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A review by nigellicus
The Golden Age by Mark Buckingham, Neil Gaiman
5.0
The interesting thing about Gaiman and Buckingham's run on Miracleman is what it doesn't do. Following on from on the most conceptually amazing and ambitious superhero comics ever made, from its early days in the pages of Warrior through to its troubled publication history with Eclipse, Alan Moore pushed the bounds of the superhero genre, taking it first to hell and then to heaven, with the creation of a utopian vision of a world remade into something like perfection.
To continue a superhero comic that has reached a utopian crescendo is usually to ignore it, or to insert a worm into paradise and bring it all tumbling down. In The Golden Age, Gaiman and Buckingham sit down instead and look at the world, really look at it, and try to tell us what it's like. So we get a series of short stories - a pilgrimage, an affair with a goddess, a bed-time story, an artist undergound, and others. Each story is finely wrought, with an emotional core and a sense of the wonder of this world of miracles set against the tiny hopes and dreams and failures of ordinary life. It all ends with Carnival, a comic of incredible emotional heft, deeply moving, somehow universalising the concerns of, of all things, a superhero comic, and transmuting them into a vision of hope, of grief and loss that can never be forgotten but which ca be lessened over time. After all, there aren't many superhero comics that spend so much time time with people mourning the casualties of the latest big superhero fight. But that's what makes this seem real, this joyful, hopeful, painfully bright fantasy. There's a snob in me that finds it a bit tawdry that Miracleman has ended up between the covers of a Marvel collection, but to see it all in one place like this, one complete piece of work, is pretty miraculous.
To continue a superhero comic that has reached a utopian crescendo is usually to ignore it, or to insert a worm into paradise and bring it all tumbling down. In The Golden Age, Gaiman and Buckingham sit down instead and look at the world, really look at it, and try to tell us what it's like. So we get a series of short stories - a pilgrimage, an affair with a goddess, a bed-time story, an artist undergound, and others. Each story is finely wrought, with an emotional core and a sense of the wonder of this world of miracles set against the tiny hopes and dreams and failures of ordinary life. It all ends with Carnival, a comic of incredible emotional heft, deeply moving, somehow universalising the concerns of, of all things, a superhero comic, and transmuting them into a vision of hope, of grief and loss that can never be forgotten but which ca be lessened over time. After all, there aren't many superhero comics that spend so much time time with people mourning the casualties of the latest big superhero fight. But that's what makes this seem real, this joyful, hopeful, painfully bright fantasy. There's a snob in me that finds it a bit tawdry that Miracleman has ended up between the covers of a Marvel collection, but to see it all in one place like this, one complete piece of work, is pretty miraculous.