While The Past and Future Exist Simultaneously (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Four: Miracleman at Eclipse)
{Impressively, Alan Moore’s second publisher for Marvelman/Miracleman was an even bigger trainwreck than his first. It is perhaps unsurprising, given this, to find out that Dez Skinn negotiated the bulk of the deal. The financial plan for Warrior had always involved selling the strips to foreign markets, and Skinn was determined to sell them as a package, reasoning that “strips like Spiral Path – which I put into an anthology alongside Shandor and Bojeffries Saga – were not the stars of the show,” but that Warrior would never have happened without them and that they deserved the same shot at foreign publication as the heavy-hitters like V for Vendetta and Laser Eraser and Pressbutton. But ironically, it wasn’t the lesser Warrior material that made selling the strips abroad a challenge, but the nominal crown jewel, Marvelman, as neither of the two biggest comics publishers would touch it. DC was the obvious first choice, since they were already having considerable success publishing Alan Moore in the US market, and were indeed interested, but Dick Giordano pointed out that there was simply no way that they could publish a comic called Marvelman, citing the number of problems they were already having with Captain Marvel, which they’d bought from the smoldering ruins of Fawcett and started publishing under the name Shazam! But the obvious second choice proved no better; Marvel wouldn’t touch it either, pointing out that if they were to publish a strip called Marvelman it would be read as representing the entire company, which was perhaps not quite what they wanted Moore’s psychologically damaged take on superheroes to do.
 |
| Figure 920: An advertisement for the never-published Challenger #1 from Pacific Comics. |
That left smaller companies. Initially the plan was a company called Pacific Comics, but after contracts were signed and the first issue of Challenger, headlined by V for Vendetta, advertised Pacific abruptly went belly up in August of 1984, leaving all of the Warrior properties homeless once again. Ultimately they were acquired, alongside some other remnants of Pacific, by Eclipse Comics, created by siblings Jan and Dean Mullaney, but edited by cat yronwode (lack of capitalization per her wishes), a small publisher originally out of New York, but by this point run out of Guerneville California. But there were still other problems. Not only was Marvel uninterested in publishing Marvelman, they were uninterested in the idea of anyone else publishing him. This started with Marvel UK’s dispute with Skinn over the latter’s decision to break the informal truce they had by actually publishing a comic called Marvelman on the cover instead of featuring him inside Warrior, but rapidly spread to the US branch of the company.
In Moore’s telling, the figure at the heart of the dispute was Jim Shooter, who he characterizes as “one of these comic book industry führers,” which doesn’t actually rate very highly in the list of awful things Jim Shooter has been called by his fellow professionals.…
You know the drill, I’m sure. 
Weird Kitties fizzled out, but I had a few spare reviews lying around and Jane’s holiday is going to run one more week, so here they are.
As the science fiction community mutters “I thought MidAmericon said nominations would open in early January” with baited breath, I note that certain fascist pricks have begun to ramp up their performative chortling. So I figured “why not write a mildly trolling open letter to someone else entirely?”
When I cover it in Last War in Albion, I am inevitably going to have to suggest that Phonogram was a magical ritual to murder David Bowie. Part of this will be a straightforward and well-reasoned technical argument based on The Immaterial Girl’s meticulously rendered and devastatingly well-structured invocation of Michael Jackson’s death, and another part will be the fact that Bowie’s cancer diagnosis would have come right around when WicDiv #1 hit, with Lucifer’s death literally coming ten days after the debut of “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” (“Sue, the clinic called /The x-ray’s fine / I brought you home,” although for the purposes of Phonogram the lyric you’d want is “Sue, I found your note / That you wrote last night / It can’t be right / You went with him”), and of course a big part is just going to be a big influence-based dig through the primary source material in a slightly self-parodic attempt to factually evaluate Gillen’s claims about Kenickie.
From worst to best of what I bought. 
Here’s the official description of this podcast, which James pinged me and told me existed last night: