“Sit tight. We’ll have some additional news soon.”

Yep, that’s as good a summary as you’ll find regarding Marvel and their plans to bring back the Marvelman stories written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.

It’s the final piece in a long, extensive, and informative round-up by Pádraig Ó Méalóid of everything that’s gone on over the last couple of years since Disney/Marvel obtained some of the rights to the Marvelman character.

Here’s how it starts:

“On Friday the 24th of July, 2009, Joe Quesada, then Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, accompanied by Dan Buckley, Marvel’s publisher, made an announcement at San Diego’s Comic-Con International, saying that Marvel Comics had bought the rights to Marvelman.

That’s now two and a half years ago (or a bit over 900 days, if you like), and we’re all more or less still waiting for them to announce what their actual plans are. Without attempting to draw any conclusions of my own here (because I’ll be doing that somewhere else, before the year is out), I thought I’d try to find out what theyhave said in those two and a half years.”

But if you’re in any way interested in the recent history of this long and tortuous saga, I definitely recommend you have a read at Pádraig’s blog.

Update: Andy Turnbull points out the Miracleman/Marvelman logo above isn’t actually from the comics as we thought, it’s from a really nice, crisp, clear experimental version he tried out himself.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid has kindly produced this extensive obituary for the FPI Blog.

Mick Anglo 1916 – 2011 RIP

Mick Anglo was born Maurice Anglowitz in the Bow area of the borough of Tower Hamlets in London’s East End to Hyman and Rachel (nee Pelter) Anglowitz. He claims he was born on the 14th of June, 1916, even though his birth certificate gives the date as the 19th of June, due to his father registering the birth late – it wasn’t actually registered until the 28th of July, well over a month later.

He was the youngest of a family of five boys, the others being Andrew, Sidney, Stanley and Richard. After school in the Central Foundation Grammar School in Cowper Street in London’s Islington Mick got a scholarship to the Sir John Cass Art School in Aldgate. He left school at eighteen and eventually got some freelance work drawing clothing designs for one of the London fashion houses.

In 1939, at the age of twenty-three, he enlisted in the army at Oxford, becoming an infantryman in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and at one point found himself working as a cartographer at Earl Mountbatten’s headquarters in Sri Lanka. He also did some cartooning work for SEAC, the official army newspaper for the South East Asia Command, and later on for the Singapore Free Press. On the 29th of December 1940 he married Minnie Cedar in the Wembley District Synagogue in Hendon, London. On their marriage certificate, both their fathers are said to be tailors, and it turns out they lived on the same street. Mick’s occupation is given as Fusilier #6468556, with his civilian occupation as commercial artist noted in brackets, while Minnie was a tailoress.

When he got married his surname was recorded as Anglo, as was his father’s, who was by now styling himself Harry Anglo, rather than Hyman Anglowitz, so Mick Anglo was already halfway to the final version of his own name.

(Two of Mick Anglo’s Johnny Dekker books – pics from Micksidge’s Flickrstream)

After he returned to civilian life Anglo went looking for work in comics, and the first company he worked for was Gerald G Swan, followed by work for a lot of others, including Paget Publications, for whom he drew Wonderman, and Martin & Reid, where he ended up working as an editor, and for whom he wrote a number of books, including thirteen American-style private eye novels for which he also drew the covers, featuring the adventures of Johnny Dekker, and including titles like ‘Gowns and Gunsels’ and ‘Lugers and Larceny.’

It would have been around this time that Anglo had his first dealings with L Miller and Son. In an interview with Roger Dicken in Alter Ego #87 (TwoMorrows, Raleigh, July 2009), Mick Anglo describes how he first came upon them:

“As I recall, it was a still drab post-war Britain, and I’d been doing this, that, and the other to keep body and soul together. One day in the early 1950s, my next-door neighbour showed me a couple of bright American-style comics bearing the distinctive triangular logo L Miller and Son, an English company, with a 6d price on them, and he suggested I check them out for some further artistic work. I duly visited their warehouse headquarters in Hackney Road, London, and was fortunate to meet the son, one Arnold Miller, who, it turned out, had formed his own branch of the company to publish original British space comics, as the bulk of the lines up until then were American reprints, such as Captain Video. Anyway, he was raring to do a series under his own banner ABC (Arnold Book Company), and I was very interested, as you can imagine.

