Customer Reviews

Miracleman: Olympus

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If there was ever a series that EVERYBODY gets excited about, it's Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman's Miracleman. The first 10 issues are a very entertaining spy story, reworking the title character's origins in classic Moore fashion. The art is a little spotty, unfortunately, and the story suffers for a couple of issues in Book 2: The Red King Syndrome. Olympus is the payoff. Moore and Totleben were made to make comics together, as evidenced by their acclaimed run with Steve Bissette on Swamp Thing, and this is the best work either of them has ever done, and perhaps ever will do, with the super-hero genre. This book is abou 150 pages of the most heartbreakingly beautiful comic art you will ever see in your life; Totleben's baroque line art impressively manages to save Moore's purple prose from caving under its own weight, and Moore has Totleben draw some of the most compelling characters and moving scenes in any medium, all while decorating it with beautifully poetic language. There's a reason that everyone gushes about this series, and Olympus is that reason.

Okay, this is not the best comic that Alan Moore has written, that honor goes to FROM HELL. But Miracleman Book 3 is the best superhero comic book ever done. Miracleman is the first on-going series that Moore did, and despite that he wrote 16 issues, which were released over the course of 7-8 years, he left a mark on how we see superheroes. Sure, Watchmen was a great superhero saga but it was and reads like a classic suspense novel. Watchmen is very calculated book, right from the start, and does have a formula; but I get the feeling from reading Miracleman that the same reasoning can not be applied here. Miracleman was a natural writing experience for him, it flows very organically into it's story.

Unlike most superheroes, Miracleman aka Mick Moran is not on a quest to fight justice and save the world. He is a man who's thrown into a situation by his former sidekick,the evil Kid Miracleman, and the British Government which created him. Little by little, Mick Moran begins to find out the secrets of how he became Miracleman, this leads into the events of Miracleman: Olypmus also known as Miracleman Book 3.

Book 3 is a masterpiece. Through the powerful and extremely underrated artistic talents of John Totleben, we experience the climax of this story. Miracleman is destined to battle Kid Miracleman to the death. Mick Moran must also decide what he is to do with his life. And finally, Miracleman decides to make a perfect world, a better earth whether we humans want it or not. He becomes the first superhero who actually tries to solve all the problems we have on this earth. Moore answers a lot of questions about superheroes and believe me, it becomes very hard to keep reading superhero comics after this book.

Recently, people are starting to take note of the quality of this series, which it really deserves. When the original comic book issues were coming out it was a comic that was regularly late but now we can the entire Moore epic and read it in one sitting and see its magic and quality. If you can find these books, enjoy them. If you don't have them, get them! They really are worth the trouble of hunting down and in the end you will feel rewarded.

To say that Alan Moore is just a comic book writer is like saying Beethoven was just a composer! Married to the incredible artwork of John Totleben (whom I've had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with from time to time), Miracleman: Olympus is one of the best readings out there! Miracleman is the true redefining of the comic book super-hero genre! There is nothing more I can say, go out there, search, beg, borrow, or steal (just a joke) a copy and find out for yourself! I promise you won't be disappointed!

Alan Moore is probably the best writer to work in the comics medium, and this is his greatest story. If you enjoyed Kingdom Come, this is a must read, the paralells (not that Kingdom come is a rip-off) are striking. These comics are so amazing, there's really no excuse for them being out of print. Even if you have to pay several hundred dollars to collect this series, it's worth 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.

Forget your pre-conceptions as to what a superhero would mean to our world. Alan Moore has a new point-of-view on the subject, and after you read it, you'll never look at Superman or his ilk the same way again.

Miracleman is a super-hero who exists in "the real world", which means that the real world affects and is affected by him. This means several things.

First of all, and most notably, it means that when his evil counterpart, Kid Miracleman, goes on a rampage in London, people DIE. And not just die...they're arms are ripped off, stuffed down the throats of their loved ones, and then boiled. It's a grotesque but thoroughly TRUE interpretation of the way things would be in a world populated by these beings.

