Ritesh K | Department of English | Michigan State University
The year is 1982. Having worked with the likes of IPC Magazines, Warner Bros., and Marvel UK for over a decade, British comics editor Derek “Dez” Skinn had had a brief flirtation with advertising design in the film and fashion industries before he decided to return to publishing. This time, he established Warrior, a comics anthology, published by his own company, Quality Communications, and he wanted to include a superhero strip, knowing the staying power the genre had over audiences. Instead of launching a brand new character, Skinn went back to his childhood to unearth a half-forgotten British legend created by Mick Anglo in the Superman fashion.
Enter Marvelman. After passing over a few seasoned writers for various reasons, he chanced upon a young Alan Moore, who was a fellow long-term admirer of the character and, therefore, was eager to lend a hand to this relaunch. While Moore would go on to achieve worldwide acclaim for his later titles, most notably for the subversive superhero series Watchmen, it is in Marvelman where he, and arguably American comics at large, found the first revisionist thread which would unravel and redefine superhero fiction forever. Three years after the relaunch, Warrior would fold, having operated at a loss ever since its inception. Skinn would attribute part of the loss to Marvel Comics’ lawsuit over the naming of the character, even though the company renamed itself long after the character had debuted in 1954. He would enter into a deal with Pacific Comics to continue the story, but the San Diego-based publisher would be taken over by its Guerneville-based rival Eclipse Comics, who were now in charge of taking the stories ahead in North America. In order to avoid any further litigation, the series was renamed Miracleman.
While [Alan] Moore would go on to achieve worldwide acclaim for his later titles, most notably for the subversive superhero series Watchmen, it is in Marvelman where he, and arguably American comics at large, found the first revisionist thread which would unravel and redefine superhero fiction forever.
Across both its UK and North American publishing contexts, Miracleman attracted numerous reader responses, who were all reacting to this seismic shift in the genre in distinctive ways. In addition, these responses existed in specific sociocultural milieus across transcontinental geographies, ensuring that the letters, as a whole, formed a tremendously important moment in the development of genre fiction. With readers across these locations responding to different but equally significant cues in the narrative; such as readers in the UK recognizing tones of post-imperial cynicism while readers in the US more affected by the brutal reframing of the Superman archetype for the very first time; the letters form a vital archive of readerly affect in the broader context of literature.
Miraclemapped is a digital humanities initiative that maps the entirety of readers’ letters to Miracleman across its time on Warrior in the UK and its later run in North America under Eclipse Comics. It is an archive that aims to shed light on this pivotal cultural moment through the specific multiplicity of reader responses and break new ground in the study of comics and the applicability of cultural developments on real-world societal change. This initiative also has the potential to hold added significance in the modern day where the shift to digital has largely rendered letter columns in mainstream comics obsolete.
The project is a direct consequence of my research interests in digital methods as not only facilitators of preserving cultural heritage but as a means to make such heritage actionable for further insights. Digital methods offer powerful opportunities to safeguard fragile artifacts, uncover hidden patterns in vast datasets, and democratize access to knowledge. Specifically, within the realm of defunct comics, digital methods are not merely advantageous but absolutely essential. The 1982 relaunch of Miracleman being an integral part of two defunct publishers across two continents makes it highly pertinent to my own research outcomes.
[Miraclemapped] is an archive that aims to shed light on a pivotal cultural moment through the specific multiplicity of reader responses and break new ground in the study of comics and the applicability of cultural developments on real-world societal change.
At this nascent stage, I envisage the project to serve as an introduction to Moore’s seminal run for folks residing within and beyond institutional bounds, including comics readers and genre fiction enthusiasts, academics working with transatlantic histories and also within comics studies and popular culture at large. More specifically, those with a proclivity toward digital humanities can consider this project as a base to create similar reader-mapping projects for other seminal comics narratives. The immediate goals of the project for next semester under CHI are to build a platform-agnostic interactive map of reader responses to Miracleman, along with a temporal slider, documenting all scanned reader responses to Moore’s sixteen-issue run, complemented by thematic codes for sentiment analysis. In effect, the objective will be to showcase the series’ overall geospatial reach and cultural impact(s). The potential URL would be miraclemapped.github.io.
The project will utilize a technology stack that accounts for the three distinct phases of the effort, i.e. database and metadata management, geospatial analysis, and website presentation and hosting. In process order, Miraclemapped will likely begin from database population in a CSV and image-to-text conversion, to then transition into Omeka S for building the primary archive using the raw datasets and managing metadata. The next steps will involve using QGIS for map data cleaning, verification, analysis, and GeoJSON conversion, OpenSourceMap for the base map layer, and Leaflet for the mapping engine. Finally, Bootstrap will provide the visual framework for the website, which will be hosted on GitHub Pages. Most, if not all, of this stack is chosen to be as effective and user-friendly as possible, keeping the limited scope of a single semester in mind. In terms of potential support, the Michigan State University Libraries do possess the Miracleman series as part of their Murray and Hong Special Collections, and as such, can be included as an institutional partner.
Work on Miraclemapped formally begins next month. I hope that the project can ignite a critical conversation about the massive sociocultural and political impact(s) of subversive literature as it seeks to present uniquely individual voices in an analytical limelight and also be a launchpad for similar digital research initiatives within comics studies.
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