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 #4, by the writer Chip Zdarsky with the artists Delio Diaz and Frank Alpizar, reached comic shops on Wednesday 16 September. It answers the question the five-issue series has been asking since issue one: the Origin Box, the object that gave David Colton his powers, came from Miracleman. Colton, who arrived in Zdarsky's Captain America last year as a government-backed Captain America, goes into the final issue under Miracleman's name.

Marvel confirmed it the same day on its own site, under a spoiler warning. The cover of issue five, published with the announcement, shows Colton in the blue suit with the red and gold MM on the chest, standing over the Avengers on a battlefield. A second cover, by John Romita Jr., was published at the same time. Marvel's site, Bleeding Cool and two other comics sites had the story within hours. No newspaper has run it.

1954

Miracleman began in 1954 as Marvelman. He was drawn by Mick Anglo for L. Miller & Son, a publisher in Hackney that had been reprinting the American Captain Marvel. When DC Comics sued Fawcett, Captain Marvel's publisher, the American titles stopped coming, and Anglo drew a replacement with a new name and a new magic word, Kimota, which is atomic spelled backwards with a k. 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 Alan Moore, then at the start of his career. Moore's story was about Mike Moran, a middle-aged man who cannot remember that he used to be a superhero. That run came four years before Watchmen, and it is the reason Marvel's announcement this week calls the character a pioneer of modern superhero storytelling.

The rights

The strip moved to the American publisher Eclipse Comics in 1985 and was renamed Miracleman there. Eclipse carried it until 1993, and then it stopped. For more than twenty years the comics business believed that Anglo had sold the rights in the 1980s and that they had since passed through several hands, and nobody could establish who held them, so the comics went out of print and stayed out of print.

In 2009 that turned out to be wrong. Anglo had owned Marvelman since 1954, and Marvel, under its creative director Joe Quesada, made a deal with him directly. It then took years to sort out what could be reprinted. The first Marvel issue of Miracleman, a restored reprint of the Warrior material, went on sale on 15 January 2014.

Marvel went on to reprint the Moore run and brought back Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham to finish the story they had started at Eclipse. On 29 December 2021 a one-shot called Timeless ended on a page carrying the MM logo, the first sign that the character was going to be used in the Marvel Universe and not only reprinted. That took until this week.

Issue five

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 later this week about where Miracleman goes next. Issue five, the last of the series, is 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