Kimota!: The Miracleman Companion |
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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fit with V for Vendetta (!), an index to all issues of the comic, the script of Miracleman #1, the pencils for an unpublished Moore/Totleben collaboration, and more.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) |
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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!
