Some background:

When I started regularly buying my own comics in the mid-1980s, a significant fraction of those books were from what was called "independent publishers". One of these publishers was Eclipse Comics, and one of many important books that was published by Eclipse was Miracleman. Initially, Miracleman was just reprints of Alan Moore's "Marvelman" strips from the British Anthology Warrior (based on a UK version of Fawcett's Captain Marvel from the 1950s-1960s), but later issues of series featured all-new story and art.

Moore's run ended at issue 16, after some publishing delays due to artist John Totleben's eyesight problems. I can vividly remember my surprise at seeing issue 16 the week it came out! The series was to continue with Neil Gaiman writing and Mark Buckingham/D'Israeli on art. Six more issues told the 'complete' story of "The Golden Age", and a couple of issues (#23, #24) of the next arc "The Silver Age" were published before economic changes in the direct market, along with some underlying financial issues led to the bankruptcy of Eclipse comics and all books ceased publication circa 1993.

Eclipse had also published some reprints of original Marvelman comics (some in a 3D special) as well as a 3 issue series of "apocrypha" that provided some extra narrative for the Golden Age stories. Unfortunately for US-based fans, the few "Warpsmith" stories (quite important for the first 16 issues of Miracleman) were not reprinted by Eclipse. A single Warpsmith story was printed by Atomeka press in the first issue of the A1 anthology. Five (uncolored, unlettered) pages of Miracleman #25 were published in Kimota! The Miracleman Companion (a TwoMorrows publication that includes a lot of the early history I've either skipped or skimmed).

Todd McFarlane had money to burn, and purchased the complete intellectual rights (and presumably finished scripts/artwork) to whatever Eclipse had. This story (especially as it relates to the tangled mess of the rights to "Marvelman"/"Miracleman") is reasonably well-documented in many places but to skip ahead, after ~20 years, Marvel Comics ended up with the rights to publish both Marvelman reprints (form the 1950s-1960s) circa 2010, and then (in 2014) publishing their own reprints of the Warrior and Eclipse material up to issue 22 (of the Eclipse run).

As a fan of the story and the material, I picked up most of the Marvel reprints (skipping a majority of the 2010 Marvelman Family's Finest reprints). A side note: There is Marvelman Primer from 2010 that doesn't appear in the Grand Comics Database. There is very little in this ($4.99 cover price!) book; it contains little besides short transcript of a conversation between Joe Quesada and Mick Anglo and pinups of the covers for the Marvelman Family's Finest reprints. Because of my familiarity with the existing material, it was only this past month did I sit down to read these Marvel reprints. To date, only the material up through the end of The Golden Age has been reprinted. Honestly, I was hoping that The Silver Age reprints would have started (as promised) by now... anyway, more on that thought later.

My final evaluation of the Marvel 2014 reprints: (a shaky) B

The good: From the historical comics perspective, I cannot understate the importance of having this series be widely available. The first two arcs of the Alan Moore story "A Dream of Flying" and "Red King Syndrome" are vital to see one of the many different paths traveled by Alan Moore during his approach/appreciation of the comics that predated him. We are all familiar with similar explorations in his work for DC in Watchmen and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and some may recognize explorations of that material in his excellent Supreme: The Story of the Year, and his America's Best Comics titles Promethea and Tom Strong... and Miracleman stands a distinctly different consideration of our collective comics' past and how those stories can fit into a Modern era. (I use the term "Modern" to describe the specific era of comics that explored the public's past recognition/relationship with comics, not to describe comics published in a specific chronological era. Please don't confuse my "Modern" with "Grim and Gritty"). Alan Moore's third arc "Olympus" (along with the Warpsmith stories) are another (unique) exploration of the necessarily tremendous impact superbeings could have on the world outside our window. This story is probably the most vital piece of it's kind; moreso than Watchmen, Authority, Planetary, Invincible, etc.

The Gaiman/Buckingham followup arc The Golden Age expands on Olympus, and tells some fun stories with incredible art. The stories are important in that they (mostly) explore the lives of everyday mortals living in the early days of an earth transformed by the Miracles. Besides the art, what most amazes me about these stories is how they are grown from the tiniest throwaway fragments from the earlier work my Moore. There are only six issues of the Golden Age, but folks familiar with how Geoff Johns similarly took a few seeds from Alan Moore's work and turned it into the entirety of his Spectrum Wars for the Green Lantern titles can appreciate how fertile Alan Moore's scripts are.

The Marvel reprints of the Warrior/Eclipse comics are very good in terms of the art. Some of the color choices for the Eclipse reprints of the Warrior strips were (in my opinion) garish and didn't serve the original art or story. The paper quality is (as expected) more modern, and while I am not a great fan of the glossy paper, the retouching of the art does seem to have been done with the different paper in mind.

There was an 'all new' Miracleman Annual #1 published that more-or-less fits between issues #14 and #15. These are fine stories with solid art and they fit nicely in the canon.

In terms of reprint content, the Marvel reprints do not track exactly with the Eclipse reprints (of the Warrior strips). Generally, the Eclipse reprints included four 8-page strips, while the Marvel reprints include only two or three. The Marvel reprints are supplemented by including extra material (images of earlier/unfinished art) and best of all the (mostly previously unavailable from Warrior and A1) Warpsmith stories are included!

