The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 91: Miracleman #7, August 2014

Read today. Will fill in post tomorrow. Exam in the morning, so no time today.

(And now the proper post:)

It's a strange world that Miracleman inhabits. Less for us than for him, though. I think this issue is dealing rather fantastically with the realization that MM is having that every battle he remembers, every other supervillain, every relationship, was completely false. While such a realization would in and of itself be shattering, couple it with the idea that the only other superhuman that he's sure exists is his psychotic ex-sidekick. What does one do upon realizing that one is only one of two members of a species. There's a bit of reference there to the Superman/Supergirl question, one that becomes increasingly moot as more and more Kryptonians appear to have survived that planet's destruction. And then in Supreme, Moore elevates Ethan Crane, makes sure that his origins are firmly grounded in humanity, but then supplies him with other superhumans with whom to collaborate/commiserate. Miracleman, by contrast, is left alone. Where that will lead him is a mystery so far, though we see him with a look of rage on his face more and more with each passing issue. Those of us who are familiar with the trajectory of the series have some idea where things head, but to see how that trajectory unfolds is the real treat of this reprint series.

More on Miracleman as I can afford the subsequent issues. If Marvel knew one thing in reprinting this series, it's that they could pretty much charge whatever they wanted and crazy people like me would buy it. Though I'm feeling much less crazy these days....

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 88: Miracleman #6, July 2014

A short one today (I seem to type that a lot and it never end up being true). I'm kind of tired of writing right now so rather than a long diatribe about how this comic is speaking to Supreme, can we just take a short moment to consider Alan Moore's words? The first page of this issue is a monologue by Evelyn Cream, whose story I'm still super-intrigued by. There is such personality in these words. Not words enhanced by personalized caption boxes (though the blue of these boxes calls to mind the fact that Cream's words issue from between sapphire teeth), but simply words explaining to us an interiority of a character who is, ostensibly, a hitman, a murderer, but who is also a protagonist in this story. I like Evelyn Cream, even if I don't like what he does. To be able to do that with words is magic.

(Bit of a conundrum now, as I do not own Miracleman #7. I'll either go out and get it for tomorrow's comic, or go back to the storage collection and we'll continue the Miracleman/Supreme comparison at a later date. See you tomorrow.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 87: Miracleman #5, July 2014

Back to Miracleman, and more and more now the links between it and Supreme are blatant. Though I kind of wonder if that's a retroactive blatancy. I don't think (I don't know for sure) that the original Eclipse reprints included old Marvelman strips, but the juxtaposition of them in the Marvel reprints makes for an interesting contrast to the old-style stories that are inserted into each issue of Supreme. After the revelation of Miracleman's origin, reading the reprinted Marvelman stories at the back of each issue is like having a glimpse into the history that Mike Moran is currently discovering to be false. In Supreme, the flashbacks are filling in a truth, in that they are filling in "new" Supreme's back story, in Miracleman, the flashbacks are revealing a lie. There's an interesting moment in this particular issue in which we get a story of Young Miracleman entitled "1957." YM flies to Pluto to get some jewels to impress a young lady, but the jewels melt upon YM's return to Earth. Here's the thing, though: this adventure is a fashioned memory. Neither of the surviving members of the Miracleman Family feature in it, so it's strange to have a flashback to a manufactured memory of a character who is, ostensibly, dead. I wonder whether or not this is foreshadowing something to do with Young Miracleman.

Miracleman's associate, Evelyn Cream, is a neat addition to the story. Originally hired to assassinate Mike Moran, Cream instead allies himself with Miracleman, which I did not see coming. I'm interested in Cream's back story, though I've no idea if one will ever be fleshed out for him. How did he get sapphire teeth? And what's it like to eat with a mouthful of jewelery?

