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It was the biggest news story to come out of San Diego Comic-Con four years ago, but after Marvel Comics announced that it had acquired the rights to Marvelman, everything went quiet — until Saturday afternoon, when the publisher finally told the comics world what it had been waiting to hear: The classic “lost” superhero epic written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman would be returning to print starting next year.
The series, a revival of a forgotten 1950s British superhero that originally ran in the pages of the U.K.-published anthology Warrior before switching to its own independent series Miracleman — with the strips renamed, ironically, due to the threat of legal action from Marvel Comics — ran sporadically from 1982 until 1993, when Eclipse Comics, the series’ publisher, went bankrupt. Although Todd McFarlane teased the character’s resurrection at one point, having purchased Eclipse’s intellectual properties assets, it never appeared after it was discovered that the rights to Miracleman were in dispute and may, in fact, have been owned by the creators of the work and/or Mick Anglo, the original creator of the character.
STORY: ‘Lost’ Neil Gaiman Stories Reissued for Charity
Today’s announcement at New York Comic-Con revealed that, after years of work, Marvel will be publishing new editions of the Moore-Gaiman storylines — with art by the likes of Alan Davis, Mark Buckingham and Garry Leach — that will be recolored and relettered. Additionally, Gaiman and Buckingham will create a new conclusion for their storyline, which had previously been unfinished.
In a video played at the show, Gaiman described his Miracleman story as “the big incomplete book in my life” and said that he “love[d] the idea that it’s finally going to be seen.” The series, which will begin with the first Moore and Leach stories as well as new art and background material in each issue, will launch in January 2014.
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