Miracleman: The Golden Age
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Collection published: 2016 Contents originally published: 1989-91 Previously read: March 2012 Acquired: March 2016 Reread: August 2024 |
Back when I originally got into Miracleman, this is the one volume I was actually able to source via interlibrary loan, so this is the one volume I have read before, in a 1993 trade paperback published by Eclipse. But, of course that time I lacked the context of the preceding three volumes by Alan Moore.
What Alan Moore did in the final issue of Olympus was genre-shifting: take the premise of the superhero genre to its logical conclusion. If superheroes use violence to improve the world, isn't their ultimate goal to force a utopia? In his continuation, Neil Gaiman extrapolates from that, telling us stories of what that utopian world might actually look like. The Golden Age contains a number of short stories from around the world of Miracleman; these issues were originally published 1989 through 1991, though it was two issues after this that right issues would result in the series fizzling out, only to be continued decades later.
Rereading my original review, I have to saw, I largely agree with my past self. Each of the stories here examines some aspect of what it might be like to live in a perfect world—and who are the people who might not fit, what are the ways in which people might be left behind. The only story I didn't really rate in my old review was the spy one, about how Miracleman sets up an artificial city for spies to play out their dramas because there's nothing for them in the new world; I dismissed it as derivative of The Prisoner. And maybe that's true, but the twist isn't the point. The point here is that the spies are all of us. So many of us would rather exist in comfortable but destructive routines than embrace an uncomfortable but perhaps redemptive way of living. (It reminds me of that Jameson canard about the end of capitalism versus the end of the world.)
Perhaps it's a hot take, but Mark Buckingham is probably the best artist on Miracleman so far, a series that has been blessed by a succession of admittedly strong artists! His beautiful work is well suited to the utopian vibes of the post-Miracleman Earth, but I also really like how adaptive he is, with lots of varied artistic styles across the book's eight chapters, always choosing one suited to the particular story being told.
It's almost a shame the series was continued. At the point I write this review, I've already read The Silver Age, and I kind of agree with something I wrote back when I read The Golden Age on its own a decade ago:
It's a shame that we'll apparently never see more of this story to come, but in a way, I like that. The Golden Age explores the sadness that comes with the passing of a way of life, but if what comes next is a genuine utopia, it really would be impossible for there to be a sustained series of stories. The Golden Age really only succeeds at that by using Miracleman as a god, not a character. Without Gaiman's planned next two volumes, we'll never see the degeneration and corruption of Miracleman's utopia, and we'll be able to forever stop on that image of the people of Earth floating away on balloons. It makes The Golden Age a much more unconventional work than it might otherwise have been, one that shows a utopia that though it has cause for sadness, has much larger cause for joy and wonder.
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