Mister Miracle #6
Writer: Tom King
Artist: Mitch Gerads
Covers: Nick Derington,  Mitch Gerads
Publisher: DC Comics $3.99

Mister Miracle has been a rather jaw-dropping comic. On paper it shouldn’t be surprising: the team behind Sheriff of Babylon doing a take on a beloved Jack Kirby character around the time of the King’s 100th birthday? Easy crowd-pleaser obviously, but it’s something else to have your rather lofty expectations blown away. Instead of attempting to go the direct route of outdoing Kirby or Morrison’s takes on a scale of spectacle, Tom King and Mitch Gerads have opted for a more intimate and yet somehow no less grand take on Mister Miracle opting to focus on the troubled life of Scott Free and his marriage to Big Barda while the big good and evil battles play out more as noise and weights for Scott’s psyche.

King has proven to be pretty skilled at getting to the soft cores of characters as notoriously cold as Batman and the Vision, but Mister Miracle presents a different face to tackle. Being the platonic ideal of freedom and the son of a God would ideally be less challenging than being simply human, but the focus of the entire arc has rested upon how the destructive childhoods and lifestyles that Scott and Big Barda lead has been a great fuel for drama, and more interesting than the cosmic game of good and evil we’ve seen play with Orion and Darkseid before. It also helps to showcase the mundanity they’d like to have, vs the gravitational pull of what their responsibilities demand of them.

Mitch Gerads has been a huge part of why this comic works too. In seeing his work for The Punisher, or Sheriff of Babylon it’s almost hard to believe that this is the same guy who drew those other comics. It evokes the same kind of free-wheeling grandiosity that defined Kirby’s take, but without being beholden to it. The cheerful, yet eerily beaten take on Scott Free wouldn’t work half as well without Gerads’ work here. It’s also a ringer for one of the most gorgeous comics of the year. If you’re going to jump on to Mister Miracle, now is pretty much going to be the time.

5 Cosmic Buzzsaws out of 5