Before his own Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, there was 1982’s Marvelman, Englishman Alan Moore’s landmark deconstruction of the American superhero.
If you ever need an example of why real art requires an outsider’s viewpoint, this is it. Moore took his loving familiarity with American comic book conventions — the superhuman powers, the magic words, the skintight costumes, the youthful sidekicks, the secret identities, the archenemies — and juxtaposed it all in his imagination with mundane British reality. The result was not the usual parody, but aesthetic insights that cut in more than one direction.
Using this American dreamscape to expose the American collective unconscious, Moore also explored a philosophical theme that paralleled Plato, who suggested that with great power comes catastrophe.
And Moore did it with a character who had an impeccable, if convoluted, pedigree. Marvelman was the son of Captain Marvel, the grandson of Superman.
When the Superman-DC lawsuit finally put Captain Marvel out of business here in 1953, his British publisher L. Miller & Son saw no reason why such a great concept should die there. Writer-artist Mick Anglo replaced “Shazam!” with “Kimota!” and created Marvelman, clearly a pastiche Captain Marvel, in 1954. The feature and spinoffs ran until 1963.
In 1982, Moore revamped the character for the British comic magazine Warrior (that version of Marvelman is now called “Miracleman” for corporate branding purposes).
The original character was juvenile even by 1950s standards, pretty thin stuff, but Moore’s reimagining was anything but.
Decades ago, through sheer luck, I acquired the first issues of Warrior, seemingly rare in the U.S. I realized immediately that here we had something familiar yet completely original, that the ground had shifted under the superhero fans’ feet.
Moore came up with a pseudo-scientific explanation for Marvelman’s original powers, which were virtually magical. Using salvaged alien technology, government scientist Emil Gargunza creates perfect alternate superhuman bodies for Micky Moran and his fellow test subjects, storing them in a pocket dimension to be summoned by a trigger word.
Gargunza “…creates four super-beings: Marvelman, Young Marvelman, Kid Marvelman, and Miraclewoman,” noted Chris Murray in his book The British Superhero. “One day while in the laboratory’s cafeteria, he comes across a copy of an L. Miller and Son British reprint of an American Captain Marvel story left by one of the workers and decides to create a computer-generated illusion that feeds his subjects the fantasy that they are living as superheroes. This repositions all the 1950 stories (or most of them) as fantasies, created to control the super beings. Gargunza also sexually abuses his young test subjects, adding another level of cynicism and horror to Moore’s reinterpretation.”
Marvel’s Ultimate titles and the whole twilight atmosphere of later American superhero comics can be traced back and credited to that obscure black-and-white British magazine.
In the middle of a terrorist attack, seedy, migraine-ridden journalist Micky Moran sees the oddly familiar word “atomic” backward through a glass door panel, mutters it, and explodes into the god that he had forgotten he was. His wife is incredulous, and the authorities are ungrateful. (An understatement. Their term for the superheroes is “the monsters.”)
Moore’s flair for dramatic surprises that amplify his themes appears throughout the series. When his wife expresses concern for his safety, Micky tells her not to worry — nothing can hurt him, he’s a superhero. Then, in an elevator, strangers hand him a baby, point out that he can’t transform without incinerating the child, and shoot him point blank. As Micky sinks into darkness, he is mocked by his own swaggering words…
“Marvelman, with art by Garry Leach and Alan Davis, prefigures much of what Moore would later do with Watchmen, although it is much darker in tone,” Murray wrote. “Moore’s Marvelman was unsure of himself, and the violence he faced was excessive. In Marvelman’s stories, he was surrounded by death and forces that challenged his very understanding of reality.”
“(Marvelman) was a character whose Eclipse reprints awakened me to a new world, one where guys in tights could be something much, much more than cardboard cutouts mouthing lame banalities,” observed the Blog into Mystery site. “It was like the first time a sports fan watches the NFL in high-definition. An eye-opener. The stories had a depth and pacing that I wasn’t accustomed to. They weren’t necessarily better than the standard fare, just on a different plane.”
“My approach is never ‘give the audience what they want’ because the audience doesn’t know what they want,” Moore once said. “That’s why they’re the audience. It’s the job of any artist or writer to give the audience what they need, which is not the same thing as what they want.”
With Marvelman, the deconstruction of the superhero had begun. He’s never been the same since.
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