Alan Moore's Miracleman

Let's not beat around the bush: Miracleman, with Alan Moore writing, was the greatest superhero series of all time.

Many might argue, pointing to the halcyon days of creators like Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby, or to another distinguished run like Frank Miller's on Daredevil, or even something like Grant Morrison's brain-bending tenure on Animal Man. (Which I will also do a writeup for eventually.) But in my opinion, Moore's Miracleman was as smart, inspired, and intense as superhero comics have ever been. An although it never received the notoriety Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns did, it was Miracleman that truly ushered in the modern, revisionist age of superhero comics. And series like The Authority, The Ultimates, and Supreme Power have overtly echoed themes first pioneered by Moore in Miracleman.

[WARNING: Spoilers below. Seriously, go read Miracleman, I don't want to ruin it for you.]



"Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this lightning...he is this madness!"
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Miracleman (originally called Marvelman and renamed Miracleman for American audiences) began as an update on an old golden age hero, who was himself a legal retooling of Captain Marvel. Along with sidekicks Young Miracleman and Kid Miracleman, Miracleman had what Wikipedia calls "fairly typical, unsophisticated superhero adventures" until 1963. Almost twenty years later, Alan Moore took up the character with the idea of bringing him into the modern world as a grown man, no longer a superhero.

At the beginning of Miracleman, Michael Moran has forgotten who he is: at night he dreams of flying through space, and during the day agonizing headaches plague him. Working as a reporter, he sets out to cover a group of environmentalists protesting a newly-built nuclear power plant—and in the process becomes caught in a terrorist attack. Moran passes out from his migraine, and in a daze suddenly remembers the word he'd long since forgotten, the key harmonic of the universe that transforms him from the mundane Michael Moran into the hero called Miracleman: "KIMOTA."

After foiling the terrorists, our hero rushes home to tell his wife Liz the news. Having remembered the past he had thought lost, he recounts his story—and Liz responds with astonishment, "I'm sorry Mike...but that's such a bloody stupid story! Can't you see it? An 'astro physicist' pops up and tells you the 'key harmonic of the universe'...Which just happens to turn you into a muscle man in a blue leotard? I'm sorry Mike, I really am, but that's just so stupid!"



And so Miracleman begins. Alan Moore took up the daunting task of reconciling a serious and intelligent take on the superhero story with its own hokey continuity, and what he came up with, although it doesn't seem quite as inventive now, was nothing short of revolutionary. The Miracleman that readers knew, the "fairly typical, unsophisticated" superhero with the two young sidekicks, was nothing more than a virtual reality simulation beamed directly into Moran's brain—a simulation inspired by comic books the researchers compiled. The real Miracleman was the product of a top-secret government initiative called Project Zarathustra, which sought to use technology recovered from a downed alien spacecraft to create the ultimate soldier—Miracleman, and his two sidekicks.

It's easy to see how this narrative turn marked the beginning of the superhero's modern age. With Miracleman, comics gained a postmodern self-awareness that cast everything that had come before in a new light: the idea of a government super soldier had cheered and inspired during WWII, but in a post-Watergate era it sounded decidedly more ominous. Miracleman forced us to look back on Jack Kirby's iconic rendering of Captain American punching Hitler in the jaw as a cynical illusion, blinding us to darker realities—like the shady postwar manuevering of government programs such as Operation Paper Clip and MKULTRA.



But Moore didn't stop there. Miracleman broke boundaries not just in terms of content, but style as well. I mentioned before that the series pulled no punches, an expression that I think fits perfectly: we're used to seeing superheroes clobber villains and save the day, leaving them tied up in a heap for the police to haul off to jail—but when Miracleman fights his enemies, they are left in bloody chunks, torn limb-from-limb by superhuman strength. Miracleman forces us to imagine what superpowered violence would actually be like: not a brightly-colored adolescent fantasy, but a savage display of raw force. The quote in the panel I scanned above says it best: "There are men, and the men mean nothing to him."

