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fit with V for Vendetta (!), an index to all issues of the comic, the script of Miracleman #1, the pencils for an unpublished Moore/Totleben collaboration, and more.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

Miracleman: Olympus by Alan Moore, John Totleben, et al.

Miracleman, Book Three: Olympus

Collection published: 2015
Contents originally published: 1987-2015
Acquired: April 2015
Read: August 2024

Story: The Original Writer with Grant Morrison & Peter Milligan

Art: John Totleben with Thomas Yeates, Joe Quesada & Mike Allred

Color Art: Steve Oliff with Richard Isanove & Laura Allred

Lettering: Joe Caramagna with Chris Eliopoulos & Travis Lanham

Alan Moore's final Miracleman volume explains the mystery running through the previous book (who was the mysterious woman?), ties things up with Michael Moran's wife and child, sends him into space to meet the Warpsmiths, and draws him into a final confrontation with Kid Miracleman.

Moore's comics can often be densely narrated, but usually he makes this work, achieving sympathy between word and art. I did not find that to be the case here. Though the stuff with Miraclewoman is fine if kind of predictable (the critique here is that female superheroes are sex fantasies), once the action moves into space, I struggled through the massive amount of ponderous text boxes, and I very much struggled to care. In here and in book one, the Warpsmiths are very much the weak link of the Miracleman saga. They are a necessary part of it, I suppose, but I never found reading about them very interesting.

Once we move back to Earth, the high point is definitely the stuff with Michael Moran's wife, showing us the human cost of utopia and perfection. 

The fight with Kid Miracleman is one of those things that would have been more shocking at the time, but after Watchmen, The Walking Dead, The Authority, and so on, it's hard to get excited about comics' ability to depict detailed and gruesome violence.

The other high point is the last issue. This to me was the truly revolutionary idea of Miracleman, and admittedly, the violence of the previous issue was a necessary step to get us there. The idea that superheros are fundamentally about using violence to reshape the world is baked into the origins of the genre; you can see it in the very first Superman stories. But most superhero stories pull back from this, not wanting to show violence, or not wanting to show big changes to the status quo. In Miracleman (as in Watchmen), Moore runs straight into that premise—now that the violence is over, Miracleman and Miraclewoman reshape the world into utopia. It's a staggering concept that few superhero comics would dare to embrace, and I loved the issue; it clearly makes the whole rest of the series worth it, and is probably the single best contribution Moore makes to the idea of the "realistic" superhero.

The volume has two stories by other writers, both published in 2015. One is by Grant Morrison, written in 1984 but not illustrated or published. I found this kind of half-baked, an interesting idea not well executed. The other is an adventure of the Miracleman Family at its peak, like the ones Moore sprinkled through the first two volumes, mostly worth it for the great Mike Allred art.

Don't be fooled by this volume's page count of 328; the actual story pages only go up to 147, and the Alan Moore stuff you are here for just 124. There's a lot of original art here, which to be honest I do not find very interesting. Marvel's three chunky collections of Miracleman are a lie; they are really three thin collections... and ought to have been one 300-page collection. (Marvel did later release a Miracleman Omnibus, but again, they padded it out with all these extras.) It feels like, having finally secured the rights to the character, Marvel wanted a return on its investment by padding the series out into as many purchases as they could, but in the long run, I think it harms the series's purchasability. It wasn't until 2023 that Marvel finally released a reasonably-sized volume of the whole series in one go than can stand alongside Moore's other 1980s works. I probably should have held out for that one.

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 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.