Miracleman And The Prisoner

I compared V For Vendetta and The Prisoner here and here.

In The Prisoner episode, "A, B and C," No 2 observes No 6's dreams on a screen and manipulates the dreams. This is like the para-reality programming. In the episode, "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling," the Village puts No 6's mind into another body.

In Neil Gaiman's Miracleman, the Qys (alien) called "Mors" (Latin for "death") asks Warhol no 6 to befriend Gargunza no 6 who is a prisoner but tries to escape after six months - also after Mors has given him a pomegranate, a mythological reference.

Also, former spies are subjected to para-reality programming and confined in "the City," of which Evelyn Cream says that he is its Number One. When No 1860 is allowed out into the real world, she wonders whether there is a realer world beyond it and feels that she is still being watched, just as No 6 realizes that he is not free from his enemies even when he is back in London.

Transformations

When Alan Moore started to write Marvelman, later Miracleman, MM learned that all of his previous adventures had occurred inside a virtual reality.

When Moore started to write The Saga of the Swamp Thing, Swampy learned that he was not a man who had become a plant but a plant that thought that it had been a man.

In both cases, the entire basis of the series was completely transformed. And the transformations continued. MM's powers made him a benevolent global dictator, regarded as God. Swampy learned, thanks to John Constantine's intervention, that the passage of a man through fire and his transformation into a swamp plant is the first stage in the genesis of the next plant elemental, the guardian of the Terrestrial ecology. The elemental has powers that make him a nature god although Swampy had not suspected that he had such powers before he was written by Alan Moore.

MM changes the world. Swampy can change the world by transforming deserts into plains and forests but decides that it would be wrong to interfere in evolution in this way. The difference is that MM has his own continuity whereas Swampy must conform to DC Comics continuity where the pretense is that the world remains essentially unchanged despite the presence in it of powerful beings like Superman, other superheroes and the Swamp Thing.

In Watchmen, Doctor Manhattan and Ozymandias change the world because, although this group of characters began as the Charlton Comics superheroes who were incorporated into DC continuity, Moore was able to transform them into the Watchmen with their own continuity.

Watchmen

(Far out. One image gives us the cover of my edition of Watchmen and the Awesome Mage himself.)

I am rereading Alan Moore's Watchmen so I need an angle to discuss it on the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog. Easy. It is all in the alternative histories.

Poul Anderson gives us alternative histories in which:

the Carolingian myths were true;
William Shakespeare was not the Great Dramatist but the Great Historian;
technology was based not on science but on magic.

And Alan Moore gives us alternative histories in which:

when superhero comics inspired real life superheroes, comic books turned instead to pirates and, after the New York incident, to horror;

Superman and Captain Marvel were comic book characters but Mick Anglo's Marvelman was a parareality program and Moore's revived Marvelman was the real thing.

Absolutely Mind-blowing.

Worlds And Words

I copied this post from Poul Anderson Appreciation because it mentions Miracleman and Smallville:

SM Stirling, "Shikari in Galveston" IN Worlds That Weren't (New York, 2003), pp. 63-148.

Science fiction writers show words changing their meanings in the future. In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, Jack Havig, time traveling to his future, meets a young woman who, when asked what she does with her time, replies that she jokes a lot. An amateur comedienne? However, when she and he share a picnic with no one else present, she announces that she had figured they could joke after eating but why not before and after?

(15 Mar: Also relevant is Anderson's "A Tragedy of Errors.")

In Neil Gaiman's sequel to Alan Moore's Miracleman, "London" means an event as "Hiroshima" does to us and "Kidding" has become a swear word because of what the Kid did in London. (Alan Moore had asked, "What would someone with Superman's strength and speed but not his scruples do?" He then answered this question with extremely detailed instructions to a comic strip artist.)

In SM Stirling's "Shikari in Galveston," a Bengali trader surprises us by telling Eric King that the local savages "'...are a clean people...'" (p. 80) Clean? King has just complained of sweat, squalor, smoke, sewage and stink. However, the trader's use of the word "clean" does not refer to hygiene. He spells it out:

"'From the time of the Fall.'" (ibid.)

King understands:

"King nodded...that was one of the fundamental distinctions in the modern world, between those whose ancestors had eaten men in the terrible years after the hammer from the skies struck, and those who hadn't. The only more fundamental one was between those who still did, and the rest of humanity." (ibid.)

And I am certain that the use of the word "clean" would be extended in precisely this way in those circumstances.