My only complaint about the reprinting of the Warpsmith stories is that the reprinting is essentially chronological, but one of them belongs (in terms of the narrative) much later in the Olympus story. I'm not convinced that including that part of the story (Miracleman and Aza Chorn collecting energy to combat a re-emerged Bates) in its original place in the Warrior publishing chronology is really that smart of a choice.

I think Marvel's choice to split the main "Miracleman" Warrior reprints where they did was a good choice. The story beats felt completely natural to me while reading the Marvel issues. This choice also allowed Marvel to "close the gap" with the Eclipse run, as Marvel omitted reprinting the fill-in (using an old Marvelman story) that Eclipse published as issue #8. The Marvel reprint did include the Eclipse-specific material from that issue, featuring then-editor Cat Yronwode's explanation for the reprint!

There is a lot to like about these reprints, but this is not the entire story...

The neutral:

I was not put off by the cost of the reprints. The cost of the individual issues (generally $4.99 each) does not strike me as being too egregiously high for this era of Marvel comics. As I wrote above, the content (story and art, especially by John Totleben in Olympus) is valuable. Of course, the earliest issues published by Eclipse were a bargain 75¢ (for a full-color Indy comic!) but even at the end, the Gaiman/Buckingham issues had cover prices of nearly $3.

I am also neutral on the choice to (eventually) polybag the Marvel reprints. The original (Eclipse) issue #9 did include a warning that the comic did include art that depicted childbirth, but that was as much of an advisory warning that Eclipse ever included. Cat Yronwode did include specific discussion on this topic within the pages of the book.

Cynically, I think that Marvel decided to start polybagging these reprints as a further marketing ploy to get folks to buy multiple copies, as if the variant covers were not blatant enough. For sure there is a lot of violence, and assorted nakedness, but this type of content was present before Marvel started polybaging (in issue 6, IIRC). This does however, lead naturally into my negative feelings about these reprints...

The bad:

Ultimately, the reprints lost a lot of my goodwill by self-censoring portions of the original script, which makes zero sense considering the decision to only sell the comics in sealed polybags. Specifically, there are several instances in the original script that use the "N-word", only to replaced in the 2014 reprints as "N-----". If I've opened a polybag to read a story about a naked black man imagining himself running naked through a Carribean mythological nightmare, or a massacred London full of assorted, dismembered body parts, I think I can handle the N-word.

After encountering such blatant self-censorship, I started to wonder what else had been changed from the original story. I personally don't own any of the Warrior comics, but my impression was that the Eclipse reprints did nothing beyond substituting "Miracleman" for "Marvelman", and possibly altering the text in a few places to use "Miracle" where "Marvel" had been used. I haven't done a complete side-by-side comparison, but I didn't find any other textual changes, except in Cat Yronwode's 'dialogue' where she originally explicitly named Alan Moore: In the reprint his name in the dialogue balloon was changed to "the original writer".

As part of the artistic touch-up, the decision was made to re-letter all of the text and dialogue. The modern/computer-based lettering (Chris Eliopoulos) is smaller than the lettering in the Eclipse books, but the balloons and text boxes have not shrunk to show off more of the original art. Presumably, the original art was not available to allow this, but it was very visually jarring to see giant word balloons with little tiny text. This had the effect of making the reprint efforts seem particularly amateurish, on top of the blatant self-censorship.

There was a place in which I noticed the art had been altered as well. Again, without doing a side-by-side comparison, I only noticed that in the Marvel reprint #4, the story "Saturday Morning Pictures" had art (and text) changed from referring to "Fu Machu/Dr. Gargunza" to "The Avengers" and some art that was presumably "Big Ben a.k.a. The Man with No Time for Crime". This was (in the Eclipse 3D special) a framing story for some older Marvelman reprints, but in the Marvel issue #4, the reprints were not included in the story, so this was a bit of a narrative mess. In the original telling, this was one of the earliest introductions to Emil Gargunza in the 1980's narrative; I feel that this choice/change ultimately hurt the story of the "Red King Syndrome", as in the Marvel reprints it feels as if Dr. Emil Gargunza comes out of nowhere.

The most offensive artistic mistake of the reprints was within issue #14, in which all of Bates' dialogue is unlettered! Luckily (I suppose) the extra material includes original artwork in which you can read what he was supposed to be saying. Again, this was just an amateur mistake that should have been caught, once the decision to explicitly re-letter the comic was made.

There were other places where the original creator credits were obscured or removed from the art as well, but I didn't find that as jarring. These changes (and possibly my dislike for them) may seem petty, but these were not disclosed anywhere within the content of the books. I was aware of the agreement to not include Alan Moore's name, but for historical purposes I thought more explicit clues could have been dropped about the reasoning.

By the end of the reprints, especially within The Golden Age, I felt that the choice of the extra material to include was quite poor. A few of Gaiman's scripts were included as bonus material, but from my perspective the least interesting/important of them were included. I swear that I've read his script and notes describing his taking on the project for the first issue of The Golden Age (originally Eclipse issue #17) somewhere before, so again, I'm left with a sense of laziness when it comes to this bonus content. I suppose the script for Retrieval may be useful for readers that can't figure out what is going on, but really it just gives away how much of a brilliant storyteller the artist Mark Buckingham is (as if we didn't now know from Fables).

