All throughout April and May, we’re crowdsourcing a coronavirus quarantine comics reading list. Each weekday, we post a new recommendation from someone in the comics industry to help folks get through the isolation. This includes writers, artists, letterers, editors, comics journalists, publicists, and more…often paired with a local shop that’s currently selling the books via mail order.

Today’s pick comes from writer Christopher Cantwell…enjoy!

I wanted to reach deep into the catacombs of my comic book knowledge and pull out something extremely obscure so as to impress the insightful readers of this wonderful site.

But instead I’m going to go a different road and be much more honest. I’m recommending Mister Miracle by Tom King and Mitch Gerads—which, if you’re reading this on this site, you probably have read already—but I’m going to try to speak to precisely why I’m recommending it. Maybe it’ll inspire you to go back and give it another read should my perspective push any buttons in your mind and soul.

I probably talk about this too much in essays for my own books and in my own comic interviews, but mental illness is an especially resonant story topic for me. Mister Miracle opens with the starkest depiction of that—a terminus we all fear, maybe have at times considered or even tried, or at least we might unfortunately be familiar with through a colleague, a friend, or a family member.

I’ve never said this before publicly, and a lot of people I know aren’t aware of this, but I tried do something like what Scott Free does in the opening pages of Mister Miracle in January of 2018. Thankfully it didn’t work. I’m glad it didn’t, and in retrospect I’m sometimes amazed at how I was able to mentally and emotionally get to a place like that. But it happened, and I think it happens to a great deal more of us than we’re willing to admit. Gerads’ depiction of it hooked me immediately—not from a lurid place, but from a place of sheer vulnerability. Here is the titular hero alone and defeated on the floor of a bathroom.

This is perhaps what is the most amazing and searing thing about Mister Miracle to me, that (at least to me, Tom might feel differently) the whole thing deals with the roots of darkness within ourselves and our ongoing struggles with those roots. The book also potently portrays the stacked deck of different personas we wear for different groups of people. Scott Free is at once: Barda’s husband, Mister Miracle, the child of Darkseid, a liberating slave, sibling rival of Orion, potential black sheep heir to the All-Father throne, a war hero, and ultimately, a potential father.

There is an undercurrent within Scott throughout the series of his anxieties over passing on his darkness to his child. This is something I have worried about with my own sons and continue to worry about. It will never go away, even when they’re adults and I’m a frail old mound of dust sitting in a shadowed corner chair.

Additionally, I think the real Orion and Darkseid are strong allegorical proxies for Scott. Orion is the embodiment of vainglorious pride—something that Scott is reluctant to embrace during his successes in the war against Apokolips—and Darkseid is the embodiment of dark selfish power—of pure solipsism—something that may come out in more subtle ways in Scott’s life, in terms of how selfish his choices and preoccupations seem to be at times, especially when it comes to his family.

This book also expertly captures the mundanity of a person’s life, something occurs as the backdrop to all our worst and most painful mental fits. It in tandem personifies the conflicts we experience within by depicting insanely violent and epic battles (Gerads’ art in both aspects of the story is just... breathtaking, both worlds ground and elevate the other visually in every panel), raising them to the status of being more important than anything. OUR CONFLICTS ARE THE CONFLICTS OF THE UNIVERSE!

But this book is also about how that’s not really true. It’s about what it’s like to be married, or with a long-term partner—the small struggles, the passive togetherness, the subtle micro-neglect... how life is often in reality at least a binary system, something that must be done alongside the existence of other people. So much of Scott and Barda’s relationship dictates who they are at home and who they are when they fight against a common enemy.

It’s also no mistake I think that this book wholly dismantles the classic idea of a family and constructs a new contemporary one. Didactic fathers die, well-meaning but violent mothers are shed, hero brothers fade. Flamboyant uncles are adopted, gender roles reverse, and children enjoy just as much power and leverage over their parents as the other way around. It all ebbs and flows like water, none of it dictating who we are in immovable stone.

All of this alchemizes into an interior portrait of a person: Scott himself. The multitudes within him need to find a way to harmonize (as best as possible) if he has any hope of success at merely existing (in the art, he even doubles and becomes astigmatized as he loses track of who he is). He may slay thousands on the bloody plains or make folks laugh on TV, but what is the balance? Imbalance results in instability which can inflame an already fragile mind and worst case lead to how this book begins.

Through Scott we can see we are ultimately are our traumas, our darkness, our failures, are hindrances, all at once. We are our best qualities and we are our worst, our strengths and weaknesses. Our children are doomed to repeat our mistakes in their various incarnations, just we did and our parents before us did.

The most we can hope for—as Scott and Barda do—is a net gain, that the attrition cost does not outweigh the joyous reward. Peace of mind is the real goal, and even that is extremely difficult to achieve and fleeting. In Scott’s life, everything is ever-changing; a seemingly concrete version of him is here one minute and gone the next. Mister Miracle is a master escape artist from his own true self, of which there may be none.

And in that lies a profound mirror for the reader... perhaps there is no true self. Perhaps it is okay to disappear instead of come into focus once and for all—not in the way a frustrated and scattered Scott might haven initially chosen, but in an acquiescence to the tides of one’s life.

It’s then that we can let ourselves instead be reflected in the faces of others who love us and let go of the darkness we cling to.

Only then are we truly Scott Free. -Christopher Cantwell

Christopher Cantwell is the co-creater, executive producer, and showrunner of Halt and Catch Fire. He is also the writer of a growing list of comics that includes She Could Fly, Everything, The Mask, and Doctor Doom.

Mister Miracle
Writer: Tom King
Artist: Mitch Gerads
Publisher: DC Comics
The critically acclaimed 12-issue mini-series is collected. Scott Free is the greatest escape artist who ever lived. So great that he escaped Granny Goodness' gruesome orphanage and the dangers of Apokolips to travel across galaxies and set up a new life on Earth with his wife, the former Female Fury known as Big Barda. Using the stage alter ego of Mister Miracle, he has made a career for himself showing off his acrobatic escape techniques. He even caught the attention of the Justice League, which counted him among its ranks. You might say Scott Free has everything...so why isn't it enough? Mister Miracle has mastered every illusion, achieved every stunt, pulled off every trick-except one. He has never escaped death. Is it even possible? Our hero is going to have to kill himself if he wants to find out.

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Click here for the full coronavirus reading list!