In the early 1990s, Neil Gaiman wrote several issues of the post-modern superhero comic series Miracleman for Eclipse Comics, taking over where Alan Moore left off. Gaiman had planned eightteen issues in total, but Eclipse collapsed after only eight were published, with the ninth still in-production.
The series was in limbo until Marvel purchased the rights to the character in 2009, and today at NYCC Marvel announced that they would begin reprinting Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman’s issues in 2014. But the even bigger news came from Gaiman (via video), who announced that he would be completing his nearly twenty-year old story! Gaiman added that he was excited to return to the series, which he considers some of his best work as a young writer. And now we’re excited to see what he has in store for Miracleman, Miraclewoman, and Kid Miracleman!
With both this and The Sandman: Overture, it looks like Gaiman is going to have yet another very busy year.
Oh hell yes.
Yay! Miracleman is one of my favorite comics ever (though IMHO the Gaiman bits weren’t quite up to the standard of the original Alan Moore issues), and it’s always been a bit depressing to have it end mid-story. I never would have expected it to get started again after all this time, much less with Gaiman returning.
When Miracleman was first being published, I was really impressed by Alan Moore’s “Olympus”, and not so much by Gaiman’s “The Golden Age”. A decade or so later, I re-read them, and Moore’s book seemed overblown and pretentious, while Gaiman’s glowed with craft and humanity.
Does this mean they can go back to calling him “Marvelman” now?
@3: I think the ending of Moore’s series, and the whole thing in general, suffers inevitably from just not being as fresh now as it was; it’s easy to forget that a lot of the things he was doing with that story were really surprising, because so many people have done similar things since then. This was also still relatively early in Moore’s career; Gaiman was a bit more mature by the time he started on it, plus Gaiman was in the much different position of expanding on some of Moore’s ideas rather than totally reinventing them. But I agree that there are some really lovely things in Gaiman’s series.
Here’s a nice Moore interview from a few years ago that talks about the book not at all pretentiously, and also clarifies why Marvel isn’t mentioning his name: part 1, part 2.
(I’d also argue that the narration of Moore’s book 3 is meant to sound kind of overblown, given who’s narrating it. But it does get a bit much.)
@5 No, despite what Moore said in that interview about Marvel being the only company that could publish it under the original name without getting harassed by Marvel, it looks like they’re still going with “Miracleman.”
I didn’t know it was Eclipse’s collapse that cancelled the series. I assumed it was axed because the comics were so terrible. Half the time I couldn’t even tell I was reading a Miracleman comic.
— Nov 2013
… Half the time I couldn’t even tell I was reading a Miracleman comic.
—
For a long, long time it seemed any Gaiman books and comics/graphic fiction (especially the novels, a few I have enjoyed -immensely-) really have had something going for them: a literate author, references that are Shakespearian, style akin to Douglas Adams in some cases – a few really positive elements.
Altogether, many of the chapters for Miracleman were ranging good to uneven.
There really was no comparison to me for the GOLDEN AGE (collection I found late, late in the 1990s) and OLYMPUS and RED KING and A DREAM OF FLYING because the style of writing is so, or seems so disparate comparing Gaiman and Moore.
Many of the stories in Miracleman (Marvelman in the much-earlier WARRIOR era ones) have substance but not every chapter (and collection/graphic trade edition) will appeal to all of the readers — I agree with you in that!
I’ve made a point of avoiding Marvel’s current reprints because I have no interest in seeing (or supporting) the classic pages from ‘Warrior’ colorized and bowdlerized — but I *am* keen to seen Gaiman’s long-delayed conclusion.