I’m going to fully admit up front that this post–and the reading for it–were a result/reaction to the recent article about Neil Gaiman. I read it, was completely disgusted, and looked around my house to see what works of his I owned so that I could purge them.

It turns out there wasn’t much. I’d read Sandman years ago but those were someone else’s copies, my copy of American Gods was loaned out and never returned, and everything else I’d read was through a library loan. What I did have was the trade paperback of Death: The High Cost of Living and all of Marvel’s Miracleman reprints along with the new issues he’d written to finish that story. Death went into the donation pile–I hadn’t read it in years anyway–but Miracleman gave me a little more pause because it was something I was “actively” buying (well as “active” as you can be when it comes out as sporadically as it has). So I decided to reread it.

I’m not going to go into detail about the history of Miracleman as a character becuase it’s incredibly long, convoluted, and has been told in pretty good detail in a number of other places. I originally read the run back in the early 2000s when a freind lent me all of the issues; up until that point, I’d actually never heard of the character; then again, I’m not surprised considering that my “independent” comics back when I first started collect (pre-Image) were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and various Aliens and Predator titles.

Eclipse folded and Miracleman went with it in June 1993, which was during the end stages of both The Return of Superman and Knightfall, and the Fatal Attractions storyline in the X-books. Wizard had yet another Spider-Man cover (this one by Mark Bagley), and while I don’t think I actually bought that issue (perhaps I missed it?), I don’t ever recall seeing anything about Miracleman in that magazine, and after I’d stopped collecting Wizard a few issues later, I didn’t pick up much on comics industry news beyond what I saw in Previews and things I heard secondhand. So yeah, it makes sense that I didn’t hear of the character until a friend was lending me a bunch of comics, mostly Vertigo stuff.

When Marvel picked up the character and started reprinting it, I did jump at the chance. At that point it had been something like 20 years since I’d last read those books and it was a chance to read it without having to pay a ton of money for it. Although Marvel didn’t exactly sell it for cheap …

Anyway, I remember that the Alan Moore–I’m sorry, “The Original Writer”–reprints came out fairly quickly but once the Gaiman reprint started it seemed to slow down to a point where I wasn’t paying much attention to them being there; they were just in my box when they were in my box and I read them then filed them away. That is, until last weekend when I took all of them out.

I made pretty quick work of them, especially the Moore issues, and I found those to be the most interesting out of all of them. Granted, I think that by the time I had read this again, I had seen so many iterations of the “deconstruction” of the super hero that I was kind of used to it in a way. And I realize how revolutionary it all was back when it was first published. While I know that some of the original stories predate Moore’s “Twilight of the Superheroes” proposal, this really does feel like what he could have or would have done with a character like Superman. It works really well with this character, even the brutality of the Kid Miracleman character and his story because while that is really dark, I feel like it earns that darkness. And the art is phenomenal thorughout–the devestation of London scenes in the beginning of issue #15 are nightmare-inducing.

When it comes to the Gaiman issues? Well, there were times when I thought they were really interesting, times when I wasn’t entirely sure what he was trying for, and other times when I found them kind of pretentious. Gaiman’s “Golden Age” was reprinted and that storyline was less about Miracleman himself and more about the people in Miracleman’s world, some of whom are pilgrims who come to see him while others are somehow affected by him. They converge in the last issue of that storyline, then we move into “The Silver Age,” where Young Miracleman is resurrected. Gaiman had rewritten and Mark Buckingham had redrawn the two issues that were in the original Eclipse title before continuing on for a few more issues to finish that storyline. I believe “The Dark Age” is supposed to follow, but I’m not sure if that will come out in light of all of these allegations; furthermore, there had been so many delays in the title that I’m not even sure if it’s going to come out.

I’m not trying to sound negative here; in fact, I enjoyed reading it. But did I really care enough to want to keep these reprints in my collection or keep going? To be honest, not really. Since I first read these–and started buying the reprints–I have read a number of high-concept/literary types of comics and graphic novels (some even by Alan Moore) that this book, while it’s definitely historically important, doesn’t make it vital for me.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Trash.