When Marvel Comics announced recently that they would relaunch Miracleman, publishing first the Warrior Magazine stories and then the Eclipse Comics reprints before ever moving onto the next stage in the character’s development, many fans wondered when, after years of waiting, Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham’s long-delayed run on the title might finally conclude, with some new material promised and a future for the character to be set.At the time, Marvel didn’t have a specific timeframe in mind, but according to an interview with Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada yesterday, it’s now looking like the new Gaiman/Buckingham material will be coming in 2016, placing it well after the conclusion of Gaiman’s Sandman: Overture.”At the moment, from the looks of the calendar I would project Neil and Bucky’s new material to see the light of day sometime in 2016,” Quesada told Comic Book Resources. “I know that it seems like a long way away, but the material is finally going to see the light of day and will remain in print, and I think for that, we can all be grateful. To me, it’s a travesty that there are readers who have not only not been exposed to the original stories, but don’t even had a way to easily access them.”He also answered another, somewhat less pressing but nevertheless just as persistent question: Now that Marvel owns the character and there’s nothing preventing them from doing it, why isn’t the character reverting to his original name, Marvelman?”The answer is really simple. After much thought and internal discussion, we felt that between the two, Miracleman was the coolest name for the project,” Quesada explained. “I wish I had a more scientific answer for you, but that’s kind of how it went down. A bunch of us sat around at the editorial meeting and talked about it. We all remember it fondly as ‘Miracleman’ and just felt that the name was by far better than Marvelman. That’s not to say that the name Marvelman isn’t in play for something else down the line someday, but when asked to choose between the two, well…”
