Marvelman
Marvelman was a British Golden Age superhero comic book, published by L. Miller & Son in the United Kingdom between 1954 and 1963. The lead character was originally created by Mick Anglo as a replacement for Captain Marvel due to Fawcett Publications ending the latter's titles following legal action by DC Comics.
In 1982 the character was revived in the comics anthology Warrior, and later renamed Miracleman in 1985. Since 2009, the rights to the character have been licensed from Anglo by Marvel Comics, who have reprinted some of the vintage material under the original Marvelman name.
Creation
With the British economy struggling to recover from World War II, a ban on importing American comics was enacted, leading to a boom in indigenous comics. However, a loophole existed whereby a British publisher could import overseas comics, print them and sell the results. This proved to be a lucrative move for L. Miller & Son, especially when they licensed Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr. from Fawcett Publications. However, after losing a landmark legal case against National Comics in 1952, Fawcett discontinued their superhero material, cutting off the supply of strips for L. Miller & Son. Not wanting to cancel the highly profitable title, Len Miller contacted artist Mick Anglo, whose Gower Street Studios had already created cover art for many L. Miller & Son comics. Anglo devised the characters of Marvelman and Young Marvelman to replace them, featuring a similar premise of young men who could change into powerful superheroes. Working titles had included both Captain Miracle and Miracle Man, both of which would be used by Anglo for later characters.Publishing history
Transition
L. Miller & Son's Captain Marvel #24 featured the title "Captain Marvel—The Marvelman" on the front cover; inside the editorial revealed that Billy Batson had decided to retire and lead a normal life with his place being taken by Micky Moran as Marvelman. Thus Marvelman took over the numbering of the Captain Marvel series, leading to the character debuting on 3 February 1954 in Marvelman #25, which contained the stories "Marvelman and the Atomic Bomber" and "Marvelman and the Stolen Radium". A similar transition took place in sister title Captain Marvel Jr., which soon became Young Marvelman.Content
Like its predecessor, Marvelman was a weekly comic. In order to cut expenditure in resizing or modifying artwork from American publishers, L. Miller & Son retained the same dimensions as US comic books. Each issue was 28 pages long, and the interiors were printed in black and white on newsprint, with only the covers in colour. Issues typically contained two 8-page Marvelman tales and a third back-up feature from the inventory. In addition there were humour strips and, bookending the content, a letter from the unnamed editor and a page crudely styled like a page from the Daily Bugle—the fictional newspaper Moran worked for—featuring a preview for the next issue, other fragments of news and plugs for other L. Miller & Son books. It was priced at 7d, and would stay that way until the title's demise.Anglo initially handled the strip himself while it was shaped before involving other artists from his studio, including James Bleach, Norman Light and Don Lawrence. The British comic industry of the time did not keep exhaustive records of creators—with the strips themselves bearing no credits—but among the Gower Street Studios artists identified as working on Marvelman, Young Marvelman and/or Marvelman Family were Ron Embleton, George Stokes and Denis Gifford, who would all go on to have successful careers in the industry. To keep the work on schedule Anglo adopted a system broadly similar to the "Marvel method" later used by Stan Lee—to avoid complicated scripts with overdetailed panel descriptions he would instead devise a plot outline, pass it to one of the studio's artists and then write dialogue and narration to fit the resulting pages of art. Writing about the artists from the studio in 1977, Anglo would recall that this allowed the artists to put their own stamp on the character, noting that Lawrence's were "elongated"; Roy Parker used "bulging muscles and a lantern jaw"; while John Whitlock and Norman Light both made the character barrel-chested. He also claimed the contributions of Gifford and Frank Daniels on the title brought a poor reader response.
Back-up features were either produced by Gower Street Studios or were from other series licensed by Miller, including adventure serial Lance and science fiction heroes Captain Zip Morgan of Space Patrol and Johnny Galaxia. In-house humour strips such as Young Joey, The Friendly Soul and Flip and Flop were also used to fill single or half pages. These were initially devised by Anglo before he handed them over to Gifford, who was more at home with humour strips than superhero material. Anglo's assistant Dorothy Saporito and her successor Roshan Kanga also helped finish off material for the comic.
Marvelman was similar to Captain Marvel: a young copy boy named Micky Moran encounters an astrophysicist called Guntag Barghelt who gives him superpowers based on atomic energy instead of magic. To transform into Marvelman, he speaks the word "Kimota", which is phonetically "atomic" backwards—Anglo changed it to avoid readers thinking the word began with a soft 'c'. Typically, either through his work or happenstance Moran would stumble across some sort of criminal activity, change into Marvelman and save the day. Most of the adventures were self-contained, though occasionally a 'Marvelman serial' would run across multiple issues. When surprised, both Micky and Marvelman were given to exclaiming "Holy Macaroni!". The character's origin was initially only relayed in a text box accompanying the first frame of each adventure, before later being told in the strip "The Birth of Marvelman" in Marvelman #65, dated 13 November 1954. In Marvelman #102 a third member of the Marvelman Family appeared—Johnny Bates was gifted the power to transform into Kid Marvelman, and would briefly feature as a back-up in Marvelman.
The title's most lasting villain was evil scientist Doctor Gargunza, a reinvention of Captain Marvel's arch-enemy Doctor Sivana, given a new look that involved a black widow's peak, spectacles and an exaggerated overbite, a distinctive "Hak! Hak!" chuckle and a name invented by Anglo's brother. A prototype of the character called Professor Zargunza would appear in Marvelman #26, with side-parted white hair, before Gargunza debuted in "Marvelman and the Skeletons in the Cupboard!" in Marvelman #27. The visually and narratively identical Cuprini would also feature in Marvelman #32 before the character's identity and design settled down. While Gargunza would invariably lose and be bought to justice as each scheme failed, the character would always escape and return on numerous occasions. Another recurring antagonist was the fictional Eastern bloc country of Boromania, agents of whom were defeated by Marvelman on numerous occasions. Other story opportunities were opened up when Marvelman gained the ability to fly fast enough around the Earth to travel through time, usually into the past but occasionally into the future. This allowed him to visit periods such as England in the Elizabethan era or the Middle Ages, the reign of Louis XIV, the Wild West or American Civil War, and also meet historical figures including Hannibal, Hippocrates, and Charles II. His adventures also saw him cross paths with fictional or mythical characters such as King Arthur,
Icarus, Scheherazade and Dick Whittington.