Fellowship & Fairydust

Today, November 18, is the 70th birthday of Alan Moore.

Click here to read the previous installment, about the beginning of Alan Moore’s career in comics.

I Dream a World of Dreams Fulfilled: Utopia in Miracleman

Having taken a slash-and-burn approach (destroy everything about the character, rebuild as a new character) to Captain Britain, Moore used it again in 1982 when he began writing Miracleman.

Created in the 1950s as Marvelman, this hero was a British ripoff of a superhero known today as Shazam.¹ Moore starts the story by showing how Michael Moran (a teenager last readers saw him) is now a 45-year-old married journalist. After decades of amnesia, Moran remembers he becomes a superhero by saying a magic word, “kimota.”

Moran is overjoyed at redirecting his power. His wife, Liz, wonders about his recovered memories. Was there really a Miracle family (Miracleman, Kid Miracleman, Young Miracleman, Miraclewoman) in the 1950s? Did they really have such silly names and fight villains with silly names like Young Nastyman?

Moran discovers the answer is no. Almost everything he remembers about being a superhero comes from computer simulations fed to him when he was a test subject in Project Zarathustra. Scientists used tech from a crashed UFO to give the Miracle family powers. Simulations created a story that let subjects discover their powers while hibernating. In 1961, the British government decided Project Zarathustra wasn’t viable and sent the Miracle family on their only real mission: investigating a spaceship. The spaceship carried an atomic bomb that failed to kill Moran, leaving him amnesiac.

Over roughly 20 issues, Moore fills in Miracleman/Moran’s true origin alongside his new problems. Moran has a wife, Liz. Liz realizes her husband is both a loveably-yet-grumpy 45-year-old who can’t give her children… and a godlike 25-year-old who impregnates her in a single night. The Morans meet Kid Miracleman, who also survived the atomic bombing… and has had 20 years to become a psychopath. Project Zarathustra’s founder, alive and hiding in South America, tries to take the Morans’ child for sinister purposes. Miraclewoman comes out of hiding. Extraterrestrials whose tech was used to make the Miracle family return to Earth.

All these story arcs build up to Moore’s final act before he left the series, handing writing duties to his friend, Neil Gaiman. In Moore’s final act (published in book form as Miracleman Man Book Three: Olympus) the story starts in a grand mansion. Miracleman walks through this new home, a combination of Greco-Roman motifs and otherworldly décor (extraterrestrial plants, futuristic gizmos). Superman’s Fortress of Solitude looks like a student hostel compared to this place.

Miracleman sits to write his memoirs. Occasionally he looks out his mansion windows at the new London. It is a strange new London—ruled by him, Miraclewoman, and their new alien allies. Society follows free love and inclusion—people explore anything from psychedelics to tantric sex. Specialized therapies have eliminated prisons by rehabilitating criminals. In a specialized section of Miracleman’s mansion, his new alien friends have discovered they can combine android bodies with the “faint vibrations” left by dead people (111). Not only is Andy Warhol alive again: at Warhol’s suggestion, there are multiple Warhol androids, and “he interviews himself or gangs up on Truman Capote in debates” (112).

Not only have Miracleman and Miraclewoman become like gods, complete with an underworld. Soon, they will be part of a pantheon. Miracleman’s daughter Winter (a toddler with a genius-level intellect) supervises a “eugenics plan” (115) where women who’ve signed up to be impregnated with Miracleman’s sperm give birth to superchildren. Other adults become superheroes themselves through a safer version of the process that made the Miracle family.

How did this brave new world come about? Well, as Miracleman writes in his chronicles, his old foe returned. Kid Miracleman awoke from a coma, and there was a battle where neither side showed much regard for collateral damage.

“In 1985, we went to hell and learned the cost of paradise.”

– Miracleman Book Three: Olympus Age, 65

In the end, Miracleman killed his old friend. The damage left London ravaged beyond even the carnage in Zack Snyder’s superhero films. After the dust settled, the Miracle family and their alien supporters reshaped the world. United Nations delegates panicked when they received phone calls simultaneously that their nation’s nuclear weapons had disappeared—the heroes teleported the weapons into the sun. Alien tech made African deserts into greenspaces. Economic controls kept anyone from growing hungry (Miracleman stares down Margaret Thatcher when she objects to such market interference). And so on. All these changes create a world where people can do whatever they want. Endless experimentation and expression.

