Episode 81 - Marvelman/Miracleman: The Alan Moore Run - with Alex LaVelle

Dream of Flying with Alex, Jmike, and Case! They’re taking a look at the incredibly influential early 80’s story, whether they call it Marvelman or Miracleman! So whisper “Kimota” and join the Red Kings in Olympus!

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Men of Steel Full Episode Originally aired: December 31, 2021

Edited by Matt Storm

Scored by Gen Moonen

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⏱️ Chapters

00:00 Disclaimer

01:06 Welcome and Guest Intro

01:34 Miracleman vs. Marvelman

02:30 Miracleman’s Legal Hell

03:06 Captain Marvel and Marvelman Origins

06:31 Alan Moore and the British Invasion

07:05 Warrior and V for Vendetta

07:43 Moore’s Deconstruction of the Superman Archetype

08:29 Eclipse, Gaiman, McFarlane, and Marvel

10:29 Case’s History with Miracleman

11:18 Alex’s History with Miracleman

14:05 Jmike’s First Read

14:36 Reading Miracleman in Context

17:51 Miracleman vs. Watchmen

21:34 Gargunza and the Book’s Edgelord Edge

23:23 Eugenics and the Ubermensch

24:42 A Dream of Flying

25:41 The 1960s Comic Voice

26:42 The Anti-Nuclear Demonstration

27:29 Kimota

29:45 Miracleman Returns Home

30:43 Kid Miracleman Returns

32:53 Kid Miracleman’s Weakness

33:03 Why Kid Miracleman Works

35:18 Superhumanity and Disconnection

37:53 The Battle with Kid Miracleman

39:08 Liz and Mike Test the Powers

40:26 Johnny Bates as Chekhov’s Gun

43:03 Mike Moran’s Insecurities

44:00 Mr. Cream

45:47 Cream Makes a Deal

47:03 Miracleman Attacks the Facility

47:42 Big Ben

49:08 The Bones of Young Miracleman

49:56 The Truth of Project Zarathustra

51:14 How the Transformations Work

52:52 Supplemental Stories and Material

54:47 The Red King Syndrome

55:08 Alex Recaps Red King

56:09 Gargunza’s Immortality Plan

57:22 The Dream Reality Breaks

58:25 Miracle Dog

59:56 Winter Is Born

01:01:07 Winter, the Qys, and the Cuckoos

01:03:29 Olympus Begins

01:06:04 Miracleman’s Olympus

01:07:05 Kid Miracleman Looms

01:07:35 The Qys Arrive

01:11:31 Miracle Woman and Young Nastyman

01:12:02 The Warpsmiths

01:13:16 Hegelian Synthesis

01:15:00 Liz Leaves Miracleman

01:15:25 Miracleman Meets Winter

01:17:25 Miracle Woman’s Integrated Identity

01:18:39 The Fire Drake

01:20:00 The Death of Mike Moran

01:22:03 Silence in the Mariana Trench

01:22:22 Kid Miracleman Escapes

01:23:41 London Falls

01:25:00 Mythology and Fiction

01:26:09 Fighting Kid Miracleman

01:27:08 Johnny Bates Reverts

01:27:39 Killing Childhood

01:29:39 Olympus Built on Human Bones

01:30:10 Miracleman Remakes the World

01:31:42 Big Ben Rebuilt

01:32:50 Winter Returns

01:33:08 Miracle Babies and Eugenics

01:35:02 The Bates Counterculture

01:35:37 Miracleman’s Formal Look

01:36:22 The Totalitarian Utopia

01:37:26 Supplemental Stories and Scripts

01:38:34 Neil Gaiman’s Golden Age Setup

01:40:13 Miracleman’s Influence

01:41:22 The Dark Superman Story Done Right

01:43:38 Jmike’s Takeaway

01:45:49 Who Should Write Miracleman Today?

01:47:31 Could Miracleman Work as a Movie?

01:49:24 Final Thoughts on Alan Moore’s Miracleman

01:52:24 Alex’s Plugs

01:53:33 Jmike and Case’s Plugs

01:54:20 Next Time: Neil Gaiman’s Miracleman

01:54:46 Post-Show: Mr. Cream

01:58:27 CPOV Autographs Promo

Transcription

00:00
Case Aiken
Hey everyone, this is Case coming in before the episode just to let you know that this is a classic episode that is being released on YouTube, but it was originally recorded and released in 2021. So some things have changed about the comic that we're discussing. For one thing, the unfinished Miracle man. The Silver Age has been completed and I rather like it. Unfortunately, we have since found out that the person who wrote that book is not particularly a good person. And so those are things that we don't address in this episode because we didn't know about them. They hadn't happened yet. But. But aside from that, it's a really good conversation. I really like the book Miracle Man. I really love the Alan Moore era of Miracle man especially. So please enjoy. I. I think this is a really fun conversation.

01:06
Case Aiken
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Men of Steel podcast. I'm Case Aiken and as always, I am joined by my co host, Jmike Folson.

01:12
Jmike
Welcome back everybody. Today is a great day.

01:15
Case Aiken
Today is a dream come true. Something that has been buried in our minds for a long time, just waiting to get out. Like just something that was on the. Just on the tip of our tongue and just never escaped. And to realize those dreams, we are joined once again by Alex Lavelle.

01:31
Alex
A dream come true. Would that be a dream of flying?

01:34
Case Aiken
A dream of flying indeed. Because we are today talking about the Alan Moore run on Miracle man or Marvel man, however you want to call it on this one.

01:44
Jmike
You want to call it Marvel Man. Let's just get the rules.

01:47
Case Aiken
Well, so yeah, I was actually surprised sort of when Marvel Comics took over the rights that they did not revert the character name to Marvel Man. But I'm cool with it generally. And at a certain point the book just becomes Miracle man once it becomes exclusively published by Eclipse. So that kind of changes the dynamic because like, by the time it becomes Neil Gaiman, it's entirely Miracle man. To the point that there's like poetry that's written in meter working off of Miracle as opposed to Marvel. And you just can't make that work because the series just didn't continue on. It's actually the same situation that happened for Vendetta, except D.C. championed that one sooner. And so a series that didn't end was wrapped up and we are all the better for it.

02:30
Case Aiken
But also, I kind of think a lot of people forget that V for Vendetta had this like big multi year gap in its publication because most of us remember it from the trades that were readily available throughout the 2000s and you could just get those issues. Miracle man was not. Miracle man was the, er, example of legal hell for comic books for so long. So I think we should first talk about what the property was, what the hell we're talking about, because we haven't actually explained any of that. And then, and then talk about the situation that came to be for the book and then we'll actually talk about the content of the book itself. I think that makes the most sense in terms of structuring this, because the, the.

03:06
Case Aiken
From the beginning, this book is built around just looking at ownership laws for characters and copyright infringement and being like, let's fuck with that shit, baby. Because going Back to the 50s, Captain Marvel as Shazam Nowadays, for complicated legal reasons, was a really popular character. A lot of people know this. We've talked about the character a lot. It was really popular all over the world, including in Great Britain, where they would reprint issues of Captain Marvel in black and white. And that was just really successful. Like, that was a hugely popular series that was running. But over here in America, D.C. did not like that. Captain Marvel was a more popular character who had kind of a similar shtick to Superman. And so D.C. threatened lawsuits and yada yada, back and forth.

03:53
Case Aiken
Eventually Fawcett Comics, the publisher of the various Captain Marvel books at the time. So there was a Captain Marvel family book, there was Captain Marvel Jr. Stuff, which was actually the most popular of those books at the time, because teen superhero stuff has always had, like, a particular niche for fans of teen characters. Like, you know, teenage readers inspired Elvis to make his costumes look like that. All, you know, all those crazy stories. Anyway, eventually Fawcett Comics agreed to stop publishing the book. Part of that was because they were just burnt out on superhero stuff. Part of that is that the fad was kind of dying. A whole bunch of reasons. Some of it was because Cease and Desist. So they decided they were going to stop making Captain Marvel Comics.

04:31
Case Aiken
And over in Great Britain, the company that was doing the reprints of the Captain Marvel stuff was like, what the fuck? That's, that's our bread and butter. Right now. We're just doing Captain Marvel stories and we're not dealing with the issue with any sort of American courts at the moment. And so a decision was made to alter the last issue that they got to indicate that the stories would continue with new protagonists. And they hastily cobbled together a new character with British artists to keep the momentum going and be very similar. But at the same Time legally distinct. And that was this character called Marvel Man. And like, I've read some of the stories. There were a bunch of reprints that they've put out over time. There's like a mar.

05:09
Case Aiken
Like a Marvel man or Miracle man classics book that you can pick up, which has a lot. And the more recent run that we're going to be talking about today opens with a story that is based on it. And there's like, lots of reprints of this time that you can check out, but it's basically Captain Marvel, as we know, but with a palette swap and British. And instead of it being lightning, it's an atomic bomb. And I mean, like, the panel when he would transform, would have an atomic, like, mushroom cloud burst every time he would transform. And like, that was it. Also, Mary Marvel was a boy. They flipped that part because they thought British readers wouldn't dig a female character. So the.

05:47
Case Aiken
The Marvel man family of Marvel Man, Young Marvel man, who's the analogous character to Captain Marvel Jr. And Kid Marvel man, who's analogous to Mary Marvel kind of whatever, were basically this, like, new creation to fill the void that Captain Marvel left in publication and was pretty popular for the duration of the 50s, but it kind of petered out in the late 50s, early 60s, to the point where the. The line just kind of discontinued. And that was about it. But for astute fans of comics and comic book history, I think a lot of people are aware of the British Invasion that happened in the 80s, and there was a big revival with a lot of big names that we talk about. Neil Gaiman is one. And then later we get characters like Warren Ellis, Mark Millar, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison.

06:31
Case Aiken
But a particular vanguard of that was Alan Moore. And Alan Moore got started working on a lot of different books. He was a big fan of comics. Like, he's actually a big historical buff of comic books in general and likes to make allusions to these older things, later series that have had the same kind of vibe for other characters. But when he first got started, he was working for the Marvel UK department and was on the team for Captain Britain. He actually wanted to do shout outs to old classic British characters, one of whom was Marvel man, who off screen is killed and they refer to as Miracle man, to be legally distinct from this old property that existed.

07:05
Case Aiken
But at the same time, on a book called Warrior, which is anthology book, he got tasked with creating a couple different story arcs to run in these segments. And they're. They're. They're like half issues, basically. They're like 10ish pages each kind of installments. And one of them was V for Vendetta, which went on to be an immensely popular series that is continuing to shape the world. As there are weird online activists who like to wear the mask that Warner Brothers put out in conjunction with the movie tie in that came out later. But the other one was Marvel Man. They, they brought back the character Marvel man because the right had lapsed into a place where someone could swoop them, swoop in and pick them up and republish it.

07:43
Case Aiken
And so Moore started writing the series and it's such an Alan Moore book that he wrote. Like Alan Moore comes in and he's just known for being like, let's revise everything. Let's do revisionist history for everything. Like wouldn't it be weird if this happened with X character? Like that's every Alan Moore book is that. And at the time it was really fresh and cool. And since then we've started to see that's his playbook for a lot of properties. But it was really popular at the time. It was it. This is the deconstruction of the Superman archetype or at least like the grim, dark deconstruction of the Superman archetype where it's like, well, what are the consequences of a Superman in the real world? And so this is a book that tells that story and it was very successful and very popular.

08:29
Case Aiken
But Warrior eventually folded. The, the rights got floated around. They basically completed it over on Eclipse Comics in America, which only reason I even know the name of that comic book company is because they were putting this book out. And then Alan Moore, being a weird anarchist, transferred his ownership stake over to Neil Gaiman and then Eclipse continued to hold on to a percentage of the stake. And then when Eclipse folded, the book ended in the middle of Neil Gaiman's run and the rights were all the over the place. Todd McFarlane at one point tried to buy the rights to it. Neil Gaiman held on to some of it. It got like further chopped up with like estate stuff going on. It's fucking crazy. And a lot of people hate each other.

09:06
Case Aiken
Like Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane don't like each other anymore for a lot of reasons. But there's a reason that Angela, the Neil Gaiman creation has floated its way over to Marvel because you, Todd McFarlane is what Neil Gaiman was saying. I don't actually have strong feelings on McFarlane. Like, I know he's like, controversial with some people and, like, not everyone's cup of tea, but, like, you know, like, I don't know. I don't know him personally. I don't know. Like, I don't know where I stand on that one. But for a long time, they. They couldn't publish these. They couldn't reprint these, they couldn't collect these. They never. They never finished it. The. For a long time. The trade paperbacks that they put out were actually more, like, so crazy expensive. They were like, hundreds of dollars to pick up.

09:44
Case Aiken
I know, because I was looking into them back when I was a teenager, and so it was hard to actually read the story when I was a teenager. I would go to comic book stores and then immediately search to see if they had a back issue because some issues were you could easily find and some issues you could not. So there were, like, getting a complete collection was almost impossible until 2014. And after a bunch of chicanery where, like, Image tried to put out a Miracle man book, it didn't work because they didn't actually own the rights, even though they thought they owned the rights because it wasn't actually part of Eclipse's estate anymore. Marvel actually, like, consolidated enough and made a deal with Gaiman and they. They took the rights and they were able to republish it and they.

10:29
Case Aiken
They put out these, like, beautiful hardbacks editions of what were the trade paperbacks with really nice supplemental material. And I bought them immediately and was like, someday I'm gonna, like, sit down and I'm gonna do a full mark, like, Marvel Man, Miracle man reread. And I didn't until this. So I finally actually finished, like, reading it all. And it's like, oh, it's crazy because, like, I had read so much about it. I knew exactly what happened, but I didn't necessarily know what. How it all fit together exactly, if that makes any sense. So I was really excited to, like, actually finish the job and, like, go through it all for this conversation, because I love this book. Alex, when have you. When did you read this in the first place? What were your thoughts before you read it?

11:12
Case Aiken
Like, how aware were you of it? Like, it's a comic that has, like, this weird kind of, like, mysticism to it.

