I am Kyle's self-indulgence

I don't normally pay attention to comic cons, mostly because I'm jealous that I will probably never have the privilege of going to one, but this caught my eye today.

Marvel has acquired the rights to Marvelman.

To help you understand why you should care, here's a brief history.

Marvelman started as a silver age carbon-copy of DC's Captain Marvel.

In the early 1980s a promising young comics writer named Alan Moore revamped the character for the newly-created Warrior comics. He had an entirely fresh take on the character, that cast him in a more realistic and morally ambiguous world (this was all pre-Watchmen).

Warrior went under before Moore could finish his story, but Malibu comics bought the title and began reprinting the stories. They were forced to change the name to Miracleman due to a lawsuit with Marvel comics (who apparently felt that they had exclusive rights to anything with the word "Marvel" in the title). Malibu also gave Alan Moore the opportunity to finish the story he had started. In fact, he took the title far beyond what he had done previously, imagining what an entire world reshaped by near-omnipotent superheroes would be like. These stories were both terrifying and gorgeous, and represent some of Alan Moore's boldest work.

After Moore finished his run Neil Gaiman took over, but he too was unable to complete his work, this time with Malibu. It was alleged that Warrior's publisher, Dez Skinn, had actually not legally acquired the rights to the character from the original creator, and so did not have the authority to publish Marvelman in the first place or to sell the comics to Malibu. Furthermore, Todd McFarlane purchased the rights to all Malibu properties, including, he believed, Miracleman.

To further complicate things, Skinn had shared the rights with co-creators Alan Moore and Garry Leach, and Moore had passed his share on to Gaiman when he handed the title over to him. If you want to read more in-depth about all of these legal battles (and about a bitter dispute between Gaiman and McFarlane) go here.

So for years the legal status of Marvelman/Miracleman has been up in the air, with all of the abovementioned parties disputing over who actually owns the character. Meanwhile, some of the best superhero comics of the 1980s have been long out of print, and the only way to read them has been to A) pay big money for the original Malibu issues, B) pay even bigger money for the very hard-to-find Malibu trade paperbacks, or C) download scans using BitTorrent.

It has been known that Marvel was interested in buying the property, and Gaiman has beend doing new projects with them partly to pay for the effort, but there hadn't been any word that they were actually getting anywhere. Provided that Marvel is right about finally sorting out the legal issues and acquiring full rights to the characters, we can look forward to not only seeing these stories in print again, but seeing them as they were originally written, as Marvelman (not Miracleman).

Also, since Neil Gaiman has taken such a personal interest in bringing Marvelman back into print, there's the presumption that he could finally complete his run on the series. I'm not sure how this would play out. Marvelman was pretty revolutionary in its time, but a lot has happened in comics since then. It would still be interesting to see what he had planned, though.