In Tom King's seminal run on Mister Miracle, the first time you see the main character, he has just attempted suicide. When asked why on a newshow interview, his answer is simple. Mister Miracle is an escape artist, the escape artist, superpowered by the impossible Mother Box and practiced in the firey hellpits of Apokalips. He slit his wrists for the same reason he does anything else: he was trying to escape. In this case, from death.
Needless to say, as superheroes always do in the end, he succeeds.
J.R.R Tolkien had this to say on the topic of fantasy novels and escapism: "I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?" There is a reason that stories within the genre are often referred to with such derogatory terms as "wish fulfilment" or "escapism": They present another world, one entirely different from our own. Yet the world Mister Miracle is more similar than those of other comic book fair: he wakes up in a condo with his wife, brushes his teeth, drives to work, talks and lives and exists, all within the confines of a familiar planet. Each page is split into nine panels exactly: no more, no less, each of equal size. It gives the impression of time passing, but in particular time passing regularly, without change or end. There are no other superheroes ot be seen: only his family of helldemons from the firey planet Apokalips and New Gods of the Fourth World. And even then, his infernal relatives are cordial and willing to talk, while his supposedly divine rulers are... well, evil isn't right, but rude. Petty. The bad are good and the good are bad, in all the ways we see and care about. If this is an escape from our prison, then it appears we have merely tunneled into another cell.
And something does seem wrong. The entire comic, there are visual glitches, repeated sentences, the occasional jarring interjection in an all-black panel that "DARKSEID IS". Maybe he is the source of evil: as Satan analogs go, Darkseid is up there, originally envisioned as the divine embodiment of evil by the incomparable Jack Kirby. The old gods of the Third World died, including the ancient primordial evil of Darkseid's father, the evil of dark lords and torture and conquest. But Darkseid is an altogether different type of evil: the new evil of Fascism, or mindless obedience, of evil for the sake of more evil. He searches for the Anti-Life Equation: not victory, not power, but proof mathematical of the fact that he is right. Wielding the Omega Sanction, twin beams of red light that chase around corners and plunge their victims into eternal torment, he seeks final victory over all existence many times throughout the pages of DC Comics.
And in a now iconic scene, he is shown taking a carrot stick off of a plate, dipping it in hummus, and eating it, before getting back to talking with Mister Miracle. This sequence takes nine panels. A whole page.
In prison, evil isn't always trapped within a cell. Sometimes, it has to eat.
Throughout the comic, Scott Free (Mister Miracle's real name, chosen by his abusive grandmother after the fact he kept on trying to escape) lives a thoroughly mundane life. He fights in divine wars, but calls home on the battlefield to ask how the baby is doing. The day before his execuetion, he aims to spend one final perfect day with his wife, but gets stuck in traffic on the way there. After escaping his execuetion, fighting his way through the entire kingdom of the new gods, and finding his brother dead, the most emotion he shows is at the fact his wife is pregnant. Even when superhero shenanigans intrude, he chooses his child over a peaceful universe, risking it all to kill Darkseid himself with an impossible knife hidden in the veggie platter. It seems that his mundanity is infectious, as even the supervillains of the DC New Gods cosmology are reasonable and willing to talk with him: in another memorable scene, he is told a story by a demon of Apokolips as the two use the bottomless pit of Darkseids palace as a urinal. It goes something like this, speech bubbles floating over a droplet of spit flying through the darkness of the bottomless pit:
"An apprentice painter challenges his master to a contest. A week later, the two stand on a stage, each with their painting covered by a curtain. The apprentice withdraws the curtain, and there is a bowl of grapes: he has spent the whole week drawing three of them, neatly arranged. The audience laughs, before a flock of birds fly forward, and begin to peck at the canvas. His art was great enough that even wild animals were convinced it was real. So with a smile, the apprentice turns to his master, and asks him to remove the curtain."
The master says: "What curtain?", and the drop of spit lands on the head of a chained prisoner.
However, as with all good things, the comic does eventually come to an end. Darkseid lies defeated, Scott Free's son enjoys a healthy second birthday, and he goes to sleep with his wife, only to be awoken by the god of knowledge, who informs Scott Free that he has finally uncovered the truth. This is not a real world. There is another world. A world of heroes, the speech bubble broadly drawn against a backdrop of the DC universe's many iconic inhabitants.
And then the next issue begins with Scott Free still at home, still with his wife and child, still in the same hell he began in. The final issue features some discussions with hallucinations of characters past, but ultimately none of them are real. He is stuck here, now, and will remain forever.
So what is the comic about? Well, opinions differ. Some believe it really is just what it is: a strange alternate universe of the main DC continuum. A throwaway line about the baby implies it may be the work of the Lump, a DC supervillain that traps you in hallucinations and had managed to temporarily restrain Mister Miracle in the past. But the conclusion I choose to draw is that, as heavily implied throughout the run, Scott is trapped in the Omega Sanction: Darkseid's attack that sends you into an endless hell with no hope of escape. Why? Well, quite apart from the pessimistic view that hell looks something like here, my reasoning is twofold. I believe it is the Omega Sanction, the unstoppable impossible inescapable attack, because Scott Free was ultimately capable of escaping from it, and I can scarcely imagine anything else from his character.
And I believe it is the Omega Sanction, the ultimate product of the Anti-Life equation and the final weapon of Darkseid, because even though he was capable of leaving, he stayed behind.
There is a meaning to this comic book, but not one that can be easily explained. It a story about escaping from imprisonment. It is a story about fascism and the problem of evil. It is a story about love and absurdity. However, perhaps the best explanation is found in the parable of the painters: the fact that the greatest possible artistic achievement was the creation of the realistic, and the fact that people nonetheless cheered the less realistic option. Stories are escapism: they are a method of enjoying ourselves, of forgetting the world around us, of ignoring the mathematical proofs that everything ends and life is not worth living. And when hit with the absolute, awful truth, people refer to it as having "grown up". Too old for comic books and four colour spreads. Too aware of the way the world actually is. But superhero comics are all about watching superheroes do the impossible, the unimaginable, for the purpose of entertaining and inspiring us: and on every level, Scott Free did just that when he chose not to escape. He's still in that prison to this day, still trapped behind the bars of white on nine-panelled pages. Still in hell. But in spite of everything, he's happy.
Some might say that if he can do it, then so can we.
And some might say that the message is bunk, because at least there was a way for him to escape, even within the depths of torment.
I chose not to escape myself. But that doesn't mean I can't direct you towards a way out.