11:18
Alex
Yeah, I was. I was mostly aware of it by following articles about the court cases between Gaiman and McFarlane, like, tangentially in, like, the whole Shazam. Captain Marvel naming conversation, like, at the beginning of the new 52, when they started exclusively calling him Shazam, and people brought up, like, the Miracle Man, Marvel, man name conversation as well, but mostly just, like, through that sort of news. I remember the headline when Neil Gaiman won the lawsuit with McFarlane and got the rights to this and to the Angela character and, like, brought them both over to Marvel.

11:58
Jmike
And.

11:59
Alex
And at that point I said, you know, I'm gonna grab these hardcovers because who knows how long this will last? And, like, I'm curious. I am not. I think I've talked about this before on the show. Like, I'm not a lifelong reader of comics. I got into reading comics about 10 years ago. So truly, like, as those court cases were going on, I didn't have. I don't have any, like, lifelong attachment to Alan Moore or his body of work. There are things I dig. There are things that fall a little flatter for me than they do for some people. I did pick these up as they came out. I read them all. I had read volume one when it first came out. I didn't get around to reading two or three as they came out.

12:37
Alex
And then in, like, 2016, 2017, I decided to do a dumb thing for panelology to kind of, like, promote it and, like, help with SEO for it. I decided also because I had bought a lot of trades that I had not gotten around to reading, I was going to read a trade a day and write about it every day for an entire year. So in the course of doing that, I read all three of these. So getting ready for today was my second read of them. I think in general, my opinions from read one hold into read two, There are things and concepts I absolutely adore in this. There are some elements that have not aged well, which any comic that is 40 years old will have. Those issues. I think those were maybe the things I liked.

13:19
Alex
I liked maybe even more this time. The things that didn't age well, I think are an even harder read in this moment. Particularly like the way that race is handled, the way that some of the female characters, especially. Especially Michael's wife are handled, and just some of the, like, borderline homophobia that would have been super normalized at the time.

13:42
Case Aiken
Yeah.

13:43
Alex
And again, it's that. I mean, that's always the argument between, you know, do you hold a writer responsible for awful things that bad characters say? Like, no, they're villains, but at the same time, it's. There's some subtext around some of it that sits funny with me anyway. But there are a lot of ideas in this that, like, I would love to see someone pick up today and run with jma.

14:05
Case Aiken
How about you. What was your relationship with the, with the character, the series in general?

14:10
Jmike
I mean, I think we all know the answer to this question. It was you case. Like I. You'd mentioned it a couple of times. I'm like, okay, that sounds kind of cool. And you're like, hey, we're going to, we're going to do some shows about it. And I was like, all right, cool. What do I need to know? And I started reading and I was like, what? I was like, what, What. What is going here? What is going on here? What is this?

14:36
Case Aiken
Yeah, it. I. I think one thing we have to start with is that this comic came out in the very early 80s.

14:42
Jmike
Yeah, that's.

14:44
Case Aiken
That I think is just flat out the first thing we have to talk about because there's so much in this book that has become part of sci fi pop culture comic book, the Zeitgeist, that it's very early in that. That run. And I'm not saying it was necessarily originated here, but it was consolidated in a way in a popular work here. And it's hard. Like, it's. It wasn't quite cliche yet. Like, Alan Moore generally is like very influential on writers of the next wave of comics after that. And so there's a lot of things going on here that were very popular and like I said, almost like kind of cliche. Like things like a decision to try to articulate the nature of their powers by way of a force field becomes like the default for characters in the.

15:31
Case Aiken
Even in the early 80s, or I guess in the late 80s, like things like Superman post crisis became very much about his force field, which then became the defining thing for Superboy at. In the 90s, having a tactile telekinetic force field. It's. That went on to influence Chronicles characters and how their powers worked. So like, that's just one part of it all. The, the body switching thing is kind of pulled from Marvel's Captain Marvel. But the way it particularly works is much more in line with things the way like Mighty man would work later on when you're looking at things like their. Well, like what they do to the world. This is the full articulation of like, oh yeah, Superman could do all these things and some of it is for better and some of it's for worse.

16:14
Case Aiken
And this is like one of those attempts to be like, all right, well, let's actually go down that road. Let's actually see that all.

16:19
Alex
So, so you can argue that there's A pretty straight line from this into something like the Authority.

16:24
Case Aiken
Yes, absolutely. And then there's the way that they were trained inside a virtual space that is just the Matrix. And then you get into the actual consequences of superhero fights, which Kevin Smith talked about. How Dogma's ending is supposed to be a tribute to the battle with Kid Miracle Man. And if you look at the Matrix movies, it's hard not to imagine that those are also kind of influenced by looking at this. I mean, for one thing, there's the, you know, growing up in the Matrix part, but the end fight feels a lot like the fight with Kid Miracle man in Revolutions. I mean, and who's to say necessarily how much it influenced them? But it seems to be the type of thing that would be influencing fans of this kind of material.

17:05
Case Aiken
So it's, like I said, it's impactful on the medium as a whole. And then later works that like writers like War, or even like, even the writers of like the late 90s, like, trying to like, pull back against the grim dark, have then tried to do stories that are direct contrast of where it's like, all right, well, this is how far you can push a Superman story to the point where he takes over the world and tries to make it a utopia. Then what's the other way? Why don't you do that? Why do you do a more traditional Superman story? And that's more of like the reconstructionist kind of talk that you see in the late 90s going into even the current era of comics.

17:40
Case Aiken
So it's just so interesting as a period piece that was so forward thinking compared to what had come before. But we're also looking at it now like 40 years later.

17:51
Alex
I mean, I'll say this though, I think, and I'm just gonna fire shots across the bow here, I guess. I think if you put this in front of me and you put Watchmen in front of me and you say, which of these, to you, as a person who has started reading comics in the last decade, is interesting and has more stuff that you would want to see explored now? It is this. Not to talk about any historical importance in the moment, but in terms of where is there still something interesting that hasn't been mined to death? It's this book of those two.

18:21
Case Aiken
Yeah, I think that's very fair. And part of that is I would say that Watchmen takes some of these ideas and explores them with Dr. Manhattan,.

18:28
Alex
But I think in a very different way. Like, for me, the most interesting Thing about this. Rereading it all today. Right. Rereading it all for this recording in 2021. Like, under even a different context than four years ago, five years ago, the first time I read it. The idea of a superhero with that amount of power, whose entire perception of reality is based on a nostalgic fiction that never existed, and then asking them to learn how to navigate the real world is something that seems very contemporary.

19:07
Jmike
Yeah.

19:09
Alex
Today.

19:10
Jmike
Yes, I can see that.

19:11
Alex
I mean, the idea. The idea that we have entire, like, narrative fictions that are promulgated as fact or some alternative to fact, as though it bears equal weight simply by. Simply the people who want their worldview affirmed rather than to, I don't know, protect themselves or the people around them. Like, that is wild. And like, there's so much in the concept of what do you do with a superhero who wants to do good but doesn't actually understand the world that he's trying to do good in? Like, separating fact from fiction.

19:48
Case Aiken
Yeah, it's. It's such a. An interesting work where he's. I mean, the thing about this, compared to Watchmen, is that Watchmen, I think, is one of the best constructed comics of all time. Like, in terms of, like, doing all the literary things, building it as. Here's a complete story with, like, all these illusions throughout and all these, like, this really intense theming of and symbolism that they're really putting in all this.

20:12
Alex
Sure.

20:13
Case Aiken
Into. I think that's. I think that's incredible, but I think that it is not as raw as this one is in this sense a good thing.

20:21
Alex
I think this, like, this is messy. This was published in what, most of it in what, eight page arcs?

20:27
Case Aiken
Yep.

20:27
Alex
Like, tone and function and structure shift so much from story beat to story.

20:33
Case Aiken
Beat and art style, because Alan Davis was the original artist on it, but because Alan Moore had started his fight with Marvel, Alan Davis was like, I can't keep working on this. I'm going to get blacklisted.

20:43
Alex
Yeah. But, like, feels fractured in a way that is appropriate to the subject matter. And, like, the thing I'm. I guess I'm talking about with this. This core concept of everything I've known as a lie that actually sort of fades into the background. That's not what this story is about as much.

21:01
Case Aiken
No, only really in the first two books and not so much in the third.

21:04
Alex
But even. Even with that being the case, I think there's something interesting in that to explore now. Like, that's the kind of thing where I feel like this book Prescient, I don't think is the right word. I think this book is just rife for, like, poking and prodding and doing things with. In a way that. That something that just even people know better than this isn't necessarily just because there's less oxygen that's already been taken up by nostalgia for it, by lifelong love of it. Like, there's just more unexplored here. And that's interesting to me.

21:34
Case Aiken
And I mean, like, some of that also comes from a fearlessness and a lack of maturity in the creative team. Like, Alan Moore is expressing some of his worst edgelord tendencies in things like Dr. Gargunza, for example, is so vile in ways that it's just like, oh, a race to the bottom to show how bad of a bad guy this character is. Like, we have to stress that detail, like, every single time he's on, like, not on screen, but, like, on page. It's just like, oh, yep. Yeah. No, no, he's the worst.

22:05
Alex
Like, he likes to say Nazis and raping women.

22:08
Case Aiken
Yep.

22:09
Jmike
This is a lot to say in one sentence, by the way. Yep.

22:13
Alex
But that's. Those are literally his defining character traits in this book. And actually, I think that's one of the things that ages the book the most. Like, I agree that's one of the, like, least refined parts of this book.

22:24
Case Aiken
Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting to think that the moment it was made was probably the last time where you could have characters who were, like, legitimately, like, part of the time. Like, you know, the people who are, like, the kids of that era, but who had been, like, succumbed to the dream of, like the actual Nazis as opposed to Neo Nazis. Like, not. Not Nazi fans. Like, people who were, like. Who were Nazis at the time can still be active villains without, like, some sort of artificial means. You know, like, we've got henchmen who are like, Yep, they were. They were young monsters in. In their era where they were brought up in Germany during that era. And Gargunza, who actually was a Nazi scientist, you know, seven years later, it becomes less plausible that you could have these characters without something going on.

23:07
Case Aiken
And, like, obviously today they're. They're all dead.

23:10
Alex
As well they should be. Yeah. I will say this. The, like, background of Nazi experiments as Gargan World and, like, sort of the lineage that the experiments that create the Miracle man family come out of does make it incredibly jarring in the last couple of issues when Miracle man starts talking about their eugenics program as part of this idealized utopian. Future. Pick a different word.

23:36
Case Aiken
That said, those words were much more in vogue at the time.

23:40
Alex
I will grant that, but it's still, I don't know, I've had to have too many, I know, too many conversations in the last five years with like black and white science, industrial engineer type friends who are like, I mean, on paper it sounds like it's like, no, it's not a good idea on paper or anywhere else. Stop that. Do you want Nazis? This is how you get Nazis.

24:00
Case Aiken
Yeah. And that is where we get to at the end, kind of. But it's like it, the thing is, it's inviting it by way of like making it couched in the form of paradise. Because like the crazy part is like once you get to the end of the book and they're like putting out Miracle Man's sperm for artificial insemination, like that is technically true. They are going to be super beings. Like, like the next generation would be super beings. But it is by way of a very up thing that reminds me of.

24:32
Jmike
That scene from Men of Steel. Man of Steel, where they have the baby Kryptonians in the pods the entire time. Yeah, that's exactly what that reminded me of.

24:42
Case Aiken
Why don't we go back? Let's, let's. Because like, I think we have a lot to say about Olympus, which is the, where all the big ideas really come out or like the big, like longer term ideas come out. Why don't we start with Dream of Flying and we're gonna talk about the three big arcs because there's some context also for Olympus not of like, oh, it was published at this time, but like, just in terms of like, well, the way it was written changes dramatically because that's when it switches over to Eclipse. Let's start with, with the dream of flying. The, the opening arc for this one of the questions was like, all right, well, what if Billy Batson forgot his magic word and was a middle aged man, which I think is a really interesting conceit.

25:25
Case Aiken
And so we're doing that with Mike Moran, the Billy Batson equivalent for the Marvel man character who is now like in his 40s and like overweight and he's married and like, it's not a really satisfying life. And we. And he dreams about being a superhero every night.

25:41
Jmike
Was I the only person who read that in like the 1960s Batman voice was like, Robin?

25:49
Alex
I didn't, but I love that.

25:54
Jmike
Yes. Young lad.

25:55
Case Aiken
Yeah, that's true. Yeah. The the scenes where they open it with like set during the Miracle man or like the. Yeah, the 60s Marvel man stuff.

26:04
Jmike
Yeah. So the first couple pages, it is starting off like you said, very hokey doie, 1960s comic style with like Gene Whitaker's Batman and Miracle man and Young Miracle Man. And they're all fighting off like this huge wave of bad guys from outer space with like fully equipped, purple raised case. And they're having this wonderful adventure. And then he wakes up. Like you said, he's a middle aged guy. I think he's a beat reporter. He gets assigned to. What is that, a strike?

26:42
Alex
I think it was a demonstration. An anti nuclear demonstration.

26:47
Jmike
Yes. And they are immediately accosted by terrorists.

26:54
Alex
Yep.

26:56
Jmike
And the terrorists are like, yeah, we need news people. We need reporters because we need to like broadcast this stuff.

27:01
Alex
They want to hold a press conference which is like so civilized.

27:06
Jmike
We just need the reporters to come and record us so we can get our message out there. And Mike falls down, he's sick. They're like, we'll get him out of here. We don't need the sick guy in here. Take him out. Drag him outside if he's sick. And then this guy's being. He's being drug outside. He's having these flashbacks and he sees like words like in front of his face and he's like. It's like, was a Kimatoa. Am I saying it right?

27:29
Alex
Kimota.

27:30
Jmike
There you go. Kimota. And then. Yep, they're bright. Atomic.

27:33
Case Aiken
Atomic backwards.

27:35
Jmike
Yeah. The bright, the bright flash, the guy gets burned. I didn't know there would be like casualties of war by transforming into like your superhero Persona. That never happened with Shazam. Okay.

27:50
Case Aiken
Nope. But when you think about it's crazy that it doesn't. So that's. That is part of the deconstruction here. Just like even the act of transforming is a devastating effect on the people around him.

28:00
Alex
That said, though, isn't there. I don't know if there's a comics equivalent that it's based on. I'm sure there must be. But One of the D.C. animated movies did have this like, Superman, Shazam Fight.

28:11
Jmike
Yeah.

28:12
Alex
In which at one point Shazam. Like grabs Superman and starts saying Shazam. Over and over to hit him with the lightning.