Secondly, any superhero whose worth his salt would realize that trouncing supervillains doesn't save the world. Eliminating all currency and weapons of mass destruction does...and so Miracleman does it. A clear example of Moore's own distaste for convention and conformity. If the story works, tell it.

And thirdly, the villain, in this case Johnny Bates, is finally returned to existence because of the very cruelty (his own rape in a school for orphans jumping immediately to mind) of his fellow human beings. A fine statement: We don't need supervillains to make the world a worser place.

A deeply brooding and philisophical (my significant other would call it long-winded) treatise on the superhero's place in the world, Olympus is definitely worth more than you'll pay for it.

Writing a review for Olympus, the third chapter of Moore's and Totleben's Marvelman epic (Miracleman due to legal disputes) is no small task, because this is arguably the best piece of comic book literature ever written, and very likely, the best piece of comic book literature that ever will be written. Obviously a review cannot do such a work justice, but at the same time I want to try and convey to the best of my abilities how truly profound this piece of work is.

The foundations of Moore's installment to Marvelman stem from an actual golden age comic book that was printed in Europe; Marvelman and Marvelman Family were basically a European version of America's Captain Marvel. Despite it's relatively derivative premise, for it's time it was well crafted and dynamically illustrated, certainly an imaginative inspiration for young readers growing up in England, such as that of Alan Moore. It's quite likely that this sentimental attachment to the character is what enabled Moore to write such an intense and meaningful story. But Marvelman also happens to be the type of character where upon Moore thrives. Relatively undefined, and a little bit generic. Much like Swamp Thing, Moore excelled at taking these adolescent canvases and restructuring them into masterpieces of modern day pulp fiction.

The entire Moore Marvelman plot has something of a Philip K. Dick aspect to it, in that it's a story about a man's discovery of a reality so much more vast than what he had previously known. But Moore's writing style is much more approachable and full of emotional depth than that your average Phillip K. Dick story. The introductory portions of the are quite conventional, as keeping in sync with the original golden age comic book and establish a smooth transistion. To give a brief summary, the lead character Mike Moran regarded his life to be rather mundane and unfulfilled, being middle age, overweight, and suffering from strange reoccurring headaches, until the day comes when he is caught in the middle of a random terrorist attack and gets hit on the head. In a dazed state he reads the printed letters on the glass door in front of him, "atomic" backwards, which when read this way has the phonetic spelling of "kimota". As he mumbles this odd key word, he suddenly turns into a super powered being that previous to this moment he never remembered being, but upon this turn of events, now he does to some degree. It's an intentionally unoriginal opening premise, because it's from here that Moore moves conceptually forward, exploring in great depth what it means to have been human and then attain godlike powers, and not only the discovery that his personal reality is something altogether different, but the entire reality of the larger universe is much.

Without giving away too much, we find out that Marvelman was originally a Nazi experiment that dealt with the manipulation of dreams using suggestion. Three human guinea pigs, having no other family, were kidnapped and put into an induced coma. All three of them were fairly young and male, with Mike Moran being the oldest. Within a shared dream state, all three were subjected into playing out an adolescent fantasy witg each living a role as part of a super powered family, (the "Marvelman Family"). Comic books are the actual inspiration for these dream scenarios, with the head scientist of the project, Emil Gargunza, feeding them the necessary suggestions for the "stories" through a computer that transfer the message into their subconscious. At first the three live out these stories as predicted, in typical 1940s comic book storylines, but then their subconscious awareness starts to realize that they are in fact living within a dream.

Throughout this epic there is a consistently dark and tragic element. One of the most essential of these aspects is that Mike Moran, when human, is still just an average, broken down, man, without any exceptional qualities, yet his super powered alter ego essentially makes him two separate, and entirely different beings, two beings that incidentally trade off existences when the one replaces the other. It eventually comes to the point where Mike Moran, the human, realizes his side of existence is not worth living, and that Marvelman is not really him. The outcome of this moment is brief and poignant, which as the reader, you can't help but to empathize with Mike, and the oddly sad choice he makes. I'll just say that it's one of the many brilliant moments of writing on Moore's part.

