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I just picked up the Miracleman Omnibus, this week — which I think is the fourth time I've bought these stories — and it got my wheels turning on a few questions that might make for good newsletter fodder, if you're looking for some of that:
1. This might be a question you can't answer yet, but: you mentioned in a recent newsletter that Miracleman's premise is an interesting one to explore in a single series or storyline, but it's not exactly the sort of thing that works and plays well in a larger continuity. And yet it seems like Marvel is gearing up to have some sort of integration of Miracleman into the Marvel Universe. Where do you see the risks and rewards when it comes to bringing such a transformative character into a world that — at least theoretically! — is a single 60+ year story from hundreds of creators over thousands of issues?
2. DC took a lot of heat for making new comics featuring the Watchmen characters without the original creators, after decades of promising that they wouldn't do exactly that thing. Of course, they were entirely within their rights to do so, and I'm sure they sold respectably, or they wouldn't have gone back to that well. What's your take on what DC did right and wrong vis-a-vis Before Watchmen, Doomsday Clock, etc. And how is this informing Marvel's/your approach to Miracleman, another seminal '80s series from The Original Writer that exists in its own world?
3. As we're on the cusp of Miracleman joining the Marvel Universe in some capacity, what do you think are some of the best and worst examples of bringing another company's characters to a new publisher? I feel like the Justice Society's formation in the 1940s is probably the best-case scenario, with Guy-Who-Says-Shazam! feeling like a missed opportunity in the '70s (though there are certainly worse examples).
Taking them by number:
We’ll have to wait and see what the story is at any point where we decide to intermingle Miracleman with the mainstream Marvel Universe, but at first blush, I think it would be not so different from putting the WATCHMEN characters into the DC Universe. Which is to say, I think it made them less special. The thing that makes MIRACLEMAN noteworthy, which was also true for WATCHMEN, was that its world was consistent. That very structure was necessary for the conceit of both series: how the arrival of a super-powered individual would permanently distort the fabric of human society. While I suppose there’s some fannish pleasure to be had in seeing Doctor Manhattan trade barbs with Superman or for Batman to face off against Rorschach, the fact is that, in the DC Universe, those characters just become another set of masks and tights in a veritable sea of them. Likewise, in the Marvel Universe, Miracleman would just be another Sentry, another Blue Marvel, another Hyperion—a guy who could go toe-to-toe with Thor but who wasn’t intrinsically any more interesting in that context than that. What makes MIRACLEMAN interesting is that it isn’t a super hero story at all, not really. It’s a science fiction story, with all of its otherworldly changes being traceable back to a single event: the cashing of a Qys spaceship in the late 1940s. Pretty much all of the super-powered stuff in the series (apart from the assorted aliens, and ultimately it was their ship in the first place) comes from that on inciting incident. As soon as you throw some other element into that pool, the verisimilitude of the world is completely changed, and it just becomes another in an infinite series of parallel worlds, another Earth-22 or whatever. So I don’t really have any issue with, for example, doing a series of fun cover images showing Miracleman interacting with the Marvel heroes, but having him show up for a crossover would work as well for me as TOTAL ECLIPSE did back in the day —a stylistic disaster better off avoided. Doesn’t mean that there’s no way to do it at all, but it does mean that it would require a lot of brainpower and deliberation.
Back when BEFORE WATCHMEN was announced and people were arguing the relative merits of it, I put forward my thoughts—and they really haven’t changed all that much since then. To wit: I personally don’t think there’s a whole lot of need for any WATCHMEN prequels (and the eventual comics did little to persuade me otherwise; I really only thought that Darwyn Cooke’s MINUTEMEN was really worth the effort) but if Marvel had owned WATCHMEN, those characters would have been revived and folded into the Marvel Universe decades earlier, because they represent strong raw materials with a built-in audience. Plus, so long as doing so feels transgressive, readers are going to show up to see the car crash (even if they wind up liking it once they experience it.) So I kind of think that it was inevitable, in the same way that it’s likely similarly inevitable that we’ll see Miracleman hanging around with the Avengers one of these days in some manner. So DC wasn’t intrinsically wrong to do what they did, the only real quantifier was in how good the eventual comic books were. So if you liked BEFORE WATCHMEN and DOOMSDAY CLOCK, then it was worth doing, and if you don’t, then it wasn’t.
I think that most of the best and worst versions of that sort of character integration can be found within the DC umbrella, simply because over the years they’ve done so much more of that than anybody else. Heck, what we think of today as DC was actually two separate companies with some owners in common that were merged in 1947—before that, Wonder Woman, the Flash and Green Lantern were published by different guys that Superman, Batman and Robin. So to me, for example, I don’t think that the Charlton characters have been all that well served by their time as part of the DCU—but that’s entirely down to me having encountered them before that era. If they hadn’t been absorbed into DC, few people would remember them at all. The same is true of the assorted Quality characters, and even the bigger guns of the 1940s such as Blackhawk, Plastic Man and Captain Marvel would largely be things of the past with only a small group of hardcore aficionados today were they not similarly brought into the fold. I also feel like the Wildstorm characters have largely suffered in trying to make them integrate into the DC cosmology time and time again—which is funny, because that’s one that I don’t really think should be so difficult. It probably doesn’t help that the DC Universe, like the Marvel Universe, is already such a crowded landscape, with the characters who form its pillars already solidified. It’s tough to be Apollo and Midnighter in a world where the original Batman and Superman are running around, to the point where you’re much more nakedly a riff on the World’s Finest Team rather than entirely individual players. At Marvel, we’ve done less of this kind of character-absorption. I’d say that Daredevil worked out pretty well, even if the character was completely reinvented. And Ghost Rider was made to work once he left the old west and was recreated in the present day. I don’t think we’ve quite found the answer to what to do with Angela yet, though—removed from her connection to the SPAWN mythos, there’s not all that much to her, and our attempts to cement her into Thor’s family tree haven’t entirely taken off the way we might have hoped. |
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