I wasn't sure what to expect and this book really delivers. Tim King have us a superhero story grounded in the real which is hard to pull off. Definitely, one of my fav reads this year.

I was truly disappointed in this. I tried to overlook the juvenile naming conventions which were put in place long before this volume was created: the 'super hero' being named Scott Free, and the abysmally brain-dead 'Apokolips', and focused on the story which was supposedly about escape artist 'Mister Miracle' being able to escape anything. The story began with an interview about how he had escaped death and this, despite telling us nothing, was the most coherent part of the story. After that it became a two-hundred page nonsensical drag.

The artwork and coloring was a mixed bag and the story boring, meandering, and directionless. The blurb informed me that there would be no ending (THIS IS AN INCOMPLETE PROOF OF THE BOOK ONLY CONTAINING CHAPTERS 1-10). I'm not sure why they would put it out there with no ending, but I was willing to accept that. I'd never read anything about Mister Miracle or his wife 'Big Barda' before, so I thought it would be interesting to me, but it really wasn't. Other than the fact that the hero is married, there was nothing new or different here. There was oddity which I speculated was explained by his purportedly cheating death, but the artwork which I think was supposed to convey this really wasn't pleasant to look at.

There were parts of it that were blurry with the colors not registering correctly and after a short while I realized this was deliberate, but it wasn't appreciated, and was nauseating to look at. I do not know what sort of effect the creators were going for here but it was a fail with me. There were also panels which appeared to be from a TV transmission, and far from giving us "a new take" here, we got the same ridiculous representation with scan lines on the image - like this was a low-res cathode ray TV and not a modern one. I've never found that appealing, not remotely. It's not even intelligent and it certainly isn't new. Instead, it's trope and it's tired.

I can't tell you what the story was about because despite reading all of it, I couldn't tell myself. I can tell you it was disjointedly all over the place, and it made no sense. There was endless talk of raging battles and frequent scenes of massed people fighting, but these were interspersed with laughably domestic scenes. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Big Barda is so pregnant that the baby is due, and then we got endless pages of the delivery which was tiresome. I have no idea where that came from since there was no lead-in to it.

The leader of the fighting forces for which Mister Miracle and Big Barda fought was a psychotic and the fact the Miracle and wife (who was very much secondary to him) failed to see this, told me they were profoundly stupid; far too stupid to successfully raise a child. The kindest thing I can say about this is that maybe it represents one long dream sequence somehow induced by Miracle's supposedly escaping death (or while he's in process of escaping it), but that trope is so tired it's pathetic, if that's what it was. Even if that's what it was, it lacked any kind of a pretense at coherence and so made for tedious reading.

We're told in the blurb that Mister Miracle "even caught the attention of the Justice League, who has counted him among its ranks." That's not only poor grammar, it's irrelevant to this story in which (or should I say in who?!) I saw no redeeming feature at all. Miracle's costume makes him look reminiscent of Iron Man, and since the latter precedes the former by almost a decade, some serious thought ought to be devoted to giving Mister Miracle a makeover. That would have made this story at least a little bit different. As it was, all it was, was more of the same and that's not good enough. I can't rate this positively.

I might have even gone five stars for this, except that DC's preview issue via NetGalley only collects the first 10 issues of the series, so it isn't complete. It ends at a pretty huge cliffhanger (I won't say more--if you're reading this in single issues, you're probably aware of what I mean) and...that's it. What the what? Why send this out in this form? If you want to whet people's appetite, send out a collection that collects the first half of the story or something. What is here is great. The artwork, the story that combines the mundanity of married life with cosmic battles, the human angle. But it doesn't wrap up, darn it! Now that I think about it, DC pulled something very similar with the Dark Knights Metal volume they offered previously via NetGalley. Even now, I have no idea how that story actually wrapped up.

This trade paperback collected issues 1-12, and it was better than expected! I haven't been really excited about the DC Universe in a while, and there is definitely a learning curve in this collection, which threw me for the first issue or so. Not being familiar with the characters, it was a bit jarring to be thrown in to the middle of their story. Still, it got there with all the necessary panache of an unreliable narrator (and I do love an unreliable narrator). As is often the case for me, I enjoyed the personal family issues bits much more then the fight/war scenes, but the two were blended seamlessly in several places, which made for a story line that didn't make me want to skim over chunks of pages.

Gotta call this one a disappointment, although judging it without the final (I think) two issues is unfair--not sure why this one fell short for this Team Tom King member...I was engaged, I liked the art, etc. but (so far, anyway) it didn't shift into the kind of compelling reading I'm used to from / with King. I will, of course, dutifully finish the story, either with the remaining individual issues or "my" library's eventual acquisition of the trade (it's on order, thanks to Me Truly) and hopefully wish I could come back here and amend this complicated take on 1-10.

I think if you're not reading this, you are missing one of the best, Period.
King used the best of Kirby, made sense of the bounty of ideas, even made Funky Flashman relevant. I read Kirby's Mister Miracle as the issues came out at the drug store. (Yeah, I'm old.) I felt this book respected the past and yet was completely modern.

I'm anxious about "where this book is headed" in terms of representations of mental health... But I am a fan of this author and will follow them through the end of the series.