I recently completed Mister Miracle (2017-2019) by Tom King and Mitch Gerads and rarely do I read a graphic novel or comic book series that makes me think about the world and the way we as humans view said world.
As a person who does not read many “superhero” comics I wasn’t even aware of the character nor his role within the DC universe. That did not stop me from picking up the complete series trade-back at a comic bookstore in Butler, PA. It was on the $1 rack and after quickly flipping through the pages to see if the art would agree with me, I decided to “pull the trigger”. Oddly enough, it was the same day that some loon attempted to assassinate Presidential candidate, former President, Donald Trump, so you’ll have to pardon my expression.
Mister Miracle (2017) won Best Limited Series at the 2019 Eisner Awards. After savoring each page of art and dialog I understood why it won an Eisner. The parallels that I was able to draw from the characters strife and how it related to the world around and today’s “real world” were almost scary to me. Without spoiling the experience for anyone who may pick it up, the overarching story is about how we (the characters) compartmentalize our problems, the things we care about, and essentially, what we define as our world.
I think about things like this all of the time due to where I grew up versus where I live today. Back in 2016, I wrote a post called “Quintessential Fayette County”. When reading back over that post I sounded ashamed of where I was raised and thought of the people who still lived there with a small world view and expressed a negative connotation toward that view. I reflected on some of the charms of where I was from but overall painted it in a poor light. As I get older, and after reading works of art like Mister Miracle, it puts that view into a different perspective.
Our “world” is what we know. As a person from a small “world” I knew and only cared about that small world. That changed when I became a teen, and my world was as big as I allowed it to be via the internet. No longer was I limited by whatever was on a given TV station a certain time of the night or the experiences I was able to have with the other kids that lived in my town. I met several people from all over the world through internet gaming and even more people through “local” LAN parties. Those gatherings introduced me to people from all over the mid-Atlantic region and created the foundation of the sense of community that I desire today. I think that was the start of me looking at my small world in a negative light and reaffirmed why I needed to leave. I moved to the “big city” (it’s not, but by comparison to the Village of Wickhaven, anything is) and my political views drastically changed. I cared less about myself and more about the “greater good”. Ideals that benefited the most people and I didn’t care about the people that thought those ideals aren’t worth it. The world is bigger than what they know or care to know.
Right?
As I get older, my “world” views are starting to change. I still long for the sense of community that I acquired living where I currently do and experiencing the things that I have, but I no longer harbor ill will of the people who only know the “small world” that leads to their ideals being different than mine. Do I agree with them, no, but I understand them, and I understand why people from where I lived think the way they do. Your “world” is what you decide it to be. I’m not trying to imply that the larger world doesn’t matter, it does, hence why my ideals have changed through the years, but I am saying that if you choose to allow your world to be only that small town that you grew up in and the people that make it up, I understand.
Life is complex and everyone has different problems. Society tells us that some people’s problems are worse than others, and there is truth to that, but I also understand why people prioritize the world they know over the world they don’t or choose not to know.
Now you may ask, how did you get all of this from a comic book? Well, I did, and I didn’t. I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while, but I haven’t experienced something that impacted my opinion to this degree in quite some time. It was the fictionalize take of these characters world and the priorities within them that ask the larger question of what matters and what doesn’t. I guess the takeaway is that those characters get to decide, and Tom King and Mitch Gerdas paint a beautiful picture of what the balancing act of those decisions look like. This is something we as a people should have a better understanding of and not immediately look down upon people for making a “small world” decision that we may not agree with.
Our world is what we decide it is, and that’s understandable. Maybe not ideal, but understandable.
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