Young Avengers Presents by Ed Brubaker, Brian Reed, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Cornell, Kevin Grevioux, Matt Fraction, Paco Medina, Harvey Tolibao, Alina Urusov, Mark Brooks, Mitch Breitweiser, Alan Davis, et al.

After Civil War, the Young Avengers next appeared in a miniseries called Young Avengers Presents. This is collected in the Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung omnibus, but I picked it up on its own in a used bookstore way back when, so I read that copy instead. Much easier to hold a trade paperback than a giant hardcover!

Young Avengers Presents

Collection published: 2008
Contents originally published: 2008
Acquired: December 2012
Read: July 2025

Writers: Ed Brubaker, Brian Reed, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Cornell, Kevin Grevioux, Matt Fraction

Artists: Paco Medina & Juan Vlasco, Harvey Tolibao, Alina Urusov, Mark Brooks & Jaime Mendoza, Mitch Breitweiser, Alan Davis & Mark Farmer

Colorists: Nathan Fairbairn, Jay David Ramos, Christina Strain, Brian Reber, Paul Mounts

Letterer: Cory Petit

The miniseries consists of six issues, each focused on a single member of the Young Avengers (except for #3, which teams up Wiccan and Speed) in the wake of Civil War. I'm not as plugged into big Marvel events the way I am into DC ones, so I had to work out some stuff here from context that must have happened in titles not focused on the Young Avengers: mostly they are working on the side of the Avengers who have gone underground because they are illegal, except for Cassie "Stature" Lang, who is working for the Initiative, which I think is the legit, government-registered superhero team? Since (or in?) Civil War, Captain America is dead, the Young Avengers met Bucky, and Hawkeye and Captain Marvel came back to life. Mostly this fine, though; I was able to follow along, except it would have been nice to know what made Cassie part from her comrades and pick the Initiative instead. 

Each story has a different creative team, but there are no duds here. The writing in each story is great, and in most cases the art is too. I'll take it story by story; the first is Ed Brubaker, Paco Medina, and Juan Vlasco's tale of Patriot. This is one of the highlights of a strong volume; Eli "Patriot" Bradley is questioning his own name. How can he be a "patriot" for a country that did what it did to his grandfather and so many others, that refuses to see patriotism unless it's jingoism? With Hawkeye's help, he seeks out—in the absence of Captain America—his erstwhile sidekick, Bucky Barnes. Bucky can't give him any answers, which I think makes the story all the stronger: two people trying to find the America they aspire to. Brubaker is generally a strong writer but not one I'd associate with teen heroes, to be honest, so it's pleasing to see him do such a good job here, and the art by Medina and Vlasco matches him well, detailed and realistic, with good command of faces, which is needed in a dialogue-heavy story. A strong opening to the volume.

Is that really an appropriate outfit for a high school teacher? (It definitely is very mid-2000s, though.)
from Young Avengers Presents #1 (script by Ed Brubaker, art by Paco Medina & Juan Vlasco)

The second story, about Hulking, is equally strong. In the original Young Avengers story, Hulkling discovered that his mother wasn't really his mother, but that he was the son of the Kree warrior Captain Marvel and a Skrull princess; his supposed mother was killed. At the time, his parentage was academic because Captain Marvel was dead—but this is comics, and Brian Reed and Harvey Tolibao's story begins with him seeking out his recently resurrected father. I found this really sharp and astute, a boy and a man trying to reach out and forge a connection where none exists. Sure, they are father and son, but they share only DNA, not any kind of emotional bond. It's quite sad, and really well done. I think of the five OG Young Avengers, Hulkling and Wiccan were the two who felt the least fully formed to me, and this does a good job of remedying that when it comes to Hulkling.

Not too surprising he has father issues, I guess.
from Young Avengers Presents #2 (script by Brian Reed, art by Harvey Tolibao)

We then move onto a story of Wiccan and his twin-from-another-mother, Speed; they theorize that they are the lost souls of the children of the Scarlet Witch, and in this story they set out together to find her. Once again, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Alina Urusov really nail it. It's good to see some actual interaction between the twins, there are great jokes, and I appreciated getting some depth on the often glib Speed. Urusov's art is strong, and I really liked the way the two interacted with a former Avengers villain.

