Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Comic Books >

More Miracleman fun

Page: 1 2(3)

14:55 / 25.03.06

Holy...! It's true!

I never suspected!

Austen’s work stretches back the 1980s, when he briefly illustrated Alan Moore's superhero series Miracleman, under his birth name "Chuck Beckum", which he later abandoned out of a desire to disassociate from his father's family name.

I also thought Beckum's art was rather weak, although not horrible. HH.

I still think fondly of the first part, even though it might be a little overwritten. As a result phrases like "In the sodium-lit hour before dawn" keeps popping up in my mind from time to time (another is "It is precisely 12:07 AM. It begins to rain" whenever it begins to rain...).

15:08 / 25.03.06

when it and if it does come back into print i expect many first-time readers will be disappointed or underwhelmed by it, particularly the early Alan Moore stuff,
I don't think so man. I've read comics for a long time, and those Moore issues were the most violent, hardcore, horrific superhero battles ever.

Finally got done with the Gaiman stuff, and it was bleh to me at first. MM as asshole Morpheus type guy at first, but it did start getting interesting when they brought back Young Miracleman, only to have the series abruptly end like two issues into it.

22:56 / 25.03.06

Yeah, it was Chuck Austin's art i was thinking off primarily, but also Rick Veitch's art... and yeah - there is a point halfway through book two where the format switches from 8 page chapters (reflecting the 8 page episodes that comprised each Warrior episode) to 16 or so page stories - along with the art the result is very jarring...

So yeah, the second volume is quite flawed IMO and the first quite dated (especially in terms of our expectations of superhero comics), but historically significant and ... The third volume is also dated but in a far more interesting and unified... and it is the third volume that has all the most violent images - mothers with their arms ripped off attempting to sheppard their children...

02:25 / 26.03.06

I don't think so man. I've read comics for a long time, and those Moore issues were the most violent, hardcore, horrific superhero battles ever.

Totally. I had the first two trades for years and had only read the rest of the series by reading a friend's single issues many years ago. I recently re-read the whole series and the battle in issue 15 is insanely powerful and chilling. I have a hard time picturing Marvel printing these stories. How close does Marvel's MAX line even come to this type of brutal and emotionally charged imagery?

03:08 / 26.03.06

Well, the whole deal is pretty dated at this point, and it's probably interesting mostly as an historical artifact. A lot of it seems rather "obvious", especially since so many people were doing stories about messianic supermen at the time. I mean, the indie letters pages and zines and so on were full of interviews with people saying things like, "Superman would've grown up thinking he was Jesus!" (Rick Veitch, maybe?) I think there's something poetical about the book's current status--a book about the total liberty of a human superman is mired in this petty human... whatever. Somebody get my intern in here to finish this post. The point is, I bought the original issues years ago, suckers! And, John Totleben, man! He went blind!

Clearly Alan sacrificed this book to his Stygian gods.

04:55 / 26.03.06

Honestly, I hate to sound cynical here (because I think the thing'll sell like hotcakes and a lot of people will love it) but i think there could be a chance that a lot of people will be underwhelmed by Miracleman.

And I think it really boils down to a few things.

First of all the style is much denser and more compact then comic readers today prefer.

Secondly, well a lot of the book has been done since then and it won't have quite the same impact on modern readers.

But I do think that its the kind of seminal work thats worth reading.

22:20 / 26.03.06

I strongly disagree.

The MM stories are as "dated" as Watchmen, V or Swamp Thing. The f*cking rocked then, they rock now, and they'll blow open some doors to perception in new readers, when-ever-the-hell the books are republished.

I'm reading the DOOM PATROL archive vol one: guess what? It's amazing stuff, despite old school techniques and formulas. Cool is cool, no matter what timeframe it first emerged in.

22:24 / 26.03.06

furioso,

I don't really think the Miracleman stories are dated. But at the same time, I can see how a lot of readers could feel that way. I wasn't trying to advocate this but merely to say that there's a chance of it.

Either way, I think most comic fans would buy up the whole run just to see what the fuss was about.

23:32 / 26.03.06

The MM stories are as "dated" as Watchmen, V or Swamp Thing.

Uh... hello. Yes. Dated doesn't mean bad, you know.

There's definitely a lot of cool stuff in MM that holds up well--everyone is 1,000,000% correct about Kid Miracleman, for instance, and also the Qys are the coolest aliens ever-- but the gothy, poetastical style is certainly dated, and the whole theme of superman-as-godling has been developed quite a lot further in the last 20 years. These kids, you know, they cut their teeth on Apokalyps and Supreme and, well, post-Moore Superman. I will sit here in my rocker and tell you that it was a headier brew when it was new, along with The One and The Nazz and assorted others that you've probably never heard of.
Crap. There was something else I wanted to say. Intern!

23:40 / 26.03.06

Me, I've always liked the Warpsmiths....

02:05 / 27.03.06

I think I have the wrong Apocalypse, there. I meant the godlike X-Men villain, not the godlike DC villain.

02:59 / 27.03.06

I read the series for the first time about four years ago and I still loved it. Sure, it doesn't have the shock value it may have had in the 80s, but I'd still consider it one of the three best superhero works, along with Watchmen and Flex Mentallo.

