Marvel just sent out some artwork to go along with the blockbusting news that FINALLY Miracleman/Marvelman is coming back, with Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham finishing their run on the book that was abandoned more than 20 years ago.
If nothing else NYCC ’13 was the event that answered two of the biggest questions in comics history, with both Miracleman AND Stephanie Brown coming back!
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It was the series that changed comics forever. With the utterance of one word, Michael Moran transformed from the ordinary into the extraordinary – and Miracleman was born!
Long out of print, Marvel Comics is pleased to announce that the earth-shattering stories that injected new levels of sophistication into the super hero genre will finally see the light of day once again! Starting this January, Marvel will begin publishing the legendary run of Miracleman by the original creators that began in Warrior Magazine and continued under now defunct publisher Eclipse Comics!
Fans lucky enough to have read these trailblazing stories when they were originally produced have often referred to this legendary run on Miracleman as “the lost Watchmen,” and Marvel is proud to finally bring these incredible comics to an audience that has clamored for them.
“The wait is over,” says Editor In Chief Axel Alonso. “Marvel will finally be bringing these timeless, ground-breaking stories to a whole new generation of reader.”
“We’ve been working with the Miracleman artists to obtain original artwork or photostats in every instance possible, and then applying the same painstaking restoration methods and rigorous quality standards that are utilized on the Marvel Masterworks line. The Marvel Special Projects team have even been developing some new techniques specifically for this project. These Miracleman issues will receive the most advanced restoration possible to ensure the most authentic reading experience,” says SVP of Marvel Publishing David Gabriel. “The art is crisp, clear, and looks as good – if not better than the day it was published! Also, the stories are being completely relettered to meet today’s standards.”
Making these stories available to an entirely new generation is one thing – but following the original groundbreaking run, the epic more than 30 years in the making will reach it’s cataclysmic conclusion! You heard correctly – Marvel will also be publishing all-new Miracleman stories from legendary creators Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham! Long left unfinished, Gaiman and Buckingham’s famous storyline will ultimately see the light of day!
“The tragedy of Miracleman was that we published two issues, wrote three and a half – and then it all stopped,” Gaiman said, in an interview with Marvel.com. “And Miracleman #25 has been sitting in the darkness – nobody has seen it. It was drawn, it was written, it was lettered over 20 years ago.”
“I love the idea that I will get to finish this story,” added Gaiman.
“That Neil and Bucky can finally finish the story they started, is a great relief to still-gasping fans — myself among them,” says Alonso.
Re-presented in serialized form, each issue of Miracleman features additional content including new art, interviews with the creators as well as new covers from some of the industry’s most legendary artists! Look for Miracleman #1 in print and digital this January!
I wonder if, after all this time, if the conclusion can possibly meet expectations. Hopefully, it will go well.
I’m interested since I’ve never been able to find all the “original” issues, but not sure how the story will “play” today when we’ve seen these types of things play out in various comics over the years. The stories were certainly revolutionary when they came out but not sure how they will be viewed by today’s audiences. As for the covers? eh . . . I’ll probably just pick one I like and go with that. Can’t go wrong with Alan Davis on anything of course.
Hope BWS will be back for the rest of the covers for the Silver Age. Those are what caught my eye when I started picking out up oh so long ago. Who knew those would be the only two issues I got? Fortunately my AMAZING local comic shop guy hooked me up with all the trades in the late 90s for cover price.what a saint!
Because that’s what Miracleman needed. A Skottie Young variant cover of it. I guess MM isn’t the sacred cow that Watchmen is – had this been DC’s press release, people would be calling boycotts for the shameless marketing of it all.
@Mikael
What’s wrong with a Skottie Young variant? MM it’s a revered comic character not an holy icon :) Problem with DC and WM was Alan Moore was against the prequel, in this case the authors are happy to complete their run.
“I guess MM isn’t the sacred cow that Watchmen is ”
No, it isn’t. Many of us have never even read it. I haven’t.
Miracleman is just a character. Anybody in the world could try to write a Miracleman story; whether the story turned out to be magnificent, unreadable, or somewhere in between would depend on the author’s skills and intentions. WATCHMEN was a complete work.
SRS
None of those covers do anything for me. Very boring, capturing none of the magic of the original series. Maybe better ones will be on the way.
Looking forward to it. I just hope it’s not 4.99 per issue. I might have to skip the reprints and wait for the new stuff to come out if it’s overpriced.
My sister was in the UK back in the early 90’s and brought some UK comics back with her for me. She bought a bagged collection from the shop and inside of it was Warriror magazine #1-4.
Was a litle mind blowing since those were definitely not the super heroes I was used to reading but I think it helped broaden my reading horizons when it came to the comic book genre.
The Cassaday, Yu and Perkins variants make it look like super-flatulence is one of his powers ;)
>> I guess MM isn’t the sacred cow that Watchmen is – >>
One of these days, people will start to figure out that taking a one-size-fits-all approach to different projects doesn’t make sense. Even among Alan Moore projects — John Constantine and Swamp Thing were work for hire, so he expects those to go on, Watchmen they expected to come back to them, Miracleman was something he was steward of for a while and then passed on to others… they’re not all interchangeable, so it’s hardly an occasion for outrage that they don’t get treated the same.
Variant covers on MIRACLEMAN? Is this really something to fuss about? The Eclipse series had covers by Chaykin, Starlin, Gulacy, Tim Truman and John K. Snyder, in addition to by interior artists, by guys who’d later be interior artists, and by “regular cover artists” including Dave McKean and Barry Windsor-Smith. There was even MIRACLEMAN: APOCRYPHA for people who wanted to see different artistic visions of the Miracleverse.
Doesn’t seem like “other popular artists give you their version of the character” is really a bridge uncrossed, or one that got much objection before now.