Merriam Webster says transmogrify is a word, going all the way back to Aphra Behn... but its origins are a mystery!
from Young Avengers Presents #3 (script by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, art by Alina Urusov)

Next comes Paul Cornell, Mark Brooks, and Jaime Mendoza's story of Vision, who has the consciousness of the former Iron Lad (and future Kang the Conqueror) loaded into him, though it's almost equally a story of Stature, with whom Iron Lad shared a kiss before he returned to his doomed place in the timestream. Cornell of course does a great job by both characters; I have been a little skeptical of including the kind-of adult Vision as one of the Young Avengers, but Cornell sold me on him for the first time here. Particularly strong is the depiction of Cassie, though; it seems more like her story than his to be honest! It is let down a bit by the art, which struggles to depict Cassie's size-changing in general, and a moment where she size changes at the same time the Vision phases in particular.

I can't complain about the "reused identical artwork" trick because I didn't even notice it until I made this scan!
from Young Avengers Presents #4 (script by Paul Cornell, art by Mark Brooks & Jaime Mendoza)

The actual Stature-focused story is also a good one. Kevin Grevioux centers the story around her family: Cassie is struggling with her mother and stepfather much as they are struggling with her, and her emotional state causes her to progressively shrink further and further. I liked the focus on the Young Avengers as friends here; the story isn't just about her, but also Kate, Billy, and especially Eli trying to help her, and it's well done. Cassie is probably my favorite Young Avenger. I did find Mitch Breitweiser's art a bit stiff, not always up to the emotional moments.

Lots of fun stuff with scale in this one: Stature and Patriot are on the microscope slide.
from Young Avengers Presents #5 (script by Kevin Grevioux, art by Mitch Breitweiser)

Finally, we end on a story about Hawkeye finally meeting Hawkeye, that is to say, Kate Bishop finally meeting Clint Barton. It's written by Matt Fraction; I think this is the first time he wrote either character, and he would go on to write an acclaimed run featuring Clint with Kate as a co-star. It's a bit predictable but fun enough; Kate is my second-favorite Young Avenger, and he captures her well. And, of course, you can't go wrong with Alan Davis and Mark Farmer on art.

Hm, but do I buy that Kate actually needs Speed to persuade her to "do some crime"?
from Young Avengers Presents #6 (script by Matt Fraction, art by Alan Davis & Mark Farmer)

Overall, it's a strong volume; I had expected to like maybe half of the stories, not all of them! Handing characters largely the work of one creative team off to others can be a fraught undertaking, but every writer here demonstrated a great grasp of their Young Avengers, and in all but a couple cases they were well-matched by the art. In the absence of ongoing adventures for the Young Avengers, I'm glad Marvel saw fit to release this.

This is the second in a series of posts about the Young Avengers, Loki, and Hawkeye. The next installment covers part 3 of Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung, part 1 (2005-06) 

From Marvel to Miracle (and Back to Marvel): Two Miracleman Reference Books

Having read my way through the complete (as of now) runs of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman (and their various artistic collaborators) on the character originally known as Marvelman and now known as Miracleman, I decided to pick up a couple reference books about the character. The first is Kimota!, published by comics reference publisher TwoMorrows. Originally published in 2001, there was supposedly a 2010 new edition, but I couldn't find it for sale anywhere at any price, nor was it in any libraries, so I settled for getting the 2001 edition via interlibrary loan. Poisoned Chalice, on the other hand, is self-published and thus not available in any library; I bought a print-on-demand copy via Lulu.

Kimota!: The Miracleman Companion
by George Khoury

Published: 2001
Read: August 2024

Together, the two books provide a lot on insight into the character, but they come at him from different directions. George Khoury's Kimota! largely consists of interviews with various figures: Mick Anglo (original creator of the character), Alan Moore, Dez Skinn (original publisher of the 1980s revival), many of the artists (Garry Leach, Alan Davis, Chuck Austen, Rick Veitch, John Totleben, and Mark Buckingham*), Cat Yronwode (publisher of the comic when it moved to Eclipse Comics), Neil Gaiman, Barry Windsor-Smith (who did a lot of covers), and Beau Smith (who worked at Eclipse when it published Miracleman). It also contains other features like Moore's original proposal for the revival, a timeline Alan Moore and Steve Moore worked out of how (among other things) Marvelman fit with V for Vendetta (!), an index to all issues of the comic, the script of Miracleman #1, the pencils for an unpublished Moore/Totleben collaboration, and more.

