Sunday, September 06, 2009

Kimota: The Holy Grail of Comics is Coming:

Miracleman/MarvelMan is going to be release by, ironically Marvel Comics. I wrote about the complicated IP mess of MM here (so I need not rewrite it here). The "irony" is "Marvel" legally sued to prevent Alan Moore's "Marvelman" from being released in the United States because of trademark issues. The result? It was released as "Miracleman" and Moore has never worked for Marvel Comics since (given his godlike status as a comic book author, their BIG loss). Moore sees the comedic irony in Marvel Comics publishing the book and he has no problem with it. Moore won't take a penny of profits from the reprint, will not let his name be associated with it, and is happy that the bulk of the royalties is going to Marvelman's original British creator, now in his 90s with a sickly wife.

I own and have read the first 8 or so issues. Ironically, the later issues in the run are harder to get and more expensive because fewer of them were printed. MM is as good as Watchmen; in fact it was Moore's first effort at "deconstructing" the Superhero genre. And Moore quite properly deals with Nietzsche and Heidegger (the original of our modern deconstructionists) in the MM series. Especially if you liked Chapter VI of Watchmen you'll love MM. This also reminds me of Allan Bloom's observation that so much Nietzschean and Heideggerian thought over the past 50 years or so has been given to us from the egalitarian Left with a watered down or non-existent abyss. But Nietzsche's call was from the Right and he was the antithesis of an egalitarian. And Bloom's properly observed that plunging into the abyss takes us into very dark places in the soul (a place where Nazi Germany is as likely to result as democratic-socialism).

In this sense Moore, in MM and Watchmen, more authentically represents Nietzsche and Heidegger than most present day left wing Nietzsche and Heidegger scholars.

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