So far everything I've explained is from the first two chapters, but what sets Olympus apart from these other two chapters is that we see Marvelman more intimately as he essentially leaves humanity behind him, and along with the final searing and climactic resolution of Kid Marvelman's evolution, we see both the greatest heights and most perverse depths that super powers might bestow upon an individual. The ensuing battle between Kid Marvelman and Marvelman is the darkest and most intense piece of writing I've ever seen put to print. Moore and Totleben capture not only the gritty detail, but also the mythical qualities of such a paradigmatic shift in history as it might be seen in many centuries to come; it's telling turning from whispered and painful truth to epic legend. Though gripping, this episode of Olympus is not for readers that are faint of heart.

In the final episode, we see Marvelman's last great act as he re-envisions the Earth and patterns it into the utopia he believes would be best for all, yet Moore and Totleben gives us an unshakeable feeling that there are, and will always be, lingering impenetrable doubts concerning the purpose of existence, happiness, and the ever continuing resistance to the building of such utopias. Marvelman leaves us contemplating these doubts and concerns as he himself does, sitting within his impossibly massive and ornate palace, literally on top of the world, with a balance of equal parts uncertainty and wonder.

If there was ever a series that EVERYBODY gets excited about, it's Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman's Miracleman.I love this book

Before releasing the magnificent Graphic Novel Watchmen, writer Alan Moore sought out to re-imagine the 1950s British Superhero Marvelman. However, because of the most confusing legal battle in history over one superhero most reading this review will not have the pleasure of reading this magnificent comic.

Being a huge Alan Moore fan and curious if the hype surrounding the story is truly worth it I gave Marvelman a read. To be fairly honest, the first two "Books" in his run on Marvelman (A Dream of Flying and The Red King Syndrome) are not as amazing as Moore's later work. In contrast Olympus is a truly amazing story that is absolutely worth all the hype and a must read.

Moore's dialogue and narration begin to become both realistic and poetic. With a conclusion akin to Watchmen, Moore's themes about Marvelman's ascendence are as unsettling as they are captivating.

It may even come as a suprise to some, but in many ways Marvelman: Olympus is meant to be read even more for the artist then for the writer. John Tottlebon who worked as an inker for Moore's Swamp Thing run takes over as penciller. The non-traditional style of panels accompanies incredibly detailed double page spreads showing the magnificent world that the Marvel Family creates. John Tottlebon's artwork in Issue 15 is without a doubt the most bloodchilling and violent genocide depicted in the comic medium. The beautiful savagery in 15 is only complimented by the beauty he paints in the concluding issue from threats to Margaret Thatcher to the superhero love scene in Fleet Street.

Overall Marvelman: Olympus is a masterpiece that many will find difficult to read because of an annoying legal battle.

I have owned the first two Alan Moore Miracleman books as well as book four and the Apocryphia by Neil Gaiman for a number of years. Miracleman: Olympus was just too damn rare and expensive - and lived a dreamy existence on my want list, until I finally decided to splurge. The short of it - I didn't know just how much I wanted it, until I got it.

Miracleman book 3: Olympus is Moore's end-run on one of the first truly adult takes on superheroes... dealing with the implications of 'what would really happen if they were really real?'. Olympus gives an answer, and while Gaiman manages to follow up un that answer quite well in book four, Moore roars it, writing at his absolutely bleakest and most disillusioned regarding the death of Kid Miracleman.

Olympus takes Great Britain (and the rest of the world) of the Thatcher 80's on an apocalyptic journey from dystopia to utopia (???), obliterating the line between superhero and godhood almost as a side-thought. As the grand finale of Moore's 16 issue comic book run collected into three books, the effect is as satisfying a climax as it is a demanding introduction to the world of adult thought for even the most narrowly focused super hero comic book nerd.

And first... and last... what a story! What a ride!