Miracleman, Book Three: Olympus
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Collection published: 2015 Contents originally published: 1987-2015 Acquired: April 2015 Read: August 2024 |
Alan Moore's final Miracleman volume explains the mystery running through the previous book (who was the mysterious woman?), ties things up with Michael Moran's wife and child, sends him into space to meet the Warpsmiths, and draws him into a final confrontation with Kid Miracleman.
Moore's comics can often be densely narrated, but usually he makes this work, achieving sympathy between word and art. I did not find that to be the case here. Though the stuff with Miraclewoman is fine if kind of predictable (the critique here is that female superheroes are sex fantasies), once the action moves into space, I struggled through the massive amount of ponderous text boxes, and I very much struggled to care. In here and in book one, the Warpsmiths are very much the weak link of the Miracleman saga. They are a necessary part of it, I suppose, but I never found reading about them very interesting.
Once we move back to Earth, the high point is definitely the stuff with Michael Moran's wife, showing us the human cost of utopia and perfection.
The fight with Kid Miracleman is one of those things that would have been more shocking at the time, but after Watchmen, The Walking Dead, The Authority, and so on, it's hard to get excited about comics' ability to depict detailed and gruesome violence.
The other high point is the last issue. This to me was the truly revolutionary idea of Miracleman, and admittedly, the violence of the previous issue was a necessary step to get us there. The idea that superheros are fundamentally about using violence to reshape the world is baked into the origins of the genre; you can see it in the very first Superman stories. But most superhero stories pull back from this, not wanting to show violence, or not wanting to show big changes to the status quo. In Miracleman (as in Watchmen), Moore runs straight into that premise—now that the violence is over, Miracleman and Miraclewoman reshape the world into utopia. It's a staggering concept that few superhero comics would dare to embrace, and I loved the issue; it clearly makes the whole rest of the series worth it, and is probably the single best contribution Moore makes to the idea of the "realistic" superhero.
The volume has two stories by other writers, both published in 2015. One is by Grant Morrison, written in 1984 but not illustrated or published. I found this kind of half-baked, an interesting idea not well executed. The other is an adventure of the Miracleman Family at its peak, like the ones Moore sprinkled through the first two volumes, mostly worth it for the great Mike Allred art.
Don't be fooled by this volume's page count of 328; the actual story pages only go up to 147, and the Alan Moore stuff you are here for just 124. There's a lot of original art here, which to be honest I do not find very interesting. Marvel's three chunky collections of Miracleman are a lie; they are really three thin collections... and ought to have been one 300-page collection. (Marvel did later release a Miracleman Omnibus, but again, they padded it out with all these extras.) It feels like, having finally secured the rights to the character, Marvel wanted a return on its investment by padding the series out into as many purchases as they could, but in the long run, I think it harms the series's purchasability. It wasn't until 2023 that Marvel finally released a reasonably-sized volume of the whole series in one go than can stand alongside Moore's other 1980s works. I probably should have held out for that one.
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