The Marvelous Miracleman! Part 10 of the Blog history of the many Captain Marvels!

     
When last we left our Hero, Marvelman,

Skinn shopped around his package of characters to various US comic book companies, but the name "Marvelman" and the letters from Marvel's attorneys kept getting in the way of closing a deal. It was decided to change the hero's name, and Alan Moore came up with "Miracleman," a name he had used before. Under this name, the property was sold to Eclipse Comics in September 1984, and the first issue of Miracleman appeared with a cover date of August 1985.

The series began by reprinting all that had appeared in Warrior, through issue #7, and (after complicated contractual dealings) Alan Moore picked up the story with #8. However, a flood destroyed the all-new art for that issue, so it became a fill-in issue with reprints of old L. Miller and Son-era stories. #9  began the all-new material, featuring a graphic, anatomically accurate telling of the birthing of the child of Miracleman by Mike Moran's wife.

This was highly controversial, as were future issues that wrapped up the Kid Marvelman conflict in issue #15. In that issue the entire city of London was razed to the ground in the climactic battle between hero and villain, with the inevitable and terrible deaths of thousands of civilians. A horrifying two-page spread by artist John Totleben showed the results of unfettered superpowers in battle in a realistic world.

Alan Moore finished his story arc and left the title on issue #16, which finally came out in 1989. replaced by Neil Gaiman (who got some share of the character rights in the deal). The stories continued into a series of stories world run by Marvelman as a benevolent super-powered dictator called the "Age of Miracles" (ironic, seeing as how this was a play on the "replacement" name for the hero). Eventually, however, the book was cancelled and for different reasons, Eclipse Comics went under.

Comics writer/artist Todd McFarland, creator of "Spawn," bought all the rights and properties of Eclipse Comic at auction , and believed the rights to Miracleman were included. But the complicated rights-sharing agreement established between Dez Skinn and the various writers and artists of the character was apparently still in play. Lengthy wrangling between the players involved ensued, which can be tracked by their various statements in interviews over the years.

Somewhere in there L. Miller and Son dissolved itself, with no documentation assigning the rights to Marvelman to anyone.

Eventually, Marvel Comics came into the picture. To make a very long and complicated story short, they paid Mick Anglo, the creator of the original Marvelman, ostensibly for the rights to the character, came to some sort of agreement with any other parties that may have had rights claims to the revived version of him, and most all the interested parties now accept that Marvel Comics owns both versions of Marvelman/Miracleman.

Starting in 2010, Marvel Comics began reprinting the original L. Miller and Son Marvelman, Young Marvelman, and Marvelman family stories, but stopped after a few albums  They have also completely reprinted all the "Miracleman" material available, including some unpublished material from the end of the run.

Much of the information in this post was drawn from the website and book "The Poisoned Chalice" by Pádraig Ó Méalóid

MIRACLEMAN! the Marvelous revival of the British Captain Marvel Rip-Off! (Part 9 of the Blog History of ALL the Captain Marvels!

    

When last we left our hero, Marvelman (the British rip-off/follow-up/substitute to Captain Marvel created by Mick Anglo in 1953), his publisher, L. Miller and Son, had cancelled publication in 1963, due mostly to new competition from American superheroes.

In the succeeding years, the company, whose name had been changed to L. Miller and Co. (Hackney) in 1959, faced a variety of adversities as they changed their business several times (including becoming a film producer), and folded in 1974 for an accumulation of reasons. According to The Poisoned Chalice by Pádraig Ó Méalóid, there was no mention of the ownership of the Marvelman character in any document relating to the closing of L. Miller and Co. (Hackney). This will prove to be important later, as we will see.

In March 1982, a new British company called Quality Communications Ltd. launched a comic magazine named Warrior featuring several new stories, including a revival of Marvelman. Quality Communications Ltd. had been founded by Dez Skinn, a British comics professional who wanted to create a new monthly anthology comic magazine with a dark edge, and wanted to include a superhero character, preferably a revival.

Alan Moore was an English comic book writer who had recently done significant work for the British anthology comic 2000AD and for Marvel UK's line of comic books for the British market. He had become a fan of Marvelman through the 1960's and 70's, reading the old comics, and even envisioned doing a Mad Magazine-style spoof.

Alan Moore was given the job of writing this revival, and Garry Leach was the first to draw it. This is generally acknowledged to be the first "post-modern" superhero comic book.

Context of the term "post-modern" in superhero comic books: In the comics of the Golden Age (1930's - early 1950's) and early Silver Age (mid 1950's to late 1960's), superheroes were mostly simple creatures, beloved by the public, unburdened by excessive personal problems and existing in a world in which the biggest challenge a superhero faced was a supervillain, not the daily challenges of paying the rent, getting along with fellow superheroes, and negative public opinion.

