LWIA v4 Chapter 1: Spawn and Miracleman (Patreon)

I just sorta thought "fuck it, let's make it an even 60k's worth of words on the rapey bastard." So here's the beginning of Book 4.
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Moore’s issue of Spawn was followed by one written by his protege, Neil Gaiman, who by this time was riding high on the success of what he would later describe in a deposition as “a comic named Sandman, which in 1992 was the single-most acclaimed ongoing series of comics probably that there has ever been in terms of literary rewards received and respect in the industry and personal awards that were coming in for the comic and for the writing thereof.” Unlike Moore, Gaiman would not do a significant amount of work for Image—just Spawn #9 and a three-issue miniseries following up on a character he created for that issue. But those four issues would turn out to have surprisingly large implications for a lingering thread from earlier in the War.

Gaiman’s issue of Spawn demonstrated the same efficient populist instincts that propelled his larger rise, recognizing that Spawn’s cast lacked one of the standard popular aspects of ostentatious action comics aimed at adolescent boys: a scantily clad woman who commits massive acts of ultraviolence. As Spawn was a demonic character, Gaiman decided to counterbalance him with an angelic character who, in keeping with Image’s general attitude towards subtext, he called Angela. As he put it, “I was thinking that the only reason you’d have an army of hell is if the other side were worse. I mean, you don’t have an army to fight librarians and milk monitors.” And so Angela is little more than a ruthless hunter whose prey is Spawns, as Gaiman illustrates in an entertaining opening sequence set in the 12th century in which she lures a version of Spawn in a giant medieval suit of plate armor to his doom. McFarlane, meanwhile, gives her more or less the costume you’d expect—a plate metal bra, drape of fabric to hide her genitals, and little else, alongside a giant spear with a ribbon that provided him the opportunity to draw a bunch of furling and twisting fabric, as was his wont.

Gaiman’s issue—uniquely among the four guest-written issues—was focused on introducing larger amounts of lore to the comic. McFarlane later recalled that “Neil was the most curious of the four as to sort of, you know, continuity in the book and how it all sort of worked,” and asking questions about his future plans with the title. In addition to Angela and the armored Spawn—the first time a historical version of Spawn had been shown—Gaiman ended up creating a third character, Count Cogliostro, a homeless man with an uncanny level of knowledge about Spawn and how he worked. Little about any of this got fleshed out, not least as Spawn #9 was just a twenty-four issue comic that had to end in a cliffhanger that let the plot be handed over to Dave Sim, but it laid groundwork that would be paid off in future issues, including Gaiman’s own three-issue Angela miniseries, which ended with Angela quitting heaven’s service to become a bounty hunter with a speech about how “it’s not simply a matter of heaven or hell any more. You don’t have to work for the big two. There are alternatives” that plainly alluded to the larger context of Image’s rebellion against Marvel and DC’s hegemony.

Problems, however, quickly arose. For all their financial success, Image was in many regards a fly by night operation. As Gaiman recalls it, when he asked about a contract for his work on Spawn #9, McFarlane’s answer was that “we don’t send contracts, we treat you better, you know, it’s just that’s not how we do business, we don’t do contracts,” promising instead to “treat you better than DC ever would with their contracts.” This, however, became a notable problem when it came to McFarlane’s continued use of characters created for Gaiman’s issue in things like a crossover team-up between Medieval Spawn and Mark Silvestri’s Witchblade, or Cogliostro’s eventual centrality to the plot of Spawn. In 1996, after McFarlane had put out an Angela action figure and reprinted his miniseries in trade paperback without offering Gaiman any sort of royalties, and in the face of rumors McFarlane was considering selling his company, Gaiman had his lawyers contact McFarlane demanding some clarity to the situation. This is, of course, in keeping with Gaiman’s usual business savvy, but in this case he had a clear ulterior motive in starting up negotiations with McFarlane: Miracleman.

Gaiman’s status as Moore’s protege always had several components—the thanks credit at the start of Watchmen, the fact that Moore had, as Gaiman was always quick to bring up in interviews, taught him how to write comics scripts, and, of course, the fact that Moore had secured his initial meeting with Berger and Giordano. But perhaps nothing had greater symbolic import than the fact that Gaiman was literally Moore’s anointed successor on Miracleman, one of the titles on which Moore’s reputation had been built in the first place. 