28:20
Jmike
Public enemies.

28:20
Case Aiken
Yes. So the first time we really see that was in Kingdom Come.

28:25
Alex
Okay. I thought it might have been there first.

28:27
Case Aiken
And then it was used in Clash, the JLU episode.

28:30
Alex
That's right.

28:31
Case Aiken
Each other.

28:32
Jmike
That's right.

28:33
Case Aiken
And around this time they Started doing those kind of things. Jerry Ordway was a big fan of having the lightning have impacts on it. If you look at the power of Shazam, like, original graphic novel that launched, like the 90s iteration of Shazam, he kept on blowing up. Like, at one point he was standing on top of a blimp and he transformed and then, like, the blimp was totally destroyed.

28:51
Alex
That feels like it comes out of the same place too, as having Wally west accidentally make things explode when he phases through them. Like, kind of uncontrolled powers.

29:01
Jmike
But you never really think about. Well, I mean, yeah, I think that.

29:03
Case Aiken
Idea of collateral damage is. Is part of this, like, deconstruction kind of idea. Like taking the things that we took for granted, taking that this little boy says Shazam. In full public and just there's a panel that's just a lightning, and then all of a sudden he's a superhero. Or that a Power Ranger could transform and have an explosion behind it. And, like, no one's actually hurt by it. This is like, nope, it's. It's. It's an explosion. So it's going to be loud, it's going to be bright, and it's going to burn.

29:27
Alex
Sir.

29:28
Jmike
Those Power Rangers explosions were out in the middle of nowhere. They were fighting. They were fighting the bad guys out in the middle of nowhere because they were. They were being safety conscious here. Okay?

29:38
Case Aiken
Right. Because the bad guys are always like, we have to attack the quarry.

29:45
Jmike
But yeah, and he does his whole Katoa. The guy gets burned. He's like, I'm back after. After a decade, two decades of being gone, I'm back in my. My full body form. And he, like, flies off, goes straight home, scares his wife half a death. And she's like, holy crap. But. And what happens after that? Oh, the military goes crazy. The military guys are crazy. Like, what's going on? This can't be happening. He's having flashbacks about how. How he lost his powers, how Miracle Man, Young Miracle man. And was it Miracle Boy. There you go. Kid Miracle. They're flying on this adventure and they see the spaceship and they're investigating and a nuke goes off in the spaceship and he thinks everyone's dead except for him because he obviously survived. And a couple days later, I think someone reaches out to him.

30:43
Jmike
It's like they want to talk to him. Turns out it's Kid Miracle and he's like, giving his sob story of like, oh, yes, after the explosion, I survived. I thought you guys were dead. You know, I don't have my powers anymore. It's crazy, but it's good to see you. Get to catch up, reminisce, blah. Miracle Man's like, wait, I don't believe that at all. I think you're lying to me. And he pushes him off the edge. And then Kid Miracle transforms into. They said the dragon. It was like they kept calling him a dragon. I don't know if there was any kind of significance to that or not.

31:19
Alex
They use the dragon imagery a lot through the book, right? Like, when we get into the lore of the alien race that these powers come from. Like, they are in space referred to as dragons, and their political rivals are warlocks or wizards or something like that.

31:36
Jmike
But. Yeah, but at the beginning, you're like,.

31:38
Case Aiken
Yeah, there's a lot of mythological.

31:42
Jmike
Yeah, yeah. Like, he. I was not expecting, like, the fight to go as off the rails as soon as it starts. Like, his Mike's wife is running away, and, like, she passed by the girl who brings the coffee, and she's like, see ya. And the girl, the coffee is like, wait, sir, your coffee. And he, like, picks her up and, like, full on injustice, Superman lasers her eyes. Lasers her. And I was like, holy crap. This is. This just got real.

32:13
Alex
It's also like your prototype, Ozymandias, right? Like, only you don't hold off the reveal for later. Here's the industrial billionaire businessman. Guess what? He's the villain.

32:24
Jmike
He's evil. Oh, my gosh.

32:26
Case Aiken
Which is very Alan Moore right there.

32:29
Jmike
Yeah. The giant fight ensues. Miracle man gets his butt kicked.

32:37
Alex
Across.

32:38
Jmike
The entire city, basically.

32:39
Case Aiken
Oh, yeah. No, he. He. The only reason he survives is that Bates has the worst weakness possible, which is that if he says his name, he turns back Captain Marvel Jr. Style. His code word is Miracle man, and his code name is Kid Miracle Man.

32:53
Jmike
He totally misses a playlist himself.

32:58
Case Aiken
Somewhat. All right, I want to talk about Kid Miracle man here for. For a moment, because Kid Miracle man is, I think, one of the really interesting things that they do here. So the idea that a child who looks the same in his powered and unpowered form would just decide to grow up superpowered, I think is a really cool idea. Like, because, like. Well, why wouldn't you. Why would you ever go back?

33:18
Jmike
Very true. Why would you want to be a little kid again when you could be a God?

33:23
Case Aiken
Right? So I think that's a cool.

33:24
Jmike
That.

33:25
Case Aiken
That's a cool component right there. I think the idea that. That their powers as a Superman type being were just, like, scraping like. Or like scraping the Iceberg. Like they'd barely gotten anywhere into like how powerful that they were. And that Kid miracle man with 20 years of practice was like so much more powerful that he could just do that. Like, like at no point do we ever see Mike anywhere like near him in terms of like raw ability or control. Even Winter we don't see do some of the same kind of things later on. So I think that's really cool. And then the fact that like Johnny, like the human form is stuck in stasis that whole time and like that causes a psychological like snap.

34:06
Alex
Yeah.

34:06
Case Aiken
When the body is forcibly switched back, I think is a really cool component.

34:10
Jmike
And then from that point on he's like having the entire fight going on in his subconscious where the adult form is like constantly harassing the kid form.

34:22
Case Aiken
Yeah. But that's even after some healing has happened. Because at first he even says Miracle man and he doesn't transform because it's a post hypnotic suggestion and his brain was too broken to work.

34:31
Jmike
All this in the comic book, guys.

34:34
Case Aiken
Yeah, but I think all three of those are really interesting components. And like the powers thing is such a one working with this idea of like, oh yeah, if you really tested it, like if you had telekinesis to fly, what else can you do with it? Would later get developed. You know, again, Superboy in the 90s had that basic stick and would learn how to do new kinds of things with his telekinesis. As with the character Match, for example, that Alex and I have talked a bit about recently. Because that's a character where it's like, oh yeah, all that telekinetic power. Let's, let's like really push it further. Let's like experiment with things like bending light around your body with that telekinesis. And in this case Kid Miracle Man's doing it in the way of like creating lightning, having the heat blast.

35:18
Case Aiken
Like Miracle man never has those kind of powers. And I think that's a cool component being like, oh yeah, there's a lot to learn. Like you have these great abilities that are godlike just in their base form, but there is so much more you can do with them if you even just gave an a little bit of effort to try. And then there's the last thing actually that we that kind of is brought up, which is that being a superhuman means that you don't relate to people at all. That this whole time Bates in the form of Kid Miracle man has been so disconnected from the world that he sees everything as Just ants and that it's innate. Like we see that with Miracle man as the story goes on.

35:59
Case Aiken
The more time he spends in the Miracle man form, the less connected to humanity he is.

36:05
Jmike
I thought I was. Just because he was evil. Yeah, I can tell he's here.

36:11
Case Aiken
But the thing is, he used to be good. Like they even make a point of showing that he was a good guy at the start of the story. Like they pick up. They pick specifically. Well, a Kid Miracle Man. Miracle Man. Heavy story in a childish way. Yes. Like that's the thing. He is like there's alien invaders. Let's kick them in the crotch.

36:28
Jmike
Well, I mean if it was all technically quote unquote the Matrix, like what was he actually a good person? Or are they just feeding him stuff they want in to see?

36:38
Case Aiken
I think that he was at the very least unproven. I think he was a child. I think that he had the potential for good in him. But being stripped away without consequence that whole time, then he was just doomed.

36:52
Alex
You could, you could also maybe make the argument that as young as he was, as the youngest member of the trio, absent the other two, to kind of show him how to grow into his powers without anyone who had the same powers, who he could relate to, that is another reason why he would break bad even. Even at least when we start to see Mike get more distant later in the series, there is Miracle Woman around who he can relate to. He's got these sort of other like super powered alien peers who he interacts with and who he can get support from. There's another human who's received fire based powers from this cosmic force who he can kind of come in and help guide. Like he's always surrounded by people.

37:40
Alex
After the Dragon Slayer or whatever it was called, incident that made Mike forget who he was and that killed Dickie Dauntless. Like Johnny was alone.

37:53
Case Aiken
Yeah. So the battle with Kid Miracle man is interesting and sets up a lot of stuff. Stakes for it and also starts to set up kind of the, the poetic language we get a lot with Miracle Man. I mean there's all the dragon talk. There's like the talk about a predator. There's all this stuff going on here and that shifts the tone from just being like completely about. Here's a realistic depiction of this being like the super being in our world, which we kind of got with the first part of that story into the more grandiose kind of stuff that we'll eventually get to and will Kind of dominate the third volume.

38:26
Alex
Yeah. The myth making.

38:28
Case Aiken
Yeah.

38:29
Jmike
I still think it's very cool about how they spoilers. How they set up or they created Miracle man after they found the alien.

38:39
Case Aiken
Well, why don't we. Let's. Let's finish up this volume, because then that is basically the chunk.

38:43
Jmike
Well, that's the end.

38:45
Case Aiken
Yeah. So let's move on. It's not a spoiler. Well, it is a spoiler to someone who was not reading.

38:50
Jmike
Oh, yes. If you haven't read this book before, this is a very bad way to go about learning about this right now.

38:57
Case Aiken
Well, maybe not bad, but it's definitely going to be spoilerific.

38:59
Jmike
It's spoilerific. It's complete full of spoilers. There you go. You've been warned. About 40 minutes into the episode. Sorry.

39:08
Case Aiken
So the crazy thing about introducing a character who is godlike in a world that doesn't have godlike super beings, people notice a little bit. Just a little bit, and people are going to come for you. Yeah. So, like, we get some fun stuff. I really like the. The scene of Liz and Mike testing out his powers and trying to figure out how. How it would work. Yeah, very much. Those, like, classic style. Like, nah, super strength wouldn't work that way. It would do this, you know, like, being like, oh, if you flew it, you'd freeze.

39:36
Alex
If you.

39:37
Case Aiken
If you were super strong, you'd, like, if you picked up something heavy, you'd still dig into the dirt. And it's, you know, I think a really good exploration of that and trying to set up, like, no, there's more going on with his powers than just like, oh, yeah, I'm strong and I'm. My skin doesn't break. I like that. They continue to remind us that Miracle man is smarter than Mike Moran.

39:58
Jmike
Yeah.

39:59
Case Aiken
But they're limited by the same memories and thoughts being shared between the two.

40:04
Jmike
Like, they. They. They talk about it with. With Mike, but they show it better with. With Kid Miracle.

40:14
Case Aiken
Yeah.

40:16
Jmike
Because, like, they kind of glance up, they give you an overview, but they really dig into it with the, like, the whole mental battle going on with Kid Miracle, and you see just how much it affects him. Yeah.

40:26
Case Aiken
Hiding away inside his own thoughts, being tormented, and it's a ticking time bomb. Like, that's. That's one thing that overwhelms this entire story, that once. Once they decide not to kill Kid Miracle man when he first transforms back into a young Johnny Bates, that just. You just know it's Chekhov's gun, it's gonna Explode at some point.

40:46
Alex
And it's this wildly irresponsible choice just to, like, never check in on him either.

40:51
Case Aiken
Oh, yeah, that part is crazy.

40:52
Jmike
Like, what?

40:54
Alex
It's like there's never even a conversation of should one of us go look in something? Just like, oh, no, okay, we gotta get out of here or the authorities will find us. I guess we just won't worry about Johnny.

41:05
Jmike
Yeah, they check on him one time, but that's because Mr. Cream calls in and tells him to check on him. They're like, oh, he's fine, and that's it.

41:12
Alex
Yeah, but that's not even Mike or Liz, right? That's Mr. Cream being like, could he be responsible for taking.

41:19
Jmike
Oh, no, he's totally fine. You're not worried about him?

41:22
Case Aiken
Yeah, I, I wondered. Alex, speaking about how this hits different now versus when it first came out, like, thinking about, like, radicalized individuals with a nostalgic past and like not paying attention to them while in the background, they just bubble up and get worse.

41:39
Alex
Yeah, I mean, it definitely feels like it's the other side of what I was talking about with just the basic premise, right? The, the like, how does someone who wants to do good but comes from this sort of false nostalgic background navigate the world they live in? It's. It's the toxic version of nostalgia. It's. I have only had this. I have grown up with this framework. I have only done the things I am interested in and what benefits myself. And I don't care about doing good because in my mind, all that is good is what satisfies me. Like, that is. I mean, I think, I don't know that. That that specific beat hits wildly differently for me now than it did then.

42:21
Alex
Only because there's so much of that, like, isolated cutoff villain thing that I think is kind of always there and that sort of. Of building or is always an option that's on the table. And that sort of building narratives for heel turn super villains. It's. It's Darth Vader, right? Darth Vader has a similar background, but I do think it dovetails with everything else that I was talking about earlier. It's the other side of that. I think it's the side that gets more time. And maybe that's why the other side of it. How does a hero who's in that same position ground himself? Becomes interesting to me, maybe because that has gotten less time, but I think they're connected for sure.

43:03
Case Aiken
Yeah. And at the same time, we're seeing a lot more about Mike's own insecurities with sharing the life with Miracle Man. You know, we. We get pages where he's just talking about how he's like, he's 42 and he's a schlub, and, like, he feels stupid all the time and embarrassed. Right. After being this kind of, like, you know, poetic, like, godly being who's capable of flight and whatnot. And he's having issues with his wife. But now part of those issues are that his wife is pregnant with Miracle Man's child.

43:33
Alex
And anytime he runs into a wall talking to her about those issues, he transforms and lets Miracle man do that for him.

43:41
Jmike
Yeah.

43:41
Case Aiken
Or he walks out of the room. Yeah, Right. But he. I mean, he continues to be a good person because we are introduced to. To antagonistic figure. I'm not necessarily going to call him a villain because he's ultimately an ally, but at the beginning, he's antagonist.

