Mister Miracle 4
From Barbelith
"Forever Flavored Man"
Barbelith thread: I will set you free! I am the lord thy destroyer! (http://www.barbelith.com/topic/21563/from/315)
| Table of contents |
Background and General Commentary
Synopsis:
The Life Trap has Shilo Norman in it's grip! Shilo finds himself living out a rapid succession of synthetic lives, each one more grim and hopeless than the one before. Plagued by a feeling that there is something he must remember and toyed with by gods, Shilo will have to confront his most awful, most defining memory before he can escape The Omega Sanction: the trap that follows you wherever you go, unseen and all around!
Annotations
| Featured Characters | Featured Locations |
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Page 5
The menorah in PANEL 1 is a subtle reminder that Shilo Norman is Jewish. Shilo's grand-daughter is wearing a female version of the Mister Miracle costume, implying that she will carry on the legacy, perhaps as a future Miss Miracle. The Rabbi Dezard who appears in PANEL 3 is really Dr. Dezard, who is really Desaad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desaad).
Page 6
PANEL 4: "I studied Houdini and Steranko and Thaddeus Brown... I'm an escape artist."
Mario: "Houdini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houdini) is self-explanatory. Steranko is Jim Steranko (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Steranko), who was an escape artist in his youth (and one of the sources Kirby used for Scott Free). And Thaddeus Brown is Mister Miracle I (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Miracle)."
PANEL 5: "Aaron! Nooo!"
The death of Shilo Norman's older brother, who was a policeman who was shot by a gang leader, was a formative event in Shilo's young life and lead to his first meeting with Scott Free.
Page 7
PANEL 4: "You're all heart, Dina Bell."
During the Joker: Last Laugh (http://www.dcuguide.com/Joker/JokerLL.php) cross-over in 2001, Shilo Norman appeared as a security expert at The Slab Penitentiary. U.S. Marshall Dina Bell (http://www.dcuguide.com/who.php?name=dinabell) also appeared as a supporting character in that story.
Page 8
PANEL 3: "Oracle?"
This homeless god is the same being as Oracle I (http://www.dcuguide.com/who.php?name=oracle), who first appeared in Justice League of America #100, in a story that involved the original Seven Soldiers of Victory and Nebula Man.
PANEL 3: "Did... Did the Spear find it's mark?"
In Manhattan Guardian #4, Gloriana Tenebrae's magic mirror prophesied that "Seven will come, by roads unseen, unknown. And end the Queen of Terror's reign with a spear that never was thrown." Given that Oracle can see through time and space, it seems that he is talking about the same spear, predicting an event that is still yet to come.
In Bulleteer #4, the ghost of Vigilante will reveal the identity of the Spear that Never Was Thrown.
Page 9
PANEL 3: "Made vast... and heavy... Broken in the torture chambers of the Sheeda at Summer's End..."
Oracle's appearances here as a giant Enchained God is strongly reminiscent of the Chamber of Croatoan deep beneath New York, where, by all accounts, a god was once enchained. (See Klarion #4 and Manhattan Guardian #2). All-Beard pondered, "Where's me Gods in Vast Irons?" and Ebenezer Badde reflected that "Maybe there was a God here once but he's long, long gone. He escaped and left us on here alone. Only his dreadful chains remain." Given that Oracle was once held and tortured by the Sheeda and given that the Witch-Folk are half-Sheeda descendants of the exiled King of Summer's End, it seems likely that Oracle was once imprisoned in the Chamber beneath New York. This does not necessarily imply, however, that Oracle and Croatoan are one and the same. We have been told (in Klarion #4) that Croatoan, the missing Witch God, is "a sophisticated artificial intelligence system and it comes in the form of a pair of dice," both of which have already been located elsewhere.
The God Exterminators in PANEL 5 are Darkseid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkseid) and Desaad, again.
Page 10
PANEL 3: "Art thou one of the 666 Monsters of Chaos?"
The 666 Monsters of Chaos were Oracle's earliest and oldest enemies. We will see a little bit more about them in Seven Soldiers #1.