I've not much else to say about this issue. It's interesting to see Gargunza as a villain in both "reality" and the reprinted adventures, though something tells me he's going to be much creepier and disturbing in Moore's revision of him. Back tomorrow with another installment of "The Red King Syndrome." See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 82: Supreme #41, August, 1996

When I first laid hands on Supreme #42 (tomorrow's comic), I really didn't know what to expect. It had Alan Moore's name on it, but if his other Image stuff is anything to go by, just the name is not a guarantor of excellence.

Then I read it. And then I bought every single issue of the series that was available.

To say that Supreme is one of my favourite comics is an understatement. Though flawed, I think it might be one of the most well-conceived and well-rendered superhero comics ever. So that I'm here comparing it with Moore's other superhero opus, Miracleman, is appropriate.

If you like, we can see the two as mirror images. Where Miracleman starts out very innocently in his origin, and has it twisted inside out in Moore's revision, Supreme starts out twisted, and is revisioned into innocence. This initial issue is all set-up, with only one superheroic punch up right at the very beginning. Moore ties the series in to its previous incarnation (basically a very violent version of Superman), and in doing so acknowledges not only the metafictional history (i.e., Supreme as Superman), but also the character's fictional history in the pages of Image comics. He, of course, proceeds to chuck all that out and start fresh, but through the device of the "revision of spacetime," he does not alienate all those readers who might have enjoyed the previous adventures.

Supreme, then, is the story of the first superhero and of the processes of authorial and editorial flux that he has undergone over the course of, at the time of publishing, 60 years. The series bounces back in time to investigate those particular eras in the development of Superman, and reflects on how those eras inform the current version of the character. I've often said that this series is the best Superman story you're ever likely to read that doesn't feature the Man of Steel himself. Even the cover of this issue is a tribute to the first issue of Superman.

In comparing the series to Miracleman, then, the initial response has to be to the weight of history that is placed upon the character, rather than taken from the character. The weight is distributed evenly over about 13 issues, and Supreme's discovery, along with our own, is not alienating of traumatic, but celebratory.

I've not yet quite figured out how to divide the series up, but we'll likely be on Supreme for most of the week, and then back to Miracleman for the Red King storyline. But for now, let's celebrate the superhero, and the superheroic, with "The Man of Majesty!"

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 81: Miracleman #3, November 1985

Yep, that says number 3, just like yesterday. I missed the fourth issue of the reprint series, but fortunately I have an old, torn-cover copy of number three from the Eclipse run that contains the same stories that were in the fourth Marvel issue.

The end of the "A Dream of Flying" storyline, exciting, though not unexpected, revelations about Miracleman, Young Miracleman, and Kid Miracleman's origins and identities. I'm quite excited to see how this plays out with the title character. In true Moore fashion, things that have happened earlier in the story were actually clues as to the true nature of the Miracleman family, like the way in which Young Miracleman dies, or that Kid Miracleman is still a 13-year old. Similar things happen in Supreme, so again I'm having a hard time not seeing the one as response to the other. Is Supreme what happens to superhero comics after a deconstructive moment in the medium? It seems to me that it's an ironically-reconstructionist superhero we get. I think that that's a pretty good way of calling it a myth.

So. Book 1 fnished. I'm going to have a look at the Supreme run and see if I can break it up into four discrete components, the way Miracleman is. See you tomorrow with Supreme #41!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 80: Miracleman #3, April 2014

It becomes more and more apparent (see what I did there ;P) to me that Alan Moore's run on Supreme is speaking directly back to this series. There are beautiful passages in Miracleman that try to imagine what it must feel like to be, basically, a god, but the undercurrent of menace at the foundation is chilling rather than celebratory. Supreme deploys much of the same kind of language and concern with one's history, but from that celebratory place. Where Mike Moran's investigation of his past and his powers seems to lead to a darkness, Ethan Crane's leads to a brightness. It may be that after I've finished off Moore's Miracleman, I'll have to re-read Supreme. And then maybe a book....

(Okay, article. Let's be realistic.)