I showed him some of my work I’d brought along, though what it was escapes me, and he was suitably impressed. It was then, during discussions, to my surprise I discovered that the boss, Arnold’s father Len, was in fact the same man who once sold me comics as a kid! … After some in-depth discussions re could I create such-and-such and find other artists, etc, things started to buzz, and very soon I formed Mick Anglo Limited, and found myself searching for suitable premises for a studio. Eventually I located some rooms at the top of a rickety flight of stairs in an old building at 164 Gower Street, London NW1, long since demolished, which became the Gower Street Studios.”

Mick Anglo’s first work for L Miller and Son was Ace Malloy of the Special Squadron #50 in August 1952, published under the Arnold Book Company imprint, at which point Anglo was apparently already in his studio at Gower Street. Further work for the Millers followed, both for Arnold Book Company and for L Miller and Son Ltd itself, including titles like Space Comics (1953), starring Captain Vic Valiant of the Interplanetary Police Patrol, and, later on, Space Commander Kerry and Space Commando, both in 1954.

Fate was about to hand him his most significant job, however. This is what he had to say in Alter Ego #87:

“One day in late 1953, I think, the Millers rang me to say, ‘Come over, Mick – urgent – very urgent!’ I went to the warehouse premises, and much consternation! Len was in a right old mood. It seemed that in the USA Fawcett had lost a court fight with Superman comics, etc, and could no longer market their Captain Marvel character; thus Miller, in turn, wouldn’t receive further supplies of the comic plates to print Captain Marvel. They held the license to reprint the comics in Britain, and he was one of their very lucrative lines. This created big problems! … So boss Len needed a substitute real fast and could I come up with something?”

Mick Anglo says that he went back to Gower Street and thought about it, and decided that what they needed to do was create a British copy of Captain Marvel to step into his shoes, and to carry on instead of him. The character Anglo apparently suggested to take Captain Marvel’s place was virtually a carbon copy of him. The name Billy Batson was turned into Mickey Moran, with Moran being a young copy boy for the Daily Bugle newspaper, as opposed to Batson’s position as a reporter for Radio Whiz; the costume was changed from red to blue, and the cloak was done away with, for being too much trouble to have to draw all the time; the dark hair became blonde; the magic word SHAZAM!, given to Batson by the wizard Shazam, was replaced by the word KIMOTA! – a slightly altered backward spelling of the word Atomic – given to Moran by Astro-physicist Guntag Barghelt, making Marvelman’s powers science-based, like Superman’s, rather than magic-based, like Captain Marvel’s; and the transformation was all but complete. All that was needed was a name.

According to Derek Wilson’s article “From SHAZAM! To KIMOTA! – The Sensational Story of England’s MARVELMAN – The Hero Who Would Become MIRACLEMAN” in Alter Ego #87:

“The first name change suggested – and most obvious one – was finally adopted … although other names were seriously considered, including Miracleman and Captain Miracle, which were registered as possibilities.”

“That first name was, of course, Marvelman.”

In a short interview with George Khoury in Kimota! The Miracleman Companion (TwoMorrows Publishing, Raleigh, 2001), Anglo says this:

“Yes, it was my creation except everything is based on somebody else. A bit of this and a bit of that. With Superman, he’s always wearing this fancy cloak with a big ‘S’ on his chest … I did away with the cloak so that I didn’t have to draw the cloak, which was awkward to draw, and played with a gravity belt, and they could do anything without all these little gimmicks.”

