Miracleman Returns
Marvel.com
Marvel has announced the reprinting of Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham’s classic run of Miracleman, culminating in new issues by the original creative team, and a chance to finish the story they started telling some 30 years ago.
Originally created in the 50’s, Micky Moran encountered a physicist who endowed him with superpowers – with the utterance of a magic word, the young reporter became Marvelman! The character soon spun off an entire family of characters – similar to DC’s Captain Marvel. Their popularity led to Marvelman books being printed weekly for nearly six years, and monthly for another three. In 1963, the original run ended.
In 1982, Alan Moore brought the character back. Moore was early in his career then. Most of his work had been for 2000 AD, but an anthology series called Warrior gave him the chance to write two serials – one was Marvelman, the other was an original story called V for Vendetta.
Warrior folded, and both serials wound up elsewhere. After bouncing around some – and changing the name due to legal pressure for Marvel Comics – Miracleman debuted in a standalone book, published by Eclipse Comics. They reprinted the old anthology work, and let Moore take off with new material from there. Miracleman was controversial – an infamously graphic birth scene in issue 9 drew a lot of fire at the time, as did a brutally violent massacre by a child supervillain a few months later.
Miracleman is a book of immense significance – In the book, you can see Moore fleshing out themes that he would work with his entire career. His questions about what superheroics would look like in the “real world” would be expounded on in Watchmen, and set the tone, to some extent, for almost all superhero comics of the modern era.
When Moore ended his run by having his god-like hero take over the world, Gaiman stepped in to continue the story. Gaiman had a specific roadmap for the series – three stories, each six issues long, entitled “The Golden Age,” “The Silver Age,” and “The Dark Age.” Of the three, only “The Golden Age” was published. Two issues into the second arc, Eclipse comics folded.
The character fell into copyright hell. Todd McFarlane claimed ownership of the character – he had purchased the rights to Eclipse’s intellectual property – but the rights had been tied up in various companies for decades. As a result, Miracleman books have become extremely valuable, especially for modern comics – even the paperbacks fetch top dollar, because there weren’t many, and it didn’t look like there were ever going to be any more. Gaiman has been trying for the last 25 years or so to collect total rights to the property and finish the story. It looks like Marvel has finally provided him the means to do that.
Curiously, the article on Marvel’s site doesn’t say anything about reprinting the Moore run. Whatever hesitation or issues arise, here’s hoping they work through them – it’s a cornerstone of the industry, and a necessary precursor to Gaiman’s run. They’ve started numbering the issues with “1,” so here’s hoping.
In any case, it’s a fantastic day, and fantastic news. When a creator of Gaiman’s stature holds a project this close to his heart, you know you’re in for something special.
