The Ownership of Marvelman and The Character's Future
The legal ownership of Miracleman is a complicated story, which stems from the character's beginnings.
L. Miller & Son, Ltd. was a UK comic publisher with two popular series reprinting stories featuring Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family, originally created by Fawcett Publications in America. In 1953, at the end of a long legal battle between Fawcett and National Periodicals (the forerunner to DC Comics), Fawcett agreed to stop publishing the Captain Marvel titles (see National Comics Publications v. Fawcett Publications for further details).
Faced with the sudden loss of their star feature, Miller turned to Mick Anglo to come up with a replacement character that, while ostensibly a new creation, mimicked enough core elements of Captain Marvel to retain the interest of readers who had enjoyed the reprints. Anglo created Marvelman, which proved successful enough to keep the Marvelman/Young Marvelman titles going. In 1959, with demand for British produced black and white reprints shrinking, Miller cancelled Marvelman Family and turned both Marvelman and Young Marvelman into reprint books. The titles struggled on, but were finally cancelled in 1963.
L. Miller & Son Ltd. ceased comic book publication in 1966. The physical asbestos printing plates from which Miller had produced their comics, and presumably the rights to the comics as well, were sold to Alan Class, Ltd.. Class, for his part, was interested primarily in horror and science fiction stories and reprinted few of the original Miller creations. (Class was still using some of the Miller printing plates as recently as the late 1990s.)
In 1960, a disgruntled Mick Anglo recycled some of his Marvelman stories as Captain Miracle which appeared briefly under his Anglo Comics imprint which folded in 1961. Anglo always claimed ownership of Marvelman and although creator's rights were almost unheard of in the British comics industry of the 1950s and 1960s, at least some of Anglo's Marvelman stories do have a tiny "© Mick Anglo" in the margins lending a measure of credibility to Anglo's claim.
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