Disney Comics today announced that "Marvelman Returns in June", which is the long-awaited word on what they'll be doing with their recently-purchased character. In the article, they proudly trumpet "the debut of Marvelman Family's Finest #1, a new ongoing series reprinting Marvelman's greatest adventures for the first time in the US!" Implied in that statement (and all-but-confirmed elsewhere) is the fact that these are the early, Golden Age adventures of the Marvel Family characters, not the 1980s/90s material that brought them to worldwide prominence.
Is this just typical Disney (nee Marvel) hype, or do they really not get it? The greatest adventures of this character didn't happen in the 1950's/60's... those were largely crap, and their eventual disappearance from the comic racks in the U.K. wasn't exactly mourned by many British fans, from what I can tell. Instead, it was the work Alan Moore and (later) Neil Gaiman did with the characters between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s that brought the Marvels/Miracles to prominence, both in the U.K. and North America. Claiming that the original, dreadful stuff contained the "greatest adventures" is like saying that the greatest portable music device was the Walkman. It's either a spurious claim, or a really ignorant one. Or maybe, because this is Disney Comics, it's both.
[By the way, if you don't know who I'm talking about with this "Marvelman" stuff, but would like to, check out the Marvelman Primer I posted last year. It's got a lot of background material in it that's intended for those who don't read comics as much as I do!]
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2 comments:
Matty - I bet you probably know this, but there is 90% chance that Disney knows exactly what is it doing, and that is publishing a character to establish ownership of the movie/tv rights.
Yeah, Tim, I'm sure that's part of it. But it just rankles me that Disney continues to pretend that the reason people are interested in Marvelman are the old, pre-Moore stories. That's complete garbage and I think it makes them look ridiculous by taking that stance.
I wouldn't fault them saying "Here are the tales that inspired his greatest adventures" or "Come read the classic early adventures..." but calling them "the greatest" is like labeling the mid-90s issues of Fantastic Four the pinnacle of that title's run! It just invites disbelief.
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