Moore had explored utopian ideas in a limited way with his 1986 Superman story—a story featuring a futuristic world resembling the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair designs for homes of the future. In doing so, he played on a famous Superman trope. Graham J. Murphy observes that the very first Superman story appeared just months before the 1939 World’s Fair, which helped associate Superman with utopian ideals about a world of tomorrow (74).

However, Murphy suggests that while many American superhero stories explore utopian ideas, the need to bring back readers each week means that the stories rarely deliver on these utopian desires (75). Watchmen ends with a hint that superheroes have brought about a new, near-utopian, age, but never explores it much. It ends on a cliffhanger suggesting the new utopian world may be undone if certain facts about how the superheroes created this utopia enter the wrong hands.

Miracleman shows Moore embracing the idea that superheroes could change society, going places he later avoided exploring in Watchmen, places that even most Superman writers rarely explore. Freed of caring what happened to his character in the long run, Moore ends his Miracleman saga with what so few comic book stories deliver: a genuine, realized utopia.

The Utopia Will Be…. Nietzchean?

Since Moore politically identifies as an anarchist and has spoken freely about his experiments with drugs, polyamory, and ceremonial magic, it’s hard not to see the Miracleman utopia as his perfect world. It is a world where you can sleep with whomever you want, explore whatever you want… and maybe find the idyllic future promised in the original 1950s Miracleman comics.

At the same time, this is a utopia built around a discrepancy. It is a world where anything that doesn’t involve manhandling other people is allowed, but the Miracle family will step in to remove those who break this rule. Anything is okay, provided Miracleman allows it.

The discrepancy becomes more apparent given the Nietzschean overtones. Miracleman is created by Project Zarathustra. When Miracleman regains his memory, he faces off against Project Zarathustra’s founder and his German cronies in South America. During the extended fight, one of the Germans recalls his awe at seeing Miracleman.

“He was a vision… that blond hair. Those blue eyes… When I was a youth, our leaders spoke of a new kind of man. An Übermensch, ja? I saw him, then, in my mind. I saw him again tonight.”

– Miracleman Book Two: The Red King Syndrome, 71

But what is an Übermensch supposed to do? Roy Schwartz argues in his discussion about Nietzsche and fascism that an Übermensch cannot become a dictator because his end goal is following his own will: “Any authoritarianism, whether nationalist, racist or religious, subsumes individual will,” contradicting Nietzsche’s ideal (Schwartz 170). Ergo, an Übermensch cannot be a utopia’s ruler. Perhaps the true Übermensch is Doctor Manhattan, who ends his role in Watchmen by deciding to leave Earth and explore other galaxies, effectively becoming a traveling god.

Moore seems to affirm that a true Übermensch would not become a world ruler. In a 1991 Comics Journal interview, Moore argued that the final act of Miracleman’s story is “a complete contradiction of the Nietzschean ideas expressed in the other volumes” (Groth 74). Instead of becoming Übermenschen who rise above everyone to do their own thing, Miracleman and his expanding superhero family become administrators.

However, some have argued the opposite point: that by setting up a utopia built around his values, Miracleman takes the Übermensch role to its natural conclusion. If Übermenschen learn in the end that there are no morals, why not rule others? What moral ground would anyone have to argue they are being inconsistent, if Nietzsche is correct: God is dead, there is no one to dictate ethics. 

Whichever view on Nietzche is correct, the fact remains that Miracleman has become a dictator. Even in a happy scene where he attends a party with the Miracle family atop his mansion, he wears a ceremonial uniform that is “undoubtedly formal, possibly authoritarian” (287).² Moore creates a utopia that seems an anarchist’s dream, a world without restraints… all made possible by a semi-benevolent dictator god.

