DC's critically-acclaimed series Mister Miracle sees the titular superpowered escape artist of the New Gods forced to confront himself, his mental state and that nature of reality itself.
In a new interview with Salon, Tom King, the Eisner Award-winning writer behind Mister Miracle, explained how he drew inspiration for the book from what he described as the "dangerous absurdity" of the current presidential administration.
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During the interview, the former CIA operative told an anecdote about walking his dog around his Capitol Hill residence during the morning of President Donald Trump's inauguration. During the walk, he saw numerous Porta-Potties from a company called Don's Johns. However, the word "Don's" had been censored, apparently at the behest of Trump. From there, King immediately started thinking about how he would write about what he was seeing."
"There are two ways to do that," said King. "I think the first would be just to be open about it. To write about all the politics of this movement and the stupidity of it all. But somehow that just comes across as too obvious."
"The second thought is just to write about the anxiety of this Trump moment," he explained. "It seems like everyone is a little crazy, everyone's a little on edge. Watching how Twitter and your family has transformed and there is so much anger in the air and so much tension in all of us now. That is what I wanted to write about with Mister Miracle."
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The author continued, "I have a platform, I have illustrator Mitch Gerads, and the two of us can get together and write a story about this time. Not about the politics but about this f-cking crazy moment."
Elsewhere in the interview, King addressed how Mister Miracle was also inspired by his own battles with mental health. He explained that he felt that the escape artist would be the perfect character for such a story, as such a struggle can be seen as perpetually trying to escape, but not being able to.
"Mister Miracle is about him being stuck in this horrible reality and can he get out of it or not?" the writer answered. "We can't get out. We have to find our way to live with it and find a way to make it better."
Tom King and Mitch Gerads' Mister Miracle is available now as a collected edition and