43:55
Alex
He is on his own side. He is doing whatever benefits himself. Yeah.

44:00
Case Aiken
Cream. Mr. Cream.

44:05
Jmike
Still a crazy name.

44:07
Case Aiken
Yeah. But not as crazy as having sapphires for teeth.

44:10
Jmike
No, that's awesome. We were talking about that, and I was like, that is awesome.

44:15
Case Aiken
Yeah.

44:15
Jmike
Where he.

44:16
Case Aiken
He pins Mike in an elevator. He sneaks up behind him and has someone hand him a baby so that if he transforms, he'll murder the baby.

44:24
Jmike
Was I the only person who thought this was the baby they caught earlier? I was like, yo, this is messed up. Like, she hands him the same baby that he caught earlier. That would be crazy.

44:36
Case Aiken
I'm not sure. I mean, it's.

44:38
Alex
I think. I think this baby. I read this baby as being, like, a little younger. Like, baby versus toddler.

44:45
Jmike
Right. Yeah.

44:46
Case Aiken
It certainly comes off as baby.

44:48
Alex
That might have just been me.

44:49
Case Aiken
It also could be the shifting artist at this point.

44:51
Alex
Yeah. How many times can we hand him the same baby torture?

44:56
Case Aiken
Really? Minor note. So the jacket that Mike Moran wears in a lot of these has a similar style to Miracle Man's, like, costume look. It has this, like, yellow stripe pattern. And there was a promotional piece that someone did where Miracle man was wearing that jacket, that. That Mike Moran jacket, along with his, like, outfit that then inspired Grant Morrison to put the jacket on Animal man and kind of kicked off the 90s jacket craze. But it was an unintended side effect of just, like, promotional art.

45:25
Alex
Incredible.

45:26
Case Aiken
But, yeah, so. So being. Being put in a position where all your only choice is either kill a child or get shot by a guy with sapphire teeth. Mike Moran does not kill the child. But then the start of the next story, he's back in control as Miracle Man. We see J. Mike, what happens?

45:47
Jmike
So you already mentioned the part where Mr. Cream shot him with tranquilizer darts. And he comes to, I guess in,.

45:56
Case Aiken
Like, a warehouse, something like that.

45:58
Jmike
Yeah, yeah. Mr. Cream is basically telling him, hey, they wanted me to kill you, but how about we come to an agreement that I don't kill you, and we work together. And there is interconnected panels where these three guys are talking. I don't know who they are. Did they ever say who they were?

46:17
Alex
We know that one of them is.

46:20
Jmike
Was it a general?

46:21
Alex
The. The intelligence officer who was over the Zarathustra project, who Garganza answered to? Dennis Archer.

46:31
Jmike
Yeah.

46:31
Alex
We know one of them is him. I don't think we know who the other two are.

46:34
Jmike
Basically. They're basically saying that, hey, they think that Mr. Cream is like, switch sides and someone needs to take care of that.

46:41
Case Aiken
And they're very perceptive.

46:43
Jmike
Yeah. I was like, how do they know that? They just met.

46:47
Alex
Well, he gave them a fake name. They gave him the name of someone.

46:50
Jmike
Who didn't exist, like Bob Jones. But they're going back and forth about how Mr. Cream is flipped and certain measures need to be taken. Meanwhile, they're having this whole conversation about what to do next.

47:03
Case Aiken
Well, it's intercut with Miracle man laying siege to this one facility.

47:08
Jmike
Oh, yeah, the. Yeah, the atomic facility. So they're talking about what would happen if he got to the. The. The. The base of operations where they created the Miracle man and Miracle. Miracle Man. Kid Miracle.

47:21
Case Aiken
Where they create super beings. Yeah, like, that's. Yeah.

47:23
Jmike
And so it's intercut with, like, him laying siege that. Tearing apart. Tearing through all the soldiers and the traps. And then he runs into who I thought was like a bizarro character at first. Yeah.

47:36
Case Aiken
So after all these soldiers try. And there's, like, explosions and all that, he's face to face with this big muscly guy.

47:42
Jmike
It's like Big Ben. There you go. Boom. Yep. Who has been. Like, his mind has been altered or something. They said it was.

47:48
Case Aiken
Yeah. So. So first up, Big Ben is also a character that was being shown in stories in Warrior at the time. And this was Alan Moore sort of creating a connected universe, but where Big Ben's universe was another fantasy that was inside a different superhero's head.

48:02
Jmike
Yeah.

48:02
Case Aiken
And then this was the real body in the real world that was delusional and thinking that. What was it? Mr. Molotov was. Miracle man was. But it is a less powerful second attempt at creating a super being. So like once their prime assets have been destroyed, they try to recreate the project and it is not as good.

48:20
Alex
He's the US Agent to Steve Rogers.

48:23
Jmike
Yeah. Just about to say that this is basically what it is. And so he's like, he's trying his hardest to like inflict some kind of damage on Miracle man, but look, nothing is working. He's hitting those rocks. Hit him with trees.

48:36
Case Aiken
He's real strong. Yeah, he's super strong. Like you show him picking up like very large boulders and like ripping trees out of the earth, but he's doing nothing.

48:45
Jmike
Like he's like a fight back. And like Miracle Man's like, okay, he like slaps him across the face and sends him flying like three counties over. And then Miracle man and Mr. Cream descend into the laboratory where they see the bones of the alien. Did they mention was young Miracle man his bones right there?

49:08
Alex
Yeah, he was there too.

49:10
Jmike
Did they mention him?

49:11
Alex
Well, they mention him there and those bones are identified as his. We actually learn later that those are young nasty men's, but about right.

49:18
Case Aiken
But the. There is a sign that says young man. Yeah, next to it.

49:22
Jmike
And, and they find the clips of all the research and things that was done. And then they're also being watched while they're watching this and someone's like explaining what's happening in the background. And so they see all the 1940s and 50s style clips of them being created and how all the simulations and things were done and how their entire life is basically a giant comic book. And Miracle man flips out, smashes the equipment and they go flying out of there.

49:56
Case Aiken
And it should be noted that what the thing that like is the final trigger on that one is Dr. Gargunza showing up and saying that it was putting them in the comic book scenario. And it's two parts there. One is that it is a. Everything is a fantasy. Like it wasn't just like, oh, it was all covered up or anything that he suspected at the beginning of the story that it was truly a fantasy that he was inserted in. But also Dr. Gargunza was his doctor Savannah, like in the classic stories. It's. It's the equivalent of if Superman found out all of his adventures weren't real and that he was actually created by Lex Luthor,.

50:33
Jmike
That would be hilarious to see.

50:35
Case Aiken
And he kind of snaps. He blows up the facility. He just completely destroys it. We see that they still have Big Ben under control.

50:41
Jmike
They.

50:41
Case Aiken
Yeah, come. He hallucinates and thinks that they're other superheroes.

50:45
Jmike
Yeah. So like he's. He, like he saw Big Ben, saw one of the clips that was specifically talking about him and then he kind of like goes into shock because he can't believe what he's seeing. And like you said, like the doctors, the research people show up and they're like, oh, there he is, let's go get him. And he's hallucinating the entire time. It's like, oh, my friends have come to rescue me and they're putting me in this anti radiation suit that's going to drain all of the poison out of my body. They put him in a straight jacket and throw in the back of a truck.

51:14
Alex
We also learned the mechanism for the transformation, which is.

51:17
Jmike
Yeah.

51:18
Alex
From this alien tech. We later learn these aliens are called the Kees, whereby Dr. Garganza has. Has recreated it in a mechanism that involves taking a volunteer, quote, unquote, volunteer, cloning them into a more like idealized, perfect version of themselves, then implanting in each of them simultaneously this device that, using modern vocabulary, basically like quantum, entangles them and then dropping the perfect version into a void, into like an interspatial void so that when they speak their magic word, it summons. It just swaps places across this dimensional barrier. Yeah.

52:03
Case Aiken
And they had started to hint at that earlier on where when he would transform, you would see both figures at the same time.

52:09
Alex
Yeah.

52:10
Case Aiken
And this is why we get the fused bodies, what we think are young Miracle man and this other alien being that has like two sets of anatomy fused together.

52:20
Alex
Well, and there's this great moment early on when Mike is telling Liz about history. She's like, none of this is real. This can't be. I would know about this if this were real. This is all made up. No, no, there must have been some kind of COVID up. And like then you get the reveal. No, it was in fact all made up and just planted in them in dreams, basically. And he makes the joke about was there also one of them makes a joke about a miracle dog and later.

52:44
Jmike
That was her.

52:44
Alex
We get a reveal about miracle dog. Yeah, like some of the foreshadowing in this is really well done.

52:52
Case Aiken
Yeah. And this is kind of the end of the arc here. There's some additional material in the trade that was being published. There's. So again, Warrior was anthology book with lots of stories going on and there was pressure to try to consolidate some of those character bits. So The Warp Smiths also were their own, like, weird sci fi kind of alien stories going on. So we get some stories from that. And we also get a filler issue that was put out by Eclipse to try to bridge some of the stories where it's like a time traveling thing. And it was an attempt at hinting at what flew future story arcs would be about by having an older Miracle man than we've even seen hitting different spots in history. Along with a Warp Smith. Which is cool.

53:34
Case Aiken
We get a fun fight between Miracle man and Miracle man right after you discovered his powers.

53:40
Alex
Which then both of those stories end up being referenced later in the book.

53:45
Case Aiken
Yes. However, because there's so much time that happens between when these occurred and we finally get to Olympus, they end up having to be written as possible timelines, but not necessarily the true timeline. Because Alan Moore is like, I don't. I don't love those anymore.

54:00
Jmike
Kind of over this.

54:02
Alex
Yeah.

54:03
Case Aiken
And we get a lot of supplemental material. We get like black and white reprints. We get design work. We get. It's a really nice volume in general if you're looking at the. Like I said, the collected edition. Although just read it whichever way you can. I'm not saying, like, definitely you have to buy the trade.

54:18
Alex
Yeah. But each of these trades are about as much supplemental as they are story. The last one might even be more supplemental than story.

54:25
Case Aiken
Yeah. Depending on how you define supplement. Because they're supplemental. Like. Like I said, character sketches and that kind of. And then the black and white reprints versus stories that didn't necessarily fall into the main arc.

54:39
Alex
Yeah. I am. I am literally gauging it by which pages have black borders and which pages have white gutters.

54:45
Jmike
Right? Yeah.

54:47
Case Aiken
But then this bleeds in pretty well into the Red King syndrome. So much so that like. And this is the two that came out in Warrior. So it is just one big story with a break in there. Like, when I think about the story, I immediately jump into Gargunza showing up. Which is what we get next. Alex, do you want to start the description of what happened with Red King?

55:08
Alex
So at the top of Red King, we pick up some of the quieter threads. We get a little more of Mike at home with Liz. We get a check in with Johnny and the. The kid Miracle man Persona aspect of him kind of in the void they share together. And then Mr. Cream and Archer sort of settling up the here's why you're not going to do anything about me. Archer. I've got all the cards. And from there Things start to go wrong. Oh, there's a little, like, interstitial where. Where Miracle man meets this kid, and it's about, like, kids and imagination. And then he gets home, his wife has been kidnapped. He calls Cream. We learn that it is Gargunza who has kidnapped his wife and not Archer or Kid Miracle Man. They are both accounted for.

56:09
Alex
Gargunza basically explains over the course of some of this is a little bit back and forth just because of the way this was published. We kind of hop between different chapters. I'm gonna streamline that a little bit here. Gargunze explains basically his whole reason for getting involved in the Zarathustra project was to grant himself immortality. We get, like, his whole backstory. He sucks, he's awful, he's evil, and he doesn't want to die.

56:38
Jmike
Yeah.

56:39
Alex
And his whole goal here, because he could not. He was too old to use the process on himself by which he created Miracle Man. And he couldn't just implant his consciousness in that brain because of the MacGuffin in the brain that allows the transformation. He needed Miracle man to have a child who didn't have a mechanical doohickey in their brain so that he could upload his consciousness into that child and live forever. And that is why he did the whole thing. He did. That is why he has kidnapped Liz. That is part of why he's terrified of, like, Miracle man and Kid Miracle man and young Miracle man waking up from their dreams and finding him out. Because, like, if he doesn't have the ability to fly under the radar or if they just straight up kill him, he can't become immortal.

57:22
Alex
And that's what the Red King Syndrome itself is. The Red King Syndrome is this pair of flashbacks we get to during the experiments. Miracle man trying to, like, recognize the dream situation he's in and pull himself out of it. And it's this sort of, like, Gargoonza as Rider writing the story that Miracle man is then trying to recognize the reality around.

57:45
Case Aiken
Yeah. Miracle man, like, all of them are constantly fighting to free themselves of the story.

57:51
Alex
I'm flipping through back like. Like I said, we go back and forth between those stories quite a bit. Then Miracle man very easily tracks down Gargunzel once he knows who's behind it. He and I keep wanting to call him Dr. Teeth, Mr. Cream, crash the party, only to find out that, hey, Gargoons is not an idiot. He has built in a fail safe. He says the word Abraxas. Miracle man transforms back to Mike and is stuck there for an hour. And then he says Steppenwolf. And his little puppy becomes Miracle Dog. Which looks like something out of a Metroid game.

58:25
Case Aiken
Yeah. It's very H.R. Giger esque.

58:27
Alex
Yeah. And we get the whole hunting humans thing. Cream and Miracle man get sort of sent out with a three minute head start. Cream basically sacrifices himself to save Miracle Man. Miracle man at the last possible minute realizes, hey, dogs can't talk. Steppenwolf. And the dog transforms back.

58:48
Jmike
Yeah.

58:48
Case Aiken
After getting fucked up, like.

58:50
Alex
Oh, yeah.

58:51
Case Aiken
Mike gets. He loses some fingers. Like he's in rough shape.

58:54
Alex
It is the last possible moment for him to realize dogs can't talk.

58:58
Jmike
Right. He's pouring out Mr. Cream.

59:00
Case Aiken
Yeah. Cream, you think is going to be a big player in this. Like, he's so competent and he seems so charming and cool, but he's. He in this whole thing, he's like losing it.

59:10
Jmike
He.