I think, having said that, that I'm going to stick with blogging Miracleman, mainly because it's such an important piece of superhero literature, but I'm going to break up the various books. It's just too dark and intense to read on a daily basis, I think. Maybe it's just me, but I find myself particularly susceptible to being influenced by the tone of the things I read or watch or hear or play. I'll have to break the dismal Miracleman up with something lighter, happier.

Oh. Maybe I will read Miracleman and Supreme in conjunction for a little while. That might be really, really interesting.

Okay, last bit of book 1, "A Dream of Flying" tomorrow, and then on Sunday perhaps we'll dive headlong into Moore's Supreme. See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 79: Miracleman #2, March 2014

I'm really not sure why I stopped buying this title. It's really remarkable. I think the price was a major factor. Much as I enjoy all the extra content and such, and much as I think it's a necessary part of reading what is probably one of the most important pieces of superhero writing that's been done, the inclusion of all that stuff makes the comic itself a bit expensive. Not prohibitively so, but enough to cause one (or me, at least) to take pause in picking it up on a monthly basis.

That said, the way that these stories are being presented is quite awesome. I'm not sure how much access there was to the older stories when Eclipse was originally publishing Miracleman, but the juxtaposition of the older material with the newer, that movement from innocent altruism to deconstruction makes for an interesting read. It would be easy, in only reading the later material, to distance it from the original Mick Anglo stuff, but to have it presented together really drives home the fact that the adventures of Marvelman in the 50s are actually a part of Mike Moran's memories as Miracleman. I don't know much about what happens later in the series, but it would be cool to see 80s Miracleman travel back and witness one of the older adventures of 50s Marvelman.

"The Original Writer" continues to impress. Though it'd be nice if he came down from his high horse and just owned his past, warts and all.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 78: Miracleman #1, March 2014

(I know I'm waffling about, not sticking to any particular order, but that's the nature of the beast at the moment, I guess.)

What can I say about Miracleman that hasn't been said already? I remember hearing about the title, having vague impressions of what it was about, what the main character looked like, but it was published by Eclipse in 1985, which was before I'd discovered comic stores and anything that wasn't published by Marvel.

And then it went out of print.

And then it became a contested property, and the reprints became prohibitively expensive, and I figured one day it would all get resolved and I'd be able to read it. But maybe not.

And then a year and a bit ago, Marvel got the rights sorted out and started reprinting what has been touted as one of the seminal superhero stories of all time, one of Alan Moore's earliest deconstructions of the genre, one of Neil Gaiman's earliest forays into comics, one of Alan Davis' earliest works. It's legendary.

So why did I buy the first three issues of the series and then lose interest?

I think that, perhaps, the deconstruction of the superhero is just too overdone for even this early version of it to be intriguing. It's one of the reasons I avoid most of Mark Millar's superhero stuff. He seems intent on reproducing the grittiness of the 80s superhero revision, a revision that's come and gone and been replaced by something more fundamental to the genre, I think. The deconstructed superhero has been folded in as a trope now, having been an under (and over) current in the genre for almost 40 years now. Instead we have heroes who are aware of the problems of their status and writers who demonstrate how such characters deal with deconstructedness, rather than simply heroes that fall apart under the strain. And so Miracleman looks just slightly dated in comparison to the very sophisticated parsings of the superhero in even the most mainstream of comics these days. By way of example, look at the way The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl deconstructs the genre, the medium, includes metafictional commentary on virtually every page, yet manages to do so under the guise of a friendly, exciting, and funny comic. We don't need to be so grim in order to understand the problematics of the genre.

(So, I'm handing my major field exam essays in today, and I think my analytical brain is overheated, because that last paragraph just wandered all over the place. I'm going to leave it as a testament to what an exhausted academic brain produces, for the sake of posterity.)

That said, I did pick up a couple of the later issues in a dollar bin yesterday, and I discovered that one of the few issues of the original run that I have actually has the stories in it that I'm missing (I don't have #4 yet), so I'm going to read it because I feel like, as someone who studies this genre, that it would be negligent for me to not have it under my belt. So, perhaps, more Miracleman tomorrow.

See you then.