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fit with V for Vendetta (!), an index to all issues of the comic, the script of Miracleman #1, the pencils for an unpublished Moore/Totleben collaboration, and more.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 Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham

Miracleman: The Silver Age

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 1990-2024
Acquired: May 2024
Read: August 2024

Writer: Neil Gaiman

Co-Writer & Artist: Mark Buckingham

Color Art: Jordie Bellaire, D'Israeli

Lettering: Todd Klein

This volume finally extends and continues the story of Miracleman from where Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckinham left off in the early 1990s; my understanding is that it contains a few issues they completed then (though with alterations to the art and coloring) and a few issues only published in the 2020s (mostly or entirely written in the 1990s, I think, but not illustrated until the 2020s). Even though Marvel began reprinting Miracleman back in 2014, it was only this year that they finally wrapped up Gaiman and Buckingham's second volume in single-issue format and thus finally released a collection—its release finally being my impetus to sit down and read all the Miracleman comics I'd been picking up.

While book one of the Gaiman/Buckingham run gave us a series of one-off snapshots of Miracleman's utopia, this volume consists of one continuous story. Or rather, half a story, as it ends with a declaration that the story is "TO BE CONTINUED IN THE DARK AGE." But given it took us ten years to get The Silver Age, which had largely already been written, I'm not optimistic that we'll get The Dark Age anytime soon. Maybe in the 2050s?

Anyway, as part of his project to bring the dead back to life, Miracleman revives Young Miracleman, who died before the events of Alan Moore's first book. Richard "Dicky" Dauntless is thus thrust from the world of the ordinary(-ish) 1950s straight into Miracleman's utopian 2003. The book covers his difficulty adjusting to this new time and place, as well as to his discoveries about his own history. How does someone with 1950s attitude toward gender, sexuality, and other social constructs fit into a benevolent libertarian dictatorship?

The story moves slowly but strongly, especially thanks to the work of the always dependable Mark Buckingham. While The Golden Age saw him working in a number of styles, this volume keeps him what I think of as his "default" style (as seen in works such as Dead Boy Detectives); he's good at capturing emotion and character, which works well for the highly contemplative tone of this volume. The best material, in my opinion, was Richard's trip to the mountains, where he seeks out a man who was given powers by Miracleman but voluntarily gave them up, and this causes him (as well as his traveling companions) to think about his place in this new world.

Moore's original run hinted that Young Miracleman was gay; Gaiman picks up on that here, but in a way that made me a bit uncomfortable with its implications. I'm curious to see where this goes in The Dark Age, however. 

Overall, I found this interesting but unfinished. It very much depends on The Dark Age. It seems like it could have some interesting things to say, but it also seems like it might end up being a reactionary take on utopias, undermining what made Olympus and The Golden Age so interesting. Hopefully we find out before the 2050s.

Also, I have to complain that while the first four Miracleman volumes were originally released in hardcover, this one only came out in trade paperback. C'mon Marvel, what the hell is this? Your target audience for releases of long-lost 1990s comic books is also the exact kind of people who want their collected editions to go together and will pay for a hardcover! The release strategy of this whole series has left a lot to be desired... I fervently hope they don't end up doing a hardcover later, though; I don't want to have to fight off the temptation to rebuy this.

Miracleman: The Golden Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham

Miracleman: The Golden Age

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 1989-91
Previously read: March 2012
Acquired: March 2016
Reread: August 2024

Story: Neil Gaiman

Art: Mark Buckingham

Color Art: D'Israeli

Selected Painted Art: Mark Buckingham

Lettering: Todd Klein

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.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXXIV: Dead Boy Detectives: Ghost Snow

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2014-15)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2016

Dead Boy Detectives, Volume 2: Ghost Snow

Writer – story: Toby Litt

Penciller – layouts – story: Mark Buckingham
Finishers: Ryan Kelly, Al Davison, Emma Vieceli, Victor Santos
Colorist: Lee Loughridge

Letterer: Todd Klein

The second (or fourth, depending on how you count) and final volume of Dead Boy Detectives pays off some plot threads left dangling from the previous volume. Dead boy Charles Rowland meets the half-sister he never knew he had, a Buddhist monk with a rationalist daughter. His sister tells him his father may have directly caused the dead of his mother, so it's up to the Dead Boy Detectives to investigate with the help of new friend Crystal Palace. At the same time, Crystal's comatose childhood friend Rosa is trapped in the dimension of the half-dead, the Neitherlands, along with another one of her friends, Hana, where a mysterious power is amassing to invade our reality. But Rosa's parents are read to pull the plug on her life support, which could doom both her and the universe.

