks) and renders him unconscious, allowing a flood of Furies to swarm into Section Zero and overpower the operators.

Back in The Battle in the Id, Scott is faring poorly against The Lump, but once he’s at the thing’s mercy, being crushed in his rubbery grip, he at least manages to get him to listen. As Scott points out, killing him just means that more intruders will enter the Lump’s realm, again and again, and the Lump will just have to keep killing them, forever, at the whim of Granny and her servants.

But the Lump keeps up his death grip, and just as things look bleak, the Furies burst in. Tigra, who had been watching the battle with contempt, takes up the cause with glee and blows away the guards. Kanto, as ever, remains neutral, but Granny can’t resist cackling that Scott is dead, and that Barda is a traitor. This really sets her off, as she gets ready to crush Granny: “Why, I’m the purest, most superior product you ever turned out!” Again, we have this weird case of divided loyalties on Barda’s part—she seems to think she’s still being loyal to Darkseid in some weird way, and that it’s OK to whomp on Granny and her minions because they’ve strayed from true loyalty. Since, as we’ve seen, the code of Apokolips seems to allow for some pretty vicious infighting, I guess she may have a point. Nevertheless, Barda seems willing even to defy Darkseid to get Scott back, and is on the verge of crushing the life out of Granny in a berserker rage, when Scott himself pops up.

Yep, it’s another “See, I escaped! Now let me tell you how!” denouement. But in this case, it was pretty reasonably set up; Scott managed to close his case to the Lump by breaking off a piece of glass, which had been fused out of the ground by the Lump’s fire-breathing, and using it to show him his reflection. Getting a glimpse of himself sent the Lump screaming in terror, deep into the recesses of his mind, and Scott was able to escape. Scott demonstrates by holding up the piece of glass he used…in the mental landscape…which he’s now somehow holding in the real world. Oops.

I make fun of these books a lot here at Fourth World Fridays, mostly due to the awkward dialogue and sometimes erratic plotting. But when you really start to look for them, it becomes obvious just how many ideas Kirby packed into this series, and you start to get a little staggered by his genius. If he’d only been a little better at consistently conveying those ideas, the Fourth World might easily stand as the greatest comic book series, like, ever. This issue is one of his best, with a lot of meat to chew on. What is the Lump, exactly? Is he a personification of Kirby’s own fears? Every artist risks withdrawing too deeply into his own imagination and thus, losing the ability to relate to others or face the outside world, a process that is portrayed pretty concisely here. The Lump really is Scott’s opposite number, but whereas Scott uses his talents to set himself and others free, the Lump withdraws into extreme solipsism and becomes a tool of the forces of evil.

Heady stuff. Kirby was really hitting his stride here; it’s too bad that the very next issue we’ll be looking at saw the beginning of corporate interference in this book, and the slow decline of the saga as a whole…

Mister Miracle #7--"The Apokolips Trap!!"

“HORSEPLAY WITH THE DIGNITY OF KANTO MAY PROVE TO BE FATAL!!”

Partly because of the nature of the times, and partly due to the work itself, Kirby and Stan Lee’s comics started to garner a certain level of cachet with a more culturally discriminating crowd as the 60s wore on. College students and other cultural commentators began to focus their attention on Marvel’s superhero work, praising it for any number of reasons, and Lee was certainly happy to encourage them. This new gravitas they attributed to Kirby’s work seems to have made him more determined to lend depth and meaning to his comics, which is spawned the Fourth World in the first place. Fortunately, Kirby never started taking himself so seriously that he forgot what had made people love his work in the first place; so when, for example, he started to incorporate literary references into his work, far from being pretentious, it was usually as delightfully insane and entertaining as anything else he did. (Well, OK, maybe it was a little pretentious.)

On the other hand, comics have been borrowing (and “borrowing”) from literature since they first began; The Hulk is just Dr. Jekyll crossed with Frankenstein’s monster, the Joker owes a huge debt to Victor Hugo’s “The Man Who Laughs”, and so on. So it didn’t have to be literary pretentions that inspired Kirby to use “Oliver Twist” as the basis for Mister Miracle, but that may be why Kirby felt the need to make the point more clearly in this and future installments, starting with a return to where Scott grew up: Granny Goodness’s Happiness Home on Apokolips.

