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WATCH: Tom King on the Jack Kirby secrets in his Mister Miracle

By SYFY WIRE Staff

For Tom King, Mister Miracle isn’t just an ultracool superhero everybody wishes they could be at some point. Talking to SYFY WIRE, he confessed that the comic is actually very personal.

"People are reacting to it saying, 'Oh man, that’s me too, I've gone through that, I've had some of those experiences.'" King said.

Writing makes King feel like he's not alone, and that has had an impact on his work. He's definitely seen a reaction from Mister Miracle fans who feel they aren't alone when they read about the hero who has to battle not just Darkseid and his swarm of villains but also the anxieties we all fight. He doesn't feel real life is a superhero swooping in to save you and then flying off into the sunset.

"It doesn't feel true to me; it doesn't feel like what real life is," he said. "[With] big problems in your life you never find any actual solution; you learn to live with [them]."

King wanted to convey this in his comic not only through the storyline but also via the ambivalent ending that doesn't exactly reveal what the two worlds teased earlier actually are. He knows the answers that even Scott Free can't find. This nebulous conclusion was actually his master plan ... not a last-minute decision he made to torture fans while laughing evilly to himself.

By the way, the whole thing is an homage to Jack Kirby.

"Jack Kirby is at the heart of this book," King admitted. "It works because it sort of steals from the magic of Kirby."

You wouldn’t call it "stealing" so much as "honoring," but every issue begins and ends with a narration that is directly from an issue of Mister Miracle that Kirby wrote. King knows (like the rest of us) that nobody can ever replicate Jack Kirby unless it was in some alternate universe, but instead of trying to out-Kirby the master, he decided to compliment him and go along for the ride.

Kirby may be immortal, but King is a master in his own right.