There's a lot going on in this book, apparently.
from Dead Boy Detectives #8 (art by Mark Buckingham & Ryan Kelly)

I kind of like this set-up for the Dead Boy Detectives. Crystal Palace is great, as is Charles's skeptical rationalist niece, and the two cats that are each half a philosopher are fun. I'm less into the Buddhist sister, though at least Litt stops her from being a serene cliche. But I'd rather see the dead boys out in the world solving supernatural mysteries, not plunging the depths of their own backstories: I don't think we gain anything from Charles's family being anything other than an ordinary human family. Their deaths should have been an entry point into a weird world after banal yet horrifying lives, and involving Charles's family so much with ghosts and murder plots and mystical meditations undercuts that; it's like how Steven Moffat Doctor Who companions all have these complicated backstories where they're splintered across time or grow up near cracks in reality when Russell T Davies showed us all they really need is a life boring enough to want to leave it behind. This is a good set-up, but it's only being used to generate insular stories.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXXIII: Dead Boy Detectives: Schoolboy Terrors

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2014 (contents: 2013-14)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2016

Dead Boy Detectives, Volume 1: Schoolboy Terrors

Writer – story: Toby Litt

Penciller – layouts – story: Mark Buckingham
Inkers: Gary Erskine, Andrew Pepoy
Finishers: Russ Braun, Victor Santos
Colorist: Lee Loughridge

Letterer: Todd Klein

They've had a couple of confusingly-titled standalones to their names already,* but the Dead Boy Detectives have finally landed an ongoing series, some twenty years after the characters originally debuted in The Sandman (and almost as long since they became detectives in The Children's Crusade). I'm not sure why, but I committed to reading every Sandman spin-off years ago, so here I am!

Schoolboy Terrors contains three stories. The first, "Run Ragged," is a short tale of the two ghost boys (Edwin, d. 1910s, and Charles, d. 1990s) helping find a lost dead cat; events quickly spiral out of control and they end up enrolled in a creepy school. This is fun, if inconsequential stuff: like Jill Thompson did in her run on the characters, Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham extract a lot of humor from the two boys' interactions with girls. (Charles is obsessed, Edwin less so.)

Weirdly, after the first story sets up these girls and their claim on the Dead Boy Detectives' treehouse, they basically don't turn up again except very briefly, and then we get a whole story about the boys making a different female friend. Not sure what that's about.
from Time Warp vol. 2 #1 (art by Mark Buckingham & Victor Santos)

School turns out to be a fruitful setting for the Dead Boy Detectives (Thompson's run was also set in one), as in the title story, they end up traveling to St. Hilarion's, the very school in which both boys died, eighty years apart. They're there to protect Crystal Palace, the daughter of a performance artist who likes MMORPGs but is possibly being set up as the receptacle for demons coming through from another dimension. I like the idea of taking the boys back to the scene of their demise, but it shows up one of the fundamental difficulties of the Dead Boy Detectives premise. What happened to these boys was terrible and gruesome-- they were both killed by bullies-- but the inclination is to put them into light-hearted goofy adventures. The plot in "Schoolboy Terrors" is about kids being killed so demons can use their bodies, sure, but the writing and especially Buckingham's art emphasizes the goofiness more than anything else, and the danger is all "fantasy violence," not realistic violence. Yet the boys have this fundamental, disturbing trauma in their backstories that is difficult to reconcile with their ongoing adventures, and bringing them back to the scene of their deaths makes that disjunction hard to ignore. Neil Gaiman is actually pretty good at mixing horror with childlike whimsy, but Toby Litt is not as talented a writer (no slight to him, of course).

Review: Doctor Who: The Hypothetical Gentleman by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert, and Philip Bond

Comic PDF eBook, 100 pages
Published 2013 (contents: 2012)
Acquired May 2014
Read October 2014

Doctor Who, Volume I: The Hypothetical Gentleman

Written by Andy Diggle and Brandon Seifert

Art by Mark Buckingham and Philip Bond with Ilias Kyriazis
Colors by Charlie Kirchoff
Lettering by Shawn Lee and Tom B. Long

Despite continuing with the same Doctor and same companions as the last, this volume restarts the numbering, I guess because of the arrival of superstar writer/artist team Andy Diggle and Mark Buckingham. Well, like too many superstar teams on IDW comics, they don't last long-- all of two issues! And to be honest, it's neither's best work. Diggle's writing is not flooded with continuity references like previous Who scripter Tony Lee, but it shares Lee's lack of depth. And Mark Buckingham can do great work, but I find his tie-in work distractingly over-referenced at times.

