Miracle Man

And I just wrote the foreword for DC's forthcoming trade paperback of Jack Kirby's Mister Miracle.  This will be the fourth collection of Jack's Fourth World series, this time reprinting #11-18 of Mister Miracle in, alas, black-and-white again.  I don't think this is Jack's strongest work — his heart went out of the project when the other two books were cancelled — but even weak Kirby is head-'n'-shoulders above most other comics, past and present.

Actually, the original plan was to also reprint The Hunger Dogs in this fourth collection.  That was the graphic novel Jack did years later to ostensibly wrap up the Fourth World saga — probably an impossible task.  (Imagine an author who plans a 100-chapter epic novel, gets stopped about a fourth of a way into it…and then is asked to come back, years later, and wrap it all up in one or two more chapters.)  No one, Jack included, was too happy with how it came out so at DC's request, he redid it, expanding the thing and adding new pages.  No one seems to feel the revised version was much better than the first and some of us feel it was inferior.  What we were going to print in this new book was the first version, which has aged very well, I think.  At least, I like it now a lot more than I did then.  Unfortunately, various complications are preventing its inclusion…so now we all have to lobby DC to put out another volume, preferably in color.  Spread the word.