MARVELMAN/MIRACLEMAN:

WHAT GOES AROUND…

The Generation Gap! The stuff of endless arguments about who’s music was better etc etc etc. What about comic books? I personally believe that after the Marvel Age of the 60s with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, the finest era of comic books is the Eighties, when writer Alan Moore was changing the industry.

So, even though I’ve more or less given up on the contemporary comic books industry, I was intrigued by the news that Marvel had purchased the rights to Miracleman (a character that Moore had rebooted and passed on to Neil Gaiman before it was cancelled in 1994 due to the bankruptcy of publisher Eclipse Comics.

I do remember purchasing the early Miracleman issues before discovering the original black & white stories in Warrior magazine (above on top). For some reason, I had to pay over the odds for that first issue (above), something I don’t normally do. Of course, the writing and art were amazing but the coloring on the original black + white was quite awful.

So, I was quite happy to pick up the hardcover collections of those classic Miracleman stories now published by Marvel. Finally, the coloring looks awesome (see above) and certainly worth the price of admission, this time around. I am really looking forward to the reprints of The Golden Age, in particular and curious to see how Gaiman completes The Silver Age and The Dark Age.

Thirty years later, the legend lives on…