Episode 33: Unlikely Voice Of Reason

There are two types of people in this world: superhero comic fans who love Miracleman by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, and superhero comic fans who haven’t read all of it yet. Rob is in column A, and Amanda is in column B. Which means that they had very different reactions upon hearing that Marvel has announced that they will be publishing a Miracleman annual, with stories by Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan. This announcement begs the question: should new creators be allowed to jump into a story like Miracleman, which is a combined yet singular vision between two epic creators? And being two different types of people, Amanda and Rob have differing views on the announcement.

But there is more to comics than a couple of new short stories tacked onto a 30-year-old narrative. So Amanda and Rob also discuss:

• The Death of Wolverine #1, written by Charles Soule with pencils by Steve McNiven,
• Original Sin #8, written by Jason Aaron with art by Mike Deodato and
• Big Trouble In Little China #4, written by Eric Powell and drawn by Brian Churilla!

And now the legalese:

• We record this show live to tape. While this might mean a slightly looser show than your normal comics podcast, it also means that anything can happen.
• This show contains spoilers. While we try to throw out a verbal warning before we cut loose, consider this fair warning.
• Amanda and Rob use adult, explicit language, and therefore this show is not safe for work. The janitors portrayed in Miracleman had Walkman headphones for work, and that was 1984. What’s your excuse?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:27:35 — 70.5MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

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.

A Dream of Flying Again: Marvel To Reprint Moore’s and Gaiman’s Miracleman, Complete Gaiman’s Story

There are hazards, when you run a comics blog, to making the decision to fuck off to central New Hampshire to play classic video games during the weekend when the New York Comic Con is occuring. We knew when we made the call that we would miss some news, but we figured that that wouldn’t be all that big a deal, as there would be half a dozen comics blogs with budgets bigger than ours (read: almost all of them) who would have boots on the ground and be better able to cover it than we would even if we spent the weekend parked at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office Information Center (read: the couch with a first-generation Transformer tablet tuned to our “comics news” RSS feed).

So we knew that we would be late with some news… we just didn’t anticipate that some of that news would entail several hundred dollars worth of direct impending loss of value to our personal comic collection!

To wit: Marvel announced at New York Comic Con that they would be reprinting Neil Gaiman’s and Mark Buckingham’s late-80s / early-90s run on Miracleman… and that they would be finishing the three-part storyline that was aborted after Miracleman #25, the first part of the middle The Silver Age storyline, after Eclipse Comics went under.

Which is excellent news (well, it’s excellent news for anyone who didn’t spend the first two years of the 21st Century hunting down those original Eclipse issues), but that original announcement only referenced Gaiman’s and Buckingham’s issues, which didn’t start until Miracleman #17. Miracleman #1 through #16 were written by Alan Moore, and include the infamous 15th issue, Nemesis, writh art by John Totleben and featuring the complete decimation of London in the battle between Miracleman and Kid Miracleman. If you’ve never read it, it’s a classic, that is well worth the fat cash I dropped on it during a drunken bidding war on eBay in 2002.

And it looks like that is fat cash that I will never see again, because today Marvel made it official: they will be reprinting the entire Eclipse Comics run, starting with Alan Moore’s Miracleman #1, starting in January.

But Marvel’s still not using Moore’s name anyplace.

A Dream Of Flying (Again): Marvel Files Trademark For Miracleman

It can’t be this easy. And make no mistake, it won’t be… but as of a week or so ago, Marvel Comics now seems to have the rights to the trademarks of Marvelman and Miracleman, putting them under the same roof for the first time in… well, considering Dez Skinn started publishing Marvelman stories in Warrior back in the 80s without necessarily paying Mick Anglo, the character’s creator know, maybe ever.

So here’s how it apparently plays out… and let’s all keep in mind that I am not a lawyer, I am not privy to nearly 30 years of discussions and legal paperwork, and I am quite hung over: Neil Gaiman settled the main part of his lawsuit against Todd McFarlane over the rights to the Spawn characters Gaiman created for McFarlane back in January of this year. But apparently there was still an outstanding issue: McFarlane had filed a trademark for the Miracleman character after he bought out Eclipse Comics in the early 2000’s, and Gaiman had, in turn, filed an opposition to that trademark. And that trademark has remained in dispute since then, even after the disposition of the original lawsuit, meaning that even though Marvel bought the rights to the Marvelman trademark from Anglo back in 2009, the trademark for Miracleman – which includes all the Eclipse-printed Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman stories form the 80s, which are the only ones anyone gives a fuck about – was still up in the air.

Well, whether as part of the terms of the settlement, or via sheer laziness or forgetfulness, it seems McFarlane has legally abandoned his claim to the Miracleman trademark. And on September 5th, Marvel Comics filed their own notice of trademark on the name.