Discover Top Posts Tagged with #kid miracleman

One of the most important things with how I write Willow in fanfic and with the canon character, too:

Is that I look at the Buffyverse slightly differently than most. Yes, it's absolutely an allegory show about growing up and the monsters and supernatural forces at one level are literal metaphors, that's how Whedon wrote it. In fanfiction I don't care because I'm not plagiarizing Whedon's notes, I'm doing my own stories with my own themes.

And yet even in Whedon's own sandbox the setting is ultimately a superhero show in the vein of Blade, Werewolf by Night, or the Creature Commandos. The Slayers are empowered messianic superheroes standing against very literal demons and fighting them in the dead of night. And in this regard, Willow's an Outside Genre character, because her arc is very literally a classic superhero narrative.

It is, ultimately, *these* narratives, the hero amassing enormous power, that going to her head, and very bad things following from it. The supporting character sidekick becomes immensely more powerful than the regular hero to a point that you literally cannot fight Dark Willow. Unlike Kid Miracleman or the Dark Phoenix she doesn't go for anywhere near the scale of atrocities....because she was stopped at the last minute.

Willow Rosenberg, in both Seasons 6 and 7, has the power to remake the world. First, for evil, and burning it to a cinder at the end of Season 6 (and I will always be confused why killing Warren is the bigger point against her and not the almost wrecking the world and having Xander talk her out of it in the literal last five seconds on the Doomsday Clock, hypothetical resurrected Tara would be much angrier about the almost destroying the world thing than killing Warren and would be right to be).

Then for good.

Treating this as, essentially 'characters never understand what genre they're in' works as the broadest single element here. They're all in a superhero story, they get that to a point. What they don't get is that it's none of the Slayers who have the classical superhero narrative, it's *Willow*, whose entire experience loops into the most classical comic book narratives and where she very much does match comics Jean Grey, who starts off as a mid telepath and telekinetic, grows greatly in power, then killed off a planet by eating its star for fueling that power growth as the Dark Phoenix.

It shapes everything about her, both the irony that the most powerful being in the setting is shaped by crippling self-loathing that leads her to put all her worth and value into her relationships with the people around her, which makes her amazingly sweet, adorable, and loving at her best and becomes horrifying very fast if a gear slips even slightly. Willow with that identical power and even a marginal degree of emotional health would be a completely different character and essentially straight up 'Jean Grey if she was magic.'

It is the absence of any emotional center or self-worth (at least until she gets her shit together in the comics, which as I've written before is the Willow the Tara we see in the show deserved but due to having her emotions together would not be a Willow she'd actually want entirely and there'd be major issues about that) and colossal amounts of power that form the basic dichotomy that makes her work.

Too much of the discourse around her, ironically, hinges on the same things that lead into her faults, much as most Tara discourse relies on the same 'Tara is meant to fix everyone's booboos, uWu' thought that in a darker, uglier sense was the very mentality her biological family had for her that the character rightfully fled from even knowing she was going into a Hellmouth and what that meant for her.

And in the fanfics, accordingly, where I write her, I tend to use a narrative trick where the stories are Willow-centric but the main POV character is ultimately Tara with her actions seen through the eyes of others and only intermittent glimpses of her psyche (usually the kind, at that, that show that her friends have completely wrong views of why she does things to note that the results of these misunderstandings are....explosive...much like happens in the show, except writing lets you do things differently to visual media). Willow is extremely smart and extremely powerful, and even before that power grew she had friends to help her escape the more dangerous situations she tended to get into, while being reliable hostage bait was incentive all by itself to start developing that power.

It's also a stealth meta-commentary in that Tara, in the canon show, is deeply codependent on Willow at great expense of her own health and never really changes this or considers that she probably should even after the breakup. Tara's broader interest in the setting has Willow-colored glasses, while her greater grasp of mystical theory + less power means that there's both greater tension and ability to neatly do the 'as you know' factor in a perfectly justified way with a geeky nerd who'd collect trivia on magic.

This is also an emphasis that places how dangerous Willow can be as a front and center factor, while her friends going 'aww, she looks just like that girl from the movie with the line about the flute, she's adorable' right up until the 'holy shit this is scary' moment happens is right in line with what we see in the show. Alyson Hannigan as an actress is typecast, but it's a type that has layers and lets her show her skills, because the type is 'adorable person with some deeply toxic traits' in two flavors.

Willow, the good person with very toxic traits she struggles against and starts to grow out of it, and Lily, the completely toxic person with a good veneer who never does grow out of things and is a slimy manipulator trying to puppeteer her friends' lives.

#willow rosenberg #lily aldrin #himym #buffy meta #dark phoenix saga #kid miracleman #Willow is the one with the most classic comic book narrative but it's the horrifying kind #her friends think of the Slayers as the superheroes and they are #they fail to grasp that their adorable bubbly ginger friend is one bad day from turning into a high level DC-Marvel supervillain #and in all fairness Willow's powers break a lot of in universe rules solidly #so a lot of the blindness there is both coasting on Alyson Hannigan tier adorableness #and that they didn't read the script and realize they were living the Dark Phoenix Saga Buffy-style in real time #tara maclay

Miracleman 3 (1985)

The above Miracleman and Kid Miracleman illustration was the first piece of Chuck Beckum's artwork to ever see print.

Recently, I discovered a Beckum piece I had never seen before from Amazing Heroes Preview Special issue 2.

The Kid Miracleman figure is clearly based on the drawing from Miracleman issue 3.

It was intended for publication in Miracleman issue 6 but was not used.

#miracleman #chuck beckum #eclipse comics #kid miracleman #alan moore

Miracleman: The Silver Age #3 (2022)

Art by: Mark Buckingham

#Miracleman #Kid Miracleman #Young Miracleman #Mark Buckingham #Neil Gaiman #Marvel #Marvel Comics #comic books #comics #comic book artwork

Beautiful Miracleman covers in October from Peach Momoko, Phil Noto, and Alan Davis!

#alan davis #marvel #miracleman #kid miracleman #Phil noto #peach momoko

Miracleman by Alan Moore, Garry Leach, Alan Davis.

#comic books #comic book #comicbook #Alan Moore #Garry Leach #Alan Davis #miracleman #kid miracleman

Miracleman #3 - Book One: A Dream of Flying (February 26, 2014)

a collecting remastered and recolored reprints that reprinting classic black-and-white original Miracleman stories by Alan Moore from the British anthology magazine Warrior [Warrior #6 - Marvelman: Fallen Angles, Forgotten Thunder (October, 1982)]