Wait, so any story involving a good hero gone bad is ripping off Miracleman?
Apparently any comic with violence is.
Damn straight!
Okay, more serious answer - 'ripping it off' is too harsh. But let's say I wanted to do a cool, super vast war between the worlds of Elves, Men, and some cave monster men, I call them Kors! Right. Even if I'm
not doing what Tolkein did, the truth is, my work is in the very same genre as Tolkein's LotR. I may do many things to make my story unique, and I may draw inspiration from stories that predate LotR, but the two entities are in the same spectrum and comparisons are inevitable. Unless I actively understand how LotR works, my ability to be unique will be even more difficult as I won't know enough about LotR to differentiate myself.
In the cases of Superboy Prime and Ultimatum and Irredeemable, while it's not a direct ripping off, the thematic elements of the stories are very much in the vein of MIRACLEMAN. And since MIRACLEMAN is pretty much the originator of this type of story - the other being SQUADRON SUPREME - the comparison between the two is even more obvious.
Superboy Prime, in particular, is a very, very poor attempt at Kid Miracleman.
How dare you put Johns in the same group as Loeb and Bendis.
I have tried many Johns issues. I can not recall reading a single one that I thought was good.
I think, strangely enough, his FLASH run I've not read. Maybe I should?
My own Alan Moore reference for "Ultimatum as superhero snuff movie" was his take on Captain Britain, actually: specifically, when The Fury was first introduced and we saw him, in flashback, killing off all these superficially disguised versions of British superhero characters from the 1960s.
The Fury was absolutely terrifying. And it made it worse because these characters were really from strips designed for children; they had this innocent faith that things would work out, their adventures and battles had never been dark or gory, they always won. And suddenly they were being slaughtered. And they saw each other die, and Moore showed their disbelief and despair and grief. It was gut-wrenching. None of the characters in Ultimatum seem to be feeling anything beyond a clenched-teeth "lets get this guy."
Grant Morrison did something very similar to Moore in his Zenith strip for 2000AD, bringing together and then killing off a multiverse of Brit comic characters from days gone by.
But yes, I agree with Bass in that 'Miracleman' refined the concept of the dark, adult, realistic superhero to the point where you almost couldn't go any further down that road. Watchmen may have been technically cleverer, but Miracleman is the stronger strip on a mythic level, IMO.
It's almost as though its non-availability were a conspiracy to stop it showing up our current top comic creators as the charlatans they are...
(By the way, sorry for my reference points being a) British, b) from the 80s and c) often out of print. I can only apologise and admit that I am a) British, b) 38, and c) I have a lot of old comics and not many new ones. I basically missed the 90s completely, but on my return to the field as an adult, this broad obsession with superhero death was one thing I really noticed. So I'm not an expert, and it's not in everything, but it does seem to be there).
I agree with you except with the idea that you couldn't go further down the road with the subject matter seen in MIRACLEMAN. I believe that it is possible to go further - if you're
really very good indeed. I, personally, wouldn't know where to begin. But if you asked Alan Moore, I'm sure he'd tell you what a 'better' version of that story might be.
But terrific references all. In fact, ULTIMATUM actually validates THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE (from 1986). The first twenty minutes of that movie is carnage, where all your favourite toys are killed off and replaced with new toys for you to buy. You cannot get more shallow than that. Orson Welles exclaimed this when asked about the movie, "It's about toys doing horrible things to one another" he said. And yet... those first twenty minutes, while not particularly golden, are actually well-written for the most part. The deaths are treated well, in that they have meaning. The lines are great, the pace and structure flows and builds, increasing in spectacle until it goes for a smaller, more emotionally intense duel, while juggling a vast number of characters. And it works. For a 6-year old, it's harrowing and will be remembered for the rest of your life. For a 30-year old who's never seen Transformers, they won't get all the individual characters and it'll just be "pretty cool, but the music is pure cheese, and why did Megatron have a lightsaber anyway?" But they'll never go, "That's just disgusting".
It wasn't gratuitous.
It is a sad world when Ultimatum is readily available and Miracleman, Zenith and Flex Mentallo are not.
Agreed.