Miracleman vol. 1: A Dream of Flying

One of the first and best superhero deconstructionist stories.  The work that helped launch the careers of Alan Moore, Alan Davis and Neil Gaiman.  Out of print for over two decades.  The subject of a legal quagmire between the aforementioned creators, Todd McFarlane, UK comics publisher Dez Skinn, and probably a few other parties that I’m forgetting to mention here.  These are the things that have defined “Miracleman” during its absence from print.  It’s this absence as well as the creators involved and the reputation of the work itself that has led to it becoming one of the “holy grails” of out-of-print comics over the years.  How Marvel and their army of lawyers, along with the help of many others including Gaiman and Davis, were actually able to get all of the rights to this title and bring it back into print would likely make for a fascinating story all by itself.

Yet all of this stuff will likely be fading into the background now that “Miracleman” is back in print and people can start making up their own minds about it instead of having to hear about how good and/or influential it is from a secondary source.  I actually did get the chance to read the comics collected here over a decade ago when I was a student at the University of California Riverside.  They were part of the Eaton Collection, the largest privately-held collection of science-fiction film, video, and print media in the nation, and it was exciting to find that these comics lived up to their reputation.  At the time, that its.  After all, it’s been over a decade since I last read these comics and I’ve absorbed a lot more in the time since then.

So how have they held up?  Surprisingly well, all things considered.  While you can see how this would’ve been considered as a revolutionary, genre-breaking work at the time, parts of it have not held up all that well.  Some of the plot twists now come off as blindingly obvious and poorly set-up, while a lot of prominent plot points have been rendered less special after the mainstream latched onto them and drove these things into the ground.  Yet there’s still some real cleverness to be found in the writing and the art as well as some real tragedy as an ordinary man finds out that he used to be/is still now a virtual god amongst men.

Things kick off with an old “Miracleman” (or “Marvelman” if you want to go by what this title was originally called in the U.K.) story from creator Mick Anglo to give you an idea of what this series was originally like back in the 50’s and 60’s.  It’s a bit of silly fluff that involves the title character, and his friends Young Miracleman and Kid Miracleman stopping some nasty time-travelers from the far-off year of 1981.  The story is mainly useful as establishing a baseline against its reinvention, though the final page is appropriately creepy with its eight-panel zoom-in with accompanying quote by Nietzsche for effect.

Then the story begins in earnest with “…A Dream of Flying” as one Mike Moran, an under-employed news photographer struggles with these awful dreams that he’s been having.  Ones where he’s a being of enormous power before getting snuffed out in an explosion and subsequently waking up with a migraine.  He soldiers on in order to go out and cover a nuclear power protest that is subsequently interrupted by masked men with machine guns who herd everyone inside.  After Mike’s migraine worsens and he falls down ill, he’s dragged outside where in a haze he is reminded of the secret word — Kimota (say it backwards and you’ll get it) — that changes him into the superhero Miracleman.  Though he saves everyone from the attackers, Mike’s about to find out that his world has just become a lot more complex and dangerous.

One of the things that this series is remembered for is how it took a more realistic look at how superheroes would actually exist in the real world.  Looking back on it now, “realistic” is clearly a misnomer as you could at best call what we see here as being “grounded.”  Not only are there far-reaching consequences to the superhero violence here, but there’s also an effort to acknowledge superhero conventions in the story itself.  This is seen when Miracleman explains his origins to his/Mike’s girlfriend Liz, which are acknowledged as a silly mix of Silver-age tropes and implausibilities.  Later on, the two get their hands on some comics to explore what kind of powers Miracleman has.

It’s interesting to see all this if you’re able to accept this as a period piece, or aware of the state of storytelling in the medium at the time this series was being published.  “Warrior,” the anthology series that this title was originally published in was intended as a vehicle for more mature comics work in the U.K. and also counted “V For Vendetta” as one of the series published in its pages.  So compared to Marvel or other British comics of the era, there’s clearly more sophistication and depth on display here.

These days?  Not so much, as a lot of the innovative things Moore did with the superhero genre here wound up being explored further by himself in “Swamp Thing” and “Watchmen.”  The whole “Everything you know about the character is wrong!” tactic while still acknowledging everything that came before.  Done here in “Miracleman” first.  Superheroes as product of a shady government program?  Ditto.  Same with the whole deconstructionalist superheroes in the real world approach as well.  It’s interesting to see how these approaches were pioneered here even if they’ve been done better elsewhere later by Moore and many other writers.

