Day 658

Aka Monday 19^th November 2018

Today I read ‘Mister Miracle’ #12 and ‘Mars Attacks’ #1…

… the ‘Mister Miracle’ series, by Tom King and Mitch Gerads, has been an intriguing one, we’ve seen Mister Miracle attempt to kill himself, a cosmic battle between the New Gods, with plenty of deaths on both sides, Mister Miracle and Big Barbara have a child and get pregnant with a second child, but it’s all been done in a nine-panel grid and I had thought that the ‘punchline’ of the series would be that the suicide attempt would have been the start of the Antilife equation “trap” and that the vast majority of the series was the “trap” trying to prevent Mister Miracle from escaping and Mister Miracle beating it and that in #12 we would see him escape and confront Darkseid, to say something about how evil can never beat goodness forever, our heroes would go off into the sunset and we’d have a treatise about depression dressed in superhero clothes. 

But we don’t get that, we get hints that Mister Miracle is in a “trap” and that he isn’t experiencing reality, a tribute to Stan Lee, a tearful reunion with Oberon, a happy ending and an end panel that says “The “Mister Miracle” series will not be continued…It’s new thrilling successor will soon be on sale! Look for it!”. All of which has left me feeling unfulfilled and slightly cheated by this series, it’s unclear if the ‘…to be continued’ box is true or if it is just an affectation, a call back to the comic books of yesteryear. 

If this is it, I feel kinda cheated as it could all have been told in six issues and not padded out to twelve. I get that repetition is a big part of the story, as it feeds into the feeling of, and represents, depression, but you could have had plenty of repetition in six issues. And Grant Morrison did a similar story with his 'Mister Miracle' series in just four issues as part of his ‘Seven Soldiers’ event. If the story is to be continued and there are going to be another six issues, so that DC can get a third trade out of it, I feel even more cheated as at most you would only need nine issues to cover the Mister Miracle getting caught in the “trap”, realising it’s a “trap” and then escaping the “trap”, it would have been more than enough to tell the whole story, with plenty of extra room for repetition. So, I’ll give #12 and the series (so far?!?) 7/10.

…‘Mars Attacks!’ #1 is a fun read and should be a great series, but with something written by Kyle Starks, with gorgeous art by Chris Schweizer and Liz Trice Schweizer, how can it don’t be! There’s plenty of Martian mayhem and destruction, but it’s mostly in the background as we get to know our two main characters, Spencer Carbutt and his dad, Major Carbutt, before the full fury of the Martian’s is unleashed. There’s a real sense of family and history between Spencer and his dad and there’s plenty of action and laughs/jokes, very much like the Tim Burton movie of 'Mars Attacks', or at least my memories of the film. 8/10.

…and I did the G2 Crossword:

…which gets the week off to a middling start, with having to cheat on a fifth of the clues (six out of 25), which I think is due to ‘that Monday feeling’, “a case of the Mondays”, most of the answers did come, but it was a struggle and they took a while to arrive. But I did learn that ‘Warsaw’ is an ‘European city (with a Convention for commercial flying)’ (well I knew it was an European city, but not that it had a Convention), that ‘Pashto’ is an ‘Iranian language spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan’ and that a ‘Rattler’ is a ‘North American pit viper’. And I’d argue that the clue for 20a (‘Ages’) should have had a (slang) attached!!!, to me, the answer ‘yonks’ feels like a slang term and not a proper word (or I may be annoyed that I didn’t get it!).