Customer Reviews

Miracleman: A Dream of Flying

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In "MiracleMan" (UK vt. "MarvelMan") Alan Moore places a classic superhero type in the "real" world - a world very much like this one, in which people who see a man in tights are not going to think "super".

During a terrorist hijacking at a nuclear plant news photographer Michael Moran suffers a debilitating headache and mutters a word he sees from the wrong side of a glass door. And is transformed.

But people don't know what to make of a man who is invulnerable and can fly, and that includes Moran's wife. She asks why she'd never heard of MiracleMan and his now-remembered superfriends, and he has no answer. And the truth of the matter is world-shaking, literally.

This is just an outstanding book. The series hit a very dark spot in a later volume, one which I found personally distasteful, and it seemed to lose its focus by the time Neil Gaiman took it over; unfortunately it was never finished. Nonetheless, an excellent and enduring deconstruction of the idea of the superhero.

I'd recommend Moore's "V for Vendetta" to those who like this book.

One point: the graphic novel edition (the one that I have anyway), is missing several pages which were included at the beginning of the original comic. The comic began with a deliberately cheesy Captain Marvel-style story about time travel, but suddenly froze at the end of the story and zoomed in on MiracleMan's face, panel by panel. "Behold I teach you the superman: he is this lightning, he is this madness!" -Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". The next page was the beginning of the graphic novel, with a far more realistic art and writing style. A very effective demonstration of what Moore planned to do to the cliches of the superhero genre. I don't know why it was eliminated.

There is a weird feeling you get, reading Alan Moore's Miracleman stories-the feeling that you're not reading a comic book. The story takes place in the real world-not the comic book universe. As the story opens, we find middle-aged Mike Moran being haunted by dreams of flying. During a terrorist raid, he is taken hostage and suddenly remembers his magic word and becomes a super-hero again. Having forgotten his past for twenty years, it all comes flooding back to him: which presents him with his biggest problem-how to explain things to the misses! As he does, she (famously) begins to laugh at him! The inconsistencies of his super-hero past begin to become apparent to him. Of course something is wrong here. Just what that something is, and how Alan Moore explains it are left for you to be seen.

Of course Miracleman (Marvelman in England) is the British version of Captain Marvel. In reincarnating him, Alan Moore (as is his want) completely reinvents him for a new age. Miracleman is `aufgehobened' for a new era. For me, the best superhero comics like this, The Watchmen, and Marvels, try to portray their larger-than-life heroes as realistically as possible and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, put them in the real world, populated by real people, with real consequences for their actions. In Mike Moran's universe, Superman is well-known...as a comic book character. When Miracleman bursts onto the scene (literally) we imagine what it would be like if a super-hero really appeared in our world. But then, the adventure begins...

There's a hint of disdain in Moore's Marvelman (renamed Miracleman for distribution in the US, for obvious reasons) for virtually every aspect of the comic "super hero". His response? Laugh a bit, have his fun, and then go on to analyze what a super hero would REALLY mean to our world.

His hero isn't some rock-jawed alien or identity disassociative with a predilection for flying rodents. He's a normal person, and Moore doesn't forget this for a second; when Moran, or Miracleman, is being laughed at by his wife (obviously the voice of Moore in this instance) as he describes his absurd past as a superhero, he shatters a table in frustration.

This book, along with it successive volumes The Red King Syndrome and Olympus, are Moore's legacy to the world of the super hero. Neil Gaiman ties up the package nicely with The Golden Age. In the end, you're left with a lot more questions than answers...but then, that's the point, now isn't it?

Marvel Comics now owns the rights to this character as of 2009 so expect to see an omnibus edition containing the entire series. If you can wait a year or so you'll save a small fortune over the individual issues and graphic novel collections. Who knows we may even see new material from Gaiman and/or Moore.