On Apololips, an “Aero-carrier” discharges a load of frightened, miserable kids into the hands of a group of “Harassers”, who make it absolutely plain that the kids aren’t here on a field trip. “When the worms disembark, let ‘em know where they are!!” Bellows one meatheaded creep in unlovely close-up. “No Goddling!! No Faltering!!” screams another, though I’m kind of assuming he meant “coddling”. Proper spelling will not be tolerated on Apokolips!

The point is made ad nauseum over the course of four pages, as the Harassers sneer cruelly and begin marshalling their pathetic charges across the plain, beneath the ominous shadow of Darkseid’s statue, and into the waiting arms of Granny Goodness. No opportunity is spared to dole out a punitive whack, and of course there’s much talk of molding them from quaking little wussies into disciplined soldiers. Granny herself, of course, provides both the carrot and the stick, offering cooing, sarcastic words of encouragement to the kiddies right before encouraging her lieutenants to boot them in the behind. She spends a moment chatting with her right-hand man, Hoogin, who we learn was once much higher-ranked but has been busted down—seems he was the leader of a squadron that was home to a certain mister Scott Free, and accepted responsibility for his escape, hence his demotion. Nevertheless, he’s itching to get his hands on Scott once more, an opportunity Granny assures him he will soon have.

Meanwhile, back at Casa Del Free, we’re witnessing a tearful scene as Scott and Barda make plans to return to Apokolips, following up their decision of last issue. As usual for this series, the motivations are a little vague, but the idea seems to be that Scott’s prior escape was somehow bending the rules, whereas if he goes back and escapes again in full view of everyone, he’ll have earned his freedom under these Apokoliptian codes of conduct we keep hearing about, and they’ll have to leave him alone. Or something. Look, don’t ask me—I think that being able to escape from an incredibly hostile and well-guarded fortress-planet in another dimension ought to count as an achievement no matter what circumstances under which it’s done. But apparently Scott, and for that matter Darkseid, don’t see it that way.

Oberon is, predictably, giving Scott a hard time about this decision. “Don’t fill this room with sentimental slop!” sneers Barda. “Just say good-bye—and blow!!” There follows one of those scenes you always get in buddy movies, where the two characters are insulting each other to mask the fact that they really care about each other. It ends with Obie and Barda hugging while Obie calls her a “loudmouthed, military, man-killing harpy” and Barda stutters, “Oh, shut-up!-- or I’ll—I’ll—“ Awwwwwwww.

Anyway, Barda and Scott whisk themselves away to Grayborders, while Oberon suffers a last-minute attack of nerves or something and goes running into the room, screaming at them not to go, as they fade from view. “Oberon eyes the wisp of vapor where his friends have been! --And knows that he’s truly--alone!” Yeah, laying it on a bit thick there, aren’t you, Kirby?

I mentioned “Grayborders”, the region of Apokolips to which the pair are headed—but it’s not the same area in which the Orphanage is located—that would be “Night-Time”. I think the idea is that part of Apokolips is constantly in daylight and part in shadow—presumably, the part that faces New Genesis is the “light” area. Though obviously that would make for a pretty inhospitable environment. More inhospitable than it already is, I mean.

Anyway, Barda has taken them to the border instead of the actual Orphanage region because…wait, why?

(Checks)

Oh, it’s because Barda is insane.

Seriously, she literally materializes them right under a patrol. I guess she couldn’t control that part of it, but she was literally cackling about “fighting their way” to the orphanage as they faded out, and when the patrol orders them to stay put, she starts barking at them that she wants to commandeer their vehicle. “You recognize an officer’s uniform—don’t you?” she bellows. Given that the Female Furies don’t seem to wear anything resembling a consistent uniform, this seems more than a little like picking a fight. Which it is. Barda brings a column down on the hapless patrolmen (Shouting “Run a check on this, you clod!!!”) to which Scott calmly replies, “Well—as they say—in the standard cliché—the fat’s in the fire!!” “Sure! I like it that way!!” responds Barda, and proceeds to hijack a car and ride it into downtown Apokalips. It’s like Grand Theft Auto: Apokolips Edition.

