Miracleman - Once more unto the breach

In my continuing quest to be the clearinghouse for all Miracleman/Marvelman developments until we finally get a resolution, here's what's new.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid provides most of the news this time around through his combination of journalism and detective work. Interviewing Moore over at Forbidden Planet's site, we get Moore's current understanding of the situation and his position:

PÓM: OK. The only other thing about your previous work is, do you keep up with what’s going on with the Marvelman Miracleman debacle?

AM: Nah. I mean, other than the fact that I was happy to do everything that I could to help Mick Anglo, who is the person who has always owned all of the rights to Marvelman, as far as I now understand it, that we never had the rights to do those stories, even though Mick really liked the stories that we did. We didn’t understand at the time that Mick Anglo was the sole owner of the rights. We were misled. So I’ve done everything that I can to clear all that up.

[more on the topic in the full interview]

And over on his Alan Moore Fan page at Livejournal, he follows my own legwork on some of the news that came out in that ComicMix story (and shares my opinion on the quality of that piece), and adds something I didn't know. So now we have a company called "Emotiv" buying Mick Anglo's rights to the characters (reported by Steve Bissette as information from Neil Gaiman, by way of PRINCE OF STORIES). And we have "Jon Campbell, the Scottish businessman" shopping around the film rights to the character (unsourced info, by way of ComicMix). Combining the two leads us to Glasgow based Emotiv Records, which is associated with Jon Campbell of the band The Time Frequency (internet, by way of a series of tubes).

All circumstantial, to be sure, but add to this Pádraig's independently gleaned info that "Mick Anglo apparently has a grandson in the music business"...

Hey, now we've got ourselves the fixins!

Or this could all be blind men trying to describe an elephant.

Pádraig's got some additional juicy rumours from an Ebay listing you should check out, but having both read and written Ebay listings that stretch the truth I'd say you definitely need a better source than someone trying to get almost $400 for less than $20 worth of comics, who therefore has a vested interest in people believing they'll never be reprinted in that form.

So there's stuff going on behind the scenes, and bits of it peeking out. I suppose the wait is for "Emotiv" to actually make a public move. Perhaps something more will come out in a few months when this issue of ALTER EGO comes out (it'll at least be fascinating to see what they list as the copyright holder to the images they use, since they're usually pretty scrupulous about that, but might resort to the old "everything is copyright its respective owner, and we take no position on who that might be" standby). There's some more I want to write about the whole thing, but I'll wait until at least that issue of ALTER EGO comes out to see if it clears things up or muddies the waters even more.

For now, I follow this stuff pretty closely, and I honestly can’t say whether the developments that have come to light in the last few months have brought proper reprints and a continuation of the story closer or made them more unlikely. I suppose any movement is good news, since the status quo of everything out of print wasn't helping anyone but those trying to sell back issues.

Hm, just realized, Alan Moore cedes his claim to Miracleman/Marvelman (first print royalties and other-media rights, at least) to Anglo fits "A king will forsake his kingdom". Next up, "Life and death will clash and fray".