Tomorrow there will be a family outing for Mothers' Day (we have two mothers in the household) so maybe not much time for posting. Before turning in this evening, I have had to stop reading Stieg Larsson in order to post and must now stop posting in order to watch Smallville. Retirement, as expected, is an endless choice between enjoyable activities.

"...Inside You There Is A God"

Mr Cream tells Michael Moran:

"Mr. Moran...Listen very carefully...You are a fool. You are a weakling and a coward...But inside you there is a GOD. Inside you there is SOMEONE BETTER THAN US... ...And whatever the cost, you must PROTECT him."
-Miracleman No 7 (New York, 2014), p. 16.

Comic book dialogue has its own ways of emphasizing words and phrases.

I quote this dialogue because it is true of Moran while he is not Miracleman but also because it is true of every human being.

Miracleman 8

Excellent contrast between Mick Anglo's and the Original Writer's treatments of Naziism in a superhero comic.

The Original Writer -

Former Nazi: Forty years we have waited for you, for the first of the Blond Gods that would replace us. Overman. You have come at last.

MM (putting his finger, then arm, through the guy's chest): Yes. You can go now.

Mick Anglo -

Daily Bugle: MARVELMAN WIPES OUT NAZI EVIL! 

Marvel Comics are reprinting everything, even Cat Yronwode refusing to pretend that reprints are flashbacks.

Miracleman 4 And The Sandman Overture 2

Marvel Comics Miracleman continues to be perfect. No 4:

has no Mick Anglo reprints;
completes the first story by the Original Writer;
includes the excellent "Saturday Morning Pictures" framing sequence from Marvelman Special no 1, 1984;
includes a Warpsmith story from A1, thus is not confined to reprints from Warrior;
has twelve more pages of art and no ads.

This is definitely worth buying, even by someone who has the collected editions of the Eclipse series.

I also picked up The Sandman Overture 2 - not a lot to say about this yet. Morpheus is about to meet his father, which I didn't know he had. Old Glory, whom we have met before, has been promoted to the First Circle, of which we have read before. By meeting other aspects of himself, Morpheus begins to realize that he is "...Self-satisfied. Irritating. Self-possessed, and unwilling to concede center stage to anyone but myself."

I do not yet see how the narrative about the current Dream connects with events in "1915 Across the Universe..."

I have still to pick up that latest volume on Captain Nemo in the Extraordinary Gentlemen universe.

Smallville: Rush

Once in the late 1950's, I was really excited to buy a Superman comic and a Marvelman comic. I would never have suspected that, in 2014, I would play a disc of a Smallville TV episode in color and read Miracleman.

In Smallville: Rush:

there is a DC universe reference - Cadmus Labs in Metropolis;

 
there are alien organisms in the cave;

the return of the red meteor effect on Clark;

Chloe learns the truth about Clark and predictably forgets;

Lex thinks that Clark knows more than he says about the caves;

if the carvings are in Kryptonese, then it should not be possible to decipher them;

Clark cannot tell Lana that he kissed Chloe because of the red meteor effect so there is a return to Clark's silence and Lana's distrust;

there is nothing in this episode about Lionel but Lex has to sort out ownership of LexCorp soon;

there have clearly got to be a lot more revelations about the caves;

if Kryptonians have indefinitely extended lifespans, then Jor-El could have been involved centuries ago when a Kryptonian came to Earth;

it is unusual in any kind of fiction for the audience already to possess information that is not yet known by the characters but we do not know how the details will pan out in this version.

Different Takes On Superman

In Alan Moore's Watchmen, Superman was a fictitious character but comic books changed from superheroes to pirates when there were costumed adventurers in the real world.

In Miracleman, a young boy has seen the first Superman film and we learn that a Captain Marvel comic inspired Emil Gargunza to create the Miracle Family.

In Smallville, Clark Kent will become Superman but, because this TV series was so successful that it ran for ten seasons, many other characters and situations were introduced much earlier than in previous versions of the Superman story.

Watchmen is a single graphic novel whereas Miracleman is an as yet uncompleted comics serial and the Smallville title continues in a comic book sequel to the TV series, even though Clark is by now in Metropolis and has adopted his Superman role. Although Superman has meanwhile returned in a feature film series, I regard Miracleman and Smallville as the two most important conceptual sequels to the original Superman.

More On Miracleman II

Mike Moran reads the real Daily Mirror but works free-lance for the fictional Daily Record - a good blending of realism with alternative reality. (There is a real Scottish Daily Record but I imagine that Moran's London-based Daily Record is fictional.) As a journalist, he follows in the footsteps of Clark Kent.