As the two of them blast down the “Long-Shadow” road to Night-Time, their car is suddenly brought to a grinding halt by a saboteur’s blast, and it is here that Scott meets his latest opponent: Kanto the Weapon-Master.



Despite looking like a guy who the Renfest nerds beat up, Kanto’s able to overcome Barda with her own Mega-Rod, prompting Scott’s surrender. And if you guessed that he’s about to put him in an elaborate deathtrap from which Scott will escape using some heretofore-unseen gadget, give yourself a gold star!

In this case, the trap is strapping Scott into a metronome that moves back and forth against a target, while Kanto’s men take shots at him.



The escape involves, literally, deploying an airbag. No, I’m not kidding.



Geez, I could laugh death in the face too, if I had a giant inflatable cocoon that I could deploy every time things looked hot. To hell with it, I could use something like that anyway. “Hey, Adam, did you finish that TPS report?” WHOMP! “Damn, I thought I saw him in here, but the room is empty except for a gigantic cocoon of some sort.”

Scott traps Kanto in another cocoon, while leaping free of his own, but is quickly ensnared by Kanto’s men again (prompting the hilarious “horseplay” line at the top of this post). They rope his boot and start dragging him around in an Aero-cycle, but Scott escapes by—no, not unwinding the cable from his leg, but by sending an electrical charge from his shoe up the wire to the vehicle, causing it to explode. Hey, here’s an idea, Kanto: take Scott’s damn boots off. Then we’ll see who’s mister fancy-pants escapist.

After all that, Kanto just hauls Scott up and points Barda’s Mega-Rod at him point blank…but Scott’s able to talk his way out of it, mostly because Kanto’s grown bored with trying to kill him, and because Scott knows how to pour on the flattery. Kanto laughs and lets them proceed onwards to the Orphanage, where Scott has a really anticlimactic encounter with Hoogin, basically marching up and demanding that he challenge Granny to trial by combat. Granny orders Scott sent out to “Section Zero” to face one of Kirby’s most bizarre creations: The Lump.

So now I’m wondering why Oliver Twist didn’t end with the hero battling a glob of pink protoplasm in a mental arena. To hell with literary references, Kirby outdid the classics.

Mister Miracle #6--"Funky Flashman!"

I'M GONNA GO WITH "NUISANCE".

Funky Flashman, as we will learn on the first page, is a con artist, swindler, and all-round self-interested douchebag. As the caption informs us, he “preys on all things like a cannibal!! –Including you!!!” Well, by definition a cannibal would have to. Anyway, Funky, who bears an odd resemblance to Bob Hope in a couple of panels, lives in the crumbling antebellum mansion known as Mockingbird Estates. Somehow, he managed to get himself named Colonel Mockingbird’s heir apparent, but the deal came with strings attached: rather than gaining immediate access to a fat trust fund, Funky gets a weekly allowance, doled out in a very strange manner: every week, the hideous bust of the Colonel makes a loud “BAAAAW!” sound and the mouth flips open to reveal a small wad of bills.

Kirby, rather insanely, refers to this process as “waiting for Godot”. Yes, seriously. OK, listen, Stan Lee obviously had great success writing hip, Beat-influenced, pop-culture-referencing heroes, and, as I’ve mentioned, it’s natural enough that Kirby would want to try and imitate his most well-known collaborator. But Kirby really, really wasn’t suited to this, and the results aren’t just clunky, they actively make you fear for the man’s sanity. If Lee sometimes seemed hilariously square in his attempts to write “with-it” dialogue, Kirby comes off as borderline senile. I mean, “Waiting for Godot”? How pathetic is that name-drop, even in 1972?

OK, OK. Moving on. Funky and his fawning manservant Houseroy—yes, Houseroy--have an exposition-laden conversation about his plans to pull another con in order to shore up their measly funds. Their mark, of course, is Mister Miracle, who they’ve learned about from the performance he gave at an orphanage fundraiser.

…Wait, wait, wait. Mister Miracle? Performing his act in public, for an audience? And this happened off-panel?!? Surely this momentous occasion could have warranted a panel or two! But then, the whole thrust of this story seems to suggest that Kirby realized that the logistics of Mr. M’s act may have been a bit lacking. More on that in a moment. Although I am interested to know, given the nature of Mr. M’s stunts, how many orphans were killed during that performance.