In Moore’s recollection, he offered Gaiman the opportunity with the wry comment that “this may well be a poisoned chalice.” Gaiman recalls a rather different warning, namely that “by the end of Miracleman #16 I will have solved all crimes, ended all war and created an absolutely perfect world in which no further stories can occur.” Neither warning deterred Gaiman, who readily accepted. Ironically, despite this offer coming in late 1986, even before his meeting with Berger and Giordano, the Miracleman gig played little to no actual role in Gaiman’s ascent; the extensive delays that wracked Eclipse meant that Moore’s run didn’t actually conclude until March 1989, and by the time Gaiman’s first issue came out in January 1990 he was already six months past the career-making debut of Death in Sandman #8. 

Nevertheless, it was a prestigious assignment, and Gaiman took it seriously. His first arc, entitled The Golden Age, employed the short story structure that Gaiman used to great effect throughout Sandman, opting to paint the utopian world that Moore left him with in a series of miniatures. Unsurprisingly given the lag in publishing—five years elapsed between Moore offering Gaiman the title and the final issue of The Golden Age actually coming out—there is a rather sharp upwards curve in the sophistication of these short stories. They start relatively simple; the first, “A Prayer and a Hope,” tells the story of a set of pilgrims journeying up the vast tower of Olympus in order to offer their petitions to Miracleman. It is poetic—Gaiman spends much of it in first person narration, allowing him to offer a fairly straightforward Moore imitation as he describes things like a hall that “contains nothing but dinosaurs. Skeletons of stone and bone and plastic. Tiny plastic models and huge animatronic reconstructions.” The second, “Skin Deep,” is a similarly straightforward story about a man living in a remote windmill where he carries on a love affair with Miraclewoman. 

With the third, however, this began to shift. Called “Notes from the Underground,” this issue sees a resurrected Emil Gargunza in the hall of the dead where he is tended to by Andek, one of eighteen copies of Andy Warhol who also live in the vast underground complex given over to the resurrected dead. Aside from giving artist Mark Buckingham the opportunity to cut loose with a vast number of Warhol pastiches (he has a particularly large amount of fun with a sequence of nine panel grid pages in which each panel is further divided into a nine panel grid that Buckingham fills with repeated images, some drawn by him, others copied from earlier issues of Miracleman), the issue is simply a firehose blast of wild concepts anchored by a sharp characterization of Warhol himself, who is a once viciously unpleasant and surprisingly vulnerable.

Gaiman followed this with two further issues of formal ambition—one in which large portions are written as a picture book about Winter, the hyper-intelligent infant created by Gargunza, and another that does a paranoid Prisoner riff in the city set aside within paradise for members of the intelligence community, who, as a resurrected Evelyn Cream explains, could find no happiness in paradise because “treachery and betrayal were woven too finely into your lives,” and so were left to live out their days in a city in which literally everyone is a spy, monitoring each other in the course of inscrutable missions for their handlers, all of whom are, in fact, Cream himself. A final issue depicts a festival in which characters from the previous five issues all appear, ending on the pilgrim from “A Prayer and a Hope” as he receives Miracleman’s gift to the populace—the universalizing of the ability to fly. 

All of these issues featured a brief, one or two page backup story entitled “Retrieval” that, it gradually became clear, depicted the process of resurrecting Dicky Dauntless, the Young Miracleman, who had, in Moore’s continuity, perished in the same 1963 explosion that wiped Micky Moran’s memory of his magic word and superhero identity. This would prove the heart of his second arc, The Silver Age, which dealt with the aftermath of his resurrection and his conflicted feelings about Miracleman’s utopia. But by the time this arc began, Eclipse’s longstanding problems were rapidly catching up with it. The Golden Age came out on a schedule that was in fact slightly better than the one Eclipse had managed for Moore’s last arc, producing six issues in twenty months, as opposed to twenty-two for Olympus. (Gaiman would eventually outdo both by taking twenty-three months to publish all of Sandman: Overture.) But a full year passed between its conclusion and the start of The Silver Age in issue #23, and another year elapsed before the second issue came out. This issue, which ended with Dicky fleeing Olympus in horror after Miracleman’s ill-advised attempt to kiss him, would prove to be the final one published by Eclipse.

