Tom Brevoort Says Miracleman

Will Miracleman be hanging around with the Avengers? It’s inevitable, says Tom Brevoort, Marvel Executive Editor/Senior Vice President of Publishing and Marvel’s longest-standing employee in his latest Substack. Even though that will make it less special. Indeed he states that if Marvel had owned Watchmen, they’d have all been part of the Marvel Universe much sooner than they were at DC Comics.

It’s all part of a much larger and worthy look at his job, his workload, the decisions he makes and just how cool he finds the comics he works on. Such as saying, “It’s purely anecdotal evidence, but we got more mail in response to the first issue of Ryan North and Iban Coello’s FANTASTIC FOUR launch than any other title in recent memory, most all of it overwhelmingly positive. So it seems as though the team struck a chord with their first smaller, more intimate outing”. But Bleeding Cool is as Bleeding Cool does, and of course, we are going to grab the most headline-worthy aspect and blow it up big. To paraphrase Ben Elton‘s William Shakespeare in Upstart Crow, it’s what we do.

So, asked about what might be happening with Miracleman at Marvel Comics, after Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham‘s The Dark Age storyline is finished, say, he writes, “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.”

In recent years, while Dan DiDio led with the Before Watchmen prequel stories, which had been prevented for years by the previous publisher Paul Levitz, it was Geoff Johns who led the charge integrating Watchmen into the DC Universe with DC Rebirth, The Button, Doomsday Clock and most recently Flashpoint Beyond, New Golden Age and Justice Society Of America. As a creator-owned series that DC Comics somehow has managed to find a loophole in the publishing contract to never return the rights to their owners, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, which is why Bleeding cool always referred to Doomsday Clock as an unauthorised sequel, it’s a different situation with Miracleman, and Marvel has spent seven fugures making sure that everyone involved with the rights is okay with it.

After talking about some of the Watchmen prequels in detail, Tom Brevoort adds, “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.)”

Wolverine Vs Rorschach, it would have happened, and Tom Brevoort might have edited it! He concludes, “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.”

More, much much more, including some we may revisit again tomorrow, at the link.