From its opening sequence, Alan Moore's Miracleman grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go. By turns a spy thriller and a superhero graphic novel, "A Dream of Flying" manages to transcend the grubbiness of the medium it occupies and turn the tired Superman archetype on its ear for a truly terrific story. There's moral ambiguity aplenty in Miracleman's world, and he solves it in ways that a more "real" Superman probably would if he was more of a true character and less of a franchise. Moore has some fascinating things to say about the apotheosis of his hero and this is the beginning of that story. In most of his work, Moore exhibits an obsession with taking his characters to their logical conclusions and Miracleman is no exception - imagine a sort of "last days of Superman" book and you'll have the idea pretty clearly. The next two books are even better, believe it or not, and Neil Gaiman's short stories in book four are better still. This is certainly the coolest and the smartest of the superhero re-imaginings of the eighties, and though it's more influential than is healthy, it's still a great read.

This was a great turn around for a lame, third-generation Superman ripoff character, and it's genuinely tense. Moore has always been great with redefining how superheroes, and this book is no exception. If you can actually score copies of this (it's out of print), I highly recommend it.

By now, it has become a cliche to depict the fascist superman, the debauched superman, the corrupt superman. Any number of renegade comics writers have made careers out of this sort of thing, to the point that it's become a bit of a yawn. But this is where it started, for good or ill -- and in my opinion, for both. Miracleman is a twisted take on such heroes as Captain Marvel and Superman, and as such, it will disappoint many modern readers as being too deconstructive. I concur, to an extent. As someone who cut his literary teeth on Captain America and Captain Marvel, I have little sympathy for latter-day counter-culturists who subvert icons to make a vague and murky point about human evil.

But there is power here, and poetry. The hubris of the superhuman is here taken to its logical conclusion, and the result is devastating -- and a little bit glorious, to be honest. It's a trip every comics fan has taken in his or her mind, and it's one that has waited for a long time to see the light of day. ("What If" scenarios cynically designed to reinforce the status quo don't count, sorry.)

If you're looking for lighter fare, you might try All-Star Superman or some of DC's Spotlight collections. And if you're looking for a cold-blooded killer who blames his sociopathy on a crappy upbringing or whatever, then you might be happier with Wolverine or Deadpool or Punisher or...any number of other murderers. But if you've ever wondered about the hair's-breadth line that separates a world-saving hero from a world-devouring villain, then this book is a must-have. Buy two copies -- you'll be loaning one out...a lot.

Before inspired stuff like SWAMP THING, WATCHMEN, THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, and TOM STRONG solidified Alan Moore as arguably the best comic book writer of the last three decades, two important early works of his - MIRACLEMAN and V FOR VENDETTA - first did the dirty work in establishing his rep. A longtime comic book reader, I had never come across anything like MIRACLEMAN back in the '80s, so different was it from the other comics I'd been reading back then. Alan Moore delivered stories that were dark and subversive and which turned the superhero mythos topsy-turvy. It was exciting, reading MIRACLEMAN who before was known as Marvelman. But before Alan Moore got his hands on him, Marvelman was a forgotten hero.

Here's something convoluted. Eons ago DC sued Fawcett Comics, believing that Fawcett Comics' flagship superhero, Captain Marvel, was a knockoff of Superman. Fawcett ended up discontinuing the Captain Marvel title. Thing was, this also killed the Captain Marvel reprints in the UK. In 1954 Mick Anglo created a British counterpart to Captain Marvel, named Marvelman, to fill in the gap. The Marvelman comic book had a lengthy nine-year run, ending in 1963, at which point the world forgot him. But then Alan Moore came along, with a forceful reminder.

Mick Anglo didn't even try to be covert about his mimicking of Captain Marvel. Like the Big Red Cheese, young journalist Micky Moran invokes a magic word to transform himself into a near invincible superhero. Marvelman would also have sidekicks, Dicky Dauntless a.k.a. Young Marvelman and Johnny Bates a.k.a. Kid Marvelman. His nemesis, Dr. Gargunza, would be very reminiscent of Dr. Sivana. The Marvelman family's exploits would be fairly innocuous and standard to the 1950s era.

In 1982, in a UK anthology comic book titled WARRIOR, Alan Moore introduced us to a worn down, middle-aged Mike Moran, freelance journalist and chronic victim of bizarre dreams and excruciatingly painful migraines. Mike Moran has been lost for years, searching for a missing word, dreaming of flying. The revelation comes when Mike's life is endangered during a terrorist take over of a nuclear facility. He recalls his magic word and, in a burst of lightning, becomes this godlike being. That's a pretty basic set-up for a superhero story. But that's only the start. Alan Moore is about to shake up the establishment, blow our minds up real good.

