I love that guy! He’s such a great writer.
Seriously I came across this on Amazon today and wondered what the point was. I seem to vaguely recall some kind of controversy about acquiring the rights. Does that have something to do with it?
If it does it seems totally bizarre to me. Why bother? There’s four reviews on the main page and every one of them mentions Alan Moore’s name
Because Moore refuses to be officially associated with either Marvel or DC any longer. Both of them treated him badly when he worked with them in the 70s and 80s and after DC fucked him over on…I think it was something Swamp Thing related, but it might have been Watchmen…he decided he was done with both for good. (Although he got dragged back to DC when the company publishing his ABC line got bought. He broke away from them the first time he had an excuse - IIRC it was over the V for Vendetta movie.)
It doesn’t matter that everybody knows he did it - it’s symbolic for Moore, a gesture of goodwill for Marvel, and it cleaned up the last bit of the legal quagmire surrounding Marvelman so that it’s easily accessible to readers again and the artists can get paid more royalties for it.
In his opinion. There were a large number of non-reclusive, non-anarchist writers who seemed to be satisfied under the employ of Marvel and DC.
I just appreciate knowing they are available in the US. I hadn’t known so this thread was helpful!
And there were others who were screwed. See Jack Kirby. Or, to some degree Siegel and Shuster.*
It depended on the situation.
*The situation as presented to the public is somewhat biased: when they sold Superman, they had already created other comics, some for DC, and knew how the business worked. They also made a great deal of money from Superman in the 40s, and were paid a $94k settlement (nearly $1 million in current dollars) in 1948 for the rights. However, they ran into hard times and went public in 1976. They gained a lot of sympathy and DC gave them a pension. While they clearly lost out, DC was just following practices of the time, and did accommodate them.
I’ve still got the original series, so reprints weren’t even on my radar. Searching around, it looks like the rights have been jacked up for decades and just now straightened out. Though I was pretty discontented with many of Moore’s recurring themes, I was intrigued by the “benevolent theocracy” ending of the series and wished it was explored more because it showed positives as well as negatives.
Due to circumstances beyond my control I stopped reading Miracleman at issue 14. I was more than a little surprised to find out that it continued to be released after that since that seemed to be the perfect place to end it. I can’t wait to see what happens next!