It’s been a busy week for Miracleman by Gaiman and Buckingham: The Silver Age.
On Monday we gave some thoughts on this long (30 years) gestating project, the lowkey reaction to its arrival, and Marvel’s muted PR campaign.
The topic of Miracleman drew a rather lively (by 2024 standards) comment section here, more discussion on Reddit, and the usual social media chatter. Even the writer himself, Neil Gaiman, got in on the action with a post on BlueSky:
“It’s interesting seeing the comics press going “Why isn’t there more talk of Miracleman: The Silver Age”? Meanwhile, we get the kind of review that those of us who made comics in the dawn times dreamed of as a kind of grail,” he wrote, then linking to a review of Miracleman in The New York Times, which, he wasn’t wrong. It was a glowing review, penned by Sam Thielman.
It is hard to imagine a realm of toyetic intellectual property that could tolerate Dickie Dauntless. (That’s a compliment.) He is both charmingly naïve and a product of his era in endearing, unfortunate ways. Gaiman had teased his return throughout the original run of “The Golden Age,” and now he and Buckingham shift away from employing multiple narrators as in that story to using Dickie’s perspective, putting us on his side very quickly. We bite our nails as he gapes in wonder at the immodestly dressed women, by 1963 standards, and people of color among the godlike gentry who make up his old chum’s royal court in this new world.
The review contains some back matter process illustrations from Mark Buckingham, suggesting that this was not just catching a stray, but a review with a bit of thought behind it. (In another skeet, Thielman revealed he had worked on it for months – and linked to his previous piece about Moore’s Miracleman.) In my own piece I had wondered if there were perhaps some unseen marketing efforts by Marvel or PRH to promote the book, and I guess there were!
And then yesterday (Thursday) a bit of a surprise in the old email inbox: a press release from Marvel about the book that not only included a front-facing image of the cover (the lack of which I’d complained about) but the link to a TRAILER for it.
It is perhaps a bit odd for the trailer to a graphic novel to come out the day AFTER it hits comics shops but…let’s accentuate the positive. Miracleman by Gaiman and Buckingham: The Silver Age is a book likely to sustain interest for a while, and all the buzz this week probably built up interest.
We’ll probably never know why Marvel’s roll out for the NEW Miracleman collection was so buggy by conventional standards but it did roll out. And hopefully it sold a few copies along the way and maybe even a few people came to the shop to check it out. So a happy ending…until “The Dark Age” comes out, that is.
Thanks for the link. Great NY Times review.
I guess Marvel cried Wolf too many times with Miracleman. First the unnecessary (initially projected as complete) hardcover reprints of the Mike Anglo material, then the overpriced single issue reprints of the Alan Moore material (once again filled up with not-in-demand Mike Anglo material, usually up to 50% of the actual comic pages per issue), then releasing the so-called All-New Miracleman Annual featuring a previously unused Grant Morisson script (which was way overstretched by artist Joe Quesada to get some kind of page count to make it seem worth the effort and a servicable but once again unnecessary sotry bu Peter Milligan and Mike Allred, then only releasing said Alan Moore material in three (once again overpriced) hardcover editions for the Graphic Novel market, then, after repeating the overpriced trick on Neil Gaiman’s Golden Age (both with single issues and hardcover editions, but thankkfully leaving out the Mick Anglo stuff this time) Marvel neclected to inform anybody that the previously sollicited of the Silver Age story weren’t actually going to be coming out for reasons……… unexplained.
THEN (after some further unnecessary stuff actually written by Neil Gaiman himself appearing in Marvel Comics #1000 and the Miracleman Special (supposedly new Neil Gaiman, but actually reprints from the Eclipse released Apocrypha TP)) FINALLY, Marvel did what they should have done in the first place: they released a Watchmen sized TP featuring all Alan Moore material for a reasonable price (in 2023 money admittedly) so, as a retailer, we can point to a single book and say ‘If you liked Watchmen/Swamp Thing/V for Vendetta, check this out. No his name isn’t on it, but it is guaranteed Class A Alan Moore material! He made his name with V for Vendetta and THIS!’
Now I don’t mind waiting, and I can get over a dissapointment or two, but it got very hard to be enthousiastic about Miracleman, given how Marvel completely botched the rerelease of this classic comic. And that does tend to spill over.
And I do agree with any review that is positive, The Silver Age is actually pretty good. I wasn’t that convinced while reading it during actual release (once again plagued by delays, and a few issues contained not as many new pages as others, which was once again compensated with the return of Mike Anglo reprints….. WHY?) but I read it through in one go once all issues were release and I was very happy with the experience.