It's the second story here, "The Doctor and the Nurse," by Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond, that's delightful. Amy forces the Doctor and Rory to undertake some male bonding, but they hate the idea so much they jump into the future to finish early-- only the TARDIS misses its destination. Meanwhile, Amy gets embroiled in the hijinks of the previously-unknown-to-me-but-delightfully-real-except-that-some-people-actually-died-in-it Great London Beer Flood. Seifert's writing nails the characters and humor, and I loved Bond's Dan McDaid-esque art, cartoony but very reflective of the characters' personalities. It's a shame these two didn't take over the title. (I feel like I say that a lot. I guess a lot of the "guest" contributions on IDW's Doctor Who stuff are often better than the "actual" ones!)

Next Week: The return of Lady Christina in The Eye of Ashaya!

Review: Doctor Who: When Worlds Collide by Tony Lee, Matthew Dow Smith, & Mark Buckingham

Before we get started, I should note that my review of the Doctor Who audio drama The Highest Science is now up at Unreality SF.

Okay, so like I said yesterday, on Tuesdays from here out, I'll be reviewing books in what I call my "reading projects"; books I read on some kind of regular schedule. First up is the series of Doctor Who comics from IDW that I read issue-by-issue over breakfast from June to December 2014. I've already reviewed some of them, but I left off with The Ripper; next up is:

Comic PDF eBook, 90 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 2011)
Acquired May 2014
Read September 2014

Doctor Who: When Worlds Collide

Written by Tony Lee

Art by Mark Buckingham & Matthew Dow Smith
Colors by Charlie Kirchoff
Lettering by Neil Uyetake, Chris Mowry & Shawn Lee

There are two stories here, curiously undifferentiated in the collection. The first, only an issue long, has the Doctor, Amy, and Rory playing soccer with Anglo-Saxons, and it is not as fun as that description ought to imply.

The rest of the volume is made of what I can only assume is the title story. It's one of those tales where time zones get all mashed together, and to be honest, I find those tedious if they have no more substance than that-- Doctor Who long ago passed the point where temporal juxtaposition was innately interesting. Thankfully, this one does have a little bit of something to offer, mainly an army of temporal duplicates of the TARDIS crew, Sontarans on flying carpets, and a robotic dinosaur named Kevin. Also, Matthew Dow Smith's artwork, which is one of the real high points of IDW's Doctor Who stories over all. When Worlds Collide isn't great, but it's an above-average adventure for the range.

Next Week: The Doctor, Amy, Rory, and Kevin return in... It Came From Outer Space!

Review: The Starman Omnibus, Volume Three by James Robinson

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2009 (contents: 1997-98)
Acquired June 2009
Read October 2013

The Starman Omnibus, Volume Three

Writer: James Robinson
Penciller: Tony Harris
Inker: Wade von Grawbadger
Colorist: Gregory Wright
Letterer: Bill Oakley
Additional Pencillers: Steve Yeowell, Gene Ha, Mitch Byrd, J. H. Williams III, Bret Blevins, Michael Zulli, Richard Pace, Dusty Abell, Mark Buckingham, Phil Jimenez, Lee Weeks, Stefano Gaudiano
Additional Inkers: Drew Geraci, Gene Ha, Bret Blevins, Michael Zulli, Dexter Vines, Norman Lee, Phil Jimenez, Robert Campanella, Steve Yeowell, Stefano Gaudiano, Ray Snyder, Wayne Faucher
Additional Colorists: Pat Garrahy, Dave Hornung, Gene Ha, Trish Mulvihill, John Kalisz, Noelle Giddings, Lee Loughridge
Additional Letterers: Chris Eliopoulos, John Babcock

Volume Three was the weakest installment of Starman for me thus far. Not that it's bad or anything, but that I felt there was a little too much Shade, not quite enough Starman. Throughout the series, I've felt that maybe James Robinson likes this character more than I do-- he strikes me as someone best used in small doses, but we lead off with a large one: four issues of "The Shade" miniseries, plus some diary excerpts, plus the Shade intervenes (yet again) at the end of a story in order to resolve it when it gets out of Jack's control. All of this is a shame, though, because "The Shade" miniseries, about the Shade's recurring rivalry with an English family, is actually very, very well done, especially the issue with the Flash. It's just that when you bundle the whole Starman series together, "The Shade" feels like a mistimed digression.