Superheroes and Secular Mythopoeia

Miracleman’s god status also has religious overtones. Resting from writing, Miracleman contemplates his reign: “when politicians and movie stars prove inadequate, only gods remain” (21). Miracleman doesn’t tell a single narrative when he recalls the decisive blow in the London battle. Instead, he describes five narratives from different “adherents” (77). Did Miracleman go back in time to collect energy to kill Young Miracleman with one punch? Did he and Kid Miracleman “play chess for earth, atop a mountain of the death” (79)? Did he kill all the old gods and steal their power?

Rather than answer the question, Miracleman observes “how ingenious; how baroque these myths become” (78). He argues that “the battle, far too big to be contained by simple facts, has spawned so many different legends, each with its own adherents; as valid, if not more so, as the truth” (77). In other words, Moore considers the line between myth and truth. Can myths convey truth, something more than the facts? Or, as a pre-Christian C.S. Lewis put it one night on Addison’s Walk, are myths “lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver” (Carpenter 43)? J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson convinced Lewis that night that myths are not lies; they contain hints of truth pointing humanity back to its creator.

Moore takes a different direction: a creator seems absent, but his characters create stories that become myths that fulfill religious functions. The religious imagination still exists. However, an uncreated being who said, “let there be light,” is not the object of worship. A creation who has attained god status is worshipped.

“We sell humanity a language of ideas to articulate its times; the faith to remain unafraid as society explodes into increasingly chimerical shapes about them. We describe the new thing that is coming, and they worship.”

– Miracleman Book Three: Olympus, 21

Miracleman becoming a god presents some interesting questions. Can a superpowered being with no omniscience or omnipotence really claim god status? If the utopia includes a superbaby program and a process where anyone can voluntarily gain superpowers (which Miracleman freely allows)… what happens if a superhuman stronger than Miracleman comes along?

Currently, Neil Gaiman is exploring some of these questions in his sequel Miracleman series, which is projected to feature three stages: Golden Age, Silver Age, and Bronze Age. As of this writing, the Silver Age is nearly completed, and it looks as though the utopia will not last. Which may highlight the inconsistencies at the heart of Moore’s Miracleman utopia: it is not sustainable.

Wherever Gaiman takes the Miracleman epic, the inconsistencies in Moore’s vision may be seen as a study in what makes utopian stories difficult. Utopias allow the writer to cast a vision of an ideal world. However, perfect ideals cannot be achieved. Utopias are always impossible and inconsistent. They operate less as vehicles to discuss practical steps to improve society, more as vehicles to explore the writer’s values.

In Moore’s case, utopia becomes a means to discuss his value for free love and exploration. And perhaps an argument that humanity craves myth.

His next major work would explore these concerns in a genre most consider to be utopia’s polar opposite.

Return next week for Part 3 of Alan Moore’s Utopia, Dystopia, and Apocalypse.

Footnotes

1. The story of how an American superhero called Captain Marvel got sued by DC Comics in the 1930s for plagiarizing Superman, how Marvelman replaced the resulting gap in the British comics market… and how decades later Captain Marvel became Shazam and Marvelman became Miracleman, not to mention Neil Gaiman’s legal battle to finish his planned Miracleman saga, could take an entire book. In fact, Pádraig Ó Méalóid has written that book, which is available in print or serialized online.

2. This comment is from notes for the behind-the-scenes artwork published in Miracleman Book Three: Olympus. The notes have no listed author but could be written by Restoration and Collection Editor Cory Sedlmeier.

Print Resources

Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. HarperCollins, 2006.

Groth, Gray. “Alan Moore: Last Big Words Part III.” The Comics Journal no. 140, February 1991.

Moore, Alan (credited as The Original Writer) with Mick Anglo. Miracleman Book One: A Dream of Flying. Marvel, 2014.

—. Miracleman Book Two: The Red King Syndrome. Marvel, 2014.

—. Miracleman Book Three: Olympus. Marvel, 2015.

Murphy, Graham J. “‘On a More Meaningful Scale’: Marketing Utopia in Watchmen.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 28, no. 1 (98), 2017, pp. 70–85, jstor.org/stable/26390194.

Schwartz, Roy. Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero. McFarland & Co, 2021.