The first "modern" heroes appeared in the early 1960's, when Marvel Comics introduced their new superheroes such as The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Avengers, and the X-Men. With stories and dialog written by Stan Lee and pages of pictures drawn by the likes of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, these heroes were more human. They bickered and quarreled, faced practical challenges of relationships and bill-paying, and were not always the "beloved idols of millions."

Alan Moore's Marvelman broke new ground in not just considering the personal effects of a superhero career, but also the ultimate, apocalyptic potential of super-powered humans in the real world. The hero and his alter-ego were actually separate people who switched places in a limbo-like dimension through the transformation that occurred at the sound of the word "kimota!" Micky (now Michael) Moran had grown up to be a pudgy, middle-aged schlub working as a journalist who had completely forgotten about his time as a superhero. A stressful incident with nuclear terrorists awakened his memory, but the world into which Marvelman awoke was not the one in which he had previously lived. His "mushroom cloud" transformation did physical damage to people and the area around him. His super-strength near-killed every normal human he fought. And it was the tension-fraught 1980's of Margaret Thatcher and the Cold War, not the friendly 1950's of cartoony mad scientists and fictional foreign dictators in which he found himself.

The villain turned out to be Kid Marvelman, who had not transformed back to his normal human alter ego in twenty years, and was now a charismatic business tycoon, pretending to be his look-alike alter ego, Johnny Bates. He was ultimately revealed to be a sociopath with the power to fulfill his basest desires by the most  destructive means, often graphically depicted. In the meantime, Marvelman's powers seemed to defy the laws of physics. And though he still had a basic underlying personal similarity to Michael Moran, and looked like an idealized, super-fit version of him, he proved to be smarter and more charismatic, and made love to Michael's wife in a fantastically superior manner.

The story did not reach its apocalyptic climax in the pages of Warrior, however. 

Before it got to that point, creative differences and financial difficulties led to Alan Moore and new artist for the strip Alan Davis to cease working for Dez Skinn. The Marvelman strip therefore made its last appearance in Warrior in August, 1984, after 112 pages, and with a cliffhanger.

Soon after, attorneys for Marvel Comics sent a cease-and-desist letter to Skinn, claiming that the use of a character with the name "Marvelman" misrepresented Quality Communications as the company that owned the trademark on the word "Marvel" and the name of the superhero "Captain Marvel," Marvel comics. Skinn (and his attorneys) had a lengthy correspondence with Marvel's attorneys, but the days of Warrior were numbered. Its last issue was #26 in February, 1985.

NEXT: The Marvelous Miracle! Or was it Miraculous Marvel?

Some important parts of the information in this post were drawn from http://www.comicsbeat.com/poisoned-chalice-part-4-intermission-1963-to-1982/, a very thoroughly researched work about the history of Marvelman.

We're back!

Hi, everyone. I've been away for a while, fighting at international medieval combat tournaments, producing videos, working in the insurance industry, having a girlfriend, that sort of thing, but I am revving back up the Captain Marvel Culture project. With that in mind, I wanted to share some very recent Captain Marvel news.

As you should know by now, Marvel Comics has reprinted scads of Marvelman comics and is currently reprinting the Alan Moore series about the character under the name "Miracleman," it's title in the US.

Noh-Varr became The Protector and descended into obscurity, a dead Mar-Vell showed up in a miniseries, and Carol Danvers took on the mantle of Captain Marvel in a new series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick (who I interviewed at NY Comic Con. I'll post that interview in a later blog post).

Meanwhile, over at DC, the newest re-imagining of "Shazam" (now the name of the character carrying the franchise of the original Captain Marvel) has become a regular back-up character in Justice League comics. He had his own back-up series that established the new character's origin, which includes a half-dozen foster kids (including Billy Batson and Mary) who can all transform into variants of Shazam heroes.

Now let's see what's out there on the Interwebs...

Marvel (Miracle) Man to be reprinted!

Yes, I am a little behind on this news. Marvel comics acquired the rights to Marvelman (known in the US as Miracleman because of Marvel Comics' claim to the trademark of "Marvel"), the 1950' British follow-up to the original Captain Marvel created by Mick Anglo. Now they have announced that they will be reprinting the 1980's series written first by Alan Moore and continued by Niel Gaiman.

This was a remarkably well written and drawn series that broke new ground for comics and explored the ramifications of super-powers further than any comic book had sone up to that time. Peter Sanderson has lectured that the Marvelman/Miracleman series is one of the most important in comic book history because it kicked off the post-modern movement of 1986, which in his words, is "the Year the Changed Comics."

You can read the post by Graeme McMillan on 109.com here (the comments section, however, turns into a big argument about whether or not Alan More is an asshole for what he is quoted in the post as saying about this).