Two days after that reveal, Marvel followed up by announcing a project that fans have genuinely been expecting for more than a decade by this point: the first Miracleman Omnibus, collecting the entirety of Alan Moore’s 1980s storyline (with art by Garry Leach, Alan Davis, John Totleben, and others) between one set of covers for the first time.
The reason for all this activity, according to Marvel, is that 2022 marks the 40th anniversary of Moore and Leach reviving the character in his most famous incarnation in British anthology title Warrior. (A shame, then, that the actual 40th anniversary is this March, six months before the Omnibus’s release; still, who can plan ahead for an anniversary celebration?) Left unsaid is the awkward truth that, 13 years after Marvel revealed that it had purchased what was called at the time “one of the most sought after heroes in graphic fiction,” it still hasn’t quite figured out just what to make of Miracleman, or how to convince other people to be impressed by the purchase.
It’s not as if, in the years since Marvel’s
San Diego Comic-Con announcement, the publisher hasn’t attempted to make Miracleman into a thing. Unfortunately, in almost every respect, they proved that audiences really weren’t that interested. Admittedly, that’s partially the result of some approaches that appeared to external observers engineered to fail: launching the character into the U.S. market with reprints of 1950s material, instead of the Alan Moore-written series that everyone wanted to see, for example, or making fans wait five years before bringing the Moore material to market.
Worse yet, the format of the Moore reprints — which, due to contractual agreements with Moore, couldn’t use his name at all, and were instead credited to “The Original Writer,” which remains one of the more unlikely workarounds in comics history — seemed guaranteed to disappoint fans looking to discover a piece of comic book history: padded out with “extras” that bumped up the cover price (the Marvel serialization of Moore’s run lasted the same number of issues as the Eclipse serialization in the 1980s, despite skipping the issue of fill-in material Eclipse had been forced to run), Marvel’s reprints were “digitally retouched,” as they put it — recolored, relettered, and affording small edits to material where it was deemed appropriate, whether it’s adding underwear to Liz Moran in a scene, or removing the N word from a couple of issues.
(The announcement of the Omnibus listed the original editions the material appeared in, which led some — myself included — to wonder if they’d be collecting the un-retouched material. I checked with Marvel; it’s definitely the new editions.)
Such retouching of material suggested that Marvel didn’t really place a lot of importance in
Miracleman as a historical document — if they did, surely they’d not feel the need to make it more palatable for contemporary audiences, and just bring the book back to print in as close to the original format as possible… except, of course, Marvel doesn’t even do that for its
own comics these days, preferring to outsource it to
other publishers. Marvel’s publishing focus is firmly on the here-and-now, an attitude behind the urge to bring Miracleman into the mainstream Marvel Universe, where he can rub shoulders with… Omega the Unknown, I guess…?
The thing is, Miracleman doesn’t really work outside of the 1980s Miracleman series. Or, rather, he does, but only as a Shazam stand-in — the very thing he was created to be way back in the 1950s. (Marvel has attempted to make Superman rip-off Hyperion an ongoing presence in the mainstream Marvel Universe on multiple occasions in the past couple of decades, of course, so clearly there’s no shame in attempting to use obvious analogues as often as possible.)
What makes people pay attention to Miracleman isn’t the character, but the historical circumstance of the Alan Moore-written issues in particular: a superhero series created by Moore before, during, and after his more famous, more celebrated, and arguably more enjoyable, Swamp Thing and Watchmen runs*; an overlooked work by one of the most celebrated writers in the industry that goes to places where regular superheroes can’t, due to their shared universe nature.**
In order to bring Miracleman into the Marvel Universe, one of three things has to be the case:
- It’s a different version of the character, as opposed to the one that Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman wrote.
- It’s the same version of the character, from some undisclosed point either before or during the stories that Moore and Gaiman have written.
- It’s the same version of the character, from after the end of the Gaiman/Buckingham storyline… which remains in limbo, five years after the cancellation of the already solicited first half of Miracleman: The Dark Age.
Each of these options is fraught with potential danger, of course: the last one risks ruining a story that some have literally been waiting decades for, while the middle one unnecessarily picks a narrative hole in the center of something which has previously been able to boast a closed loop as a selling point. Using a different version of the character, though… it’s something that Marvel should already know won’t work, because it’s tried it before… and with a character not unrelated to Miracleman writer Neil Gaiman.
Remember Angela? The Gaiman-co-created angel
brought into the Marvel Universe in 2013 after a complicated legal battle with co-creator Todd McFarlane — a battle that also involved the rights to Miracleman? She was brought in with an all-new Marvel-friendly backstory and given significant promotion as a big deal… only for audiences to, for the most part, be pretty much disinterested once the novelty had worn off. The potential for a Miracleman divorced from the plot that made him famous to suffer a similar fate is something that should be considered, at the very least, especially considering the lack of sales success of the reprint projects to date. (The Moore run ended around 13,000 estimated sales in North America; the last issue of Gaiman’s
Miracleman: The Golden Age around 14,000.)
Of course, the very idea of bringing Miracleman into the Marvel Universe is one fraught with danger in and of itself. Pairing Alan Moore’s deconstructionist analogs of existing heroes with those heroes is something that fans have already lived through in Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s 2017 Watchmen sequel Doomsday Clock at DC. How did that end up, anyway…?