Marvelman was a British Golden Age superhero comic book, published by L. Miller & Son in the United Kingdom between 1954 and 1963.
The lead character was originally created by Mick Anglo as a replacement for Captain Marvel due to Fawcett Publications ending the latter's titles following legal action by DC Comics.
[3] However, after losing a landmark legal case against National Comics in 1952, Fawcett discontinued their superhero material, cutting off the supply of strips for L. Miller & Son.
In order to cut expenditure in resizing or modifying artwork from American publishers, L. Miller & Son retained the same dimensions as US comic books.
[4][6] Anglo initially handled the strip himself while it was shaped before involving other artists from his studio, including James Bleach, Norman Light and Don Lawrence.
To keep the work on schedule Anglo adopted a system broadly similar to the "Marvel method" later used by Stan Lee—to avoid complicated scripts with overdetailed panel descriptions he would instead devise a plot outline, pass it to one of the studio's artists and then write dialogue and narration to fit the resulting pages of art.
[8] Back-up features were either produced by Gower Street Studios or were from other series licensed by Miller, including adventure serial Lance and science fiction heroes Captain Zip Morgan of Space Patrol and Johnny Galaxia (an import of a Spanish comic strip created by Josep Beá and Blay Navarro).
In-house humour strips such as Young Joey, The Friendly Soul and Flip and Flop were also used to fill single or half pages.
[8] Marvelman was similar to Captain Marvel: a young copy boy named Micky Moran encounters an astrophysicist called Guntag Barghelt (instead of the wizard Shazam) who gives him superpowers based on atomic energy instead of magic.
Other story opportunities were opened up when Marvelman gained the ability to fly fast enough around the Earth to travel through time, usually into the past but occasionally into the future.
[28][29][30] This allowed him to visit periods such as England in the Elizabethan era[31] or the Middle Ages,[32] the reign of Louis XIV,[33] the Wild West or American Civil War, and also meet historical figures including Hannibal,[34] Hippocrates,[35] and Charles II.
[6] While employed by L. Miller & Son in 1958, Anglo also created Superhombre for Spanish publisher Editorial Ferma, a character with considerable similarity to Marvelman.
[3][43] In 1960 they had dropped to a degree where L. Miller & Son switched the title to a monthly status and the contents to reprints, while the annuals would shrink in size and quality.
[5] Original cover-art was still created, though a lack of reference material meant the new artists frequently depicted the character as having brown hair, while Captain Marvel's cape even made a reappearance on cover for the 1961 annual.
A one-off Marvelman Special was produced by Quality in 1984, reprinting four Anglo-era strips with a new framing sequence by Moore and artist Alan Davis.
In a text essay included with Miracleman #2, Moore noted the character's existence since 1953 predated Marvel Comics' use of the name, and instead originated from the rival Fawcett publication.
[7] Marvel's first output featuring the character was the Marvelman Classic Primer, a one-shot of text pieces by John Rhett Thomas, interviews with Anglo and Gaiman and pin-ups by Mike Perkins, Doug Braithwaite, Miguel Angel Sepulveda, Jae Lee, Khoi Pham and Ben Oliver.
A note to this effect was printed in the collecting, relating that some of the collectors contacted had raised doubts the issue existed and that if it was discovered it would be included in future editions.
Writing in the second issue of Eclipse Comics' Miracleman, revival writer Alan Moore noted that the stories were "simplistic in both art and script, and to anyone familiar with the exploits of the original Fawcett Marvel Family the characters must seem woefully derivative",[49] and in 2001 would say "I like the idea of there being a British superhero, I just didn't think he was very good".