The first actual Starman story, "Infernal Devices," is only okay, which exacerbates the problem. The stuff with Solomon Grudy is fine, and I loved the appearances of Batman and Alan Scott, but there didn't feel like there was enough of a personal connection for Jack. (I did really like the Woody Allen movie metaphor, even if, unlike Batman, I have actually never seen a Woody Allen movie.)

Thankfully, a number of the one-shots are strong. "Stars in My Eyes!", where Jack tells his girlfriend three tales of superhero romance, was excellent: I liked the story of Scalphunter, but as a big Black Canary II fan, I was really pleased to see her mother's relationship with Jack's father fleshed out and expanded on, following on from two Silver Age tales where the characters team up. It's an oddly bittersweet story about fidelity and trust and truth. This year's "Talking with David," where Jack has dinner with the dead members of the Justice Society, was good too.

On the other hand, the issue where the Mist kills off Justice League Europe just to prove how badass she is is the most crass, cynical kind of superhero storytelling. "Oh, these characters are in limbo-- let's brutally murder them!" I expected better of Robinson (though maybe I shouldn't have, given he'd go on to kill kids to prove the situation was serious in the awful Cry for Justice).

Thankfully, that bad taste is leavened by the final story, the parallel "Talking with Ted..." and "...Talking with Jack...", where Ted tells Jack's girlfriend about Ted while Jack tells his tattoo artist about his dad. If Starman has an emotional core, it's the father-son relationship between these two, all the respect they can't bring themselves to say, and the parallel narratives here develop that beautifully. Jack might struggle with his father's superheroic identity, but we all struggle with our parents' identities. The final page, especially, got me right in the heart. Brilliant stuff, even if the volume as a whole seemed to tread water a bit.

Review: Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2012 edited by Clayton Hickman

Hardcover, 162 pages
Published 2011
Acquired September 2012
Read September 2013

Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2012
edited by Clayton Hickman

Okay, the cover's not as nice, but in most other ways this is an improvement upon its already-quite-good predecessor. I remember not liking the 2011 series very much as it aired, but this book got me appreciating it-- even if the plots don't hang together, surely it's one of Doctor Who's most stylish and gorgeous-looking seasons? The episode guides are still good, but there's even better features than ever before:

• notes from Amy and Rory to the Doctor during their honeymoon(s)
• cut sequences from episodes (including a Fiddler on the Roof song in "The Impossible Astronaut," and all the drafts of "The Curse of the Black Spot"... including the ship-less one!)
• an explanation of the three-month gap between "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon" (complete with map)
• "The Changing Hats of Doctor Who"(!)
• a scrapbook of Madame Vastra's history (including Henry Gordon Jago reference)
• report cards for Rory, Mels, and Amy
• a Teselecta user's guide ("The Teselecta comes with a range of pre-programed dance moves for scenarios when it is required to dance convincingly.... NEVER attempt manual improvisation - IT CAN COST LIVES!")
• a TwoStreams Kindness Facility PR brochure
• The White Flag, the newspaper of the always-surrending planet of Tivoli
• Charles Dickens's twitter updates

Particularly awesome is a Neil Gaiman/Mark Buckingham comic strip prequel to "The Doctor's Wife" and the Doctor's job application for the department store in "Closing Time."

There's a real emphasis in here on how the show is made, which is both pleasing to someone like me and sure to inspire and thrill a whole new generation of younger fans. It's a shame that there don't seem to be any future Brilliant Books on the horizon-- no doubt a victim of the awful scheduling decisions that have plagued the show of later...

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXVIII: Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?: The Deluxe Edition, With other tales of the Dark Knight

Comic hardcover, n.pag
Published 2009 (contents: 1989-2009)
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2012

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?: The Deluxe Edition, With other tales of the Dark Knight

Writer: Neil Gaiman

Artists: Andy Kubert, Scott Williams, Simon Bisley, Mark Buckingham, Mike Hoffman, Kevin Nowlan, Bernie Mireault, Matt Wagner
Colors: Alex Sinclair, Nansi Hoolahan, Tom McCraw, Joe Matt

Letters: Jared K. Fletcher, John Costanza, Agustin Mas, Todd Klein

This is close to the end of my Sandman spin-off runthrough. It's also stretching the definition of "Sandman spin-off," though no moreso than when I included Gaiman's early DC work like Black Orchid and Legend of the Green Flame. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? actually teases you with an appearance of someone who might be Death... but turns out not to be. (Or so I think, anyway. Some evidently disagree!) The story takes place after Batman's death in Grant Morrison's Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis, with all of his old allies and enemies gathering in Gotham to pay homage to him. Only... everyone thinks they did it. So we get a succession of stories told, by Catwoman, Alfred, the Mad Hatter, Joker, Robin, Clayface, Superman, each telling completely contradictory stories about something they did (or did not do) that lead to the death of Batman.

