MiracleMan Book One: A Dream Of Flying!

My first encounter with Alan Moore was his work on Miracleman and V for Vendetta in Warrior Magazine from Quality Publicatins. The latter I've discussed a few times, but Miracleman not so much. Let me correct that oversight. 

Miracleman began as Marvelman, a 1950's superhero meant to take the place of Fawcett's Captain Marvel, which had been summarily cancelled. The hero caught on and lasted into the early 60's. This fondly remembered hero was perfect fodder for Alan Moore's purposes, to take a classic hero and remake him for a leaner and meaner modern audience. The name change came at some point to avoid potential conflicts with Marvel Comics. Given the direction that Moore took the character "Miracleman" actually works better. 

Mickey Moran is a typical middle-aged reporter who is beginning to wonder about life despite being married to a very lovely woman named Liz. (I can relate.) He gets caught up in a terrorist event which causes him to suddenly transform into a superhuman. It seems he'd been Miracleman all along but had forgotten to transform. Moore makes Moran and Miracleman into two different personalities, the former filled with the weaknesses of normal folks, the latter a gleaming perfect specimen. Soon enough he has trouble when he remembers how he came to have amnesia and remembers what happened to his two colleagues Young Miracleman and Kid Miracleman. The former is apparently dead as a result of an atomic blast the trio confronted. Miracleman was struck with amnesia and Kid Miracleman has become a successful businessman. There is so much more to this story as we meet a mercenary named "Cream" who has sapphires for teeth and Miracleman learns that his whole life might just have been a lie. 

Great stuff, exceedingly well drawn by Garry Leach and later by Alan Davis. Miracleman had few cover appearances in Warrior, sharing that stage with many others, but here are the ones which are relevant to this collection. 

Later Eclipse Comics took on the character and published reprints of the Warrior stories. This time color was added. 

After years of confusion, the character was at long last revived by Marvel Comics and they too reprinted the Warrior material. 

Also included in this collection are two stories featuring the Warpsmiths, bizarre warriors who traverse time and space to uphold some sort of coherence and maintain some manner of order. These are exceedingly strange but magnificently wrought stories which do tie into the Miracleman saga. I won't pretend I grokked all the dialogue which is intentionally bizarre to effect the feeling of alieness. 

This is a stunning beginning to the Miracleman saga, which as we learn is only just beginning. The secrets of Miracleman's origins are coming back, the secrets revealing the truth about old enemies. More on that next week. 

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All-Star Comics - Fight Clubs!

Here's an exceedingly neat cover by Garry Leach, the artist who first drew Miracle Man in the 80's, featuring the Justice Society mixing it up with some Legion members. Both teams were the province of eventual DC kahuna Paul Levitz!

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Miraclemen!

Alan Davis

I knew absolutely nothing about Marvelman when I stumbled across Warrior magazine back in those halcyon days of the 1980's. The British superhero, a necessary adaptation of the successful Captain Marvel character after the latter was dropped from publication, was a total cipher to me. So that said, I lacked some of the pure joy which fans must've had when he showed up unannounced in the debut issue of Dez Skinn's old black and white magazine.

Garry Leach

Marvelman didn't make the cover until the second issue, but by then it was clear that Alan Moore and Garry Leach were creating something quite different. These days of course the deconstructed superhero is all to common, but then in those pre-Watchmen days it was a downright fresh notion. Here was a superhero who wasn't all that heroic really, not as you'd expect. He had sex for one thing, with his wife sort of admittedly, but sex nonetheless. It was a novel notion in a medium which wiped that aspect of life away save in the most obscure and sometimes titillating ways. Here was a superhero who was violent, truly violent in that he damaged mere human beings and even not-so mere human beings with the snap of his finger. Here was a guy who was Superman made carnate.

Mick Austin

This was rollicking stuff, but soon I lost track of the plot a bit and drifted out of independent comics and onto other matters. Over the years I read about the impossible tangle the Marvelman / Miracleman franchise had become, and like many fans I had such a high regard for my long-ago-traded-away Warrior magazines that I hoped it would resolve itself. But even then, I was pleasantly surprised how completely effective these stories still are after all this time. The seriousness of the storytelling is evident and compelling. This is significant stuff, not just a quaint superhero adventure, but something with import and resonance.

Mick Austin

Marvel has at long last republished these trapped gems. Like his inspiration "The Big Red Cheese", Marvelman / Miracleman has at long last escaped the limbo of the unpublished and returned to the stands with significant pomp and proper circumstance. Always exceedingly cantankerous in these matters, Alan Moore is merely "The Original Writer", but Garry Leach gets his props as does Alan Davis who quickly too over for Leach when the latter proved too meticulous for the grind of deadlines. Marvel has now published four issues, which reprint Book One of the saga. Most all of these I'd seen before, glimmering in the embers of my imagination. What comes next will be new to me. I look forward to it.

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