59:11
Case Aiken
Because of just being around Miracle man. It's like there's this like divine quality that's like overwhelming to him. I mean, there's this whole like, oh, the Superman by its very nature, like Nietzsche and kind of will destroy like the regular man. As is super hammered in by the fact that all of the goons that work for Gargons are former Nazis or.

59:28
Jmike
Yeah.

59:29
Case Aiken
I used to think about the Ubermensch, yada, yada. But yeah, this is a good reminder here, like where Moran when he gets like fucked up and he turns back into Miracle man, like later on he still has all those wounds.

59:38
Alex
Yeah. It's not like animorphs where morphing heals you.

59:42
Jmike
Yeah.

59:43
Alex
Miracle man knocks some Nazi heads together and then pulls Gargoonza up into space, shows him the world, gives him a little kiss and flings him down to the ground as hard as he can. Liz has her baby.

59:56
Jmike
Yep.

59:56
Case Aiken
In an infamously graphic.

59:59
Jmike
Yeah, I was not expecting that.

01:00:02
Alex
Yeah, that.

01:00:03
Case Aiken
That was. Apparently Alan Moore just had his first child. Maybe only child. I forget, but really wanted to like sort of highlight that and sort of talk about the sort of the majesty of birth. But then there's the craziness of after this whole thing with the baby. The baby speaks right after giving birth.

01:00:23
Alex
I was gonna say she has her baby who names herself.

01:00:27
Jmike
Yep.

01:00:30
Alex
We get, we get this. And like I said earlier, like there are a couple of things and they really are, I think in this book more than the other two that do show their age a little bit. The baby mind controlling her to not have any emotions is one of those things. I think for me A little bit like the way that the Mr. Mr. Cream being driven mad by Miracle man plays out. Also, like, I've got. I don't feel like it would be written that way today. Maybe the same beat, but through a different. Different storytelling tools. Same thing here with the baby. Like, I don't know that just totally wiping away any emotions is what. What we'd get today.

01:01:07
Alex
But I think, like, what that builds toward in three and like, how uncomfortable this entire situation is plays out in a way that ages fairly well. Like, how we get there is a little weird, but the point, I think, holds. And then at the very end, we see these pair of two figures clad in stars who are visiting this doctor's clinic. Doctor's office, looking for the five cuckoos, which I immediately love that as a way to talk about the relationship between the miracle family and their hosts. And they investigate this doctor who we hear her say. We hear her on the phone with her receptionist. She's like, kim. Kim who? And then we hear the boom. And everyone thinks a bomb has gone off. And like, I like that as a way of signaling, oh, there is another.

01:01:57
Alex
And then they head off to track down Miracle Man. And that's where book two wraps up as they say their own magic words and their footprints change and book three begins.

01:02:08
Case Aiken
Yeah, and then there's some more apocryphal stuff. There's a young Miracle man story. There's an issue that actually came out in the middle of the run where the editor stops to be like, no, we're not going to do this. I think they only.

01:02:20
Jmike
They.

01:02:20
Case Aiken
Yeah, they only collect the. The original part, which is the editor being like, I'm so. I was so annoyed back in the 70s when it would always be like a delay in Publishing or Dr. Strange to be like, this reminds me of that time I did a thing. And I. I appreciate the very non.

01:02:33
Jmike
Or. Or the.

01:02:35
Case Aiken
The very respectful of the audience. Like directly addressing the audience as opposed to trying to hide it in this moment.

01:02:42
Jmike
Yeah.

01:02:42
Case Aiken
If you guys flip through after the first black and white story in the trade, there is a cover painting by Mick Austin. Is that Chuck Austin? I know he worked on Miracle man and has changed his name a couple of times or like his pen name a couple of times.

01:02:55
Alex
I don't know.

01:02:56
Case Aiken
No, it's. Chuck Beckham is what he went under. So I think he actually drew the issue that Garuna dies. But the. The Mick Austin centerfold that they have in here was when they were. So Alan Davis apparently had modeled Miracle man after Paul Newman. And unfortunately he told other. Other people that. And that's why, like, that one in particular is like, that is just a picture of Paul Newman dressed as Miracle Man.

01:03:21
Alex
There's.

01:03:21
Case Aiken
There's a lot of like, good supplemental material in this. Just in terms of like, cool, like art pieces, cool advertisements, fun stuff in here.

01:03:28
Jmike
Yeah.

01:03:29
Case Aiken
But that kind of concludes the original story as it was being published. And then there's the break. And that's when Alan Moore is able to come back to the book and we get the Olympus story, which is the one that was the hardest for me to find when I was younger, so was the freshest for me. So this is where there's a big narrative shift because it goes from being kind of told in the moment to being told from this vantage point of the future. I shouldn't even say kind of. It's deliberately so. It opens with Miracle Man.

01:03:58
Alex
It is five years later. And also it's where we shift from like eight page stories to full issue, 20ish page stories. And like that actually, that also, at least for me, sort of magnified the like, feeling of this is a different mode of storytelling from the other two. It helped draw like a little bit of space between them because suddenly the structure is entirely different. It's. It's as though it's one. One more. One more consistent narrative, maybe, in that it's. It is, I think, told in the same voice the entire time and using the same tools the entire time, but it is largely like, framed by Miracle man. Looking back on everything that has happened. It is more like you said, it's. It's told from. From a future standpoint. So it is narrated from. This has already happened and not as in the moment.

01:05:03
Case Aiken
And I kind of feel like this is clearly the spot where coming back to this work, Alan Moore wanted to conclude the story or like, tell the story he wanted to tell, but now is like, all right, I need to actually get to the end in a way that before we're kind of like, I don't want to say meandering, but like, because we're doing this like an eight issue or eight page chunks throughout, it feels, you know, he's got a lot of space, he's got a lot of Runway to tell that story. Whereas Warrior Folds, you know, has to come back to the book years later.

01:05:32
Case Aiken
There's a dramatic shift in terms of his storytelling ability, but also in terms of like, does he have the space, does he have the bandwidth to start, you know, just pick up and do like a, you know, a serial. No, he. He knows that he now has an ending that he wants to work towards. Kind of the same way that, like, Return of the Jedi feels when looking at the Star wars trilogy. Like, you could have kept on doing stories, but it was like, all right, yeah, we gotta. Gotta wrap this up.

01:05:58
Jmike
Okay, guys.

01:05:59
Case Aiken
And that's, I think, why. Also, we start from the standpoint of, like, okay, this is all past now.

01:06:04
Jmike
We're.

01:06:04
Case Aiken
We're now. We're now in this, like, future where Miracle man now has, like, a Fortress of Solitude type space that he lives in.

01:06:11
Alex
Mm.

01:06:13
Case Aiken
Which is really interesting. It's an. It's a great excuse for more and for the artists working on the book to try to, like, illustrate really crazy kind of spaces to move through. Because it's designed for someone who can just fly and, like, observe different things, which is a nice detail, by the way. When they talk about the. The alien ship in Red King Syndrome, they talk about how it's designed for someone who doesn't need to think about, like, stairs.

01:06:35
Alex
Yeah. And like this. This building, which they also compare to Mount Olympus repeatedly. Like, it stretches up to the. The upper reaches of the atmosphere. Literally, the higher you go, the harder it is for a normal person to keep going. Just to, like, come to court with Miracle man to bring him problems. You have to wear, like, an oxygen tank and a helmet because it is high enough up in the building that you need extra air and you need to, like, stay warm.

01:07:05
Case Aiken
Yeah. But back in the time of the original battles or of the original story, we've got more Bates imagery where. Where Kid Miracle man is threatening to get out. And we've got this, like, mysterious blonde figure who sort of shows up very clearly shows up at the Moran house. And meanwhile, these, like, two strangers confront Miracle man and reveal that they have combat forms that they can switch to.

01:07:35
Alex
Yeah. Unlike. Unlike the Miracle family, they can transform to seemingly limitless other bodies, which is like the Animorphs.

01:07:48
Case Aiken
Yeah, I like this comparison of, like, Titans versus Gods, like the. The sort of Grecian concept of cyclical nature, but they're not necessarily the same thing because as. So this is all like a kind of a cool element. And the one thing I found weird is it's like. Oh, it's weird that Miracle man is actually tougher than their ba. Like the first combat form they chose. And it. It's an interesting element of, like, Gargunza actually was a genius. Like, he. Kit bashed from the tech that he found on this alien ship. He did actually make something truly incredible, even if he wasn't using part of it to its fullest potential, which I think is incredible.

01:08:21
Case Aiken
And I. I think one of themes that were having some connection issues when were talking about Kid Miracle man, but one thing theme that I really enjoy about Kid Miracle man in this element of like, he grew up in a vacuum as this, like, alien super being, is that there is this concept of maturity into. Into greatness that is going on here. Like, the Miracle man has guidance from advanced aliens as we get later into the series. And like, that is welcoming Earth into the galactic community without it having to, like, fight its way there. Because if it fought its way there, it might be a different, like, more terrifying kind of thing. And like, ultimately that kind of is how the Keys and how the warpsmiths each got there.

01:09:06
Case Aiken
They had to struggle to ascendancy by themselves without guidance, and as a result, they're at war with each other. And I think that's like, kind of cool that we've got this sort of like, parental kind of metaphor going on here.

01:09:18
Alex
Yeah. We also get in the same light, like going back to Winter, and Winter being a different kind of entity from even Miracle Man. Like, we see that distinction, like her being able to talk almost immediately, her naming herself. And as we get into her mom, her mind controlling her mom. And as we'll get into in this arc, like, she has just a different kind of status in terms of like, what is intelligent life in the universe, but also like a little almost throwaway detail. She's got the same ability to pull from multiple bodies and like, pick up new bodies as she goes that she wasn't, you know, pre programmed with made to have. So like, even in that way that is, she is more like the kiss in that regard than anything that Gargoonza was able to do.

01:10:17
Alex
Anything that Miracle man or any of the other miracle family can do.

01:10:20
Case Aiken
Yeah, like being born with superpowers, she's able to actually grow up with them.

01:10:24
Alex
Yeah. And there's no like, idealized, superhuman version of herself for her to pull. She's literally working with the power set that everything else was modeled off of.

01:10:34
Case Aiken
Yeah, she's already there, just naturally.

01:10:37
Alex
Yeah.

01:10:37
Case Aiken
Yeah. So we see that the Keys have multiple bodies. They switch to a few. They have like, travel forms, they have stealth forms. Obviously they're able to read minds because they're able to pluck the details of Winter from his brain just by when he thinks, like, oh, I want to see my daughter again before I die. But they have some limitations too because when Miracle Woman jumps in to save the day when one of the keys goes to attack Liz and rips its throat out and that causes it to start dying because it can't say its post hypnotic word. It's switched into a new. A new body.

01:11:12
Jmike
Which is kind of crazy.

01:11:14
Case Aiken
It seems like a big detail. You wouldn't like just want to have like. Like you'd want to have more than one way to switch if that. If that's your tech, you know, like. Yeah, yeah, sure you've got like your. Your fingerprint id but you also have.

01:11:26
Jmike
A passcode, a button to press something. But.

01:11:31
Case Aiken
But with this one wounded, the other Keys like calls a truce and Miracle man and Miracle Woman after Miracle Woman kind of gives a. A rundown of everything that is her side of the story because she's not from the old comics. She's a new creation for this. And. But she does reveal that young nasty man who is from the old comics who was kind of their equivalent to Black Adam. They. They talk about his story and he's really fucked up because he's painted a villain and told he's a villain so much that he internalizes it. Which I think is another interesting kind of part of this all.

01:12:01
Jmike
But.

01:12:02
Case Aiken
So the Warp Smiths show up and we've again we've been seeing them in the stuff like we've seen that they become friends of Miracle man later. So this is where they actually are introduced and they are compared to Mercury. They are able to travel instantly. I really like the fast as a Warp Smith line later on that we get where they're just so fast and part of that is teleporting. Part of that is also they're super fast.

01:12:26
Jmike
But they.

01:12:27
Case Aiken
They take Miracle man and Miracle Woman to meet with the Kees and the Warp Smiths in on the Kees homeworld. Meanwhile we get more baits terrible and stuff in the future of Crazy Art and all this stuff. We find out one of the. The warpsmith dies in this story. There's a lot of like this thing will happen by the. By the time the story is done this thing will have. Have occurred kind of narratives in this. But I. I really like the interaction with the Keys. I think that's such a cool kind of component like the.

01:12:57
Jmike
The.

01:12:57
Case Aiken
The idea that Earth can kind of be a. A ground where as this as an emergent culture, the. These existing superpowers can kind of interact with each other. And I realize as I'm saying it sounds like I'M talking about first World, second world, third world kind of conversations that were going on during the Cold War, and. And I feel a little gross.

01:13:16
Alex
Yeah. Well, I can pivot us into Miracle Woman's interpretation of Hagal as well. If you two have sex, you'll get along better.

01:13:27
Case Aiken
Yeah, I like that. I think that ultimately is actually Winter, because Winter learns both the Kees way, but she also integrates the Warpsmith warping abilities.

01:13:38
Alex
Yeah.

01:13:38
Case Aiken
She is kind of the ultimate product of the three cultures.

01:13:42
Alex
There's a lot of, like, really Kree Skrull vibes actually in this, as we say it all out loud. Like, Winter is our Hulkling.

01:13:50
Case Aiken
Yeah, yeah. Who is the child of Captain Marvel.

01:13:55
Alex
Yeah.

01:13:58
Case Aiken
And also, yeah, the. The Keys definitely feel very Skrull. And the. The Kree and the Warpsmith have comparison points.

01:14:06
Alex
Well, I'm like, even the. The Kees, the Keith, like, Supreme Intelligence or whatever. You see where I'm going with this reminded me a lot of the Kree Supreme Intelligence.

01:14:16
Case Aiken
Yeah, yeah.

01:14:17
Alex
The peak of physical perfection.

01:14:19
Jmike
Right.

01:14:19
Case Aiken
Well, and this is all not created in a vacuum either, you know, like.

01:14:22
Alex
Right.

01:14:22
Case Aiken
So, like, I've made comparisons to Mar? Vell before, like the Mar Vell Rick Jones swapping before with Miracle Man. So I think there's certainly ways where that kind of compares.

01:14:32
Alex
Oh, for sure.