The brutal, merciless violence of the series reached its peak in issue #15, which I described in an earlier posting. (Issue #9 also featured an extremely graphic birth scene that generated a significant amount of controversy.) The issue chronicles Kid Miracleman's killing spree across London with a level of detail that's still shocking twenty years later: we see human beings flayed alive, their empty skins left hanging on clotheslines; we watch severed hands fall from the sky like hailstones. Few superhero comics have so steadfastly refused to shy away from the consequences of their own assumptions like Miracleman did in its climatic issue. If we allow that superheroes can exist, then we can't deny that scenes like this can happen. (John Totleben's artwork also paved the way for Bryan Hitch's awesome "widescreen" style; it's no coincidence that The Authority's Jack Hawksmoor, who spends most of his time literally punching people in the brain, looks eerily similar to Kid Miracleman. And again, an Authority writeup is forthcoming.)



With the existence of superheroes no longer a secret, Miracleman and his allies go public in issue #16, and promptly install themselves as the supreme rulers of earth, placing all global affairs under their auspices. There's a fantastic scene where a Margaret Thatcher-esque politician scoffs at their proposals: "This is all quite preposterous. We can never allow this kind of interference with the market." With a steely glare, Miracleman only says: "Allow?"

Miracleman was not the first comic to present the idea of superheroes as truly Other, with the power to rule over mortal humanity with an iron fist. But no other comic, even to this day, has presented these themes as severely and unflinchingly as the series did. Miracleman ends on a note of agonizingly ambiguous moral complexity: Miracleman and his fellow superbeings have essentially abolished all vestiges of freedom, with every last aspect of society placed under their control—and yet it is impossible to deny that society is in many ways better, with countless social ills stamped out permanently and earth as close to a utopia as we can imagine. It's as beautiful, haunting, and perfect a final issue as I've ever read.

And with that, Miracleman ends—for Alan Moore, at least.



And of course, that summary really only scratches the surface of what I genuinely believe is the greatest superhero story of them all. Don't get me wrong: Watchmen is an absolute comic book milestone, and it still stands as one of the medium's most towering and enduring achievements. But in many ways, I read Watchmen as a re-examination of themes Moore first explored in Miracleman—and one that's much more bloodless and intellectualized. Watchmen is brilliant and astonishing in its careful, methodical execution, in the way it takes the reader by the hand through a postmodern labyrinth where all aspects of the superhero myth are distorted and bent into impossible fractals. But if Watchmen is a philosophical guided tour of the superhero genre, Miracleman is a siege: a screaming, apocalyptic storm that leaves behind nothing but smoking ashes and bones. Where Watchmen is cold and calculating, Miracleman is white-hot and starry-eyed. It's bottled lightning.

Of course, the great tragedy of Miracleman is how difficult it is to find: the series has been out of print for years now thanks to legal troubles of truly superhuman proportions. The whole issue is really too complicated to go into, but suffice it to say that both Neil Gaiman (who took over the series after Moore left) and Todd McFarlane claim ownership of the character, and the dispute remains unsettled. Scuttlebutt has it that if Gaiman regained rights, the character's name would change back to Marvelman and all back issues would be reprinted by Marvel—undoubtedly the best outcome for all. Should McFarlane get the rights, it's tough to say exactly what would happen, but his apparent ambition to bring Miracleman into the Spawn universe does not appeal to this hardcore Miracleman fan; your results may vary.

And the comic's not that scarce: you can still find the issues from Moore's run on Ebay pretty regularly, and most actually don't actually go for all that much (except issue #15, which is appropriately the most highly sought-after). But it's truly a travesty that this landmark of superhero comics is so unavailable to today's readers, and I can only hope that the dispute is resolved someday soon. Of course, an even bigger travesty is that Miracleman's impact on new readers will probably be dulled by its own influence: those who've never read the series may find it overly familiar, after seeing so much of its character reiterated by comics like The Authority. But Miracleman remains a sovereign, thrilling achievement, and a must-read for anyone with even a slight interest in superheroes.

[End note: I've been promising writeups of various comics left and right, but the next one I had in my mind for my series spotlight, um, series was James Robinson's Starman, a title that I remember everyone talking about while it was still coming out but which I hardly ever hear anything about anymore. It'll probably be a while until that post goes up though, since I basically need to reread the entire 80-issue series. So I may do The Authority or Animal Man or something in the interim.]