This was not especially surprising. Eclipse had been struggling ever since the 1986 flood that had necessitated converting Miracleman #8 into an issue of old 1950s Mick Anglo reprints. As Gaiman tells it, the situation while he was working on the book was bad enough that he “wouldn’t start writing til we got paid for the last episode. I would stop writing and Mark wouldn’t start drawing. It wasn’t that we were a year late. It was like one day our checks would turn up and then we start working on it because the checks were so amazingly unpredictable about it.” And around the time Miracleman #24 came out the situation deteriorated further when Dean Mullaney and cat yronwode, the two owners of the company, split up. (As yronwode put it in a 101 line acrostic poem in Comic Buyer’s Guide, “Dean has left me for a woman named Jane Kingsbury who has bone chips in her brain.”) From here the situation unraveled rapidly, with multiple accounts of exactly what happened. Mullaney claims that the only problem was HarperCollins’ failure to pay out royalties owed on graphic novels, yronwode claims Mullaney emptied out the company bank accounts, and Gaiman says it fell apart when Toren Smith, who had been translating manga for them, obtained evidence of accounting fraud and sued them for a $100,000 judgment. Regardless, it proved the end of Eclipse’s ability to publish. Issue #25 was completed and in their hands, but as Gaiman recalls “I don’t think they even had the money to color it and I don’t think they had the money to print it, either,” and eventually yronwode returned the art to Gaiman, in part out of fear that otherwise Mullaney would sell it off. 

At the end of 1994 Eclipse finally went bankrupt, and in early 1996 its assets were bought at auction by Todd McFarlane, who paid $25,000—a quarter as much as he’d paid Gaiman for Spawn #9. This consisted of two pallets of actual property and a pile of trademarks and copyrights, but by almost any standard the only actual valuable part of this was Eclipse’s interest in Miracleman. These were generally understood to be a 70% share in the character, a figure that dates back to the 1982 publication of the early installments of Moore’s run in Warrior. There the copyright on the strip had been split 40/40/20 among Moore, Garry Leach, and Quality Communications, which is to say Dez Skinn. This was later modified to reduce everyone’s share by 10% so as to give a 30% share to Alan Davis. Leach, Skinn, and Davis all opted to sell their shares to Eclipse, resulting in a 70/30 split between Eclipse and Moore. Moore, in turn, passed his share on to Gaiman and Buckingham when they took over the comic. A variety of reversion clauses complicated the situation—Gaiman and Buckingham’s share was to either be passed along to the next creative team or returned to Moore, whereas Eclipse’s share was covered by a clause declaring that they “shall not assign or otherwise dispose of its rights in the Ownership hereunder to any third party except to Rights Holder, or a new corporation or entity in which the majority stockholders of Eclipse are and remain the majority stockholders or managing partners.” But broadly speaking, at least in 1996, it was widely agreed that Todd McFarlane had purchased a 70% share of Miracleman. 

And so when Gaiman began pushing McFarlane for a resolution to the royalties and copyright situation around his work on Spawn, a clear resolution presented itself: a straightforward swap in which McFarlane would get all rights to Cogliostro, and Medieval Spawn, and Gaiman would get the remaining 70% of the Miracleman rights, with Angela being governed on terms equivalent to Gaiman’s contract with DC. This exchange was intended to take place in July 1997. Three months later, however, McFarlane filed trademark registrations on Miracleman, and in 1999 McFarlane wrote Gaiman insisting that the previous offer was null and void, and offering instead to swap Gaiman’s interest in Angela for Miracleman, with the assertion that Medieval Spawn and Cogliostro were and always had been his. Gaiman did not agree, and McFarlane got progressively more aggressive in his position. In March 2001 he introduced a character called Mike Moran into the Spawn comics, and then in June asserted in an interview that he owned the character outright and declaring that he’d be using him in upcoming issues. 

