Second Wind - [COLUMN] What Do We Gain By Adding Miracleman to the Marvel Universe? | by Darren Mooney

Note: It is a light week for pop culture, and I’ve actually spent a lot of it watching shows that I can’t talk about for a few weeks. So, I thought it might be worth doing something comic-book-y, in particular talking about a comic book industry event that has been stewing in my brain over the past couple of weeks. Be aware that this contains spoilers for Alan Moore’s Miracleman, one of the best superhero comics ever published, and the recent Marvel crossover miniseries Avengers: Armageddon, which is not one of the best superhero comics ever published.

This month, in what was a huge bit of news for literally dozens of people, the comic book hero Miracleman officially joined the Marvel Universe, in the pages of Chip Zdarsky, Frank Alpizar and Delio Diaz’s Avengers: Armageddon.

Some context may be required here, including, most obviously, “Who is Miracleman and why would anybody care?” Miracleman is a surprisingly important-yet-niche comic book character. He was created as “Marvelman” by Mick Anglo for the British publisher L. Miller & Son. The company had enjoyed some success in the early 1950s by effectively reprinting American comics for the British market, with one of their biggest hits being reprints of the American hero Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel, perhaps more widely known now as “Shazam!” thanks to the film franchise, was a young boy who could transform into a superhero by uttering a magic word. He had been created by Bill Parker and C. C. Beck for the American publisher Fawcett Comics. However, in 1952, Fawcett Comics lost a landmark legal case against rival publisher National Comics, who would later become Detective Comics, claiming that Captain Marvel was too close in concept to Superman.

This, naturally, left L. Miller & Son in an awkward position. The company had paid a great deal to license Captain Marvel. It had made commitments to distributors and purchasers. There was a lot of money on the line. So “Marvelman” became the solution to the problem, a suspiciously similar substitute for the now-defunct Captain Marvel. Marvelman was another child character, Mikey Moran, who could transform into a superhero using his own magic word, “Kimota!”

The comics were fairly generic and simplistic. They were not necessarily the height of sophistication. However, they did make quite an impression on one young reader, future comic book writer Alan Moore. When Moore emerged on to the British comics scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he made a conscious push to relaunch the character and concept. It turned out that the character’s second publication history would be just a fraught.

Believing the character to be in the public domain, publisher Dez Skinn revived Marvelman with Moore writing in the pages of Warrior magazine, alongside the early chapters of Moore’s V for Vendetta. However, the Marvelman revival was dropped suddenly, with Skinn publicly claiming that the issue was the threat of legal action from Marvel Comics, but the reality being a clash over ownership between writer Alan Moore and artist Alan Davis.

For not the first or the last time, the legal rights to Marvelman were a quagmire. Skinn negotiated a revival of the relaunch with Pacific Comics, unaware that he did not actually control the rights. Pacific Comics would fold shortly thereafter, the rights being picked up by Eclipse Comics, who would retitle the strip Miracleman and would publish the rest of Moore’s epic, featuring art from his Swamp Thing collaborators John Totleben and Rick Veitch.

Despite this somewhat disjointed history, Moore’s Miracleman is a remarkable read. It is the rare comic book run with a very clear three-act structure, with a decisive beginning, middle and end. Because of its troubled production history, the run spans from 1982 to 1989, which means that it charts Moore’s development as a writer, beginning while he was working on Captain Britain at Marvel and ending after he had completed Watchmen at DC comics.

It is a work of breathtaking ambition. It imagines a version of Michael Moran all grown up, having forgotten his superhero past, living a mundane existence wrestling with a midlife crisis. He is haunted by the dreams of flying. Under pressure, Michael remembers his magic world, reawakening Miracleman, and the world is forever changed. The series is firmly rooted in Thatcher’s Britain, with Miracleman’s former sidekick Kid Miracleman even reinventing himself as a “master of the universe.”

Most discussion of the series tends to focus on the two final issues. The penultimate issue is notable for featuring perhaps the single most disturbing superhero battle in the genre’s history, as an unleashed and psychotic Kid Miracleman unleashes his superpowered sadism on London. A very obvious influence on the body horror of Invincible, it is the stuff of pure nightmares, evoking the nightmares of industrialized mass murder that haunted the 20th century.

The final issue imagines a world where, in response to this atrocity, Miracleman decides to use his powers to create paradise on Earth, to build a utopia atop the graveyard. It is an incredible issue, because it taps into the same anxieties that inform the end of Watchmen, Moore’s creeping fears of a sort of paternalist liberal fascism, the uncanny horror of a word reshaped by benign and well-meaning hands removing agency and choice.

In a very real way, Miracleman is a companion to Moore’s work with Dave Gibbons on Watchmen, pushing the superhero genre to its limits and throwing down a gauntlet that the genre has never quite been able to pick up in the decades since. However, while the discourse focuses on the ending to the epic, Miracleman is a consistently thorny book, wrestling with themes of arrested development and nostalgia within the superhero genre that are even more relevant today.

Of course, if Miracleman were this important, it makes sense to wonder why more people haven’t heard of it. It is a fair question. To a certain extent, the book was overshadowed by Watchmen, which is a much easier read and a much more consistent title. More pragmatically, Miracleman was caught in legal limbo for decades, until Marvel purchased the rights a decade ago and republished Moore’s run. By that point, following decades of comics inspired by Miracleman, the book fell into the John Carter trap, a hugely influential work so far removed from its original context that it felt retro.

