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Feb. 6th, 2004 12:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
learnedaxWhile in a waitstate for the thirty dozen cookies I made today (conservative estimate) I finished reading Alan Moore's run of Miracleman. Excellent stuff.
I really liked this story throughout, although it's really almost two separate stories. There's a very sharp break between books two and three, which makes sense externally given the production gap of several years while, among other things, Moore wrote Watchmen. Thematically, the impact of a lot of ideas from Watchmen can be clearly seen in book three, whereas earlier parallels are much less direct. Both are interesting, if very different, places to go.
The very personal, emotional study of alter-ego Mike Moran that drives the first two books is thorough and poignant. I don't think I've seen a cold-light-of-reality-comes-to-mythos story done better. The dynamic that keeps it enticing is the symbiotic yet perpetually tense relationship between Mike Moran and Miracleman. The plot plays up the contrast between mythos and realism as well, and the way Moore incorporates old Marvelman adventures is not only quite clever, it also seems like a strong influence on Sandman. In fact, quite a bit of early Sandman feels like it resonates with Miracleman to me, though this is the only concrete example I can produce.
The thing which struck me about book three is that, rather suddenly, Mike Moran drops almost completely out of the picture. We are no longer looking at an everyman coming to grips with sometimes being a superhero; we are looking at a superhero coming to grips with a world full of everymen. In a way, both halves of that are also quite well developed in Watchmen, with its many simultaneous perspectives on heroism, identity, and the need to be someone other than normal. But the story of Olympus is impersonal, and as with V for Vendetta I find it to use its characters as tools for its ideas, rather than vice versa. Not a bad thing, but certainly a contrast from the beginning. And I really liked the beginning, not least because, although it contains a number of epic battles that feel like classic good vs. evil stories, they exist to highlight what comic book superhero lives are, contrasted with everyday life. In point of fact, the majority of this epic superhero story is extremely quiet and introspective, far more about the psyche than about the action. The fear of a man who discovers his alter-ego has replaced him down to taking over his marriage is not really a point of view we've seen before.
The end, on the other hand, is a very clear echo of Watchmen. Combine Dr. Manhattan, the superhuman who enacts sweeping changes in society but has lost his humanity, with the overarching ideas of how putting superbeings (Dr. Manhattan, Miracleman, Ozymandius) into our world would irrevocably change it, and you've got Olympus.
The twist here, and the reason these two stories hang together, is the consideration of man's relationship to his myths, and in particular his mixed reactions to their taking real form. Mike Moran cannot in the long term abide sharing an identity with a demigod (though he is himself quite heroic), so his disappearance from the story's conclusion is as inevitable as the demigod's isolation from normal humanity and its worship of him. Although I might wish for a more thorough examination of the psyche's bifurcation, the process of apotheosis is the natural and powerful endpoint.
I really liked this story throughout, although it's really almost two separate stories. There's a very sharp break between books two and three, which makes sense externally given the production gap of several years while, among other things, Moore wrote Watchmen. Thematically, the impact of a lot of ideas from Watchmen can be clearly seen in book three, whereas earlier parallels are much less direct. Both are interesting, if very different, places to go.
The very personal, emotional study of alter-ego Mike Moran that drives the first two books is thorough and poignant. I don't think I've seen a cold-light-of-reality-comes-to-mythos story done better. The dynamic that keeps it enticing is the symbiotic yet perpetually tense relationship between Mike Moran and Miracleman. The plot plays up the contrast between mythos and realism as well, and the way Moore incorporates old Marvelman adventures is not only quite clever, it also seems like a strong influence on Sandman. In fact, quite a bit of early Sandman feels like it resonates with Miracleman to me, though this is the only concrete example I can produce.
The thing which struck me about book three is that, rather suddenly, Mike Moran drops almost completely out of the picture. We are no longer looking at an everyman coming to grips with sometimes being a superhero; we are looking at a superhero coming to grips with a world full of everymen. In a way, both halves of that are also quite well developed in Watchmen, with its many simultaneous perspectives on heroism, identity, and the need to be someone other than normal. But the story of Olympus is impersonal, and as with V for Vendetta I find it to use its characters as tools for its ideas, rather than vice versa. Not a bad thing, but certainly a contrast from the beginning. And I really liked the beginning, not least because, although it contains a number of epic battles that feel like classic good vs. evil stories, they exist to highlight what comic book superhero lives are, contrasted with everyday life. In point of fact, the majority of this epic superhero story is extremely quiet and introspective, far more about the psyche than about the action. The fear of a man who discovers his alter-ego has replaced him down to taking over his marriage is not really a point of view we've seen before.
The end, on the other hand, is a very clear echo of Watchmen. Combine Dr. Manhattan, the superhuman who enacts sweeping changes in society but has lost his humanity, with the overarching ideas of how putting superbeings (Dr. Manhattan, Miracleman, Ozymandius) into our world would irrevocably change it, and you've got Olympus.
The twist here, and the reason these two stories hang together, is the consideration of man's relationship to his myths, and in particular his mixed reactions to their taking real form. Mike Moran cannot in the long term abide sharing an identity with a demigod (though he is himself quite heroic), so his disappearance from the story's conclusion is as inevitable as the demigod's isolation from normal humanity and its worship of him. Although I might wish for a more thorough examination of the psyche's bifurcation, the process of apotheosis is the natural and powerful endpoint.
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Date: 2004-02-08 05:16 pm (UTC)Both stories begin with their protagonists returning from a lengthy "exile", and have been changed by that exile in fundamental ways, although it takes them each some time to fully appreciate this.
But if you want to see what was realy influencing Gaiman during the early issues of Sandman, read the first couple volumes of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. Several early Sandman sequences are strikingly modeled on bits from that run. [Not that I'm accusing Neil of plagiarism; merely of having not yet completely found "his voice".]
the need to be someone other than normal
Yup, that's a powerful motif throughout Alan's work, and one that is generally quite ambivalent. He has a lot more sympathy for the common man than many writers of heroic fiction.
The fear of a man who discovers his alter-ego has replaced him down to taking over his marriage is not really a point of view we've seen before.
Not in comics, perhaps. It seems to me that Ray Bradbury must have written a story like this, though I may be imagining it. Jeckyl & Hyde comes close.
Masks have always been, to brutally mix metaphors, two-edged. This is true in real life, but is perhaps easier to see in heroic fiction. The classic love triangle between Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Superman is an obvious forerunner. And even that calls back to The Scarlet Pimpernel, and possibly even earlier works.
I myself have seen people "change masks" in very unexpected, and sometimes devastating, ways. As
I might wish for a more thorough examination of the psyche's bifurcation
It's possible that Gaiman was going there with his run, but he didn't get very far down that path before real-world issues intervened. I'd say that the odds are good that the issues will be resolved, and that he'll finish that story, both before the decade is out.
But I don't think they're good enough that I'd actually bet serious money on them :-) The legal history of the character is as interesting in its own way as the story itself, is *much* more convoluted, and has already generated at least one book. And we're still at *least* one major lawsuit away from reaching the end of *that* particular narrative.