At this point, Gaiman put his Scientology background to good use and went nuclear. A few months after McFarlane’s assertion that he owned Miracleman, Marvel Comics announced that Gaiman would be penning a series for Marvel, with all profits from it going to a company called Marvels and Miracles, LLD, which Gaiman formed in order to sort out the Miracleman rights for once and for all, with the clear implication that once they were the series would start up again under Marvel. And in December Gaiman took to his blog to blast McFarlane, reporting that he’d spoken to Joe Quesada, who reported that “‘Todd McFarlane says to tell you that on this Miracleman stuff, he’ll take it all the way. He’ll take it to the mat,’ he said. ‘He told me to tell you, though, that if you could sort it all out by just getting in a room with him, man to man, and hammering out an agreement. And he made me promise to say that, if Neil keeps up, Todd’s going to go public with all the dirt on Neil he can find, and Neil’s fans won’t like him any more.” (This was not quite the threat in 2001 that it would eventually become.) Gaiman, for his part, declared that “the last lingering shreds of respect I had for McFarlane just went away, like that,” demanding that McFarlane adhere to the 1997 agreement, pay both for Gaiman’s legal expenses and for an audit of the accounts regarding Angela, publicly apologize, and give the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund a “hefty donation,” closing his offer with the snark that “A few years ago, I’d have said a million, maybe half a million. These days it’s not clear that you’ve still got that kind of money, so it’s negotiable.” A month later, he filed suit against McFarlane.

The case moved at the speed such things do, not resolving until February 2004, with Gaiman ultimately judged to have a 50% stake in all three of the Spawn characters under dispute. A follow-up case in 2010 saw McFarlane take another loss for attempting to create characters such as Dark Ages Spawn and a pair of angels, Tiffany and Domina, who were similarly obviously derived from Angela (in an interesting detail, Domina’s role in Spawn is to lead a host of angels into battle against Urizen, who McFarlane reinvented as a soul-devouring demon), and the matter was finally resolved in 2012 with McFarlane getting full ownership of Medieval Spawn and Cogliostro, while Gaiman kept Angela, who he gave to Marvel, where she became integrated into their idiosyncratic version of Norse mythology as Odin and Freyja’s eldest daughter.

As for Miracleman, it eventually emerged not only McFarlane had never owned any of rights to the character, but that Gaiman, Buckingham, Moore, Leach, Davis, Eclipse, and Quality had never owned them either as Dez Skinn had never actually bothered to legally acquire them from Mick Anglo, who Marvel paid for them in 2009. It still took an additional five years to clear away all the other legal concerns, since the revelation that nobody had actually held any rights during the Moore/Gaiman runs meant that every writer and artist involved needed to be individually negotiated with, but in 2014 Marvel finally commenced reprinting the by then decades out of print comics in the first successful monthly series featuring the character since the 1950s. (Characteristically, Moore refused to have his name on, with Marvel instead crediting his issues to “The Original Writer”) 

These reprints were intended to be followed by a completed version of The Silver Age, however more typical Miracleman scheduling quickly took hold, and fully six years passed before this started, with Buckingham redrawing the first two issues so that the art style would be consistent throughout. This came out at the rate of seven issues in fourteen months—relatively brisk for both Miracleman and late-career Gaiman, although the latter was probably helped by the fact that Buckingham took a cowriting credit on everything after the three issues that had been written back in the 90s—culminating in the reveal that Dickie Dauntless had been repeatedly sexually abused in an orphanage (including a chilling image of Dickie being taken out for ice cream after and “sitting with a melting ice cream in your hand… unable to process what they just made you do” that provides an unsettling reminder of Gaiman’s intimate familiarity with the subject) and his declaration that he would serve as “the opposition” to Miracleman’s dominion, declaring that “if this is Eden, I’m going to be the serpent.”

The series ended with the declaration that it would continue in Miracleman: The Dark Age, although nothing was solicited, and as of early 2025, when publishers were rushing to announce that they had cut ties with Gaiman, Marvel declared that they had “no new books forthcoming” with him, and Buckingham purportedly ceased work on the project in summer 2024 after reports of Gaiman’s abuse first arose. As it stands, it appears that forty years of legal wrangling, dubious contracts, and hype will end with no conclusion beyond Gaiman’s description in an interview of how the final arc would take place a thousand years later than The Silver Age, feature the return of Johnny Bates, and end with an issue titled “Two Voices” that would feature “two people having a conversation on a fairly ruined planet while they wait for the last sun to come up.” Then again, Marvel Comics deciding to employ a notoriously abusive sex pest wouldn’t exactly be surprising, especially by the standards of what’s already passed in the War’s most convoluted subplot.