Before WATCHMEN Moore had already redefined the superhero genre, had already done that grim post-modern deconstruction schtick. It's a given that Marvel's mutantdom is universally feared by ordinary humans, who don't perceive mutants as noble superheroes. And, of course, Spidey has a running love/hate relationship with the public. Moore, however, made the public's fear of superheroes a palpable, entirely logical thing. You see someone with the ridiculous power sets of a Marvelman, you see him and another superpowered being going at it and even playing catch with a baby, and demonstrating an all-around recklessness and seeming disdain for bystanders and surroundings, and you just may drop a load in your shorts. Alan Moore gives us the real ramifications of super beings walking in our midst.

SPOILER now, in this paragraph: I remember how gripping the story was, with Miracleman facing off against Kid Miracleman, and how very cool that plot twist, of young Johnny Bates years ago suddenly finding himself without supervision and deciding to remain in his Kid Miracleman form. And power corrupts, over time. Johnny has had years and years to perfect his powers. Miracleman, recently returned to being, turns out to be no match at all, and it's pretty bloodcurdling when Kid Miracleman stands over his fallen one time mentor and boasts: "He thought he was bloody great and I beat him to a whimpering pulp." The epic clash results in heaps of collateral damage, one inescapable fallout of which is a fear of these gods amongst men. Those few in the know call them "monsters."

The story unfolds with an escalating sense of dread and oppressiveness (and, in fact, things get even darker in later arcs). MIRACLEMAN: A DREAM OF FLYING collects MIRACLEMAN issues #1-3, which in turn reprinted the Marvelman stories from WARRIOR issues #1-11. 71 pages of story in all, which means that we get far enough into the story to learn about Project Zarathusta, the true origins of Miracleman (no, his powers weren't really bestowed on him by a benevolent astrophysicist.with the inside track on the key harmonic of the universe). The trade also features an intro by Steve Gerber.

To up the cool factor, we learn of the Spookshow, a branch of British Air Force Intelligence intimately tied in to the Miracleman family. Mr. Evelyn Cream, he of the sapphire teeth and shifting allegiance, is a compelling character, an offbeat agent assassin sent by the Spookshow to take care of Miracleman. Mike's wife Liz is also nicely fleshed out, coming across with fairly believable reactions to all the crazy going down. And I liked the scene in which she and Mike scientifically test out his powers. Disturbingly, a triangle surfaces, involving Liz and Mike and Miracleman (who may be the same person as Mike, but then again, may not be).

As a fond nod to the cheesy comic book elements he had been subverting, Alan Moore introduces a fun super-powered character, Big Ben, the bowler-hatted Man with No Time for Crime. Big Ben is kept delusional by the Spookshow's machinations, and he is set loose on Miracleman whom he is led to believe is a super-commie. Their "fight" ends amusingly.

The artists are Garry Leach and Alan Davis, and their contributions can't ever be discounted. Helping to convey that sense of realism, Leach and Davis draw characters that look like real people. Miracleman isn't musclebound, isn't caught in over-the-top poses. The naturalness of his gestures and movements captures how effortless it is for him to do these amazing things, and you sense how powerful he truly is. Then the extraordinary sequences are set seamlessly into a convincing low key backdrop, and this allows you to buy into the improbable. This is awesome artwork.

How's this for a dose of irony? Marvelman became Miracleman, thanks to Marvel Comics getting antsy and crying name infringement. But, today, at the 2009 San Diego ComicCon, Marvel just announced that it's purchased the rights to Marvelman. So, now, not only can't I wait to see how Marvelman will be integrated into the Marvel Universe, but I'm hoping like mad that there'll soon be new trades reprinting the 1980s Miracleman stories. The trades out right now are set at atmospheric prices.

Another superhero with a long, broken and convoluted history. The version that pretty much everyone is interested in is the redo of the character by Moore in the 1980s.

A Captain Marvel type, Miracleman has forgotten who he is and is living a mundane life with his girlfriend. Dreams of his former superpowered life disturb him.

Eventually an attack triggers his memory, and he remembers the secret word that transforms him into Miracleman.

This is a great story of what it would be like to have superpowers, a great twist on superhero stories!