Will Miracles Never Cease?

Miracleman was like a comic book urban legend when I first started reading comics regularly. Now he's fighting alongside Wolverine and Spider-Man. How in the world did we get here?

When I got into comics, it was almost a rite of passage to have Watchmen recommended to you. Seemingly everyone knew of Alan Moore and David Gibbons’ seminal work of superhero deconstructionism.

Only a select few knew the deeper lore: that Moore wrote an even darker, more violent, and more extreme work in the same milieu. And even among those who did know, fewer had actually read the story, given how expensive the long-out-of-print issues and collected editions were on the secondary market.

That was Moore's Miracleman, but Miracleman wasn't Moore's creation. Heck, he wasn’t even Miracleman, originally. He was Marvelman, created by Mick Anglo in the 1950s as a replacement for Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family when Fawcett Comics got out of the superhero game. Anglo wasn’t subtle about it either. Besides the similar names, Marvelman's alter ego, Micky Moran, worked in newspapers and transformed into his superhero form by speaking a magic word ("Kimota").

By rights, Marvelman should be a historical footnote, if not for Moore's (and Garry Leach's, at the start) reinvention of the character in the pages of British comics magazine Warrior in 1982. In 1985, after Warrior folded, American publisher Eclipse picked up the story, renaming both the series and the character Miracleman to avoid conflict with Marvel Comics (an ironic move, viewed through the lens of history).

Moore (with Leach, Alan Davis, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben) finished his storied run, which saw Miracleman essentially conquer the planet and remake it to his liking, a supposedly benevolent god-king ruling over all of humanity. Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham stepped in to continue the story. They hadn't even finished their first arc when Eclipse went out of business. Miracleman fell into a prolonged period of legal limbo as confusion arose concerning who actually owned the rights to the character.

Marvel Makes a Miracle

Eventually, Marvel (with more than a little help from Gaiman) secured those rights. Marvel then, slowly, began to reprint old material – first the original Marvelman stories, and then Moore's revival (without Moore's name on the cover, as part of the bargain), and even some new material, with Gaiman and Buckingham picking up right where they left off.