I think the thing that makes the work so great is that it's one of the very few legitimately adult superhero works. I think stuff like Infinite Crisis is going for this serious attitude, but it's tough to take it seriously, whereas the relatively realistic world of Miracleman makes it a lot easier to relate to the character emotionally. One of Moore's best choices was to make the 50s adventures a collective hallucination, which is one, very cool, and two, allows for a seamless integration of the goofy past with the more serious present. That's a twist that's not talked about a lot, but for me, is one of the best things about the run.

And even in a post Authority world, no one's done superhero combat like Miracleman 15. That issue is brutal and emotionally devestating in a way that a bunch of two page spreads of buildings blowing up can never be. Moore went so far, I would argue that it's not Miracleman that looks bad in comparison, it's everything that's come since. And issue 16 is the definitive superman in the real world story, one of the best single issues ever. A book this thematically complex is always going to be relevant and enjoyable.

Obviously, it's his choice, but it bothers me that Alan chose to move away from this serious examination of the superhuman towards the more pastiche, goofy stuff like Tom Strong. Yeah, maybe it was a "bad mood" that produced it, but I'd rather have a bad mood that produced a sincere, thematically complex work than the good mood that produced the goofy comedy of Tom Strong or the silver age parodies of Supreme.

I would argue this is where Morrison supplanted Moore, with Flex Mentallo he made a book that kept the thematic complexity and character depth of MM or Watchmen, while at the same time bringing in that silver age craziness.

But, back to the main point, this book holds up, and other than Flex, there hasn't been a superhero book that's been as good since.

03:10 / 27.03.06

I kinda think 'Tom Strong' and 'Supreme' and such are more mature analyses of the superhero, than 'Miracleman'. Miracleman is an extrapolation rather than an exploration, and it's the sort of single-direction extrapolation that carries forward with good momentum, but kills all avenues, eventually. 'Marvelman' can only go so far, but 'Tom Strong' could be stretched in so many more directions, including, possibly, the story of the earlier Moore work(s).

03:29 / 27.03.06

And 'Flex Mentallo' trumps them all. Yes.

05:55 / 27.03.06

i think it's easy to look back on MM (and V come to that) as being a bit naive, overwritten, clumsy even at times but there really was nothing else like it at the time and so many comics since have depended on the stylistic and thematic innovations in early alan moore that it is hard to read them today and for them to stand out from what has come later. MM was one of the first character revamps that made sense and was true to the origins of the hero.

Shiny: Well Over Thirty

16:40 / 01.07.07

Bloody hell. I just read the entirity of Moore's Miracleman for the first time on download. I meant to just read an issue or two and then do some other stuff, but I once I started reading that just wasn't going to happen. I have to say from my point of view I don't think it's lost anything over the past twenty years or so.

In fact I think it's spoiled me a bit in that suddenly lots of the mediocre superhero stuff I've enjoyed over the years seems suddenly tragically flat and pointless, and I'm having to resist the urge to burn all of my inferior superhero books right now. Which would be anything except ASS and Flex and maybe Zenith really.

18:24 / 01.07.07

Urges are there for a reason, Shiny.

20:54 / 01.07.07

It's really interesting to read All Star Superman after Miracleman since they present such totally different views of what a superpowered being like that would mean to the world. Miracleman brings about a quasi-fascist world of advanced technology, but with a seeming hopelessness. Miracleman is a figure who inspires fear and admiration from a distance. Whereas, in ASS, Superman is everything humans could hope to be, both in terms of evolved power, but also with personality. He's the coolest guy and presents a more inclusive view of what this power could do. He doesn't remake the world to serve as a monument to him, he inspires others, like Leo Quintum to be better.

And, I think that's one of the central differences in the way Morrison and Moore view superheroes. Moore sees them as people with some kind of psychological deficiency that's magnified by the powers. Morrison sees them as a guide to our next stage of evolution, they may still be troubled, but they're trying to make things better.

Dan Fish - @Fish1k

10:48 / 22.12.08

Informative interview with Neil here:

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: ...I have to ask you the obligatory Miracleman question. At what stage is Miracleman at?

Neil Gaiman: Currently Todd McFarlane is suing me, claiming he owns all of Miracleman, and I am going, “You are mad, because as far as I can tell right now, neither of us owns anything of Miracleman, it is actually still owned completely by Mick Anglo, who is still alive, and who has asserted his copyright on it, and everything that Dez Skinn said back in Warrior days was apparently a lie, and this thing is Mick’s, so I don’t really see why, why are you suing me now, Todd?”

More at the link.

11:46 / 22.12.08

Not to sue the king of dreamz, Mr McFarlane! Not to sue ...

17:01 / 17.09.09

Really surprised that McFarlane hasn't made a big stink about Marvel's purchase of the character.

I guess now he's gotta deal with Disney's lawyers. Poor guy.

23:31 / 07.09.11

Well, here we are, almost 10 years later, and still no new Miracleman, no new announcements from Marvel, Gaiman, McFarlane...

No new reprints of Moore's run...

I guess I'll see you all in another 10 years, to see if there's any new development...

12:46 / 29.03.14

it's amazing what a few years will do...

18:53 / 30.10.14

I came across this which is cool

http://entitlementliberationarmy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/miracleman-triumphant-001-lettered-by.html

Page: 1 2(3)