Miracleman: The Silver Age Review (Neil Gaiman, Mark Buckingham)

Miracleman is a comic with a convoluted past. Post-Alan Moore run, Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham took over and got out the first book in a proposed trilogy, The Golden Age, with The Silver and Dark Ages to follow. Except the then-publisher of the title went bankrupt in the mid-90s so only two issues of Silver Age were published up to that point - and there the title languished, unfinished.

Until now.

With Marvel picking up the publishing rights after many years of legal proceedings over who owned the character (Mick Anglo, the original creator, not the publisher), they reprinted the original Moore run and Golden Age and brought back Gaiman and Buckingham to finally complete the full 7 issue arc, The Silver Age (with Dark Age to follow).

So was it worth the 30 year wait (assuming anyone was waiting - I certainly wasn’t!)?

Nope.

Gaiman’s abandoned his patchwork storytelling approach in Golden Age so Silver Age has a more singular, sustained narrative, although Miracleman remains a supporting character in his own series. Silver Age sees MM bring Young Miracleman, Dickie Dauntless, back to life or something for some reason and the story sees Dickie’s reaction to the “perfect world” MM has created.

Unfortunately Silver Age is as boring as Golden Age. MM is still blandly all-powerful and the story takes a bloody age to get going and nowt much happens anyway. Equally bland and slightly less powerful Dickie runs off (after a baffling encounter - did MM try to molest a teenager?! Is that what the character is meant to be - a super-powered Jimmy Savile?), ponders a bit, has dreary characters say a lot of nothing to him, remembers his traumatic childhood, and then makes some pompous declarations.

The characters are uniformly dull and the lack of an even-slightly engaging story really grates long before the end. The narrative wears its religious references heavily and the comic as a whole feels incredibly self-important - undeservedly so. Gaiman’s vision for his Miracleman run seems to be: show the “perfect” world (Golden Age), bring back a formerly missing character to look at it and go “hmm - but is it?” (Silver Age) and then presumably upend it all in Dark Age. So profound.

Which makes this run two books so far where barely anything happens. It’s so tedious. Gaiman’s written some fine comics in the past but his Miracleman work is definitely not among them. Silver Age is another drawn-out, wearisome clunker of a read in this uninteresting series. If you’re interested in Miracleman, the first couple of Alan Moore books are pretty good but skip everything else that follows. Not all lost art is necessarily a loss for the audience.