WARNING: HUGE SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: ARMAGEDDON #4 (unless you’ve been on the internet during the last few weeks).

I’ve read the Avengers on and off over the years, never sticking around for a long time but long enough to experience some pretty good stories. The 1980s run by Roger Stern, John Buscema, and Tom Palmer may be primarily remembered now for containing the first appearance of future Marvel movie star Nebula, but it really peaked with the multi-part “Masters of Evil” storyline. It’s a knock-down, drag-out battle between our heroes and a powerful group of villains, containing enough characterization, drama, and heart to keep it from just being action figures being smashed together.

The next, and ’til now, last time I read the regular monthly Avengers title was in the ’90s, when Kurt Busiek and George Pérez gave us a superhero adventure comic filled with solid writing and great art. It really was the top of the line when it came to Big Two superhero books of the period, emerging from the “Image” style and showing how coherent storytelling and professional illustration could tell memorable stories.

Aside from the occasional annual or special issue, and that first Avengers Forever mini, that was pretty much that.

And then there was this Avengers: Armageddon series. I’ve been a fan of its writer, Chip Zdarsky, for a long time, and enjoying his current superhero work. And on top of that, Avengers: Armageddon was tying into current and/or recent Marvel storylines that I am following, like the Red Hulk stuff, and all the Doctor Doom shenanigans, and Zdarsky’s own Captain America series. And even though I held that first issue of this new mini in my hands as I thought about whether or not I wanted to read this, I still decided “no.” Despite everything going for it, I just felt like I didn’t need another comic to try to keep up with, given the backlog I’m still trying to work through.

However, I came across some online chatter about what was supposedly going to happen in this comic, and my interest was piqued. If what was being talked about was true, then I was absolutely going to want to read this series and see what was going on.

“And what was going on, Mike?” I’m glad you asked, and I hope you clocked the SPOILER WARNING in the title of this post, because I’m a’gettin’ into it.

Last chance. No one to blame but yourself at this point. It starts after the cover scan here.

So anyway, Miracleman is back, and this time he’s firmly in the Marvel Universe. Well, kinda sorta. It’s finally the payoff to this one-shot from a few years ago, hinting…well, okay, not so much “hinting” as “straight up saying” that the character would pop into the Marvel Universe eventually. It’s still too early to say to what extent, if any, this is connected to the Miracleman storyline by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, et al., but I suspect, given the latter writer’s current scandals, this is an entirely separate iteration.

Long story short, Marvel spent some cash establishing its ownership over the somewhat confused legal status of this intellectual property, and by golly if they’re no longer able to monetize the other stuff, they’re gonna make some new stuff with it. Plus, the stuff they were trying to monetize was hampered by problems even before Gaiman’s current troubles, many of which I cover in this post. Basically, format issues, printing errors, and the simple fact that the property was old and mostly forgotten was keeping Marvel’s attempts at revival from getting any traction.

As I say at the end of that post, I’ve held for a long time that when it finally happened, Marvel would revert back to using the “Marvelman” name for their Marvel Universe version of the character, to keep it separate from the different, pretty-much-its-own-thing Miracleman run. (I believe I first theorized that in this 2013 post.) Again, we just got Miracleman, or somebody like him, in this new Avengers: Armageddon issue, so I don’t know where we’re going yet. Tellingly, the “next issue” page for the issue directs readers to a “Who Is Miracleman?” story on their digital comics platform, so maybe they are sticking with the name? Too many characters with “Marvel” in their names already, perhaps?

By the way, that “Who Is Miracleman” comic, produced in 2023 presumably for the return of the Gaiman/Mark Buckingham “Silver Age” chapter, seems like it would be mostly confusing, if not incomprehensible, to anyone actually new to the character. It’s a short “highlights” reel of What Had Gone Before in the Moore/Gaiman era, and the huge gaps and jumps I can fill in myself because I’ve read it all, but I wonder how someone who hadn’t could deal with it. (And notably, aside from a Miracleman special by other creators, there is no other Miracleman material on the digital service.)

How much is any of that going to apply to what’s currently going on, anyway? To keep it very short, David Colton, who had been a replacement Captain America for Steve Rogers, is given new powers by a New Super Powers Machine (an “Origin Box” from the Ultimate Universe — yet another long story), putting him in the Miracle/Marvelman costume and presumably giving him that same power set. It’s even down to the same ability to do a Captain Marvel/”Shazam!”-esque transformation by saying the magic work “KIMOTA” (in a sequence deliberately cribbed from Moore’s very first Marvelman short). It doesn’t appear to be tied to the Mike Moran (Marvelman’s civilian identity) version of the character at all, but again, we’re still way early in the process here.

As I said, before this issue even came out, there was a lot of talk about this happening, which is probably the most interest the character has had in a long time. By forcing Marvel readers to engage with Miracleman (or whatever, I just keep using both names) by putting the concept squarely in the center of an Avengers comic, fans can’t just ignore it like they could some weird decades-old thing that was revived solely for people in their late middle age who 1) are still alive, 2) are still reading comics and 3) remember it from the last time it was on the stands. It is now officially A Marvel Thing, so, I guess, coming soon to a movie screen near you? We’ll see.

At any rate, I don’t know why I’ve been so antsy about spoiler warnings when Marvel itself just plain put Miracleman on one of the variant covers for this issue, which you can see if you click the Avengers: Armageddon cover I posted above. And yes, that’s the cover I took for myself. (And yes, by all rights I should put this post under the miraclemarvelman category, but I didn’t want that being an inadvertent spoiler right at the top of the page. I’ll add it later.)