"Wilt thou give thy life that Aurakles might save us all?"
Given the unusual way Oracle chooses to spell his own name, he may be connected to Ystin's sword, which the Sheeda know as the Sword of Aurakles. This sword is one of "seven timeless objects, given to man by the Gods for his protection against... evil." It seems that Oracle was one of those Gods who chose to arm humanity for their fight with the Sheeda. The sword was "forged at the dawn of time to endure until the last black hole swallows it whole." It was "one of four imperishable treasures Arthur and his knights stole from the people of the Otherworld." (See Shining Knight 3 for all the details.)
Page 12
PANEL 1 depicts a huge super-hero battle. Heroes are fighting and dying all around him, including... Robin, Batman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Orion, Captain Marvel, two Flashes, and Hawkgirl, among others. The blue enemies they are fighting are OMACs.
Imaginary Mongoose Solutions - "The battle he's involved in is in fact Infinite Crisis (or a version of it). He and the other supers are fighting the army of OMACs released by Brother Eye and Alex Luthor."
The bum digging though a trashcan in PANEL 2 may or may not be Highfather (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highfather).
In PANEL 3, the grave next to Shilo's belongs to Multi-Man (http://www.dcuguide.com/who.php?name=multiman). Multi-Man appeared with Shilo in Joker's Last Laugh. Multi-Man has the ability return to life with a new and different superpower every time he dies. He has lived multiple successive lives, in a manner similar to what Shilo is now experiencing.
"Trapped in an endless succession of synthetic lives..." "Each existence more degraded than the last."
From Darkseid's words, it sounds like Shilo is being reincarnated in a karmic cycle, one with a negative bent. Bad past experiences lead to poor choices and actions in the present which lead to worst experiences in the future. Each reincarnated life is worse than the last.
Page 14
PANEL 3-4: "Be born again and again in me! Life after Life! Suffocated in mortal clay! Broken and blinded by the explosion of being! Unable ever to rest and gaze upon the Source!"
Based on his own description of himself, The Omega Sanction seems to be a personification of the Hindu/Buddhist concept of Samsara (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsara), in which the soul lives, dies, and is reborn into the temporal, phenomenal world in an unending cycle due to ignorance of the true nature of existence, which is timeless and selfless. Therefore, Shilo's attempts to escape the Life Trap are equated with the struggle to achieve liberation from samsara in the realization of Nirvana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana).
Page 15
PANEL 6: The positioning of Shilo's body in this panel mimics exactly the posture he was in as he fell into the Black Hole in issue #1. As we will discover in a moment, he never left and is still there in that timeless place.
Page 18
PANEL 1: "This is the interior of the event horizon, where nothing is.
Where even He cannot hear us."
"I've been here before... feels like..."
These two lines of dialogue and the layout of this panel repeat exactly the image and dialogue from PAGE 6 of Mister Miracle 1. Shilo has arrived back where he started. Seven days have passed since he entered the black hole in issue #1 and everything Shilo has experienced in the meantime has taken place inside the black hole or inside his own mind as part of his initiation at the hands of Metron. We can speculate that parts of his experience are based on real events both remembered and concurrent. We know that the Deviants joy ride and Jake Jordan's failed proposal are referenced in other comics. We know that Shilo's employment at The Slab and the death of his brother are referenced in other comics. Maybe all of it was real. Maybe none of it is real. Maybe Shilo has no way of knowing which parts of what he remembers are real experiences and which are simulated lives.
Page 19
PANEL 1: "I was sure it had something to do with the Big Storm, but..."
The Big Storm is probably Hurricane Gloria, which has been mentioned in several other Seven Soldiers comics, including Manhattan Guardian #3, Mister Miracle #3, and Frankenstein 3.
Page 20
Mario - "I'm fairly certain that the last page is supposed to be a happy memory, replacing the trap of the memory of his brother's death."
LDones - "I never meant that the last page happens in present day, it's just a symbol of his first triumph juxtaposed as the payoff of his current triumph."
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