01:14:33
Case Aiken
And like, you know, again, more takes a lot of ideas from the zeitgeist and then puts interesting spins on them. More than necessarily creating things out of whole, like, out of whole cloth.

01:14:43
Alex
So, I mean, plus, also just the same Zeitgeist. Right. Like, there is. There is clear Cold War. I mean, not even just allusions, straight up references to the Cold War and the politics of the era in this book, which, again, is kind of very Kree scroll writ large.

01:15:00
Case Aiken
But they return and Liz leaves Miracle Man. She's so frustrated. And also a lot of those ideas have been put in her head by Winter, we find out who wants to have a chat with her dad. And so cut between shots of Miracle man doing interpretive dance, his first conversation with his daughter, who is fully capable of speaking and so much more advanced than her dad at this point already. And she's like weeks old. But there are some really nice moments in there. Like, there's a. There's a line that really caught me off guard when I was reading it where he goes, winter, this is all so fast. I mean, I'm talking to my own child and I'm just babbling. I'm just not saying anything important to you. I love you. Winter.

01:15:40
Case Aiken
And like there is that moment because like now like reading it as a 17 year old versus reading it as a 37 year old, like even though I don't have any kids, like my sister in law has, like I'm an uncle, like, you know, my cousins all have had kids. Not all, but you know, many of them have had kids and like starting to feel that kind of generational component and that sort of like unimaginable familial love is really true. Like that is actually a surprising part about it where it's like sometimes these like clunky lines are actually like. No, that is actually just how you express it in the moment.

01:16:12
Alex
This is also the moment where we find out that Winter is a huge Star wars fan.

01:16:16
Case Aiken
Yes. Because her response is, I know, but I, I do love that kind of relationship with Winter because again, feel going off the God vibe and the cyclical nature, like Winter's generation are going to be so much more advanced than the gods that came before. The Miracle man and woman they came before, which I think is a fun and interesting kind of component. And I, I really like then with like the Warp Smiths, how they like make friends with the miracle people, Miracle family. I don't know what the best miracle couple the miracles. I don't know what is best to say.

01:16:49
Alex
Yeah, any of the above. Any of the above.

01:16:52
Case Aiken
But it also is showing them looking at the world from this sort of outsider perspective. Like when he first comes back to Liz's apartment or like, or his home with Liz, he describes it all feeling alien to him and like cluttered and small because his perspective has changed so much by virtue of being exposed to this like, this wider world out there. It's like in a video game where you have a starting area that feels like, oh, look at this giant hub world that I can explore and so forth, like the Citadel in Mass Effect 1. And then you realize, oh, I've got a ship now and I can go see everything. And you never bother to go back to it anymore.

01:17:25
Alex
I was gonna say we also get this like really subtle but interesting contrast between Miracle man and Miracle Woman where the deeper we get into this book, like the bigger the gulf between Miracle man and Mike Moran grows.

01:17:41
Case Aiken
Yes.

01:17:41
Alex
To the point where like we're about to see like that gulf become permanent. But anytime that he calls her Miracle man, she's like, just call me Avril. Just call me Avril. It's easier, it's more, it makes more sense. Like she has integrated both sides of her life and is, like, so much healthier for it. Oh, yeah. Consistently. And like, the book doesn't go very far with that. I. I'd love to see some more space for that, you know, in a hypothetical alternate universe where There were another six issues of this 40 years ago. But I do think it's interesting that is something that's very intentionally played out, even if it's kind of in the background.

01:18:20
Case Aiken
Yeah, we see. We will see a bit more of it with Neil Gaiman stuff. And there. There is always the possibility he'll finish it because that has been discussed now for seven years, but might happen.

01:18:35
Alex
Well, he started. He started to. And then he got pulled into all the TV stuff.

01:18:39
Case Aiken
Yeah. But we find out a bit more about why all this occurred, and it's been referenced pretty heavily at this point. But the keys came to Earth back in the 50s because they were trying to investigate what was called a Fire Drake, which is that apparently people on various worlds just spontaneously develop pyrokinetic abilities and sometimes they go nova and wipe out solar systems.

01:18:59
Alex
Not at all like the Star brand.

01:19:01
Case Aiken
Nothing like that at all. But in this case, it wasn't quite so powerful. And it's a character who we don't spend too much time with, but is still like an interesting figure who is the. The spark literally for what brings on this sort of next era of human evolution. And, you know, it's kind of cool.

01:19:19
Jmike
The.

01:19:19
Case Aiken
The world keeps growing. They keep pointing out that now the world of superpowered beings first doubles because the. The warpsmiths come to Earth and then you have the Fire Drake and, like, this pantheon is starting to build up and the world is not aware of them yet, but they are there. They're, you know, making plans on the dark side of the moon, thinking about what they're going to do with this world that they have inherited, completely devoid of, like, concepts of, like, really working with people. It's like, all right, cool, we're going to save the environment this way. We're going to do this thing and that. We're going to introduce these technologies. Meanwhile, Liz does, like, formally leaves Mike and Winter reveals that she is the one responsible for it because she is a cold bitch. And. And we get to the.

01:20:00
Case Aiken
The death of Mike Moran. J. Mike, what were your thoughts when.

01:20:02
Jmike
You saw this scene, the London scene,.

01:20:04
Case Aiken
The death of Mike Moran, the. When he commits suicide?

01:20:07
Jmike
I would say it caught me off guard, but, like, after reading this book, nothing really caught. Caught me off guard anymore.

01:20:13
Alex
That's fair. It honestly felt kind of inevitable to me, I think like just the way things had been going at some point Mike has to go away because Miracle man doesn't age and he does.

01:20:26
Case Aiken
Yeah, well, Miracle man can choose not to age. I think it's more accurate.

01:20:29
Alex
Sure.

01:20:30
Jmike
Really?

01:20:30
Case Aiken
Well, yeah, cuz like Kid Miracle man did age up, but Winter decides just to stay a baby. Like she matured to the point of being the physiological equivalent to like a one year old and then just like froze it.

01:20:43
Jmike
Fair enough. Well, I mean I understand the reasoning behind it, but like I said, it didn't surprise me at all.

01:20:51
Case Aiken
No, no, I mean Moran's life has fallen apart. Like the, the blessing of having a superpowered being who he shares thoughts with. It's not even that they, it's not even the debate that used to exist of like, is Captain Marvel a different person from Billy Batson? Like they are actually the same memories, the same thinking and so forth, but they are biologically different brains. One is a human brain and one is a superhuman brain. And just that distinction right there is sufficient to make them different people. And so ultimately one fades into the background and is then subverted by this power. Like the, the gift of superhumanity has destroyed his humanity.

01:21:32
Jmike
So if he changed back when he changed back into like super old decrepit.

01:21:36
Case Aiken
Form or he would change back into the exact point he left. Like the body's in stasis from whenever it's not being used. And that's the thing. That body has been beaten up. It's lost some fingers from Miracle Dog and is a 42 year old man. And like speaking as a 37 year old man, I like, I don't know if I would change into this body voluntarily if I could be like a 25 year old perfect version of myself.

01:22:02
Jmike
Well, yeah, I guess so.

01:22:03
Case Aiken
Yeah. So we get some more like big poetic imagery kind of stuff with Miracle man carving in the Marianas Trench, a place where he can just go to chill with no one around. Called Silence. Like his other layer. And then, and then I got a really dark scene with Bates. Yeah, we get the, the gun goes off. Chekhov's gun goes off here.

01:22:22
Jmike
Yeah.

01:22:23
Case Aiken
And that poor nurse, that poor everyone. And that poor the readers. Also like this is. This is probably the darkest scene in the book. And this book is ends with like most of London dead.

01:22:34
Alex
Yeah.

01:22:37
Case Aiken
I don't even know if I want to say out loud what happens to him, but he gets tortured in a way that finally causes him to give in and say the. The magic word. And that magic word means death for everyone. After the survivors of the initial Flash are blinded and burned and, like, screaming, trying to figure out what's going on. There's just a. There's just death everywhere. And that one night's nurse, he's like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna be nice to you. And then he's like, you know what? I. I had second thoughts. They'll think I got. I have gone soft and murders her grotesquely.

01:23:06
Jmike
Very kind of like, on a hellsing level of grotesque.

01:23:11
Case Aiken
Yeah. Like, this is. This is a comic book writer who's like, oh, like, could you imagine how gross you could be if you allowed Superman to be truly evil? This is that, like, every time someone tries to be like, okay, we could do a. We can do a dark Superman story. I'm like, what's the point? Because we already went as far as you could go.

01:23:30
Alex
Like, we've.

01:23:31
Case Aiken
We've already gone to the edge. Like, you're not telling anything new unless you do something different than what we've already done. And this is where it's like, how violent could Superman be? Oh, this.

01:23:40
Jmike
Okay.

01:23:41
Case Aiken
Okay, this. Yes. Because, man, he flays people and just, like, hangs their skin on long, like, laundry.

01:23:48
Jmike
Yeah.

01:23:48
Case Aiken
Lines we see. He impales people on Big Ben. And when the. The Miracles come back from the dark side of the moon and they see that London is burning, we see just how bad it's been. And this is the issue that I actually never read. I had just always seen pictures from and realized that. Oh, no, I never actually did read it because it's a lot faster than I thought. Like, this is not an invincible style, like, long drawn out battle. It's still a full issue of a fight, but it's not. It's not that. But damn, is there blood everywhere. Damn. Is it creepy that he's still in a business suit? Yeah. So Kid Miracle man murders most of London to fight him. They just start throwing buildings at him. They start teleporting him into buildings.

01:24:30
Case Aiken
The fire Drake tries to burn him up real bad. And we get our little weird reality kind of warper kind of side stories to explain. Like, oh, there's all these different possibilities and they. They articulated as being. These are the legends that start to be formed. Like the. The way people discuss it. Because this is such a horrific incident that it is going to forever impact our society. We will never not be able to tell stories about the day that the darkest being of all time came. Like the True devil of our nightmares came and killed a city for fun.

01:25:00
Alex
And it also calls back to, like, Miracle man has no trouble accepting, like, these fictions are all equally real at the end of the day. Because what was his whole life was a fiction. Yeah, he was weaned on fiction. Reality and truth, like, only matter to him right up to the point that they become relevant to what he does next, I guess. Yeah.

01:25:25
Case Aiken
And this is kind of an approach to mythology that we see a lot. Like the, like the. The scholastic approach of, like, here's a unified story of how everything goes is how a lot of people learn their mythology, and then they find out that there's actually different tellings of it. There's different sequences of events, there's different players involved, there's different names involved. That all is part of this, like, modern mythology. And like, this book is literally like the. The, er, example of, like, superheroes are modern mythology. I. I don't know if you could take it any further without it just being straight up, like the eternals or, you know, Thor with the gods. But, like. But I think way more here. I. I like when he's, like, trying to. To discuss.

01:26:01
Case Aiken
Like, people would later say that I was checking the cars before I threw them at him. I'm sorry, that's not true. There definitely were people inside those cars when I threw them at him.

01:26:09
Alex
But.

01:26:09
Case Aiken
But they just keep hitting him with everything they've got. And I like how the Warpsmiths start to realize that, like, Kid Miracle Man's defenses are not the same as the Keiths. Like, the. The force field stuff is stuff that he's familiar with. Like, it's implemented in a really interesting way in Kid Miracle Man.

01:26:24
Alex
Like.

01:26:24
Case Aiken
Like Gargonza, again, genius created a truly terrifying being. But there are workarounds. Like, so, side note. So this is the weekend that Dune came out, and I watched that last night, and I kept on having to reiterate that, like, the whole thing about the way all the weird fighting occurs in it is that, like, force shields exist in that world and, like, you have to hit someone real slow, but once you do, you can just kill a person. And there's elements of that here where it's like, yeah. Well, if you, like, the keys have all kinds of options because, like. Well, yeah, a force field might protect you from one approach, but, like, there's. Then you just switch to a different type of approach. Then you just teleport a girder inside someone's stomach.

01:27:00
Alex
Basically. The answer is if they had Called Ant Man. They could have solved this in the way that everyone on the Internet wanted Ant man to take care of Thanos.

01:27:08
Case Aiken
Yeah. Basically, they finally beat up Kid Miracle man so bad, he is so wounded and in so much pain that he finally gives in and reverts to his child form. And then in this fucking twisted kind of moment, this young child wannabe superhero sits there and Miracle man has to. Has to kill it.

01:27:28
Jmike
Sam from I Am Legend. The dog scene.

01:27:31
Alex
Yeah, it's the. Wait, I don't have to transfer him back. You found a way to keep me from ever having to do it. Yeah, I have.

01:27:37
Jmike
Sure did, kid. Good kid.

01:27:38
Alex
Yep.

01:27:39
Case Aiken
Then he clutches him and his pants are still at his knee or at his ankles.

01:27:43
Jmike
Fat.

01:27:43
Alex
Yeah. Yeah.

01:27:45
Case Aiken
And I mean there's like a, there's a kill your childhood kind of commentary going on here. There's just a lot going on here. It's, it's real dark.

01:27:53
Alex
I mean it's his last real remaining connection to his humanity too. Right. Like, yeah, Mike is gone. He'll have one more scene with Liz in the next issue, but functionally, Liz is gone. Winter is bouncing around space.

01:28:07
Jmike
Cherub. Yep.

01:28:10
Alex
Like this is his one. In the same way that like again, the foil thing. In the same way that Johnny had no one, so he wound up in this toxic nostalgic, self serving mode. Killing him is like the last connection Miracle man has to having been human. He just takes that in a different direction.

01:28:30
Case Aiken
Well, and the Johnny relationship becomes the old Miracle man relationship or becomes the Captain Marvel relationship.

01:28:35
Jmike
Right.

01:28:35
Case Aiken
Like Johnny has become the child who turns into a super being metaphor in a way that he wasn't before because he was a child who turned into a child super being.

01:28:42
Alex
Yeah.

01:28:43
Case Aiken
So now Johnny is in this scenario, a stand in for like that young idea that created all of this. Like it's not just killing Johnny Bates, the child, his childhood friend. He is killing the child. Mike Moran, in this moment. And then you turn the page after this whole thing, which I really like the way that they have this sort of like asymmetrical kind of cutout of the scene as they zoom out of Miracle man clutching the dead body. And then you still have like a border to illustrate just like how small it is in this two page spread of devastation.

