A Long Way From The Silver Age: New Miracleman Stories in 2016

One of the hard parts about getting older is that you start to understand that there’s a chance you won’t live long enough to see all the cool shit you assumed you would when you were a kid. When I was a kid in the 70s, I assumed that someday I would live on the moon, while now I understand that the best I will ever be able to do is a few minutes in low Earth orbit, strapped into a chair and watching only my vomit float in zero gravity, and even that assumes that I have six figures to give Richard Branson in exchange for a 45 minute “vacation” in space. Hell, when Warren Zevon was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he famously said that he hoped he hung on long enough to see the next James Bond flick, and the poor prick never knew that if he’d survived for two James Bond flicks, he might actually witness a good one.

Yes, this is a morbid and depressing way to start a post about comic books, but it feels appropriate, because I am a Miracleman fan. And as a Miracleman fan, I was thrilled by the recent news that, after 20-plus years of waiting, Marvel was not only gonna reprint the original series written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, but that they intended to publish the as-yet-unseen conclusion of Gaiman’s and Mark Buckingham’s The Silver Age and The Dark Age stories that were aborted when Eclipse Comics went under and suddenly nobody – and everybody – owned the rights to the character.

However, in comics as in life, there is no good news without bad news. The good news is that Marvel will start reprinting the original out-of-print stories soon, but I don’t care about that since I already own the entire original Eclipse Comics run (including Miracleman 3D and Miracleman Apocrypha). But the bad news in this story is that Joe Quesada, Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer, thinks that we will see new Gaiman / Buckingham Miracleman stories, well, a little less soon.

Like, in two or three years soon. When I will be 45 years old, and actuarially closer to dead than alive even if I didn’t have 35 pack years of cigarettes and about 5,000,000 case years of whiskey under my belt. Or sometimes overflowing my belt.

In an interview with Comic Book Resources, Quesada laid out some of the timeline:

At the moment, from the looks of the calendar I would project Neil and Bucky’s new material to see the light of day sometime in 2016. I know that it seems like a long way away, but the material is finally going to see the light of day and will remain in print, and I think for that, we can all be grateful. To me, it’s a travesty that there are readers who have not only not been exposed to the original stories, but don’t even had a way to easily access them.

While kind of depressing, this news, actually, is not really all that unexpected. Gaiman always has about 30 or so writing projects under his belt, and Buckingham has another year and a half of involvement with Fables to deal with before the decks are cleared enough to do between eight and ten new issues of Miracleman. And besides, if Marvel reprints one issue of existing Miracleman stories a month starting in January, 2014,  just the reprints will take two years to burn through before the decks are cleared for the third issue of The Silver Age.

What is a little surprising is that Marvel Comics will be printing issues of a character originally known as Marvelman in a series that started out being called Marvelman… under the Eclipse Comics name of Miracleman. The damn thing was only called Miracleman back in the 80s and 90s because Eclipse was nervous about taking on a lawsuit from Marvel over their trademark, so I’m surprised that Marvel isn’t taking advantage of their work restoring the original pages to scrape away the Wite-Out on the first few issues and just go with, you know, Marvelman.

After much thought and internal discussion, we felt that between the two, “Miracleman” was the coolest name for the project. I wish I had a more scientific answer for you, but that’s kind of how it went down. A bunch of us sat around at the editorial meeting and talked about it. We all remember it fondly as “Miracleman” and just felt that the name was by far better than Marvelman. That’s not to say that the name Marvelman isn’t in play for something else down the line someday, but when asked to choose between the two, well…

Yeah, if I had to hazard a guess, what we’re gonna be looking at is the treatment of Miracleman as a self-contained, Elseworlds-style story, while Marvelman gets an unrelated (or barely related) introduction in the 616 proper somewhere along the line. I can totally see Marvel making a deal with Gaiman allowing him to hold ownership points in Miracleman issues and stories in exchange for the printing rights… and some kind of story crossing the character into the Marvel Universe, choosing to change his name to break with the tragic events of The Dark Age. Of course, he’ll have to be a Marvel Cosmic character, because thanks to The Sentry we all saw what happens when a Superman-level character wanders around New York…

…but I’m getting ahead of myself. The important thing here is that there is a concrete plan to give us the missing Miracleman story. Even if, by the time if comes out, I might have to read it on a neural implant. In a nursing home. From inside an iron lung.

(via Comic Book Resources)