Neil Gaiman is finally going to see his Miracleman run completed after decades of waiting — and then another six years since its announcement. According to Gaiman, the scripts have actually been done for a while, but yet another round of legal woes delayed it, and now Marvel seems to have everything sorted out and the series is ready to finally move forward and be completed after 29 years of waiting and almost as many lawsuits. For a while after they first got the rights, Marvel published some Miracleman reprints, but eventually everything seemed to dry up without much in the way of an explanation.
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Marvel had announced at San Diego Comic-Con International in 2009 that it owned the rights to Marvelman, having bought them from Nick Anglo on the advice of Neil Gaiman. Of course, in order to differentiate the American and English publishing rights, and to avoid a potential lawsuit from Marvel, a previous publisher had renamed the character Miracleman, rights that eventually reverted to the creators after the company went bust. When Todd McFarlane (who had obtained a share of the rights) used the character in print without the permission of Neil Gaiman (who owned the rest of them), it kicked off a series of events that ultimately saw the pair in court for a decade. After years, the pair finally settled the lawsuit, and eventually Gaiman has turned over those rights to Marvel now as well.
“It’s looking very like it. I mean, given that this has taken almost three decades, I think we’re 29 years since the last time I was trying to write Miracleman, I’m waiting to see what happens,” Gaiman told Rolling Stone. “But yes. Alan has described it as a bit of a poison chalice. The legal complications involved in Miracleman were so much more complicated and tangled and weird than anybody imagined. Then there were additional complications thrown in over the years. Eclipse went bankrupt. They were bought out of bankruptcy by Todd McFarlane…. Then we looked at what he owned. Well, but you don’t own anything. It turns out Eclipse didn’t actually have anything. We had to get deeper into who actually owned Miracleman. It turned out the original creator, Mick Anglo, had kept rights that people had claimed had been bought. There’s an entire book that you can buy on the mysteries of Miracleman. But it certainly looks … I get beautiful, beautiful emails from Mark Buckingham, who is drawing away.”
You can check out a pretty thorough history of how we got to this point here.
