In comics, the name Captain Marvel is a popular one. There’s Marvel’s eponymous alien hero from the Kree Empire, there’s DC Comics magic word activated tween Billy Batson (whose since been officially re-named Shazam), and then came Mickey Moran.
Created for the U.K.’s Warrior magazine, MarvelMan – later renamed MiracleMan after Marvel Comics got litigious – was more or less like DC’s Captain Marvel except that he was nuclear powered, not magically powered, and he was activated by the word “Kimota” (“atomic” spelled backwards) as opposed to “Shazam!”
It took Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Watchmen) in the 1980s to reboot the character to feature an adult Moran, a freelance reporter who had forgotten his heroic youth, to really shake up the series and make it something original.
MiracleMan is reawakened in the midst of a disaster, and ultimately saves the day, but just as MiracleMan returns to heroism, he learns that his former sidekick Kid MarvelMan has gone mad in the interim and has become a sociopathic super-villain.
With such heady-psychological material, a MiracleMan movie could stand next to Watchmen and Kick-Ass in the club of smart superhero movies that deconstruct the mythology, but given the character’s legal morass it’s more likely we’ll see a Bat-mite movie before MiracleMan.