The stories range from a few pages to a panel or two to just dialogue, but each of them manages to be completely and utterly Batman. It's the greatest hits of Batman deaths, if he was allowed to have more than one. There are a lot of nice details-- my favorite part is the guy outside the club where the funeral is being held who watched the villains' cars-- in both the (beautiful) art (by Andy Kubert) and the writing. It's the perfect tribute to the Batman, the man who never gave up, no matter how crazy he seemed.

The whole funeral is overlaid by two people talking in caption boxes, who turn out to be Batman and not Death ("I don't think death is a person, Bruce."), and Batman passes from the funeral, from life, into something greater and beyond reality. Here, Bruce gets a chance to reflect on who he was and why he did everything he did. There are a lot of great lines, my favorite being, "Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman." And then he's done... or as done as Batman can ever be, because he's apparently got to pass on somewhere else. I know that when Darkseid kills Batman in Final Crisis, Batman actually goes tumbling into the past, so I assume this is all tied into that, but it works on its own as a story about the endurance and struggle of Batman, too.

The still-thin book is padded out by everything else Gaiman wrote related to Batman, which amounts to a weird set of stories. "A Black and White World" is about what Batman and the Joker do "off-panel" in their comics, but Simon Bisley's art is just a little too "gritty 1990s" to work for me. Check out those ears on the Batman! And those R. Crumb-style women. "Pavane" is about a Suicide Squad agent trying to recruit Poison Ivy, giving her origin story-- pretty good stuff. "Original Sins" and "When is a Door" are two linked stories about a news team visiting Gotham to do a feature on supervillains.

I like the frame a lot, being filled with big and small character moments, and jokes at the Penguin's expense, but "When is a Door," the teams encounter with the Riddler, ended up being a long metafictional rant about the death of fun in superhero comics. Well, Neil Gaiman, go write some fun superhero comics then. This is your world; as I was just reminded, Batman and the Riddler just live in it.

Faster than a DC Bullet Special: Superheroes and Utopia, Part I: Miracleman: The Golden Age

Comic trade paperback, 158 pages
Published 1993 (contents: 1989-91)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2012

Miracleman: The Golden Age

Writer: Neil Gaiman

Artist: Mark Buckingham
Art Assist: Gail Pople

Painters: Sam Parsons, D'Israeli
Letterers: Wayne Truman, Elita Fell

Since reading Peter Paik's From Utopia to Apocalypse and then rereading some of the original Superman stories by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, I've become fascinated by the idea of superheroes and utopia. Superheroes are people with powers so immense that they can change the world for the better, but rarely do we see this explored in superhero fiction. We are drawn to Superman because we believe he can make America better, but most of his stories involve him slugging it out with Lex Luthor. Alan Moore's Watchmen is one of the few superhero texts to really look at the superhero's utopian potential, and his own Miracleman series is another.

Unfortunately, copyright tangles mean that his Miracleman stories are all out of print and difficult to get hold of, even through libraries, so when I decided to read some Miracleman all I could get hold of was one volume, collecting Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham's run. As far as I've been able to tell, at the end of the previous volume, Miracleman defeats the evil Kid Miracleman and takes over the world for its own good, ushering in a utopia. In their stories, Gaiman and Buckingham explore that utopia. It's rare enough for a superhero story to show a utopia being created, and much rarer for it to try to tell stories in it afterwards. What do you talk about in a world where, by definition, nothing can go wrong? The Golden Age doesn't provide one big answer, but rather a number of little ones, and so I shall provide a number of little reviews to correspond.

"The Golden Age"

This story is simply a series of beautiful shots of the new London and new Earth created by Miracleman, with narration telling us how amazing the new world is. It's merely a prologue setting the tone for the stories to come.

August 3, 1987: "A Prayer and Hope..."
In this story, a group of three people go to pray to Miracleman, which requires climbing up a tower so high that they need spacesuits near the top. It's hard to see some aspects of this story as utopian-- why does Miracleman make it so hard for his people to see him?-- but what is particularly interesting about this grueling climb is the ending, when Miracleman refuses one petitioner's request that his daughter be healed, but answers another's that she can't draw as well as she'd like with "You are correct; each of you should have the right to art. Yes. I will see what I can do." What is important in this utopia isn't an individual life, but the lives of many.