Six months after the launch of Marvelman, Mick Anglo formed Mick Anglo Limited, UK company number 537200, which was registered on the 21st of August 1954 – with Anglo having filled out the forms in his solicitor’s office nine days earlier, on the 12th of August – with a nominal opening capital of one hundred pounds split into one hundred shares of £1 each, with ten of those shares being drawn down and allocated, nine to Mick Anglo, and the other one to his wife, Minnie.

The exact circumstances surrounding the creation of L Miller’s Marvelman, however, are still the matter of some conjecture, as is Mick Anglo’s part in it. He certainly did have a part in that creation, but whether as primary and only creator or simply as work-for-hire, following detailed instructions from above, is still not clear, nor is it likely to be, it seems.

What is clear is that Mick Anglo, through Mick Anglo Ltd and the writers and artists at Gower Street Studios, provided the Millers with Marvelman material for the next six years, until the title went from weekly to monthly, and became a reprint title.

Marvelman wasn’t the only superhero title that Anglo created, although most of those that followed were based on his earlier work. There was Captain Universe, AKA The Super Marvel, who was a man called Jim Logan who said the magic word GALAP to be changed into his alternative incarnation, published for one issue in 1954 by Arnold Book Company; Captain Miracle, a man called Johnny Dee with the magic word El Karim, published for nine issues by Anglo Comics starting in 1960, just after Anglo ceased working for the Millers; and Miracle Man, a man called Johnny Chapman with the magic word Sundisc, published for thirteen issues by Top Sellers in 1965. The last two are said to simply be redrawn Marvelman stories, in much the same way that some of the Marvelman stories are said to be redrawn Captain Marvel stories.

As the years went on, Anglo continued to work in UK comics, but more at the production end, as an editor and packager, rather than as a writer or artist, and his output, over all the years, is substantial, and significant. He also wrote several books for Jupiter Books, like ‘Penny Dreadfuls and other Victorian Horrors,’ and ‘Man Eats Man: The Story of Cannibalism.’ It was also for Jupiter Books that he wrote a series of books with the series title of ‘Nostalgia – Spotlight on…’, including Nostalgia – Spotlight on the Fifties, which contains an article called The Age of Marvelman, which contains his version of the story of the creation of Marvelman.

In 2007, Anglo’s Marvelman rights were sold to Emotiv and Company, allegedly for four thousand pounds. What exactly those rights are, and where they come from, has also been the matter of much conjecture, but neither Emotiv, not Marvel Comics, who subsequently bought those rights, have publically clarified any of these issues, nor do they appear to intend to do so in the foreseeable future.

(From Miracleman #1, published 1985, by Alan Moore and Garry Leach)

Much has been said, particularly in the past few days, of Mick Anglo’s place in British comics’ history. For myself, I don’t think he was the huge creative genius that people try to make out he was. He certainly wasn’t the hugely influential, legendary comics’ creator that the American comics media seem to want to make him out to have been.

What he was, rather, was a man who worked hard to make a living in tough times, and who ended up providing employment for not only himself, but many others as well. He was not interested in owning any of the rights to the characters he worked on, but simply in doing the work he was asked to do, and getting paid for it.

His set up was as a comics packager, producing a finished periodical to specifications from a publisher, and this is what he did. In these more enlightened times, that may not seem like much, but at the time it was good honourable work, which he did to the best of his considerable ability. He worked hard at what he was good at. That seems a good enough for epitaph for any of us.

(Warrior #2 Marvelman cover by Garry Leach, published 1982 by Quality Communications, you can see a larger version on our Flickr page)

Issue 2 boasted contributions from David Lloyd, Alan Moore, Steve Dillon, Pedro Henry, Steve Moore, Paul Neary, steve Parkhouse, John Bolton, Garry Leach and Uncle Dez himself. Let’s kick off with the cover star, Garry Leach and Alan Moore’s brilliant Marvelman (click the pics to see the larger versions on Flickr):

(From the published Marvelman Family’s Finest #1, July 2010 – variant cover by Dougie Braithwaite, posted on his Facebook. Still with the old, Marvel owned MM logo, nearly one year on, still no movement.)