I just wish Marvel or the Beat had credited the artists — I recognize all but the last two, and know that when I do find out who did those, it’ll be an “oh, right, of course” reaction. But it’d be nice to have them listed.
Still, it’s interesting to see how quickly the fan reaction to MIRACLEMAN news can veer from “when are you going to reprint it huh huh cmon quit stalling youre never gonna reprint it announce something damn you” to “what can we be outraged about, now that they’ve announced it?”
Oh, no. They’re going to try to sell reprints of long out-of-print work written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, and drawn by Erskine, Davis, Totleben, Buckingham and others, that fans have been eager for for years. How dare they try to sell that stuff. The bastards.
Somehow it just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
kdb
Looking forward to the new material. Maybe I’ll pick up the trade(s) of the reprints, since I recall the earlier issues had some variable printing.
Nice to see it back in print for people who missed out the first time. I haven’t read any of it for a long time, but I think now the later Moore/Totlebein and Gaiman/Buckingham issues will read better than the earlier stuff from Warrior.
Thanks, Kurt Busiek, for giving perspective to some of the more outrageous comments above. It makes me think that really the fan base for this site is rather young… not (cough) fifty-ish, like myself. I totally agree with Mr. Busiek’s comments, and I’d like to address a few of the other complaints that have been aired. Never read it and not sure what the fuss is about? Then you’re in for an amazing treat, a comics run unlike few I’ve read in almost-fifty years of comic reading. If you want to take that with a grain of salt, that’s your prerogative, of course. Think that maybe Alan Moore is somehow at fault again, because of Watchmen or some other reason? Remember how carefully and respectfully he was approached for this project, at least according to what we know, and how the overtures to primary creator Mick Anglo reassured him (again, according to reports). Wonder if maybe the ending won’t live up to the legend? Well, there are actually two endings already – Moore and Totleben’s ending, and Gaiman and Buckingham’s ending to “The Golden Age.” They were both perfect in their own way. Anxious that the stories will not have their original charge after so many years, and so many other “revolutionary” comics? I for one will be interested to see how new readers react. I think the stories hold up, hooplah or no hooplah. But we’ll see. For a possible correlation, try this… think of what it would be like if the primary run of “Astro City” had been out of print all these years, and was now returning. Some readers would be overjoyed, some would be doubtful, but the stories would be wonderful either way.
Yeah, I’m not sure how those early issues are going to play with readers unfamiliar with the context of time and place. I can hear it now, “Why is it broken up into eight page chunks? This is weird.”
I like the nuclear bomb one (and ‘lil Miracleman), but Jesus, that last cover is hideous.
So many questions…
Will the issue numbers match up with the Eclipse series?
Will Marvel reprint “Yesterday Gambit” that was never reprinted in the US?
Will “Apocrypha” be reprinted?
Will “Triumphant” be finished and published?
My guesses:
>> Will the issue numbers match up with the Eclipse series?>>
I doubt they’ll consider that an issue one way or the other. If it happens that way it’ll be by chance rather than design. But since after a while the stories start becoming issue-length, they’ll probably want to keep them roughly the same packages.
>> Will Marvel reprint “Yesterday Gambit” that was never reprinted in the US? >>
I expect they want to, and if the legal issues have all been resolved, it’s hard to imagine why they wouldn’t. That would be one thing that could throw off the numbering, of course.
>> Will “Apocrypha” be reprinted?>>
They’d have to restore and recolor it, so it would be an expense. If book collections sell real well (as they almost certainly will), they’ll want to reprint anything that could also sell well, so while APOCRYPHA wouldn’t sell as well as the main series, if the expected profits outweigh the restoration expenses, I’d think they’d want to. Gaiman, Buckingham, James Robinson, Matt Wagner, Alex Ross, Darick Robertson and more (including, er, ahem, me) — I’d think any publisher would want to reprint it, unless the main collections do markedly more poorly than expected.
>> Will “Triumphant” be finished and published?>>
I doubt it. Fred Burke’s out of comics, I think, and the project wasn’t close to completion. If Marvel wants a MIRACLEMAN (or MARVELMAN) project drawn by Mike Deodato, it’d probably be easier all around to just do a new one.
kdb
Kurt, you can find out the cover credits if you save the images, they have the artist’s surnames in the file names. It would have been nice if they’d been credited in the post though.
Still wonder about Marvel reprinting the childbirth issue. Some shops refused to carry that issue more than 20 years ago and Eclipse was not as high profile as Marvel is. Has Marvel ever published a comic with an explicit childbirth scene? And it is explicit.
It’s my understanding, from reading articles on this site, that the name of the character as well as question of ownership of the character have been contentious. Isn’t it safe to say that the reason the Miracleman* comics have been out of print for so long has something to do with the fact that Marvel (or was it Marvel UK) bullied the folks that were putting out Warrior magazine issues into dropping the character, which then had to be rebranded & sold to Eclipse (after Marvel passed on it).
Marvel leaned on the folks over in the UK till they buckled and now get to pick up the pieces and profit off of others hard work and risk taking.
Seems a bit two-faced.
*Marvelman
>> Isn’t it safe to say that the reason the Miracleman* comics have been out of print for so long has something to do with the fact that Marvel (or was it Marvel UK) bullied the folks that were putting out Warrior magazine issues into dropping the character, which then had to be rebranded & sold to Eclipse (after Marvel passed on it).>>
No.
The comics have been out of print for so long because there was considerable confusion and disagreement over who owned the character and who owned the copyrights to the stories and art.
Marvel’s gripe was about the character’s name, which they viewed as trademark infringement. But that was solved in a very simple manner — new name. If that were the issue, then this material would have been in print for years under the name Miracleman. But it wasn’t the issue. The issue was ownership, both of the core character and concepts and of the story and art.
kdb
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