"Trends"
A group of schoolkids talk, drawn in a cartoony style. What I found interesting about this was that the counterculture that is springing up values Kid Miracleman, using him as the basis for their aesthetic. But aesthetic is all it seems to be, or at least the values are those of every coutnerculture movement.

"Screaming"
A man paired with a woman by computer reflects as they lie in bed together after having sex. He very nearly missed out on dying in the battle between Miracleman and Kid Miracleman. This story shows us the emotional cost of utopia-- but also its power, in a flashback to a moment where the man, as a young boy, had a brief encounter with Miracleman and was awed. Despite it all, he admires Miracleman, not hates him.

June 1990: "Skin Deep"
A man recounts the story of how one night, working at a windmill in the middle of nowhere, he had sex with Miraclewoman, the embodiment of female perfection (just as Miracleman is male perfection). They have sex many subsequent times, but when he accuses her of being perfect, she reverts to her "civilian," non-superhuman form, and they have sex one last time. The story seems to say that Miraclewoman is not perfect, or rather that she is only perfect because all people are perfect; it is only easier to see with her. It's an interesting, touching story-- probably the one that stuck with me most out of the book-- and I like what it says about the superhero archetype, that it represents the possibility for perfection within all of us. But it suggests that archetype's dark side, too: that because we can never fully realize perfection in our own lives, we will always be disappointed...

May 1 - October 1, 1993: "Notes from the Underground"
This is an odd story: one of Miracleman's alien allies has created a series of androids based on Andy Warhol, but has also resurrected Doctor Gargunza, the deranged scientist who helped create Miracleman to begin with. The alien, we eventually learn, has been resurrecting Gargunza again and again, hoping to someday change him into a better person. It's a dark, unsettling story with interesting potentials.

October 28, 1993: "Winter's Story"
After his victory, Miracleman allowed women without children to apply to be injected with his sperm, creating a race of superbeings. This story shows a family with one such child, Mist, as they read about the first one, Winter. Again, it's an unsettling story: you have a woman granted the gift of life, but unable to connect with her daughter's cosmic consciousness. Does Mist treat her mother unfairly? Or is her mother simply failing to adjust to the glorious new world they live in?

"Spy Story"
A group of spies unable to let go of the old world have been made happy by being placed within "the City," where they can play out their spy games to their heart's content. Pretty good, but derivative of The Prisoner (or at least Danger Man), and pretty tangential to the world of Miracleman.

August 22, 1994: "Carnival"
The last story brings together at least one character who appeared in each previous story, on a day in London where Miracleman's triumph over Kid Miracleman is celebrated. It epitomizes what works about the rest of the book: at the same time we mourn the old world and people unable to transition out of it, we see the glimpses of potential that make this new world wondrous. The book's last two pages, as hundred of people take flight supported only by balloons, is wondrous.

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.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XIV: Taller Tales

Comic trade paperback, 216 pages
Published 2003 (contents: 2000-02)
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2011

The Sandman Presents: Taller Tales

Writer: Bill Willingham
Artists: Mark Buckingham, Zander Cannon, Duncan Fegredo, Peter Gross, Niko Henrichon, Adam Hughes, Phil Jimenez, Michael Kaluta, Marc Laming, Jason Little, Shawn McManus, Linda Medley, Albert Monteys, Kevin Nowlan, Andrew Pepoys, Paul Pope, John Stokes, Daniel Torres, Bill Willingham
Colorists: Lee Loughridge, Daniel Vozzo
Letterers: John Costanza, Todd Klein

This collection brings together a disparate set of stories by Bill Willingham, who I guess is kind of a big deal because he wrote Fables or something? I don't know, I never read it. (Should I?) As Willingham himself points out, all of the stories here are about the telling of stories, but that's appropriate; this is the Dreaming, after all.

First off is "Merv Pumpkinhead, Agent of D.R.E.A.M. I've said it before, but Merv, the Dreaming's janitor, is my second-favorite Sandman character, and this story is every bit as good as you'd expect a James Bond story featuring a man with a pumpkinhead to be, dirty sex jokes and all. The idea of a world-level threat doesn't feel very Sandmanesque, but on the other hand, I thought the car that could move out of people's dreams and even become a matchbox car when need was awesome. (But why is Matthew the Raven, my favorite character, now white?)