For bonus content, I would have much preferred to see the original scripts for Issues #19 (Notes from the Underground, the "Warhol" Issue), #20 (Winter's Tale), or #21 (Spy Story), than just seeing black-and-white pages of the story I just read. I feel that those three stories (especially 19 and 21) really only work because of Buckingham's art, and I would have loved to see what he was given in the script as a starting point.

Final Recommendation:

This is a series worthy of checking out. The story itself will not disappoint readers, although it may go to unexpected places. Readers should be aware that they won't be getting a 100% faithful reproduction of the 'original' (i.e. the Eclipse-published) series, but a mostly-faithful reproduction is better than having the material languish in complete obscurity. We are to be thankful for the efforts of Neil Gaiman and Marvel comics for getting this series back in front of the public, despite some of the peculiar choices to rework certain elements.

Assorted personal thoughts:

I'm personally disappointed that The Silver Age (re)prints have not begun. The first two issues should really not be any harder to produce than some of the earlier issues, since they already made it to print under Eclipse. The art for Issue 25 was completed (five pages have been published in B&W), although it isn't clear if Todd McFarlane kept the originals or not.

I have no insights, but I can imagine both Marvel Comic's administration as well as the creative team playing major roles in keeping these comics off the selves. I don't think the sales for Miracleman have been particularly strong (~15K) for a ~$4.99 book but also not completely in the toilet, but I don't know how that compares to the ultimate expense of acquiring the property. Buckingham has demonstrated that he is a professional workhorse, so I can't imagine that his ability is holding up completion (unless he is redrawing Young Miracleman to look less like Little Boy Blue from Fables!) It's possible that Gaiman never finished (or lost!) his scripts for the Silver Age, and I can't imagine that he wrote more than an outline with notes for the Dark Age... but the (lack of) timeliness for his last few comics projects doesn't bode well.

Despite my love of the Fawcett Captain Marvel stories, I have always found it difficult to sit down and read the reprint-only Mick Anglo Marvelman stories. I've enjoyed the ones that were chosen specifically for storytelling reasons within the context of the original Miracleman narrative. I only mention this because I am tempted to look for more of the reprints, but I haven't been cataloging which ones I've read from either Eclipse or Marvel, so shame on me!

For the truly dedicated, I would recommend trying to track down certain items from the Eclipse era. The three issues of Miracleman Apocrypha are unlikely to ever be reprinted by Marvel, as agreements would have to be worked out with each of the writers and artists whose stories were published within. Again, because of the confused state of the Miracleman rights, it's not obvious to me that the Dez Skinn/Quality Comics/Todd McFarlane/Miracles and Marvels settlement would really address this book.

I would have also liked to see the original editorial content (including letter columns) of the Eclipse issues. I realize this isn't practical for Marvel to reprint, but these do offer some insights in bringing Miracleman to print in the USA. The Kimota! book from Twomorrows is also great, and I'm a little peeved that I couldn't find my copy within 30 minutes.

I realize this was a long monologue, but I had a lot on my mind after working through these reprints. Check them out!

When I read that Marvel had once and for all scooped up the rights I hoped that would mean we'd at last get the end of the story.
It seems as if my hopes are destined to be dashed again.

It is my understanding that this is still going to happen. Rather than being dashed, I think your hopes have just been put into a waiting room.

Courtesy of MajorSpoilers passing on a press release from Marvel Comics...

Marvel comics is planning an Omnibus release of Miracleman:
I'm flummoxed by the description of material. The dates referenced indicate that these are mostly reprints of original material (Quality, Eclipse), but Marvel censored/reworked material from the Eclipse Era... which itself was reprinting the stories from Warrior.... IIRC up through parts of the Red King Syndrome (Eclipse #6?).. and so the Marvel reprint numbers don't quite line up with the Eclipse reprints.

My guess is that the references to reprinting material from "Miracleman (1985), 1, 3..." probably refers either to a text piece by someone like Cat Yronwode, or some Mick Anglo strip that was included in the original Eclipse comics.

The Marvelman Special (Warrior, 1984) has had (most of) its contents reprinted as the Eclipse Miracleman 3D book, but I don't recall if all of the Mick Anglo strips in it were reprinted in the Marvel reprints. If this is a true reprint of the Warrior title, I think this would be the first reprinting of a certain Big Ben comic strip... but I can't keep all the reprints, repackages, and reworks straight in my head.

In any case, this looks to be a pretty weak-sauce Omnibus, as the "Golden Age" isn't included, nor are any of the Apocrypha stories (which are uneven and unnecessary). The absence of any Gaiman material (and gosh, I have NOT forgotten Mark Buckingham's BRILLIANT art) means this is just Marvel doing Marvel and I don't think we'll ever get "The Silver Age".

The character will be showing up soon.

His icon was seen prominently in a recent Kang story.

Here is a link to a longform piece about the original Miracleman 16 issues.