Poisoned Chalice is, on the other hand, a history of the character, mostly focusing on the legal issues. Pádraig Ó Méalóid dives into the various disputes that ultimately led to the existence of Miracleman: how Fawcett was accused of ripping off Superman and thus had to stop publishing Captain Marvel, how the company repackaging Captain Marvel in the UK ripped him off to create Marvelman once they ran out of Captain Marvel material, how Dez Skinn brought the character back in the 1980s but probably didn't do his legal diligence, how Marvel UK began sending cease-and-desist letters to Skinn once he published a book with "Marvelman" in the title, how the character ended up being renamed "Miracleman" so it could be published in the US, how the rights to the character ended up spread out all over the place, how possibly some of them fell into the hands of Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, how McFarlane got caught up in a long dispute with Neil Gaiman over various characters Gaiman created for McFarlane, how publishers in the 2000s and 2010s began attempting to assert and consolidate rights to both Marvelman and Miracleman, and how the character ultimately all ended up in the hands of Marvel Comics (who finally republished both some of Mick Anglo's original stories and Moore's and Gaiman's runs, as well as continuing into new stories). Ó Méalóid does a lot of a research, drawing on primary source legal documents, interviews from various sources including Kimota!, and his own original interviews.

Between the two, you get a good sense of both the significance of the character and the legal disputes that without which the character would not exist, but also made the actual publication of the character a fraught issue. Kimota! is a quick and easy but informative read; it's the kind of "companion" book that doesn't focus on analysis really, but more on providing behind-the-scenes information. The interviews are interesting and fun. What were these people thinking when they did this work? There's good tidbits here you won't find anywhere else. Not everything here is going to interesting to every reader—I skipped over the script to Miracleman #1, the unfinished Moore/Totleben story, and the index, for example—but there's a lot to like here, and I tore through it in about a day.

Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman (and Miracleman)
by Pádraig Ó Méalóid

Published: 2018
Acquired and read: September 2024

By contrast, Poisoned Chalice is a long, detailed read. Not content to start even just with the dispute between Fawcett and DC over Captain Marvel and Superman, Ó Méalóid goes all the way back to Philip Wylie's Gladiator and claims that it was ripped off by Siegel and Shuster when they created Action Comics #1. Ó Méalóid surfaces every single fact he can find about the legal ownership of the character—much of which was pretty thin on the ground before his investigations. As he shows, the character has often been mismanaged or used flat-out illegally; it's pretty clear from his investigations, for example, that Dez Skinn probably didn't really lay the necessary groundwork to use Marvelman in Warrior. Some of what was in here I knew already, either from Kimota! or my general knowledge of the character, but it's good to see it documented in detail. I think the most new-to-me information was contained in the discussion of how the rights to Miracleman supposedly ended up with Todd McFarlane, how  McFarlane ripped off Neil Gaiman, and how the two tangled in court for years until Gaiman was ultimately vindicated. I knew vaguely there was a dispute about a Spawn character named Angela, but I didn't know any of the parameters, or what it had to do with Miracleman.

The book's detail is, however, sometimes its downfall. There is a decent amount of repetition, and sometimes Ó Méalóid uses five examples when two would do. And though he's mostly scrupulous about the legal details, I did find that occasionally Ó Méalóid made statements that I don't think make any legal sense. Even if Marvelman was a rip-off of Captain Marvel, the collapse of the company that owned Marvelman would not somehow grant rights to the character to DC, that's just not how copyright (or any kind of ownership) works as far as I know.

On top of that, this is self-published—and oh boy is that obvious. Some paragraphs are indented, but most are not, resulting in huge blocks of text on many pages; footnotes are not always logically positioned; sometimes the little black bar dividing footnotes from the main text overlaps with text. On top of that, it needed a good content edit; there are way too many footnotes and Ó Méalóid is, at times, an overly digressive writer. For $18, one hopes for better! It reminds me a lot of Camestros Felapton's Debarkle, though, in that a professionally published version of this would be better in some ways (it would have been actually edited) but probably worse in others, because I don't think a professional publisher would want something with such a narrow focus and such detailed documentation. So you either get the roughness of a self-published book, or you get a different book, to be honest. 

I did really appreciate Ó Méalóid's critique of the pretty stupid way Marvel published the Marvelman and Miracleman material it acquired, fannish as it probably was. I appreciate all the hard work, labor, and love that obviously went into this book—Ó Méalóid has clearly read everything ever written about Miracleman, and dug up a lot of information no one else has ever bothered too, straightening out a lot of vague misconceptions people have around the character. I like that he interviews key figures in the history of the character, but also (unlike Khoury, who to be fair, just has a different project) puts those interviews in context of other interviews and actual facts. I also appreciated the times he showed what was bluster, such as that the disappearance of Marvelman from Warrior was probably more about Dez Skinn's deteriorating working relationship with Alan Moore than the threats from Marvel UK over the use of the "Marvelman" title.

