Kirby's Jesus

A lot of bad things have been written about Grant Morrison, and maybe they're all true (I am just getting back into this game and haven't read Final Crisis or even 52). But I have read Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle and I've read the Fourth World Omnibus, so something ought to be said: Morrison gets Kirby, and Morrison gets Mister Miracle, and that's not nothing.

According to The Hunger, this is the part of the blog where I tell all two of my readers that I read the X-Men when I was a kid and then stopped but got back into comics when a college professor introduced me to Watchmen. Well, um, guilty, except I didn't read X-Men, I read Spider-Man, which is why I became a philosophy major and not a cultural studies tool. Moving on.

Basically, what Morrison got about Mister Miracle is that beyond the costume, beyond the goofy premise, and beyond the romance with the completely awesome Big Barda, Mister Miracle is the son of the Highfather given over to the "dark side" in exchange for peace. That's inescapable Jesus-y. Mister Miracle subsequently escapes from Darkseid (and the vastly more disturbing Granny Goodness, who, whether Robert Jordan admits it or not, was the source for Semirhage and Mesaana alike--whoa, that's like three whole other blog spots right there).

The Jesus stuff is right there in Kirby. Mister Miracle, we are constantly told, produces genuine "miracles," "cheats death," and walks, with alarming frequency, into the hands of his enemies, seemingly like a lamb to the slaughter, although he always escapes all but unharmed. He is seldom violent beyond incapacitating his foe du jour. His death-defying escapes are accomplished with the aid of a Mother Box, which we know from elsewhere in Kirby is a direct line to the "infinite" or "the Source"--no less than God Himself. If there is a moment in any of Kirby's Mister Miracle stories in which Scott Free, post-escape from Granny's brainwashing, acts with less than perfect virtue, I'm unaware of it--even when, in the final issue of Mister Miracle, Scott is captured by Granny Goodness and his Mother Box is disabled, he begs for the release of his comrades, not himself. His assistant, Oberon, goes so far as to say to Scott that "By daring death, you taught me the value of life."

So when Morrison produced Seven Soldiers, with its repeated crucifixion and self-sacrifice imagery for the new Mister Miracle, Shilo Norman, he was not being especially groundbreaking, except insofar as honoring the root ideas of classic characters is "groundbreaking" in today's comic world (rimshot!). What Morrison did that was clever was realize that Kirby's Mister Miracle #12 (in the unlikely event anyone is reading this AND knows what I'm talking about, the one with Mystivac, the thought-controlling idol) is all wrong, and essentially rewrite it correctly.

What probably hasn't come across in this entry is that Jack Kirby's Fourth World stuff, now helpfully collected in four hardcover editions, is awesome. It's better than his work on Thor. As blasphemous as this sounds, it's better than his work on Fantastic Four. I could go on, and will later. I wanted to hit the Jesus elephant in the room first, and now I have, in a rambling, disorganized way.