DCEU: 10 Comics It Must Adapt To Beat Marvel

4. Mister Miracle (2017)

Mister Miracle 12
DC Comics

Of all the upcoming DC projects, it is Ava DuVernay's New Gods that should get fans most excited. After all, DuVernay is a superb director, and she now gets to work her magic on some of the most inspirational and creative stories that DC has ever published: Jack Kirby's Fourth World Saga.

Kirby is often considered an architect of Marvel Comics - and that is true - but his time at DC fostered a legacy comparable in scope to what he achieved over at the House of Ideas back in the sixties. At the core to this series was the conflict between the planets of New Genesis and Apokolips, the former ruled by the ostensibly benevolent High Father, and the latter by the indisputably tyrannical Darkseid.

Elements of the Fourth World were already shown off in Justice League, but audiences haven't seen anything yet. There's a really compelling conflict to examine between these two immortal civilisations, and at its core in recent years has been two perspectives - Scott Free's and Big Barda's.

In order to achieve a truce between Apokolips and New Genesis, the two leaders decide to swap their children (because obviously). Darkseid's boy becomes Orion, while High Father's son, Mister Miracle, heads to Apokolips, where he is then tortured for the rest of his days at Granny Goodness' orphanage.

Eventually, he falls in love with Big Barda and escapes to earth, which is where Tom King and Mitch Gerads' series comes in. It's haunting, honest, and though not nearly epic enough to inspire an entire film, embodies the relationship between Scott and Barda perfectly.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.