Like I said, I had to read the 2001 edition of Kimota!, but even the 2010 edition wouldn't have been very up-to-date, as it would have predated Marvel's acquisition of the character and republication of the Moore and Gaiman's runs. That's probably its biggest flaw; there's just a significant piece of Miracleman content that the book does not and cannot say anything about. If TwoMorrows announced a third edition, I would pick it up... but maybe they need to wait until The Dark Age is done. I was worried that, as it predates the publication of The Silver Age, Poisoned Chalice would be out-of-date a bit, too, but actually in terms of the legal issues, Ó Méalóid is pretty much up to the moment; things have stabilized since his book was published even if it was six years ago.

Are these books for everyone with a casual interest in Miracleman? Probably not. (Though—do people with a casual interest in Miracleman actually exist? Seems to me you're probably either in or you're out.) But if you're the kind of person who's into 1) Alan Moore, 2) the development of superhero comics as a genre, or 3) literary histories and copyrights, (and I'm into all three) these books are must-reads.

* I think John Ridgway is probably the significant omission. Of course, as a Doctor Who Magazine fan, he's one of the ones I'd like to hear from the most!

Miracleman: The Red King Syndrome by Alan Moore, Alan Davis, John Ridgway, Chuck Austen, Rick Veitch, et al.

Miracleman, Book Two: The Red King Syndrome

Collection published: 2014
Contents originally published: 1983-86
Acquired: November 2014
Read: July 2024

Story: The Original Writer with Cat Yronwode

Art: Alan Davis, John Ridgway, Chuck Austen & Rick Veitch with Rick Bryant

Color Art: Steve Oliff

Lettering: Joe Caramagna

The second volume of Miracleman is very attention-grabbing—it contains both gruesome violence and an extraordinarily detailed rendering of a birth, as Michael Moran's wife gives birth to their baby. In the post-Watchmen, post-Authority era of superhero comics, the violence isn't so striking, but I still can't think of any other superhero comic I've read in the following four decades where a baby's head emerges from a woman's vagina in close-up detail.

Outside of that, though, this feels like the weak link in the chain of the Miracleman saga. Not that it's bad, but in terms of story, what happens in the two volumes on either side of it are more significant and more interesting; in a classic middle-volume-of-trilogy situation, we need this volume to get from book one to book three, but it doesn't have as much to say on its own. We need the birth, we need to see Miracleman investigate his origin, and there's some important themes and resonances here, but they're not so interesting as what the other two books do.

Thankfully, given it's by Alan Moore and some talented artistic collaborators, how it says what it says is always interesting. Interesting writing as always (though some of what it does with race is very dated now), and Alan Davis and John Ridgway in particular are always great illustrators worth reading. (This might be the first time I've seen John Ridgway art with color and not felt it diminished by the coloring, so kudos to Steve Oliff.) Highlights include: Miracleman's conversation in the woods with a kid scared of nuclear war, the flashback chapters about Gargunza manipulating the dreams of the "Miracleman Family," and the way the malignant government agent ends up helping Miracleman in the end.

There are two extra stories here: one a kind-of-funny story about Young Miracleman trying to hit on a receptionist in 1957, and a frame story by Cat Yronwode to a set of Mick Anglo Marvelman reprints that had to be run in Miracleman #8 when a flood damaged the Eclipse offices, which I guess is nice to have for completeness's sake but pretty meaningless on its own.

Most of the extras in this volume are pages of uncolored original art, which is less interesting to me. Two things I find frustrating about the otherwise detailed archival presentation of these volumes are 1) there are no individual art credits (which chapters did Alan Davis draw? who knows) and 2) there is no original publication data given. Where did these stories originally appear? This is particularly frustrating as the extras will say things like "this is the cover of Warrior #16"... but you have no clear indication of which story originally appeared in Warrior #16!

Miracleman: A Dream of Flying by Alan Moore, Garry Leach, Alan Davis, et al.

Miracleman, Book One: A Dream of Flying

Collection published: 2014
Contents originally published: 1982-89
Acquired: May 2014
Read: July 2024

Story: The Original Writer with Mick Anglo

Art: Garry Leach & Alan Davis with Don Lawrence, Steve Dillon & Paul Neary

Color Art: Steve Oliff

Lettering: Joe Caramagna and Chris Eliopoulos

Many years ago now, I got interested in Alan Moore's 1980s comic Miracleman (a.k.a. Marvelman) as part of a project about superheroes, violence, and utopia; analysis of the series by Peter Paik in his excellent monograph From Utopia to Apocalypse made it sound very relevant. Unfortunately, rights issues meant the book was long out-of-print, and copies of the collected editions so rare, I couldn't get any via interlibrary loan except for the Neil Gaiman–penned follow-up. But, some years later, Marvel acquired and sorted out the rights, eventually reprinting Moore's run in a series of three deluxe hardcovers (with new coloring and lettering) that I picked up as they came out, and some years after that, that I am finally getting around to reading.

