So, the MIRACLEMAN saga rears its ugly head again.

I'm writing this on Thursday. Marvel announced their deal with Neil Gaiman yesterday; Alan Moore has given his bearded blessing to the project; and by the time you read this on Monday, Todd McFarlane will no doubt have issued a fabulous press release hinting at some killer argument that he sadly cannot reveal but which would prove him to be entirely correct if only he could tell us what it was. Sadly, I am going to spend the weekend walking up and down hills in Yorkshire, so you'll just have to put up with these initial, and by now out-of-date, reactions.

I have always tended to tune out when Miracleman is mentioned. Moore and Gaiman's MIRACLEMAN stories long since got elevated to the Canon, which means that people speak of them in hushed tones without ever really bothering to explain quite why it's meant to be so bloody wonderful for the benefit of those of us who weren't reading it a decade ago. I'm sure it's a great book that was every bit as influential as you all say, but frankly, I've never read it and I got bored years ago of people telling me how good it was. So I've stopped listening. Sorry about that.

People speak of the series in hushed tones, without explaining why it's so wonderful. More to the point, most recent articles on MIRACLEMAN have been unbearably dull reading. There is a usual formula. You start off with a misty-eyed passage about how great WARRIOR was, particularly if your article is being published by Dez Skinn. You then launch into a painstakingly intricate explanation of who actually owns the character, which might just about be comprehensible with the assistance of some Venn diagrams and a pie chart. You then do much the same to explain who owns the previously published stories. Finally, you explain precisely where the film is presently kept, possibly including a brief description of the layout of Neil Gaiman's basement. By this point, half the audience has fallen asleep.

Nonetheless, this has been the stock Miracleman news story for a good few years now, regularly trotted out in response to another cryptic comment from Todd McFarlane about how he acquired the rights in Eclipse's car boot sale and owns it all, so we shouldn't listen to that nasty Gaiman chap.

But now it looks like something is actually happening. Neil Gaiman is raising money for a new company which will hire lawyers to "sort out" the rights to Miracleman. Presumably this will involve "sorting out" Todd McFarlane. This raises the surprising prospect that those of us who weren't reading Eclipse books in the early 1990s might actually be able to read the damn thing. It also raises the virtual certainty that Gaiman's lawyers are going to be suffering from a lot of migraines in the next year as they try to work out what the hell has been happening with these rights.

Most of all, though, it raises the prospect of two well-known creators having a big public fight. With lawyers and everything. Obviously, this is enormously entertaining, and a very welcome development. Even better, we all know who to cheer for. To be honest, I don't envy anyone the task of untangling who really owns Miracleman and I have no real clue which of the various claimants really owns the damn thing in what proportions. For all I know, McFarlane might be right. Stranger things have been known. This is, however, entirely beside the point. Gaiman seems like a nice chap, and McFarlane seems like a complete wanker, so clearly we're all going to be cheering for Gaiman. If only all intellectual property disputes could be sorted out this way, the savings in court time would be huge.

McFarlane has failed to grasp that the character does not have a fanbase. The last major development in this long-running soap opera, of course, was McFarlane's bizarre attempt to introduce the character into the post-Bendis HELLSPAWN, a use of the character that certainly did wonders to remind us all who we should be cheering for. I'd dropped the book by that point, but I seem to remember it being a rather murky, sepia-tinged affair, even after Bendis was removed. Miracleman must have fitten in like a klaxon at a funeral.

Still, it's not like many people bought the thing. What McFarlane has so amusingly failed to grasp is that Miracleman, the character, does not have a fanbase. He's a generic hero, which was a strength in a comic that was playing off the genre, but doesn't make him the sort of desperately original idea we're crying to see back in print at any cost. The acclaim was never for Miracleman the character, but MIRACLEMAN, the series. Given that that series was written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, it was always blindingly obvious that a Todd McFarlane interpretation of the character had limited appeal to the audience.

(Interestingly enough, McFarlane's Miracleman stories seem to have tailed off into chronic lateness. It's tempting to think that this might be on legal advice. Then again, it's McFarlane. So it's probably just his usual chronic lateness.)

The stage is now set for a brutal and pointless public battle in which the heroic Neil Gaiman fights to bring a lost classic back into print while evil Todd schemes to retain his character. If we're lucky, they'll make it as humiliating and high profile as they possibly can, so that we can all be kept informed of the latest development on this very important matter. Maybe they can be persuaded to copy all their lawyers' letters to Newsarama. After all, it's going to be a long slow slog before they resolve anything (probably ending with one of them paying the other a substantial sum of money to piss off), and the least they can do is keep us entertained in the meantime. They're storytellers, after all. I'm sure they can shoehorn a bit of drama into their intellectual property disputes.

Developments are going to be slow. Gaiman is raising the money by doing a six-issue miniseries for Marvel that isn't even going to start until 2002. Once he's got the money, it'll doubtless take the lawyers a good few months to sort everything out, even assuming they don't go to court over it. Then they'll start worrying about who gets to publish the old stories, and Gaiman will start looking for a gap in his schedule to finish off writing the story. So let's be realistic here. It'd be very surprising to see the book back in print this side of 2004.

Moore might write something for Marvel in a few years time. Maybe. For the moment, we can keep ourselves amused with a selection of side issues. Neil Gaiman writes a superhero book, bitterly disappointing the sort of people who'd like to think he was above that kind of thing. Even if the book turns out to be crap, at least I've had some good solid entertainment laughing at the anti-superhero purists over the last couple of days, and you can't ask for more than that. Although admittedly, it's a bit jarring to see Gaiman giving excitable quotes about playing in Stan and Jack's sandbox. You don't really associate him with that sort of thing.

Then there's the slightly ambiguous position of Marvel in all this. From the comments at the press conference, there's no firm deal for Marvel to publish Miracleman (or Marvelman) stories in the event that Gaiman proves ownership. This begs the question of why exactly the company is giving him all the profits from a six issue series. Marvel isn't a charity, and it doesn't do this kind of thing to help "creator's rights" (a concept that's been rather bizarrely invoked in some quarters, bearing in mind that none of those currently fighting for the character created him). Books like HEROES are the exception, not the rule. Presumably there's some kind of side agreement in place between Marvel and Gaiman, perhaps involving some kind of first refusal arrangement. There's something we can all pointlessly speculate on.

And then there's the steady thawing of relations between Alan Moore and Marvel, which has already seen Moore make the earth-shattering announcement that hypothetically, he might conceivably write something for them in a few years time, although he hasn't really thought about it. To think, Alan Moore drops his hardcore principled objection to Marvel, and the IRA decommission their weapons - all in one week! This is an important and moving time for humanity.

Sure, it's going to be a while yet before we see any actual Miracleman stories, whatever happens. But we're going to get a steady flow of Miracleman-related public squabbles. That's got to be enough to keep us going in the meantime. Just remember: Neil is the goodie, Todd is the baddie, and the comic is an influential work of genius. With these basic principles in mind, you'll be able to bluff your way in any serious MIRACLEMAN-related discussion. And then you can sit back and enjoy the fighting.

Go on, you know you want to.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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