Yet even though I have the same issues with “Watchmen,” it still remains a compelling story even after its own innovations were absorbed into the medium.  That’s mostly true here thanks to the combined efforts of Moore, Davis, and the volume’s other main artist, Garry Leach.  The title was originally serialized as a series of short chapters, and the team works to cram a whole lot of information into eight page allotments.  Fortunately, everything is presented in a way that’s easy to follow on the page and even allows for some stylistic experimentation at times.  Chapter Eight’s non-linear storytelling on every other page, with the silhouetted government agents commenting on things in a horizontal image breaking up these pages is one example.  Though it’s not as flashy, I also have a soft spot for government cleaner Mr. Cream’s “written questioning” of the survivor from Miracleman’s return as his notes build up to a darkly funny joke.

There’s also the matter of Mike Moran himself.  Presented as a decent guy who has had a streak of bad luck, the return of Miracleman is presented as more of a curse than a blessing to him.  Though they’re effectively the same person, their personalities are defined by how one has godlike powers and the other does not.  Their differences are beautifully summed up in the story when Mike talks to Liz about how Miracleman’s love is so pure and direct, while his is all tangled up in who’s not doing their share of the washing.  Essentially Mike has to compete with a version of himself that’s better at everything and there’s no getting away from him at all.  You really feel for the guy as a result, and that’s good for the narrative as it makes the soap-opera-ish development regarding his impending fatherhood more tragic than absurd.

Not everything comes off as well as this, though.  The development of Johnny Bates, a.k.a. Kid Miracleman, is the prime offender here as there are good concepts behind his character, but they’re not fleshed out very well at all.  Now, the idea of what unlimited power can do to an individual has been documented in many other stories besides this one.  Yet what we get here is some very expository dialogue telling us exactly what the character’s deal is without any modicum of subtlety or nuance.  Though the art gives these scenes a fairly creepy edge… well, consult the previous sentence as to my thoughts on the demolishment of subtlety and nuance to find out how it works in context.

This volume also collects some extra stories relating to the world of “Miracleman,” with “The Yesterday Gambit” giving us a glimpse of the character’s future as he works with one of the Warpsmiths to accumulate enough power to take on a deadly foe.  How does he do this?  By fighting other versions of himself at key points in his life.  The story was commissioned as a bit of filler between episodes and it probably read a lot better at the time of its original serialization.  What I found most interesting about it was the fact that it featured art from Steve Dillon, circa 1982.  His work here is very rough, but you can see the beginnings of his distinctive style in these pages.

The other two stories are about the Warpsmiths, aliens with teleportation abilities and with a key role in galactic society.  We get two stories from Moore and Leach about these beings with “Cold War.  Cold Warrior,” being a story of an infiltration of one of their bases by some alien children, and “Ghostdance” coming off as a more esoteric look at their culture.  Both read like the kind of science-fiction short you’d see in “2000 A.D.” with the former story coming off as pretty hard to follow in spite of its basic simplicity.  While I appreciate that these stories are here for completeness’ sake, that mostly stems from my knowledge of the Warpsmiths’ role in the later part of Moore’s run on “Miracleman.”

Though these stories represent the last narrative bits of this collection, the rest of it is padded out with pieces of art from the title’s original run and the variant covers from Marvel’s reprinting of the series.  There are a few lines of commentary to give the artwork context, but it’s nothing too significant.  All of this takes up 59 pages of the volume’s 176-page length, thus giving you the illusion that it’s more substantial than it actually is.  In its defense, I will say that the actual comics presented here represent a very dense read and will likely take any reader longer to get through than pretty much any Marvel collection of a similar length.  There’s also the fact that paying the $30 cover price for this collection is still cheaper than buying a used copy of the original trade paperback on Amazon.  (You can also get this hardcover collection for $15 from the site as I type these words, which is significantly LESS than what I paid when this came out.  Grrrrrrr…)

Even if this first volume of “Miracleman” may not live up to its legendary reputation, it still manages to have enough to make it a worthwhile read.  The intricate art and layouts from Davis and Leach, it’s dense but not needlessly complicated narrative, Moran’s characterization and the overall cleverness of the execution still stand up to scrutiny today.  This is only the start of the story, though, and things are only going to get bigger, better, more insane, and heartbreaking as they go on.  Frankly, I can’t wait — so long as they’ve aged as well as what we got in the first volume.