Best Of The Decade: 2017 //Best Of The Year

Welcome back to You Don’t Read Comics Best of the Decade! Our daily retrospective of the best comics this decade had to offer in celebration for the new year. Please refer to our post highlighting the criteria used to determine each year’s entry. We hope you enjoy today’s piece and encourage you to come back tomorrow.

You Don’t Read Comics best comic of 2017 is Mister Miracle.

Mister Miracle, by writer Tom King and his frequent artistic collaborator Mitch Gerads, was a revelation when it came out. I don’t think anyone was expecting a full double page spread of Scott Free, the titular Mister Miracle, slitting his wrists. It was a shock, but one the book would build on expertly.

It wasn’t the war on Apokolips, that Scott and his wife Big Barda would become involved in, that would give the series its artistic pedigree, but it didn’t hurt. However, that was something that readers had seen before. Any fan of the character who hadn’t experienced a New Genesis/Apokolips war was in for a treat, since King and Gerads gave readers one of the best ever, but that's just window dressing—it played into what the book was actually about. King has a tendency to write about mental illness and his experience in the CIA means that he knows more than a little bit about war and intel work, and how they affect the human psyche. Mister Miracle is about trauma, how it affects a person, as well as how that person deals with the resulting depression and what that engenders.

I remember reading the first issue (and each subsequent issue after it), and feeling like this was the most real depiction of depression I had ever experienced. I’m a person who deals with depression and suicidal ideation on a daily basis; I make jokes about it (some of which can be seen in my Let’s Talk About series, shameless self plug), but it’s always there. And the same is true for Scott. Scott was raised in a terribly abusive environment. He fought his way out of it, with the woman he loved by his side, and then became enmeshed in a war he never wanted to be in. He would go on to be a famous superhero and escape artist and it would seem like his life was perfect. This series showed us that the pain of his early life, and every thing that came afterward, was always there. It didn’t matter that he was Mister Miracle, hero to millions, or that he had the love of his life right there next to him. It didn’t matter that he has the best t-shirt of any superhero we’ve ever seen (seriously, I don’t know if his t-shirts were in King’s scripts or that was totally a Gerads thing, but I was consistently jealous of Scott’s t-shirts), all of the terror and pain was still there, just waiting for him to weaken a bit. It felt good to know that even someone who had everything that I could have wanted could feel like I did. That was the triumph of the series.

There are a lot of people who might not like the way the book ended. We all had theories and none of them were correct. However, for my money, that ending wasn’t nearly as important as what we saw throughout the series. I personally liked it and will defend it, but that’s just me. Besides, most people who know anything about pre-Crisis continuity are used to the idea of Apokolips and New Genesis existing on their own in their own dimension.

The book wouldn’t be the same without Gerads’s art. King and Gerads are sympatico to a degree that is kind of scary. There are a lot of parts to the book where Scott (and the reader) are doubting the reality of the situation and Gerads art sells that perfectly. He’s able to capture the mood of every page wonderfully. This still would have been a good book with any other artist attached, but the sympatico connection between writer and artist really made this book sing. The book used a nine panel grid that gives the whole thing a momentum it otherwise wouldn’t have had if it used another set-up; and Gerads uses this to his advantage. The action scenes have a feeling of movement that they wouldn’t have otherwise and the way the nine panel grid allows him and King the ability to linger on scenes really gives them more impact, be it a joke, a moment of pain, or a moment of triumph.

Mister Miracle is a masterpiece, plain and simple. There’s an indie sensibility to the whole thing that drives it; an examination of a broken man at his lowest and how he finds his way back up, combined with a great superhero story. There’s everything one could want from a comic in it- deft characterization, great action, drama, amazing art, and some actually funny jokes that don’t take away from the overall tone of that book. Nothing else released in 2017 holds a candle to it. Tom King’s work has been divisive to many, but this book takes the promise of his Vision book and expands upon it, making something truly unique that spoke to me, and countless other readers, in a way very few books have.

Honorable Mentions- Paper Girls, Witch Boy, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, The Mighty Thor