Miracle Man
Robert
M. Price
Perhaps I ought to call the character Marvel Man, as Alan
Moore did when he revived and revamped him, but no. I will stick with the name
under which I first encountered the super hero, in Eclipse Comics. There he had
been dubbed “Miracle Man” in order to avoid legal entanglements with Marvel
Comics (which is pretty ironic given the rumor that Marvel may now reprint
these comics!). For myself, I’d rather reserve the name “Marvel Man” for the
50s British rechristening of Captain Marvel, whose unofficial continuation he
was. The Alan Moore 80s revival I call Miracle Man, whichever side of the Atlantic
you happen to be on.
These
ruminations are going to be based upon issues 1-15 of Alan Moore’s Miracle Man epic. I never read the rest,
by Moore, then Neal Gaiman, and they are too expensive to buy right now. So I
will have to comment upon the latter issues some other time.
Alan Moore
has a gift for rewriting problematical or lackluster hero origins. He had just
retrovamped Swamp-Thing for DC and would soon rewrite the Charlton and
Red
Circle characters (among others) for DC’s Watchmen.
I just loved the combination of true-ringing original elements that gave
authenticity to Moore’s versions
together with the radical novelty of his conceptions. This alchemy was on hand
in plenty in both Miracle Man and in the two-parter Whatever Happened
to the Man of Tomorrow? But even Moore
could overdo it, and I feel he has way overdone it, to the point of parody, in
his retconning of Supreme as well as in his League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen.
But Miracle
Man was a masterpiece. The clash between Golden/Silver Age sensibilities
and those of the modern period was nowhere better displayed than in the scene
in which the reawakened Miracle Man was newly remembering his earlier
adventures with Young Miracle Man (= Captain Marvel Junior) and Kid Miracle Man
(=, sort of, Mary Marvel) and recounting them to his skeptical wife. She just
could not take seriously that there might have been a sidekick named “Dickie
Dauntless.” And Miracle Man smashed the floor with a frustrated fist: he knew
how stupid it sounded, yet he remembered it!
Naturally,
it eventuated that none of these remembered adventures had ever really taken
place. They were false memories induced while he was in suspended animation in
Dr. Garganza’s “Zarathustra Project.” Zarathustra was the name of the prophet
who founded Zoroastrianism in either the seventh, twelfth, or seventeenth
centuries. The Greeks called him Zoroaster, but Nietzsche preferred the Persian
original and utilized the name for his blasphemy-hurling sage in Thus Spake
Zarathustra. There he promulgated the doctrine of the coming of the
Ubermensch, the Superman, who would transcend the socially-conditioned
herd-existence of the mob and transvaluate all values in the light of his own
courage and his best thinking. The name “Project Zarathustra” tips us off in
advance that Miracle Man is going to be a Nietzschean Superman, beyond puny
human standards of good and evil, just like Moore’s
character Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen about the same time.
What
motivated the evil machinations of Dr. Garganza, the counterpart to Captain
Marvel’s Dr. Sivana? It had become, in Moore’s
hands, quite a bit more complicated since the Marvel Man days. We learn that
the German expatriate Garganza had traveled the world. In the course of his
peregrinations, he chanced upon Existentialist philosopher (and one-time Nazi Party
member) Martin Heidegger, who famously spoke of the need to accept the reality
of one’s inevitable death. One must no longer slide by, wasting days and years,
under the comfortable illusion that one has an endless supply of them to
squander. Rather, one must come to reckon with one’s own mortality and then
take into one’s own hands one’s destiny. Resolving to follow the mob (“das Mann”) no further on the lemming
path, the “authentic” man will decide for himself what his life, the remainder
of it, will be about. One can readily see the analogy with the
Invictus-Superman of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
Only
Garganza did not like what he heard from Heidegger. He could not accept
mortality and resolved to transcend it. This dream came quite close to fruition
by his chance discovery of a crashed alien space ship, containing a whole
wardrobe of different physical forms, stashed in alternate dimensional pockets,
each equipped for a different sort of use. The Miracle Man body was one such.
The implantation of the comic-book memories into Miracle Man was part of
Garganza’s Project Zarathustra, as he experimented on the subject by having him
live an illusory life while in suspended animation. (You will recall Moore’s
use of the same gimmick in his Superman Annual story, recently remade as part
of the Justice League TV series, “For the Man who Has Everything,” where
Superman is “put under” and begins to live out a dream life reminiscent of
Jesus’ in The Last Temptation of Christ.)
The echoes
of Alan Moore’s Miracle Man have rung far and wide. For instance, the
powerful notion of an alienated, turned-evil sidekick surfaced again in Kingdom
Come. In this version, it is Billy Batson himself who has refused to call
forth his godlike alter ego for all these years, and when he finally does, like
Moore’s Kid Miracle Man, he
rampages. But think also of the failed miniseries The L.A.W. in which DC
tried miserably to revive the Charlton heroes under their proper names but with
much less class than Moore had done. Anyway, this series, too, involved the
evil revenge of a sidekick, namely Tiger, the young partner of Judo Master. He
became the world-threatening Avatar. Most recently, the theme has resurfaced in
The Incredibles. It is the fan and would-be sidekick of Mr. Incredible
who learns resentment (and mimetic rivalry) when his idol, fearing for his
safety in a way Batman never did for Robin’s, refuses to allow him to fight
alongside him.
It seems
quite ironic to me that Alan Moore grew to bemoan the age of dark and paranoid
superheroes he and Frank Miller created in the mid-eighties. Miracle Man did
not mind plowing right into enemy soldiers, blowing them to bloody smithereens.
And think of Rorshach, the Comedian, etc. Moore,
an ultra-liberal, may have been interpreting (and parodying) the Nietzschean
Superman in the Nazi-leaning way, rejecting the belief of Kierkegaard in Fear
and Trembling that the individual transcends the absolute. Moore
may have been trying to satirize the draconian heroics he portrays, blaming
Steve Ditko’s Ayn-Randism for them. But if so, it was not clear whom he wanted
us to root for, and many of us rooted for Rorschach (“Used to mollycoddle
scum—let them live.”). And for Miracle Man.
Years later, Moore would try to
ring the curtain down on his own dark-heroic era by writing the Awesome Comics
mini-series Judgment Day in which we discovered that the Youngblood
agent Sentinel, Rob Liefeld’s version of War Machine, had rewritten history to
make it into the dark world of the 80s-90s comic universe complete with the
“chainsaw-wielding cyborgs” typical of Image and Awesome Comics. Sentinel was
convicted and exiled by his superheroic peers, and Moore
oversaw a total revamping of Awesome Comics to make it into more of a vehicle
of nostalgia and parody, as with his spoofing take on the once-brutal Supreme series. Moore
finally allowed his politically correct colors to emerge, an ideology in which
heroes are monsters and we would be better off thinking of them only as the
butt of jokes. Miracle Man finally spoke the magic word “Kimota” and turned,
once and for all, into his weak and mortal, unheroic self.