Marvel put Miracleman, the British superhero it bought in 2009, into the Avengers on Wednesday, 72 years after he first appeared in a Hackney comic.

Avengers: Armageddon is a five-issue event by the writer Chip Zdarsky with the artists Delio Diaz and Frank Alpizar, and its fourth issue reached comic shops on Wednesday 16 September with the answer the series had been holding back since issue one: the Origin Box, the object that gave David Colton his powers, came from Miracleman, so Colton, who arrived in Zdarsky’s Captain America last year as a government-sponsored Captain America for this century, goes into the final issue under that name.

Marvel confirmed it the same day on its own site with a spoiler warning at the top, and the cover of issue five, published alongside the announcement, shows Colton in the blue suit with the red and gold MM on his chest, standing over the Avengers on a battlefield, with a second cover by John Romita Jr. that Marvel had until then kept classified.

Marvel’s own site, Bleeding Cool and two other comics sites had it within hours, and no newspaper has run it, because the name means nothing unless you know where he came from.

Made in Hackney to replace an American

Miracleman began in 1954 as Marvelman, drawn by Mick Anglo for L. Miller & Son, a publisher in Hackney that had been reprinting the American Captain Marvel until DC Comics sued Fawcett, Captain Marvel’s publisher, and the American titles stopped, so Anglo built a replacement with a new name and a new magic word, Kimota, which is atomic spelled backwards with a k, and the character ran in British comics until 1963.

In 1982 the editor Dez Skinn revived him for the anthology Warrior and gave the strip to a young Alan Moore, who told the story of Mike Moran, a middle-aged man who cannot remember that he used to be a superhero, and the run that followed came four years before Moore wrote Watchmen and is the reason Marvel’s announcement this week calls the character a pioneer of modern superhero storytelling.

Two decades nobody could print him

The character was renamed Miracleman in 1985 when the strip moved to the American publisher Eclipse Comics, which carried it until 1993, and after that it stopped, because for more than twenty years everyone in the business believed Anglo had sold the rights in the 1980s and that they had passed through a chain of hands nobody could untangle, so the comics went out of print and stayed there.

In 2009 it emerged that the premise was false and that Anglo had owned Marvelman since 1954, and Marvel, led at the time by its creative director Joe Quesada, made a deal with him directly, then spent years sorting out what it could reprint, and the first Marvel issue of Miracleman, a restored reprint of the Warrior material, went on sale on 15 January 2014, sixty years after Anglo drew him.

From there Marvel reprinted the Moore run and brought back Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham to continue the story they had begun at Eclipse, and on 29 December 2021 a one-shot called Timeless ended on a page carrying the MM logo, which was the first sign that the character would be allowed into the Marvel Universe rather than kept in a reprint programme, and it took until this week for that to happen.

What Marvel says comes next

Bleeding Cool reported the rumour a month ago, Zdarsky has said the reveal was planned a long way back, and Marvel says it will say more about where Miracleman goes later this week, with issue five, the last of the series, due on 21 October.

Dave Colton is a fascinating, complicated character, now much more so as he takes on the mantle of Miracleman. Chip has BIG plans for him that will affect not just the Avengers, but the entire Marvel Universe.Wil Moss, Avengers editor, in Marvel’s announcement