"The Further Adventures of Danny Nod, Heroic Library Assistant" is all right. The premise is okay-- it doesn't really do anything new or interesting with the idea of wandering into different stories-- but the art sells it, as each couple pages is illustrated by someone else, Danny himself remaining the only visual constant in the story. There are fun bits. Nice to see Goldie again. (But didn't he leave the Dreaming?) "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Dreams... But Were Afraid to Ask" takes a similar point, with a bunch of two-page vignettes all illustrated by different teams. My favorite stories were the ones explaining why dreams can be sexual (it's because Merv is a bit of a sleaze) and whether dreams have dreams (they do and it's weird).

The bulk of the book is "The Thessaliad," about Thessaly, the last of the Thessalian witches, who featured in the Sandman story "A Game of You." There's some great ideas here, such as the fact that if Thessaly just reenacts the tropes of a quest story, she'll automatically end up wherever she wants to be, and I liked the interplay with her "fetch," but sometimes the characterization was a little too straightforward, and the difficulties a little too easily escaped. The end sets up some mysteries; I hope these are solved somewhere. (There's a lot of comments about Lucifer being up to something; I guess this is a reference to the concurrent Lucifer spin-off?)

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part III: Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame

Perfect-bound comic, 38 pages
Published 2000
Borrowed from the library
Read June 2011

Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame

Written by Neil Gaiman
Artwork by Michael D. Allred & Terry Austin, Mark Buckingham, John Totleben, Matt Wagner, Eric Shanower & Arthur Adams, Jim Aparo, Kevin Nowlan, Jason Little
Colored by Matt Hollingsworth
Lettered by Todd Klein

Action Comics Weekly sounds like the kind of thing I'd've liked, given my enjoyment of Wednesday Comics: an anthology title that came out weekly, with several stories advancing slowly issue to issue. But it was apparently a nightmare to pull together, and so it didn't even last a year. Legend of the Green Flame is the finale it never got, as Gaiman's script was dumped for someone else's, finally being illustrated and published some twelve years later. The story unites all of the characters-- the Blackhawk Squadron, the Green Lantern, Superman, Catwoman, the Phantom Stranger, Deadman, and a demon who totally isn't Etrigan, honest-- from Action Comics Weekly into one big story.

In this tale, Hal Jordan and Clark Kent find an old green lantern, originally found in some rubble in 1949, in a museum exhibit. When Hal uses it to charge his ring, the two of them end up flung into Hell itself. It's short, only a little longer than your typical single issue, so not a whole lot actually happens. What does happen is fun enough, I suppose, though I suspect it would have been funner had it actually been read as the conclusion to all of these characters' stories in Action Comics Weekly. I think my favorite random appearance was Deadman, who gets some funny material. I don't get why the Blackhawks find dead members of the Justice Society (including the Sandman, natch) in 1949, though.

As it is, it's nice to see Clark Kent and Hal Jordan hang out together. I don't know why Hal Jordan is so mopey here, or why the events of this story make him get over it, but Gaiman write a nice Clark/Superman. There's a fun bit where in the middle of a conversation, Clark flies off and gets a cat out of a tree, and the best scene in the book is probably when, upon their arrival in Hell, Superman is incapacitated by being able to hear the torment of every single being in Hell at once. Sometimes it sucks being Superman.

The resolution is a bit too easy, given all the buildup it gets, but that's a done-in-one story for you, I suppose. There are a number of different artists for some reason, but it's not as jarring as you might think, since each of them does a different chapter, and each chapter takes the story some place completely different. Oh, and the ending joke is fun, though it wasn't until just now that I finally got it. "The place is all yours," indeed, Neil.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part I: The Absolute Death

Comic hardcover, 360 pages
Published 2009 (contents: 1989-2003)
Borrowed from the library
Read October 2010

The Absolute Death

Writer: Neil Gaiman
Artists: Chris Bachalo, Mark Buckingham, Mike Dringenberg, Colleen Doran, P. Craig Russell, Malcolm Jones III, Mark Pennington, Dave McKean, Jeffrey Jones
Colorists: Steve Oliff, Matt Hollingsworth, Daniel Vozzo, Lovern Kindzierski, John J Muth, Alex Bleyaert, Rob Ro
Letterers: Todd Klein, Jeffrey Jones

This last Sandman Absolute Edition collects the adventures of Dream's sister, Death. It leads off with two Death-centric issues from The Sandman, which was probably done to pad out the book, but I still appreciated the chance to reread "The Sound of Her Wings," which features Death's first appearance. In retrospect, it stands out: Dream narrates part of it, which rarely (never?) happened again in the series, and it also seems to set up some of Dream's decisions in The Kindly Ones, a full fifty issues later. But the primary point of this collection are the two Death-focused miniseries it collects.

