* I assembled a gallery of Miracleman #1 covers over at Trouble With Comics, along with my thoughts on Marvel publishing the series. Well, my thought.
* It's kind of amazing to me that I've lived long enough that the re-release of Miracleman #1 apparently isn't a big deal at all. Nobody seems to be talking about it. To me, this should have been one of the most momentous events in comics publishing history. But Tom Spurgeon is actually baffled that they're doing it, so I must really be out of touch. (I'm not entirely certain he isn't being sarcastic; let me know if I'm being tone deaf on his comments about it.) I would think the fact that it's a seminal work by many of the top comics creators of all time (Moore, Totleben, Veitch, Davis, Gaiman, and more), that it includes two of the most controversial comics issues of the past 40 years, and that it's been out of print for so long make it a big moment in comics. All available evidence suggests that few people care, though. I'm stunned.
* Anyway, it took me some doing, due to Diamond's customary incompetence, but I managed to get a copy of Miracleman #1 on the day it came out. Having held the book in my hands, I do think the new colouring (by Steve Oliff) is respectful to the material and easy on the eye. I think it'll be possible to read these new editions as comics and have them actually read as comics. I did spot at least one lettering error (a non-pronoun "I" in the middle of a word with serifs, which most people would probably not even notice, but it's a sloppy mistake that should be fixed for future reprints), but overall even the new lettering looks organic enough that I can't complain, despite loving the rough-and-tumble lettering of the original Warrior presentation of these stories.
* Where I call bullshit is in the presentation of not one but three black and white Mick Anglo stories as backmatter, where surely we could have managed to include one more chapter of work by The Original Writer, better justifying the $5.99 price tag. The Marvelman stuff reprinted a few years back that was in Surprise! black and white that pissed off readers and retailers alike, who were hankering for this stuff, the Alan Moore stuff, that left a bad taste in a lot of mouths. And including it in this new #1 seems like a mistake to me, although Marvel may feel there's some good reason to have done it.
* They drew panties on Liz Moran. Come on, Marvel, what child do you think is buying this book? And do you really think that child is unaware of the existence of buttocks?
* Despite that, on the whole I'm not outraged or disgusted by the product Marvel has delivered; it's not perfect, but I'm glad Marvelman/Miracleman is back in print, and I'm really glad DC Comics didn't manage to get the license under their weird and creepy Stalking Alan Moore Initiative, for which it wouldn't surprise me if there was an actual office and staff somewhere, dedicated solely to sticking pins in Alan Moore dolls all the livelong day. It'll be pretty swell when Marvel gets all the Moore stuff into nice hardcover editions, because those should be a thing that exists in the world. In the meantime, though, I'm told there's an amazing torrent out there with super high-quality scans and the Warrior stuff in sterling black and white, so you can see the material as it really was intended to originally look. If nothing else, the existence of such digital delights should be a shot across the bow at Marvel to do this project right so that people actually pay for it, and so that at least some of the original creators get a piece of the pie that they deserve after all the decades this amazing work of comics has been in limbo.
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