Anyway, Funky slaps on a fake hairpiece and beard, all the while engaging in extremely, um, flamboyant dialogue. Houseroy says that he thinks Scott Free will prove “quite edible!!” and Funky calls him “Sweetie”. I have to wonder if Kirby wasn’t slipping in a whole other subtext on top of making him, you know, a two-faced conniver.

Meanwhile, it’s time for our standard Mr. Miracle opening splash—Mr. M in the clutches of some ludicrously awesome mechanical deathtrap that he’ll escape from once, let it destroy itself, and then never use again! This time he’s shackled into a crazy-looking rocket sled—it even says “NASA proving ground” on it—on a track that ends on a sheer cliff. The sled takes off in a blast of Kirby Krackle, and, with nanoseconds to spare, Scott…

…ejects.

Huh. The rocket sled had an ejector seat, complete with parachutes. I don’t know whether that’s shrewd or cowardly on Scott’s part. Oh, sure, he had to get out of the shackles in time to hit the eject button, but still. Do real super escape artists need parachutes?

Anyway, after the standard, “Oh God, he’s dead, those crazy contraptions finally killed him! Buh—WHA?!? You’re alive!” reaction from Oberon, Scott mentions that he thinks the crowds will enjoy this stunt…which broaches that taboo subject of money. “You’ve been hinting about going on tour!!” needles Obie. “Well!! –Why not!! It’s time this act began making money!”

Really, Oberon? Are you sure? We don’t want to rush into this, after all. Maybe Scott should wreck a few more NASA rocket sleds before he makes a rash move like trying to make any money out of his antics. Maybe he ought to purchase a few more antique civil war cannons, too. I mean, these things do grow on trees, after all. And risking your life in radical, foolhardy ways just isn’t the same if there are people watching. People who might inadvertently be entertained. It cheapens the whole act, man.

Whew. Well, while that bit of thudding obviousity is being taken care of, interesting events are unfolding back at Casa Del Free: Flashman has made the pilgrimage to see Scott, only to be met with Big Barda. I mentioned a while back that Barda was basically Kirby’s wife Roz in personality, and this scene is a variation on something that apparently happened a lot in the Kirby household: some shyster or corporate shark comes to the door while the King is trying to work, and his missus gently discourages him by, um, crushing a gun in her bare fist. Funky is apparently a hard one to dissuade, however, and Barda gives up and goes to take a bath (?) just as Scott walks in. Apparently splashing around in the water is one of her default reactions when she gets sick of hitting things.

Funky announces his presence and introduces himself to Oberon—“mentioned briefly in your letter,” as Funky puts it. And yes, that’s supposed to be a short joke. Can someone explain to me why it’s been OK to make little-person jokes long after we stopped making fun of people’s other disabilities? I mean, if you mocked a guy in a wheelchair by calling him “Hell on wheels” no one would think you were clever. They’d think you were a huge jerk. Of course, Funky’s a huge jerk anyway, pinching Oberon’s cheek and then suddenly attempting to drop kick him as soon as Scott’s back is turned. Charming.

As soon as Oberon’s departed to make some coffee, Funky launches into his spiel, declaring it a “tingly, wingly thrill!!—To actally be in the very setting where the hallowed Thaddeus Brown, like a warlock of ancient yore—conjured up his majestic manipulations!!” He proceeds to lay it on thick with flowery verbiage. More than a few people have commented that Funky seems to be channeling Stan Lee in this sequence, beard included. By the way, if he’s using his real name, why did he bother with a fake beard? That would seem to clinch the idea that Kirby wanted to evoke Lee. I mean, a pompous con artist with a grandiose way of talking---what else were we supposed to think?

We cut to Barda in the bath. This page was apparently scripted by Mark Evanier to fill space when Kirby accidentally came up short in the page count, and he claims it doesn’t add to the story at all, but I don’t know if that’s quite true—it includes a panel where her “warning circuits” detect a “carrier beam” from Apokolips, without which the next page would seem to pretty much come out of nowhere. She gets dressed (in her bikini-thing rather than her full battle armour) and goes downstairs to meet…MAD HARRIET!