The first of these is The High Cost of Living, which tells the story of a 24-hour period spent by Death as an ordinary, living person in modern New York. Primarily told from the perspective of a layabout teenager, it's a nice story with a lot of fun moments and couple reappearances by Sandman stalwarts such as Mad Hettie and Hazel and Foxglove. Death's adventures are alternately entertaining and horrifying, as you might imagine, and I enjoyed this one a lot.

The second is The Time of Your Life, which isn't really about Death at all, though she appears; it's more about Hazel and Foxglove, and how they deal with having a child and the pressures of fame. I liked getting to focus on these two because, for me, Death doesn't really work as a principal character-- even more so than Dream, she's all-powerful and all-knowing, and what's worse, she likes what she does, so what's at stake for her? She works better as a side character in the stories of others. Hazel and Foxglove go on a stranger journey in this tale, and learn a bit about themselves-- though unfortunately the story occasionally descends into the kind of cheesy aphorisms you might see inside of chocolate wrappers. Also the ending is a convenient cop-out.

The art of both tales is ably provided by Chris Bachalo. I especially liked his art in the second story, where Mark Buckingham's inks are clear and gorgeous. The use of color in The Time of Your Life is really great, too.

After this, there's a few mini-stories about Death, all of which look pretty good, but maybe didn't do a whole lot for me. The one about 9/11 also descends in cheesy aphorisms, I think. The AIDS awareness story featuring Death was worth it for John Constantine holding a banana while Death put a condom on it.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman, Part III: The Absolute Sandman, Volume Three

Comic hardcover, 616 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 1991-2000)
Borrowed from the library
Read September 2010

The Absolute Sandman, Volume Three

Writer: Neil Gaiman
Artists: Jill Thompson, Vince Locke, Bryan Talbot, Mark Buckingham, P. Craig Russell, Michael Zulli, John Watkiss, Dick Giordano, Michael Allred, Shea Anton Pensa, Alec Stevens, Gary Amaro, Kent Williams, Tony Harris, Steve Leialoha
Colorists: Dave Vozzo, Lovern Kindzierski, Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh
Letterer: Todd Klein

As I'd mentioned earlier, I was somewhat lukewarm towards the earlier volumes of The Absolute Sandman. There was certainly an amazing mythology at work, but I found it hard to be interested in Dream as a character; often, I was more invested in the random people who got caught up in his adventures. (Curiously, all of these substitute protagonists seem to usually be women. I wonder if there's anything in that.) But the substory Brief Lives, collected here, changed all that. This story features Dream and his sister Delirium searching for their lost brother Destruction-- and in the process of that, Dream finally has to come to terms with his relationship with his son. It's half a road-trip comedy, half a meditation on knowing when to move on, and half a very dark fairy tale. It's definitely the funniest of the Sandman storylines... but it's also the most touching. I enjoyed every aspect of this one a lot, from Delirium's inane attempts to try to drive a mortal car, to Dream and Destruction's conversation on reuniting, from the first appearance of Merv, the pumpkinheaded janitor of the Dreaming, to the moment where Dream finally goes and sees Orpheus. Most of all, it's great to finally get a sense of Dream as a person. (Inasmuch as an anthropomorphic personification of an abstract universal concept can be one, I suppose.)

What struck me as I was reading it is that The Sandman really is a literary comic book. I mean, there have been plenty of literary graphic novels produced-- non-superhero fare that is done in one sitting. But The Sandman unlike most "highbrow" sequential art pieces, is completely and utterly a comic book: an ongoing, indefinite story. In total, the series comprises some 75 issues, and stories and characters and ideas weave in and out of these issues the same way they might in a Superman or Spider-Man ongoing. Gaiman really utilizes the potential of the comic ongoing to its maximum here, and that is the reason I like The Sandman as much as I do. It might have taken until Brief Lives for me to like The Sandman, but Brief Lives would never have worked without all the preceding issues to lead up to it. Gaiman has utterly mastered one of my favorite aspects of the medium here, and I find that delightful.

A brief word about the other storyline collected in this volume, Worlds' End. This is a collection of one-issue stories set in the world of The Sandman, but unlike many of the other ones, they're connected with a frame narrative. They're also the weakest; most of these did nothing at all for me. Strangely dull for Gaiman.