Clearly one of the things Alan Moore did to the superhero genre that he came along and asked, "What if superheroes were real?" Now, he was not the first to do this, nor the last; I would argue that a great many important works of superhero fiction, at least as early as Amazing Fantasy #15, were premised on this question. But with his work on Watchmen, Moore was the one who asked this question for the 1980s. In the first book of Miracleman, A Dream of Flying, Moore asks the same question in a different way. While Watchmen looks at what kind of people would do something like become a superhero, and what real people would do with that kind of power, and what the real effects of using violence to change the world would be (a theme Moore comes back to a lot; see also V for Vendetta), A Dream of Flying comes at it from the opposite direction.

Instead of taking heroic figures and making them sordid and realistic, A Dream of Flying asks how could a heroic figure exist in a real world. Back in the 1950s and '60s, Mick Anglo wrote the adventures of Marvelman and his friends; Moore imagines that those stories sort of really happened—in the head of Michael Moran and his friends. Moran was abducted for an experiment as a child by a depraved scientist, who used alien technology to give Moran superpowers and held him in a dreamlike state, pumping crudely written superhero stories into his brain to develop him into the weapon he wanted. Eventually things went horribly wrong, Moran lost him memories, and by the 1980s was a fortysomething adult with no idea he had a superpowered alter ego. Miracleman is, both in story and in reality, based on Captain Marvel, and Moore manages to come up with reasonable science fiction explanations for a lot of what happens in Captain Marvel stories; I liked the explanation for body-swapping a lot.

A Dream of Flying begins with Michael's slow rediscovery of his true self, and then his discovery of how he was created and what happened to his friends. It's Alan Moore at the top of his craft, and he has strong artistic collaborators in Garry Leach and Alan Davis. The best parts usually center on Moore's appliance of grounded realism to the character, both in terms of psychology and in terms of sci-fi explanations. This kind of story has been told a lot since, but Moore is very good at it. I particularly liked the stuff about Michael's wife.

In addition to the eleven chapters of A Dream of Flying (most about seven pages), this volume includes a prologue retelling a real Mick Anglo Marvelman tale in Moore's idiom, a flashforward story (set during Book Three, I think) about Miracleman and the Warpsmiths of Phaidon doing some time travel, and two side stories about the Warpsmiths. The first of these is fun, and the flashforward is fine if a bit pointless. The Warpsmith stuff I found largely inscrutable, but I guess I'm glad its in here for completeness's sake. 

There's also about sixty pages of "behind-the-scenes" stuff to pad this book out to a marketable length. Most of it is pretty interesting: contemporary house ads, art try-outs, and the like. Original artwork and variant covers are less interesting, but I'm sure some people appreciate this stuff.

I would have, however, preferred a recoloring done in a more genuine 1980s style, rather than the contemporary approach Steve Oliff took.

Overall, this is an interesting start to the Miracleman saga, and highly recommended if you are interested in Alan Moore and/or the history of the superhero genre.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Gotham, Part XVI: Batman: Year Two: Fear the Reaper

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2002 (contents: 1987-91)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2015

Batman: Year Two: Fear the Reaper

Writer: Mike Barr
Pencillers: Alan Davis, Todd McFarlane
Inkers: Paul Neary, Mark Farmer, Alfredo Alcala, Pablo Marcos
Letterers: Richard Starkings, Todd Klein, Agustin Mas
Colorists: Steven Oliff, Gloria Vasquez, Tom Ziuko

Year Two, November - Year Three, August
The first of many overt attempts to "cash in" on Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Batman: Year One, this would be followed by Batman: Year Three, JLA: Year One, Batgirl: Year One, Robin: Year One, Nightwing: Year One, Huntress: Year One, and even Metamorpho: Year One and the (tragically uncollected, I'm sure) Guy Gardner: Year One. There's nothing to really distinguish Year Two from the slew of tales of Batman's early years that followed it in publication order, many of which I've already read. Basically Batman discovers that the Reaper, a vigilante who operated in Gotham after the Alan Scott Green Lantern and before himself is back, and things get weird as he decides this is the time he'll use a gun... and not just any gun, but literally the same gun that killed his parents. And, get this, thanks to contrivance, he has to team up with the guy who killed his parents to do it. Even for superhero comics, this is a bit goofy/implausible, but I think that in principle it could be made to work. Well, unfortunately Mike Barr and a cohort of artists don't succeed, but man, Alan Davis draws nice pictures.

Next Week: If you thought one year-long holiday-themed murder mystery was good, why not a second, in Dark Victory!?