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Tweet[Previous chapters: 1 to 8 - 1953 – 1985 Roundup, 9 - The Dawn of Eclipse, 10 - Alan Moore at Eclipse, 11 - The Twilight of Eclipse, 12 - All About Angela, 13 - More Angela, More Courtrooms, and Much More Todd, 14 - Back to Marvelman] Before I get around to doing a [...]
Tweet[Previous chapters: 1 to 8 - 1953 – 1985 Roundup, 9 - The Dawn of Eclipse, 10 - Alan Moore at Eclipse, 11 - The Twilight of Eclipse, 12 - All About Angela, 13 - More Angela, More Courtrooms, and Much More Todd] In Prince of Stories, towards the end of the chapter on Neil [...]
Tweet[Previous chapters: 1 to 8 - 1953 – 1985 Roundup, 9 - The Dawn of Eclipse, 10 - Alan Moore at Eclipse, 11 - The Twilight of Eclipse, 12 - All About Angela] Despite having lost both the original Angela court case with Neil Gaiman in 2002 and then the appeal in 2004, Todd McFarlane [...]
Tweet[Previous chapters: 1 to 8 - 1953 – 1985 Roundup, 9 - The Dawn of Eclipse, 10 - Alan Moore at Eclipse, 11 - The Twilight of Eclipse] In February 1992 Todd McFarlane, along with six others, announced the founding of Image Comics, after having failed to negotiate more favourable terms for themselves at Marvel [...]
TweetAlthough Alan Moore had finished with Miracleman, it wasn’t the end of the character, or the comic. Knowing he was nearing the end of his story, Moore had rung up Neil Gaiman and asked him if he wanted to take over the title. Talking to Kurt Amacker of the Mania.com website in September 2009, Moore [...]
Tweet[Previous chapters: 1 to 8 - 1953 – 1985 Roundup, 9 - The Dawn of Eclipse] The original contract between Quality Communications Ltd and Eclipse Comics called for Quality to provide enough material for twelve issues, but this ran into trouble, as Dez Skinn explained in Speakeasy #57: According to our contract, Quality has to [...]
Tweet[Previous chapters: 1 to 8 - 1953 – 1985 Roundup] Although Marvelman last appeared in Warrior #21 in August 1984, and the last issue of the magazine, #26, appeared in February 1985, this wasn’t the end of the Marvelman strip. From the beginning Dez Skinn had wanted to sell the Warrior strips further afield, with [...]
TweetSo far, this history of Marvelman – more correctly called Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman – has taken nine chapters – well, eight chapters plus an introduction – to tell the story of the events that led up to the creation of Marvelman; the story of the actual creation [...]
Tweet[Previous chapters: Introduction, 1 - Prehistory, 2 - Marvelman Rises, 3 - Marvelman Falls, 4 - Intermission: 1963 to 1982, 5 - Prologue to Warrior, 6 - A Warrior is Born, 7 - A Warrior Stumbles] By 1984, things were starting to fall apart at Warrior. Alan Moore’s Marvelman is threatened by Dez Skinn’s Big [...]
Tweet[Previous chapters: Introduction, 1 - Prehistory, 2 - Marvelman Rises, 3 - Marvelman Falls, 4 - Intermission: 1963 to 1982, 5 - Prologue to Warrior, 6 - A Warrior is Born] When Dez Skinn had started Warrior, he wanted the creators to own their own creations, which they all did, more or less. Marvelman was [...]
Tweet[Previous chapters: Introduction, 1 - Prehistory, 2 - Marvelman Rises, 3 - Marvelman Falls, 4 - Intermission: 1963 to 1982, 5 - Prologue to Warrior] Warrior took nearly a year from its original inception in the spring of 1981 to finally reaching the shelves in March 1982. The contents of that first issue were, in [...]
Tweet[Previous chapters: Introduction, 1 - Prehistory, 2 - Marvelman Rises, 3 - Marvelman Falls, 4 - Intermission: 1963 to 1982] Born in Goole in Yorkshire on the 4th February 1951, by 1982 Derek ‘Dez’ Skinn already had a long and successful history working in British comics. He had started producing the comics fanzine Derinn Comicollector [...]
Tweet[Previous chapters: Introduction, 1 - Prehistory, 2 - Marvelman Rises, 3 - Marvelman Falls] In the nineteen-year gap between L Miller and Co Ltd‘s publication of Marvelman #370 in 1963 and Dez Skinn’s Quality Communications Ltd revitalisation of the character in the pages of Warrior #1 in 1982, a number of the parties involved in [...]
TweetPoisoned Chalice Part 3: Marvelman Falls [Previous chapters: Introduction, 1: Prehistory, 2: Marvelman Rises] The actual work on the Marvelman titles was done by various artists, and Mick Anglo goes into quite a bit of detail about them and their different styles in Nostalgia: Spotlight on the Fifties. The outstanding Marvelman artist amongst all of [...]
TweetPoisoned Chalice Part 2: Marvelman – The Miller Years I [Previous chapters: Introduction, 1: Prehistory] If American comics can be said to have begun with the publication of Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics in 1933, their British equivalent began half a century earlier with Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, first published on May 3rd 1884. [...]
Superman, co-created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, first appeared in Action Comics #1 in June 1938, published by Detective Comics Inc, a fore-runner of National Periodical Publications and DC Comics. Virtually overnight it became a huge seller, and is running to this day, with uninterrupted publication for well over seventy years. A vast amount has been written over the years on the history of Superman, and by people substantially more qualified than I, but one claim, that Superman was based on the character of Hugo Danner, from Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator, (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1930), has some relevance to the larger story of Marvelman and, although I decided that it might be too far back to start this series of articles, if you’re interested in reading what I have to say about it, you should go read this article, and then meet us back here.
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