01:29:15
Jmike
Yeah.

01:29:16
Case Aiken
And it's awful. Like you see what happened to people and it is devastating. Terrifying.

01:29:20
Jmike
Yeah.

01:29:21
Case Aiken
Like the woman with I think her child like clutching her and their eyes have all been ripped out and her arms are gone.

01:29:26
Alex
Like it's literal hell on Earth.

01:29:28
Case Aiken
Yeah. And like, then they. They show, like, years later, like, London is still just covered in skulls. Like, everything as a monument of just how awful things are or can be.

01:29:39
Alex
I guess a reminder that there's. There's never been a. Where's the line? Well, I don't see it, but at some point, there's a line about how it's a reminder that, like, Olympus is always built on the. The skulls, the bodies of mortals.

01:29:53
Case Aiken
Yeah. These charnel pastures serve as a reminder, a memento mori, never letting us forget that though Olympus pierced the very skies, in all history of Earth, there's never been a heaven, never been a house of gods that was not built on human bones. And then the next issue is, everything's great.

01:30:10
Jmike
They fixed everything. Literally everything.

01:30:15
Alex
Yep.

01:30:15
Case Aiken
They. They figured out how to give anyone superpowers who want it, which means that if Gargunsa had just shut the fuck up and waited a little while, he could have had superpowers. The. The warpsmiths come in, the keys come in, they start sharing technology. I. I don't know if in 2000.

01:30:31
Jmike
Ish.

01:30:31
Case Aiken
2000, 2001, When I would have been reading this the first time, if I had gotten a hold of this issue in the back issue bins, I don't know if I would have appreciated Miracle man just verbally smacking down Margaret Thatcher. It's one of my favorite moments in my reread, like, because again, I was brought up, you know, Reaganite household, you know, like, I'd have been like, oh, but. But a good conservative woman. And it's such a perfect. Just like he. He's outlining, like, all right, so this is how we're going to restructure all of society. And she's like, you can't. You don't think we're going to allow you to do this? And he goes, allow, question mark. And then there's just a panel of her looking scared. And he goes, as I was saying,.

01:31:09
Jmike
You don't have a choice. We're gonna.

01:31:11
Alex
And we're moving on.

01:31:13
Case Aiken
So that's. That's all kind of wonderful stuff. You know, we see this restructuring and people resist, but, like, they're so powerful and they basically have no choice. They. They. They do everything. They. They fix the world, they fix energy crises.

01:31:27
Jmike
Like, they fix the ozone layer.

01:31:29
Case Aiken
They resurrect people. You know, Like, I think that's such a cool element. And then they also just fuck in the sky and people clap thing.

01:31:36
Jmike
Yeah,.

01:31:38
Alex
Again. Hey, Galleon synthesis.

01:31:42
Case Aiken
It's really interesting. I, I like when Moors, their God of death, the keys representative shows up and they actually do start resurrecting people. These are all things I knew about. And then here's the thing I didn't know about. I never, I never saw anyone referenced it. What they do to Big Ben I love.

01:31:57
Jmike
Oh yeah.

01:31:58
Case Aiken
So they fix Big Ben by way of like programming his illusions to eventually get them to the point of reality. And by this point there are so many superhumans that it doesn't seem that weird to him. And he reef models himself to be this Hercules style figure wearing a badger thing which is just so wonderful. Calling himself.

01:32:15
Alex
It's a bulldog. It's a bulldog. Yeah.

01:32:17
Case Aiken
Okay. I mean he calls himself the British bulldog which is very Churchill esque, but it's like it's Hercules and it's so cool. I, I, I love that component. I love his design as this figure. They talk about how he's a demigod because he's this like lesser version of these gods participating in their great pantheon. It's so cool. They resurrect Miracle Dog by way of merging. They just take the body because that was in other space and they overlay the brain of like a convention, like a Labrador or something.

01:32:46
Alex
He's the miracle doodle. Yes.

01:32:50
Case Aiken
And he's just, it's just fun seeing that out there. And then Winter comes back and she's like, and he's like so excited to show everything he's done to the world to Winter. And she's like, oh, you decided to keep the sky that color, huh?

01:33:02
Jmike
Oh, you redecorated. Looks nice. I guess.

01:33:08
Case Aiken
But then they start and this is where you talk about the eugenics plan where they start sending out miracle man's sperm to impregnate women so that more babies can be born that are all miracle babies while at the same time linking up people with superpowers.

01:33:21
Alex
Yeah, like I, I get the point of the whole making everything readily available. It's just couching it in the concept of eugenics. In a book with so much connection to actual Nazi eugenics programs. There's something like that is an uncomfortable acceptance of that implicit there that I don't think is meant to be. But that really took me out.

01:33:46
Jmike
Yeah.

01:33:46
Case Aiken
Again, I think that just the lexicon for it this, any sort of conversation about like, I don't know, I just feel like eugenics was like brought up with less of it being automatically seen as like the Nazi kind of race stuff back in the day. But I don't. Not to say that it's not part of that because I actually do think it is still all rooted in that. And that's why we need to like move away from those kind of concepts. But I think that this was sort of the root ideas that led to Nazi ideas or like those types of kind of up thinking. And at the time it had, it was still seen as like somewhat separate. Like there's like there's going too far but not understanding that the underlying principle by itself was kind of up.

01:34:23
Case Aiken
You know, it's like the social Darwinism kind of component.

01:34:25
Alex
I understand what you're saying. I don't know that necessarily solves for me.

01:34:30
Case Aiken
Oh, it doesn't. It doesn't. I mean it's. Again, it's still icky to think about looking back on it, but also by this point we are getting to a fairly icky position for the characters. You know, true, I, I find it interesting how all the fundamentalist fates are so, you know, aghast at the idea of these like, living gods that they like all link up together. All although very weird to think about, especially now because the world is just different in a different spot than it was in the early 80s where it's like, oh, the like fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity are like the, are now like allied together in rejection of Olympus.

01:35:02
Case Aiken
And then this is one the punk scene of all the people who like are obsessed with Bates and like dress like Bates and like model themselves after him because they are so imprinted and like that's the counterculture now.

01:35:16
Alex
That and the whole like doomsday prepper pieces of this. Way too real. Way too real. Way too real.

01:35:22
Case Aiken
Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:35:24
Alex
It's.

01:35:25
Case Aiken
It's certainly again, this book resonates in a different way than it would have even three years ago on my re on a reread. It's just we live in a different time.

01:35:35
Alex
We do.

01:35:37
Case Aiken
But then Miracle man gets into a formal attire and I love this look for a couple of reasons because he then goes to this big party with all the space gods. So I love the formal look because one, it looks like the classic Captain Marvel suit. Like it's got a similar style cape. It's got that all, like, it's got the military jacket component. Like all that looks like Captain Marvel. So it's like connecting to that root, but at the same time it is so fascy. Like he now looks like the Fascist dictator. And this is what I was saying in terms of like he ultimately does lose his humanity and puts on a, you know, a totalitarian rulership of the world. But he brings it in softly. It's like it's the good intentions, like on the road to hell.

01:36:22
Case Aiken
And at the end of this all, I like how he just kind of like looks out from Olympus upon the world and you know, thinks back on his life, but also just like thinks about like where everything is. It's such an interesting endpoint for a series about how like alright, yeah, Superman saved the world, but maybe he has kind of doomed it. Like, you know, this is contemporary with the original Squad and Supreme maxi series where it's a similar kind of conversation. Like, have you removed our ability to govern ourselves by way of saving ours?

01:36:53
Alex
Going back to that authority comparison too, like getting into this book's back matter. Like the very first one is this Grant Morrison, Joe Quesada short. That is literally looks straight out of an issue of the 2000s Authority book, which is also in line with that last sort of idea.

01:37:14
Case Aiken
I like the decision to have Kid Miracle man look kind of like kind of Beatles esque.

01:37:20
Alex
Yeah.

01:37:20
Case Aiken
In that moment.

01:37:22
Alex
Well, I mean that. The other British Invasion.

01:37:26
Case Aiken
Yep. Then we got a fun Mike Allred like flashback kind of story where I like how they like keep on talking about how the world is becoming less and less sane as they're acting in it and kind of trying to like fool themselves into thinking like, no, this is how things should be. Perfect use of Mike Allred whose art always is this. Like, even though he doesn't look like a 60s artist, it has this cartoony style that feels very nostalgic.

01:37:50
Alex
It does. Like there is a very pop art.

01:37:53
Case Aiken
Vibe and then you. Then we get the supplementals and there are a lot of bits of Moore's script in here which I love because Moore has such a detailed way of writing his scripts always. We get tons. Yeah, yeah. Just a good buy in general if you're ever curious about like what goes into making a comic book that like there's a lot of material in here for you, a whole lot. But yeah, so that's the arc here. Like it continues like Neil Gaiman takes over and like the. He was told by more before he started. It's like, all right, so just so you know, I am going to have the characters solve all the problems of the world before at the end of my last issue. So you're going to be coming in. It'll be a Golden Age utopia.

01:38:34
Case Aiken
There will be no problems in the world. And so Gaiman's then objective is to then tell stories in that world as opposed to telling stories about the shaping of that world. And so that's kind of the big shift right there. So this story here is like yeah, it is the rise of the Ubermensch and then how his existence both saves everything but at the same time kind of dooms us to being second to him. You know there are now gods out there and the gods are going to continue the story of our world's progression. But we are no longer the big players.

01:39:10
Alex
Two like the first arc of Gaiman's run is called the Golden Age and that is what was completed and has been released. The second and third that were planned were called the Silver Age and the Bronze Age. Which makes me wonder how much is that about like the fall of this. Because I haven't read the Golden Age yet.

01:39:28
Case Aiken
Yeah, my understanding of the planned stories that were going to continue on because I think it was actually Silver Age and then Dark Age, I could, oh maybe that. Who knows. Because it never, it has yet to come out. So yeah, who knows what they're going to call it. But it will be. Mankind will eventually be kind of like sort of like go into a dark age as superhumanity, then like goes out into the stars.

01:39:50
Alex
Gotcha.

01:39:51
Jmike
Huh. That'd be kind of cool to read.

01:39:53
Alex
Yeah. Hopefully someday Game infinity.

01:39:57
Jmike
One day. One day maybe. Possibly. What story was that? What story was that we read that Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman got in space like at the end of their adventure?

01:40:09
Case Aiken
It's Batman, Superman and Lana Lang at the end of generations.

01:40:12
Jmike
Yeah, there you go.

01:40:13
Case Aiken
Yeah, yeah. And you can see how this goes on to influence those kind of books. Like John Byrne definitely read this and had like thoughts about it. Like incorporated some of that into the world of the man of Steel 80s relaunch and so forth. You know, other again other artists and writers are thinking about it. The Authority I think is a great comparison point. You know the like certainly the two page spread at the end of the fight with Bates feels like it could have been drawn by Brian Hitch.

01:40:44
Alex
Have you read the Superman and the Authority miniseries that Grant Morrison just wrapped up?

01:40:49
Case Aiken
I am halfway through it.

01:40:52
Jmike
I have the book on pre order so when it like finally gets here, I will have that too.

01:40:58
Alex
It's, it's also another really interesting intersection of like obviously Superman and the Authority. It is very much Superman operating in the authorities world. Not Vice versa. Yeah, tonally. Tonally and thematically.

01:41:13
Case Aiken
Yeah, I was getting that vibe from the first two issues. I just, I've picked up three and four. Like actually today I just was not able to make it over to the shop the last couple weeks.

01:41:21
Alex
Well, that's cool.

01:41:22
Case Aiken
And so I'm happy to look back on this one again. I think that this is like such a prime example of doing that deconstruction of Superman, that dark, gritty one. And considering this is kind of the first it gets a pass. Like right now our biggest complaint is that everyone's like, oh, you gotta do him dark. But I'm happy to see it here because I think it's pretty creative. I think it hadn't been done before. It was going against a status quo that was all about a fairly bright Superman saves the day kind of setting. And so I think that's all very cool. I think more recently, too often it's the status quo has almost become the dark Superman. So it's kind of rough in that regard.

01:42:00
Case Aiken
And More has responded to that like basically his book supreme in the 90s is a direct rebuttal to this. But it's difficult to have a conversation about all the permutations of Superman and the ideas about a Superman archetype without discussing this one here, because this is the one where no one was afraid to not take it that far. You know, this is not a character that had a long history. This is a character who was revived for this. And so while there is canon, like there is stuff to call back to, there is, you know, a glorious golden age of this character to look back on and be like, yep, it was popular hint then and it was, you know, very childish.

01:42:38
Case Aiken
And it was all the things about superhero comics that we don't necessarily want to treat with the respect that is due for a property that is, you know, or for an idea that is so alluring to so many people. And let's work with that. Let's, let's take it from a middle aged perspective. Let's, let's look back at this childish idea and really explore what you can do with it. And I, yeah, I, I just think it's a really creative take on that one. And the only thing that sucks about it is that every fucking writer since then has been like, this is how it should be. And I don't think this is how it should be. This is how you tell the story once.

01:43:21
Jmike
These panels in the back are awesome too.

01:43:24
Case Aiken
Oh, you're looking at the art in the back of the.

01:43:26
Jmike
Yeah, there's one where I think it's Kid Miracle has his hand over his face. It looks like Shazam with the lightning coming out of everywhere.

01:43:35
Alex
Oh yeah.

01:43:36
Jmike
That's awesome.

01:43:38
Case Aiken
Yeah. So J, Mike, you just read this for the first time?

01:43:40
Jmike
Yep.

01:43:41
Case Aiken
Is there any strong takeaway that you're coming off it? Because like I've talked it up. I, you know, I didn't go into this blind. I, I read about the book in wizard and that was why I started like trying to pick up the issues. But you're basically coming into me being like, we gotta read this thing. So what's your biggest takeaway?

01:43:57
Jmike
Oh man, I will never get tired of the books that you recommend. I'll play that first. This is like the third time I've been like, what the heck? But the first time was Doom Patrol. You caught me, I'll grab that one first. But this was great. I, you told me to like to come in, start reading and it was gonna blow my mind. You're like, it's amazing. Got to read it. We're going to talk about it. Just go ahead and read the whole thing. I was like, okay, I'll give it a try. It was great. I loved it. I enjoyed it. I felt bad at the end cuz that was not the ending I thought was going to happen. I, I, I thought his wife was going to get a little bit more at the end, but that was it.