Okay, some latest on the attempts by marvel to get Marvelman back in print and finished.

There’s a little background here, and a few updates here, here, here and here. But long story short, Marvel acquired the rights to Mick Anglo’s Marvelman character in 2009, and they’ve been trying to sort out the complicated legal issues surrounding the character’s 1982 revival, as masterminded by Dez Skinn, Alan Moore, Gary Leach, Alan Davis et al and later passed to Gaiman and Buckingham, ever since then.

It’s taking a while and Tom Brevoort at Marvel seems a little surprised by that. Blog@Newsarama reported what Brevoort had to say on the subject:

“It should come as no surprise that while we have overcome 80 to 90% of all the loop closing that we have to do, there’s still more to be done. Everybody’s ready and lined up, and now the book’s been announced for two years. But we’ve spoken to Neil [Gaiman]. We’ve spoken to Mark Buckingham. Eventually, once every single thing is lined up, we’ll get to a point where they can come back, finish “The Silver Age” and do the “Dark Age” story they always had planned, and we’ll get the earlier four collections in some way, shape or form back into the marketplace.”

Okay, so they’re definitely on this, doing the work to untangle the various legal issues that have made this the absolute mess we all know and love talking about. Except it seems Tom et al at Marvel didn’t quite realise just how much of a tangle it all was:

“I’m sorry it’s taken so long since we announced the whole thing — we were excited about it! And we thought other people would be too, but we didn’t anticipate it would take this long.”

There’s one phrase that jumped right out at me as a “well, yeah, we all knew that” moment:

“we didn’t anticipate it would take this long”

Okay, hands up everyone who knows anything of the long and convoluted history of Marvelman who knew that it most definitely would take this long? Everyone, right?

Oh well, the least we can take out of this is that Marvel are at least actively pursuing it. The bad news to take away here is that it looks more like something for 2012 or even later  at this stage.

From the upcoming Marvelman Family’s Finest #1 – variant cover by Dougie Braithwaite, posted on his Facebook. Due in July.

Now they’re at it again, after McFarlane hasn’t paid the settlement he was found to be owing. Gaiman’s lawyers are now requesting that three supplementary characters be considered as well, three characters they claim are very similar and derivative of the characters in the original suit.

And that’s when it gets funny. Over to the Wisconsin State Journal reporting the judge’s actions:

“In a written opinion, Crabb wrote that Gaiman has a plausible claim with respect to the three newer characters: Dark Ages Spawn, Domina and Tiffany. She said each of the characters are visually similar to the others and have similar back stories.

Angela, Tiffany and Domina “are warrior angels with voluptuous physiques, long hair and mask-like eye makeup,” Crabb wrote. “Their ‘uniforms’ consist of thong bikinis, garters, wide weapon belts, elbow-length gloves and poorly adjusted armor bras.”"

Poorly adjusted armor bras. Brilliant.

On the left; Angela, created 1993, owned by Gaiman and McFarlane. On the right Tiffany, created 1996, a 100% McFarlane creation. Hmm.  And you can really see what the judge was on about with those poorly adjusted armor bras can’t you?

(Via Heidi at The Comics Beat)

(Mick Anglo’s variant cover to the Marvelman Classic Primer #1)

Press releases this week from Marvel announced their plans to begin reprinting the Mick Anglo Marvelman comics they aquired the rights to in 2009. They’re starting rather unimpressively in June with a prose comic primer; Marvelman Classic Primer #1;

“…a commemorative one-shot featuring interviews with creator Mick Anglo, superstar Neil Gaiman and more who contributed to this character’s history over the years! Plus, get all-new pin ups of key Marvelman characters by superstar artists Mike Perkins, Doug Braithwaite, Miguel Angel Sepulveda, Jae Lee, Khoi Pham and Ben Oliver! This landmark issue features two covers—one with the timeless art of Mick Anglo and another with the now-iconic rendition of Marvelman by Marvel Editor-In-Chief—and superstar artist—Joe Quesada!“

They’re going to follow that with the Marvelman Family’s Finest #1, “a new ongoing series reprinting Marvelman’s greatest adventures for the first time in the US!” and finally getting round to the archive hardcover we were all expecting in July. (via Heidi)

Alan Moore has said he’s okay with Marvel reprinting his stuff as long as the money goes to Mick Anglo. As for everyone else involved, who knows. But this reprint does at least announce to the world that Marvel have plans for the character.

