Having just picked up a huge haul of old Warrior mags I was reading through the original run of Marvelman (as was) and I know that you have had a few problems with Moore's writing in the past but I wondered what you thoughts were on this run and in general to the trend of heroes with feet of clay.

Personally, I like my heroes to be just that, heroes! Not sullied with endless amounts of angst.

What say you?

Anyway, to answer your question, with fond memories of MarvelMan behind me, I did not much care for Moore's take on the character. The "everything you know is a lie" approach is a card that should be played with great caution, and usually works best as a story arc, with all things restored at the end, rather than as a "big reveal".

I had always heard great things about MarvelMan/Miracleman and I found the Neil Gaiman issues and snatched them up. Afterwards I thought "Meh, not as good as Sandman, not really a superhero book, it was ok. I liked some more than others, but it didn't really leave an impact." Later I met someone who had all of the Alan Moore issues in trade paperback form and I read those. I was expecting a magnum opus based on what I had heard. They weren't all that. It didn't seem really to be that much better than Moore's Captain Britain and definitely was not as good as his Swamp Thing, Watchmen, or more recently Promethea, From Hell, or Top Ten.

In short: I think they were overrated. Even from the standpoint of accepting the "everything you know is a lie" and feet of clay stuff.

I'll be the contrarian yet again...I loved Miracleman and still do. For me it's only marred by the chapters with art by Chuck Beachum (today known as Chuck Austen) and Rick Veitch. Of all the revisionist superhero stories of the 80s, it's my favorite, at least conceptually, with its super-scientific take on the Billy Batson/Captain Marvel-type transformation. And the chapters with John Totleben's art, particularly the battle that destroys London and kills thousands, are astonishing and horrifying. And make me glad that superpeople only exist in fantasyland.

Admittedly, I don't have fond memories of Marvelman. Given that the character and his world were an imitation of the Marvel Family's, I can't really begrudge Moore for ripping that world to shreds.

By the way..."feet of clay"? I don't see what that concept has to do with Miracleman. Mike Moran is flawed, but not morally, and Moore's intent isn't to make Miracleman look bad/immoral. (Kid Miracleman is simply a case of absolute power corrupting absolutely.)

Miracleman as well as Kid Miracleman are cases of power corrupting...KM does it through violence, MM does it through forcing his "good intentions" on a society, whether they want it or not.

I enjoyed Alan Moore's take on the character if for no other reason than it enabled comic traditionalists and revisionists to both have their cake and eat it too.  I can actually enjoy a revision that doesn't tear down what other writers have done but instead adds a new dimension to the story.  The fifties material is very neatly self-contained and intact inside the backstory that Moore was weaving.

Of course if anyone were attempting to do this story today, it would be absolutely mandatory to deny in anyway possible the "non-realistic" storytelling of the fifties, so all those wonderful stories that provide source material would go the way of the garbage bin. 

Totleben's work on this series was amazing. 

I have mixed feelings about this series as a whole...but issue 15, the one in which KM destroys London, is probably still the single most viscerally affecting comic book I've ever read.