01:44:42
Jmike
And I was like, oh, we're just going to leave it there. Okay, this is great. This is going to be like, is this going to be one of those things where we never ever see it happen? Like season three of we just recorded a couple weeks ago, Legion Superiors. Yeah, it's got to be like that, isn't it?

01:45:02
Case Aiken
Because no, I think it comes to a satisfactory ending at the end of the Alan Moore run. So it's not like, so the Neil Gaiman stuff. It sucks that we don't get more and we certainly will have thoughts, but I don't think we quite, I think what sucks is knowing that there was story stuff, but it's not as much of a, a hard ending came to a big story arc end and then there was stuff that's very nice, but we never really set up the, the real bitter like, oh God, they never finished this kind of component. I am still bitter. I just don't think it's quite as, I don't think it's quite as bad as some others. Like what? When we talk about some other series that were unfinished, we'll. We'll have some real, like, publishers kind of anger.

01:45:49
Alex
All right, let me ask a question in like this. It's an unfinished vein, ignoring the game and stuff that may or may not happen. Who would you want to pick this up and write this today if someone were to dust off Miracle Man?

01:46:04
Case Aiken
That's really interesting.

01:46:06
Alex
I do have answer. But if either of you has one first, I. I am happy to hold mine.

01:46:12
Jmike
I don't know if anybody will be able to do it justice.

01:46:16
Case Aiken
There's a part of me that kind of would like to see someone on the X writing team right now work on it. Like, I could see a Hickman doing an interesting thing, or I could see a really interesting Al Ewing version of this.

01:46:26
Alex
Yeah, Al Ewing is a great choice. My pick. And this is partly colored by. There were. There are some things structurally that happen in here that remind me a lot of his recent Peter Cannon Thunderbolt miniseries. Kieran Gillan, I think, would make a really interesting choice on a Miracle man revival.

01:46:45
Case Aiken
Okay.

01:46:45
Jmike
Okay.

01:46:46
Case Aiken
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are a lot of people who I'd love to see work on this one. I. Kieran Gillan might be really good choice because I was thinking, like, the one thing that we haven't talked that much is that it is distinctly British. So someone from the British Isles would be nice.

01:46:59
Alex
Which is why Al Ewing's also a good.

01:47:01
Case Aiken
Is alien from. Okay, so. Okay, yeah, I. I will admit there's a bunch of writers who like, got hot while I was like, kind of not paying as much attention to monthly comics and then was like, oh, they're from xplace. Like, I listened tom Taylor speak the other day. I was like, oh, I didn't realize he wasn't American.

01:47:16
Alex
Tom Taylor is Australian.

01:47:17
Case Aiken
Yeah.

01:47:19
Alex
Rom V is. Rom V lives in the uk. Cy Spurrier is another one who is from the uk. We're actually kind of like in a second British Invasion right now.

01:47:31
Case Aiken
Nice. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, I can definitely see something like that. My biggest takeaway on this is that this part feels very cinematic. Maybe it's two movies. Like Olympus might be a second movie. But the first part, I think it's such a cool deconstruction. And the only problem is that there have been so many lesser attempts at doing that kind of deconstruction in superhero movies that I don't think it would be as jaw droppingly awesome as I Have it in my head, like, I don't think fans would be responsible. Again, we've just seen stuff like this, you know, and that's the one big bummer. But I. I still take. You know, my big takeaway is that it's still so clever and it's still so what? Like, well, fleshed out, like the. You know, the. The origins of their powers, the way that.

01:48:16
Case Aiken
The way their powers work with the body switching and the force fields and know all of these elements. I think there's such an internal consistency to all of the pieces that I. You know, I. I do wish there was more, but I also realize that there's not a whole lot more. You can tell in those sort of big, sweeping stuff without getting into, like, wanting to see what. What Gaiman had planned. Yeah, that. That's a bummer. But damn, damn. Would it be fun to do, like, the dream of flying stuff? Like a person having dreams about being a superhero and then, like, remembering the word. Like, that's so. Like that. That's such a movie scene right there.

01:48:54
Alex
Like, you can. If we wanted to go back to, like, that feel, then I'd also throw, like, Magdalene Visagio or Vita Ayala or Teeny Howard out there again, like, Ex.

01:49:05
Case Aiken
Office People X Office.

01:49:06
Alex
Yeah.

01:49:07
Case Aiken
Because the Krakoa stuff has, like, kind of shades that are similar, too.

01:49:11
Alex
Yeah. And if you read Eternity Girl, which was Magdalene Visaggio for Young Animal, Gerard Way's imprint at dc, like, that is very much at home in this sort of Miracle man world.

01:49:24
Case Aiken
Anyway, I think that we have covered quite a bit about this. Next time we are going to continue the discussion about Miracle man because Angela and JD From Fables and Reflections will be talking with us about the Neil Gaiman stuff. But as a big Alan Moore head, I really wanted to talk about this and spend some time just talking about the Alan Moore ideas. And I. I feel like. Because he hasn't really had, like, a big work in a while that people really care about, and he's just generally known for being a curmudgeon. Alan Moore has sort of faded from pop culture discussions a lot, aside from every now and then someone does a shitty remake of a thing that he worked on, you know, I don't know why I say that. Watchmen has a comic book currently coming out, so who knows?

01:50:06
Case Aiken
Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass right now, but I fucking love Alan Moore. And this is one of his big works. And this is one of his big works about the Superman archetype. And I really wanted to talk about it. And J. Mike, thank you for joining me on this journey.

01:50:18
Jmike
Dude. I'm always here for you and your journey, sir.

01:50:21
Case Aiken
And Alex, thank you for coming on doing this reread, like, bringing your perspective on it, especially since you're much more in tune with, like, what is currently coming out and just generally a more sensitive and caring human being than I am. And, like, I really appreciate sometimes, like, happy to help. Sometimes I need you to be. I don't want to present myself as being the miracle man here, but the insensitive prick. And then you're the human release valve.

01:50:49
Alex
I am the Mikey Morin to your miracle man. Got it.

01:50:53
Case Aiken
I'm not trying to say that. That sounds so conceited.

01:50:58
Jmike
I can't even.

01:51:02
Alex
I'm.

01:51:02
Case Aiken
I'm like, trying to have that not be, like, kind of a douchey way. It's like, if both.

01:51:06
Alex
No, no, I do. I do not take it that way. I am always happy to have been had.

01:51:12
Case Aiken
Had in what other space or whatever it was called.

01:51:16
Jmike
Yeah.

01:51:17
Case Aiken
But thank you for coming back on. Like, of course. It's always fun talking to you. I'm glad that you finally had some time after having a lot of crazy schedule stuff.

01:51:24
Alex
You and me both. You and me both.

01:51:26
Case Aiken
And yeah, I'm just. Like I said, I'm just glad to look at this book again. It's such a fun. I mean, fun is in. In quotes, like, creative and weird and out. Out of the box of what Superman had been up until this point kind of conversation and really explore what the impact of a super being is in a more intellectual way than just being like, oh, well, he would be a monster. Or he'd be, you know, like, it's. It's more complicated. Like, and I think that's cool. And I, I urge anyone who is, like, who has not read this and thinks that there's no good Superman story, period, should look at it. Anyone who thinks that, oh, all the dark Superman stories are bad should look at this and just be like, okay, I can see this is how, like, a.

01:52:05
Case Aiken
A good version of that is. That has not aged perfectly, but is still overall very creative and, you know, juicy. But I think it's. It's some good stuff. And then after they check out this comic, they should then find out what is currently coming out. And they can do that. If they head on over to Panelology, they can.

01:52:24
Alex
We will help with that. We're a weekly comics review podcast on Twitter, Anallology podcast.

01:52:30
Case Aiken
And they can find that@ certainpov.com where they can find lots of other great shows.

01:52:34
Jmike
But.

01:52:35
Case Aiken
But head on over there. Check out our Discord link. That's that.

01:52:39
Alex
That's there.

01:52:40
Case Aiken
We were doing this call on Discord, but were having communication issues and now we're doing it on Zoom at the moment. But you can engage with us directly. You can share memes, you can find out hints about upcoming episodes for all of our shows. You can just share pictures of your pets or vent about the state of the world, which at the moment is not a golden utopia being controlled by a totalitarian golden God. But both are bad and we would have a venting channel in either reality.

01:53:05
Alex
So.

01:53:06
Case Aiken
So head on over to that and then. Then, like, look us up on our socials if you don't really want to get involved in a server. Alex, where can people find you?

01:53:15
Alex
I am lexlevelle2005 on Twitter. That's my one social. Technically, I exist on TikTok. I don't post anything. I just submit myself to the. For your page. Gods and the Whims of Noodle the bones or no bones dog.

01:53:29
Case Aiken
Well, you should definitely check that out. J Mike, where can they find you now?

01:53:33
Jmike
I'm wondering what's on TikTok.

01:53:37
Alex
I'll tell you all about this dog as soon as we're done.

01:53:40
Jmike
You can find me on Twitter mike101. I respond to case. I post funny memes. I do it all.

01:53:49
Case Aiken
You can find the show on Twitter MenOfSteel14 because I am dumb and I didn't write podcasts when I was naming it and they just assigned a number because apparently Men of Steel has been used by lots of people. Silly me. And you can find me on Twitter @Case Aiken. Come check it all out. I'll definitely be talking about various stuff we've got going on. I will also be sharing lefty shit. So, you know, in keeping with the Miracle man vibe of a person who's like, fuck Margaret Thatcher.

01:54:17
Jmike
You hear me?

01:54:19
Alex
So. But.

01:54:20
Case Aiken
But I do hope you. You join us next time for our Miracle man discussion about the Neil Gaiman stuff. JD and Angela are awesome. They have a Neil Gaiman podcast and have a lot of perspective to bring for this conversation. So I'm really looking forward to that. But until next time, stay.

01:54:39
Jmike
Foreign.

01:54:46
Case Aiken
Welcome back to the Men of Steel podcast. Wow, my voice, just something weird there.

01:54:51
Jmike
For the record, I want teeth like Mr. Cream. I saw his teeth and I was like, wait, are those. Are those diamonds? They're sapphires. He has sapphire teeth. I want that.

01:55:05
Alex
Yeah, I I try not to think too hard about it because dental stuff creeps me out.

01:55:11
Jmike
Yeah.

01:55:11
Alex
Cause just.

01:55:13
Jmike
It was so creepy.

01:55:15
Alex
Yeah.

01:55:16
Jmike
The first time he smiled, and it's, like, all blue, and I was like, what the hell? What is this?

01:55:23
Alex
It is wild. Like. And I love that there's never an explanation. That's just how it is.

01:55:28
Case Aiken
Yeah.

01:55:28
Jmike
I thought. I thought, like, after. After he meets a guy in the hospital, he's, like, writing stuff down, like, hey, do you know who this guy is? I thought that they were gonna give some kind of backstory to his teeth and everything. I was like, oh, we're not gonna get that. Okay. I'm.

01:55:46
Alex
I'm happiest just not knowing. I think there's. There is no explanation, honestly. That will be as cool as not knowing in my mind.

01:55:54
Jmike
But it's the sapphire teeth, though. You don't see that every day.

01:55:57
Alex
You don't.

01:55:57
Jmike
You don't see it at all.

01:55:59
Alex
I was gonna say, one could argue you never see.

01:56:04
Jmike
Was like, the first you see the shades and he smiles and it's the sapphire teeth. I was like, that's creepy, but also kind of cool, but still very creepy. It was like the hospital scene. I was chuckling the entire time. I was like, this guy doesn't know he's gonna die, but he's totally gonna die.

01:56:24
Alex
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

01:56:26
Jmike
Are you gonna kill me? Oh, no, I would never. Oh, no. Well, he's dead.

01:56:33
Alex
Totally. Like, no one's gonna answer that question honestly. If they need information, that's their. That's their bargaining chip. Come on. You should know that.

01:56:46
Jmike
How is he gonna die? I was like, does Mr. Cream have powers, too? Or is he just. He's just a massive guy. Oh, he's just a massive guy. Yeah. I was fully expecting the eye beams to come out. He said, I lied. I was like, yeah, Mr. Cream. That's a different name, too.

01:57:08
Alex
It is.

01:57:10
Jmike
You kind of wouldn't expect that from, like. Well, I wouldn't say he's an evil henchman. I don't think he is. But when you first meet him, he comes across as an evil henchman. And, like, the first you find out his name is Mr. Cream.

01:57:24
Alex
Well, there's that one panel where, like, someone is calling for help and they just shout, cream.

01:57:30
Jmike
Yeah.

01:57:31
Alex
It's like, oh, right. Mr. Cream. That. Yeah, Cream.

01:57:38
Jmike
And then, like. But yeah, like, I said that his just seeing him with the shades and then the smile.

01:57:45
Alex
Yeah.

01:57:49
Jmike
So creepy. But it's awesome.

01:57:51
Case Aiken
Yeah. Cream was a cool character.

01:57:54
Jmike
Is it fixed?

01:57:55
Case Aiken
I think so. How am I sounding great?

01:57:57
Alex
Much better.

01:57:58
Case Aiken
Okay, good. I'm sorry about that.

01:58:02
Alex
All good?

01:58:02
Jmike
It's all good, sir.

01:58:04
Case Aiken
Did you guys continue chatting while I was out?

01:58:07
Alex
Just about our shared love of Mr. Cream. You could cut that out and plop that in anywhere probably.

01:58:14
Case Aiken
Matt, please. I would love for that to be somewhere at the front or somewhere at.

01:58:17
Alex
The back or right here in the middle. Nice cream filled center.

01:58:26
Case Aiken
All right, so where were we?

01:58:27
Alex
Hi, I'm Matt, aka Stormageddon and I'm the host of CPOV autographs@ certainpov.com it is a bi weekly interview series where I interview folks from all over the arts from writers to comedians to magicians to musicians, even actors, historians, podcasters, pretty much anyone who's willing to chat with.

01:58:46
Case Aiken
Me for a little bit.

01:58:47
Alex
If you like interesting conversations with even more interesting people, go to certainpov.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, music is life and life is good.

01:58:57
Case Aiken
Cpov Certainpov. Com.