What those plans are and whether they ever involve the Marvelman/Miracleman comics that the majority of us are most interested in remains to be seen.

(Joe Quesada’s regular cover to the Marvelman Classic Primer #1)

(Marvelman (c) – ah well, as we know, there hangs a tale! Mick Anglo? Marvel now?, Captain Marvel (c) DC Comics, art by Jeremy Eaton, check his Flickrcomi for the larger image and some more cool artwork to browse)

But now on his blog Pádraig reveals some new information he’s discovered: a copyright notice under Michael Angelo’s name on a Young Marvelman page reproduced in an article (see above) entitled The Age of Marvelman in the 1977 book by Mike Angelo, Nostalgia: Spotlight on the Fifties. “So, finally, it seems I have all the proof I need. Young Marvelman the character was created at the same time as Marvelman, and Young Marvelman the comic shared the same numbering as Marvelman, so started its weekly schedule at #25. It follows that Young Marvelman #38, from which the above is taken, was published thirteen weeks in the title’s run, putting it somewhere in May 1954, and from this there would seem to be no other conclusion to be drawn except that right from the very beginning, Mick Anglo was claiming that he owned the copyright on Marvelman and associated characters.” I’m not even going to pretend to know exactly how this all fits into the contentious history of ownership regarding copyright (it’s been pointed out the copyright lettering could have been added for the ’77 reproduction in the book), let alone how it affects possible reprinting (or continuation) of the later Moore-Gaiman Miracleman tales, you should simply go read Pádraig’s blog.

(On the left; old style Marvelman – which Marvel owns. On the right; modern Marvelman/Miracleman, which Marvel are getting closer and closer to owning or at least reprinting.)

The story so far: Marvel announced last month that it had secured the rights to reprint Mick Anglo’s Marvelman. Much speculation and gossiping ensued over what exactly this meant for the possibility of reprinting the Alan Moore Marvelman/Miracleman stories from Warrior/Eclipse and reprinting and finishing Gaiman and Buckingham’s Miracleman saga.

Well, according to the first part of this interview from Mania.com with Alan Moore, it seems we’re definitely one step closer to getting the complete Marvelman back into print as he’s reported as saying that he’s more than happy to see all of his MM stories come back into print, but possibly without his name on them:

“After being initially informed by Neil’s lawyer, I had to think about it for a couple of days. I decided that while I’m very happy for this book to get published—because that means money will finally go to Marvelman’s creator, Mick Anglo, and to his wife. Mick is very, very old, and his wife, I believe, is suffering from Alzheimer’s.

The actual Marvelman story is such a grim and ugly one that I would probably rather that the work was published without my name on it, and that all of the money went to Mick. The decision about my name was largely based upon my history with Marvel—my desire to really have nothing to do with them, and my increasing desire to have nothing to do with the American comics industry. I mean, they’re probably are enough books out there with my name on them to keep the comics industry afloat for a little bit longer. I left a message to that effect with Neil. I’ve since heard back from the lawyer upon another issue, and he said that he was certain that would be the case—that Marvel would accede to my request. That looks like the way it will be emerging.

And, Neil will be able to finish his Marvelman story because he has a completely different relationship with Marvel than I have with them—or rather, don’t have. The main thing is that I will feel happy to know that Mick Anglo is finally getting the recompense he so richly deserves. And, I will have distanced myself from a lot of the deceit and ugliness that surrounded the relaunching of Marvelman as a character.”

So we’re definitely getting closer to seeing the books back in print. What do you think? 2010? 2011?

(via John at Down The Tubes)