Harriet’s one of the Female Furies, the Charlie’s Angels of Apokolips to which Barda formerly belonged. Her weapons are her freaky appearance, disturbing giggle, and a row of razor-tipped brass knuckles, and ruthless efficiency, and nice red uniforms…OK, sorry, I’ll come in again. She’s a homicidal maniac in a Geisha costume, is my point, and she’s here to take out Barda for her betrayal of Apokolips. As is her partner Stompa, who joins her a few panels later, and as of now is merely a disembodied boot. After trashing some furniture, they phase out, just as Scott comes barging in. Boy, that guy is missing most of the action in this issue, isn’t he.

In fact, it turns out he’s been closing a deal with Funky to manage their coming tour. “He’s a transparent second-rater—but he’ll have to do!!” Um, really? You aren’t going to bother looking around for a better option, Scott? Obviously this arrangement parallels Kirby’s partnership with Stan the Man, but that just makes it seem like he should have tried for something better himself…

Oddly, we now cut to a day later. Wow, the Female Furies sure like to take their time in toying with their prey. Funky’s apparently rented out a rehearsal studio (complete with…klieg lights?) and dressed himself up in what he calls his “Uneasy Rider outfit” which apparently has him under the delusion that he’s John Huston. Scott proceeds to strap himself to a wooden platform that feeds into a gigantic sawblade, prompting this reaction:



Yeah, thanks, Oberon, that’s much more helpful.

Scott immediately follows this with a second escape: he crawls inside a gigantic, clear-plastic fishbowl, tightens the hatch, and lets a concussion bomb drop into the bowl. This one he escapes, somehow, by curling up in “the proper position.” Funky, duly impressed, lathers on the praise, leading Scott to melt a little and reveal one of his secrets: namely, the Mother Box. “But no one can build her!!” Admonishes Scott. “She must be earned!!” I have to admit, I don’t really get what Mother Boxes are supposed to represent. They seem to be a symbol of immense power that’s bestowed only on the worthy, but, I mean, they are basically just a piece of technology. How does one “earn” a Mother Box, exactly? At any rate, it’s clear Funky isn’t worthy, and it’s just as clear that he’s suddenly eager to get his hands on it.

His lust for power is interrupted by the belated arrival of Lashina, another one of the Furies. (Barda mentioned that there were only four, but as we’ll see later, that’s completely inaccurate.) Lashina’s another neat character design:



But before her lash (capable of cutting through solid metal) can land on Scott, Barda swoops out of the shadows and engages her in a page-long fight. Barda STILL hasn’t bothered to put on her armour, by the way. I guess Kirby knew which side his bread was buttered on. Barda manages to subdue her, and she teleports away just as—you guessed it—Scott and Oberon come running in. Barda once again describes her battle and speaks warily of the fourth Fury, Burnadeth, who happens to be Desaad’s sister. They’ve been able to find Scott by tracking his Mother Box, but suddenly it’s gone missing—Scott left in such a hurry that he didn’t notice that Funky ran off with it.

I think you can see what’s coming, can’t you? Funky’s back at Mockingbird Estate, practicing his public speaking, when the Furies come for him and decide to kill him out of spite. Burnadeth fires a “fahren-knife” that will “penetrate dimensionally—and barbecue him from the inside!!!” Funky apparently avoids it, andthrows his faithful butler Houseroy into the fray in order to hold them off for a few minutes while he makes his escape from the house, which explodes behind him. After mourning the loss of his family (?) estate (which Kirby takes a moment to remind us was founded on slave labour) Funky, his hair and beard blown off, walks off down the road to new schemes, apparently unconcerned by all that’s transpired.

We get a brief epilogue here where we reveal that Mr. Miracle and Barda arrived on the scene to pull Houseroy from the flames (oh, comics code) and engage the Furies, driving them off with explosives. This all happened off-panel, of course. The issue ends with Scott and Barda finally making a decision: instead of waiting on Earth and taking on their Apokoliptish adversaries one by one in easily defeatable permutations, they’re going to head back to the planet itself and take on Darkseid, Granny, and the hordes of Apokolips on their own turf.

Gee. Good thinking.