Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham's Miracleman collaboration for Marvel has been reworked to become "a new work" for modern times, says the artist

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2023 saw the first new Miracleman material from Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham in 30 years, with the two comic creators returning to the groundbreaking series to finally begin the completion of a storyline they began all the way back in 1990. But completing the so-called “Silver Age” wasn’t as simple as picking up where the two had left off, according to Buckingham.

“I basically redrew everything from The Silver Age arc that had previously been published, in order to make it a new work for now,” the creator told an audience at Emerald City Comic Con 2024 on Saturday evening, describing the experience as “terrifying, and it took forever. I have drawers full of artwork at home, because every time I would make a start, something else would come along that would derail us, and I would come back to it and was like, ‘no, that doesn’t work. I’ll try again.’”

He explained, “I think part of the problem was trying to revisit something that is so important to you, there’s a part of me that was still trying to make it look like it did then but superficially refresh it, and that just wasn’t working. So, because Neil and I had been working on the new scripts, I was able to say, ‘Okay, I’m actually going to draw issues 4-6, the new ones, and then go back and draw issues 1-3 so that it all makes sense.’ It was a very fluid feast to work on, and it took a lot of time, and in the end, it’s very satisfying and it feels like a work of now.”

For the new Miracleman work, Gaiman and Buckingham’s creative responsibilities have shifted from their initial time on the series, with the artist now sharing writing duties as well.

“I’m fortunate that we’ve been friends for almost four decades. We know each other a lot, and we trust each other a lot,” Buckingham explained, saying that “Most of [the collaborative process] comes from just being together. For example, a year-and-a-half back, he was in London, and I was helping him hang pictures on the wall. I was doing that, we had tea, we were chatting about family and everything else, and then for the last 45 minutes, we just plotted like crazy and an issue took shape. That’s the thing; we just converse.”

He went on, “Beyond that, I take it away, I shape it, and build it — I work out the flow, and narrative, and the pacing, and then it’s back and forth from there. With Neil it’s mostly about what’s not said, rather than what’s said. I think that’s the thing I’ve learned most over the last year or so. He’ll go through a script of mine and it’ll feel very familiar, but it’s just those one or two words that he’s just changed in a sentence, or a slight variation in a phrase that gives it that feeling.”

With the recent conclusion of The Silver Age, there’s one final storyarc for the two on the Miracleman series — The Dark Age — which Buckingham says he’s feeling conflicted about: while he’ll be sad to end their collaboration, he’s also excited about finally reaching the end of a story that the two planned together more than three decades ago… especially because, in all that time, neither has ever shared with anyone else how the story ends.

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