And so, having spent a lot of money to acquire Miracleman, Marvel struggled with what to do with the title. The original plan was to bring in writer Neil Gaiman and artist Mark Buckingham to finish their own sequel to Moore’s epic, their own three-part Miracleman saga. The first two volumes – The Golden Age and The Silver Age – were published. However, Gaiman and Buckingham’s schedules weren’t especially rigorous, and the project was derailed by the horrific allegations against Gaiman.

So, it seems like the decision was eventually made to fold the character of Miracleman into the Marvel Universe, to put him alongside familiar characters like Captain America or Iron Man in the pages of an otherwise unremarkable Avengers crossover. To a certain extent, in the era of media consolidation and cultural fracking, this felt inevitable. Miracleman was an asset. He should be exploited. Anything else would represent corporate irresponsibility towards the shareholders.

This is part of a larger trend in comic books over the past few decades, part of a larger wave of trying to mercilessly wring every last cent of value out of any possible artistic work. As fairly unequivocally the best writer ever to work in superhero comics, Alan Moore has been subject to a lot of this, opining in 2009, “I increasingly get a sense of the comics industry going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night.”

So, DC began trying to franchise Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, a singular work of literature within the superhero genre so pivotal that it was the one comic to feature on Time’s list of the top one hundred books ever published. DC launched the crossover Before Watchmen. They would then crossover the comic with regular continuity in Doomsday Clock. They recently launched a television spin-off showrun by Damon Lindelof and a sequel comic written by Tom King.

There is a sense that this attempt to so ruthlessly exploit these properties diminishes the value of the original work. Watchmen is such a beloved work in part because it is – or because it was – just one comic book. It could be picked off a shelf and handed to somebody, the singular vision of the core creative team. That selling point is somewhat diminished if every recommendation has to come with an accompanying reading list, especially one tied into a continuity quagmire like Doomsday Clock.

The same is somewhat true of Miracleman. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. And part of the reason that the story works as well as it does is because it is not beholden to the demands of a shared universe continuity. It is very hard to imagine a version of the Marvel Universe where Miracleman is allowed to establish a benign fascistic utopia in which he cures all diseases, erases the concept of money, and brings about global happiness. It’s not reconcilable with monthly comics.

Everything that Moore touched was ripe for the crassest form of exploitation, as if his talent might rub off on the publisher by association. Geoff Johns’ entire Green Lantern run derived from a throwaway short story that Moore wrote for a Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual. His work on The Killing Joke was such a major influence on Johns’ The Three Jokers that Johns even passive-aggressively opened the comic with a scene of a raccoon in the dead of night.

It is tempting to frame this exploitation of Moore’s work as a betrayal of Moore himself. Moore has spoken openly about how he feels betrayed and exploited by the industry. Certainly, Moore deserves a lot better than he has gotten. And the same is true of so many influential comic book creators. Jack Kirby fought for ownership of his art and his family fought for control of his creations. Creators like Gary Friedrich are punished for trying to assert ownership.

Many comic book creators like Bill Mantlo and Peter David have had to resort to fundraising to pay their medical bills in their old age, while their creations and their concepts are folding into vast machines that generate billions of dollars in value for shareholders. Moore is just a catalyst for this discussion because, having left the industry and being able to survive outside it, he can openly talk about it. It is crass and vulgar and cynical.

However, let’s set aside any moral objection to this exploitation of the work of an artist or the concern about the violation of the sanctity of the original object. Those are moral and artistic concerns, and this is late-stage capitalism. They have no stock here. Of course, it would make more business sense to play nice with Moore because Moore’s an evergreen writer who produces masterpieces that sell for decades. If DC hadn’t alienated him before he could publish it, Moore’s Twilight of the Superheroes would sell far more copies in the long-term than Doomsday Clock.

Still, set all that aside. What benefit does folding Miracleman into the shared universe actually bring? What does it accomplish for the publisher? Miracleman is an extremely fringe character who has no real cachet in the world outside comics, because he spent so long out of print. So, the only people who know about the character are the old purists who loved Moore’s take on the character. They really don’t seem like the target audience for folding him into generic superhero continuity.

So, it won’t attract the character’s original fans. What about new fans? What does Miracleman add to the Marvel Universe? He is really just another knock-off of Superman in a universe that already has a couple of high-profile knock-offs of Superman. What does Miracleman offer the shared universe that existing characters like Hyperion or Sentry do not? Plopped into the shared continuity, Miracleman loses everything that made him interesting and special as a character.

It is deeply frustrating, because there is a sense that Miracleman could have been of some use to Marvel. Marvel Studios is, at the moment, working through its superhero fatigue. With the exception of Deadpool & Wolverine, no Marvel Studios film between Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Doomsday made over a billion dollars. The company needs to find a way to prove that it can do new things and attract new audiences.

As such, there are things that could be done with Miracleman. An auteur-driven take on Miracleman could be exactly what the studio and industry needs – a breath of fresh air like Lanterns or Logan. If the superhero genre is in the same place that the western was decades ago, Miracleman would make for a pretty bracing revisionist superhero film. It could be the genre’s take on Unforgiven. The key is to celebrate what made the comic special, not flatten it to empty generic content.

Instead, it feels like Marvel has taken Miracleman and made him nothing but mundane.