Sir Dennis Archer had thought, in one of his captions:

"Evelyn Cream will sanction the monster. The dragon will be slain."
- Miracleman no 3 (New York, 2014), p. 8.

Cream, a professional killer, puts two shots into Mike at close range. How can he possibly survive that? It is good when there is a plausible way for our hero to escape from inevitable death. Bates made the mistake of saying "Miracleman" before killing MM. Later, when Mike is attacked by Miracledog, he remembers the word that Gargunza had said to transform a dog into a super-dog.

"Project Zarathustra" (ibid.) is a reference to Nietzsche.

More On Miracleman

"After a while he turns away to look at the city spread behind him...London, huddled against the stinging rain...
"He wonders what to do next."
- Miracleman no 2 (New York, 2014), p. 12.

With the benefit of hindsight, this is ironic because we know in graphic detail exactly what Bates will do to London the next time he has the opportunity. Moran should have killed him when he had the chance but, again, this statement is made with the benefit of hindsight.

In no 3, we learn that MM's costume can be torn and his body battered. He never fought anyone with comparable, let alone greater, strength in Mick Anglo's comic.

Bates is schizophrenic. Back in child form, he denies responsibility for his crimes.

Evelyn Cream is a big black man with blue teeth in white clothes. What I mean by this is that he is eminently noticeable and recognizable. I know that he has the government on his side but I still think that it makes no sense for him to walk into a hospital in broad daylight, speak to two staff members in Reception, ask for a patient by name, then go and kill that patient.

Morally, since Cream works for a covert arm of government and since the man he kills is a nuclear terrorist, it might be argued that this killing is a summary execution, not a murder. We want to like Cream because he is capable, urbane, polite and allies himself with MM. (We do not know that last part yet. I am getting slightly ahead of the story.)

We follow his deductive process:

the superhuman burst out of the power station so he must have been in it;
only the terrorists and the pressmen were in the station and all the terrorists are accounted for;
the transformation to superhumanity must require energy;
only one of the captured terrorists, Steven Cambridge, is burned;
Cambridge confirms that he was with a journalist who whispered and exploded;
when Cambridge describes the journalist, Cream, who has a list, circles the name "Moran."

Thus easily is a secret identity penetrated. Mick Anglo's Marvelman Family were forever transforming directly in front of witnesses ( see p. 44) but we now know (or later find out) that that was in the para-reality program where it was not necessary that events make sense.

Liz continues her deductions. In fact, she deduces that Mike has two bodies, the one not currently in use stored elsewhere, only the one in use aging normally. Mike thinks that this is "...a bit science fictiony." (p. 13) Again, our world and the superhero world are starting to interact before the latter goes on to obliterate the former. Mike points that they share the same mind but then concedes that it is not exactly the same. They share memories but Miracleman is cleverer. So are they the same person? Legally, two bodies means two persons but laws change with circumstances.

Two months later, Liz is still at it: how come MM's costume was intact the next time he transformed? Why did they not even notice? Mike is oppressed by his inferiority to Miracleman:

Miracleman got Liz pregnant;
his thoughts are like poetry and his emotions are pure;
his love for Liz is gigantic, strong, direct and clean, unlike Mike's. (p. 19)

So the differences are not merely physical. MM is a "superman" in more than the comic book sense and not in the Nazi sense.

Mike mentions the Falklands, which was then a current war, and his editor mentions Profumo, a scandal of the sixties. We still have one foot firmly in our reality.

The Era Of The Overman

Marvel/Miracleman is Britain's no 1 superhero! (see image)

There are three meanings of "Superman":

Nietzschean;
Nazi;
comic book.

After the comic book Superman, there are:

superheroes in general;
the Marvel Families in particular.

By "Marvel Families," I mean:

Captain Marvel and his younger companions;
Marvelman and his companions.

The reconstructed Marvelman/Miracleman is a superhero comic that addresses the Nazi superman idea. Thus, Kid Miracleman to Liz Moran:

"I'm going to do it, you see, where all of them failed. Like that pathetic German clown...a stunted syphilitic proclaiming the doctrine of the superman.
"Poor Adolph. He had no idea. The real era of the Overman starts here, Mrs. Moran. How sad that you won't live to see it..."

- Miracleman, no 3 (New York, 2014), p. 2.

(Liz, following Mike's earlier advice to "Get out of the area!" (p 1), has driven directly to where Bates and Mike have just fought.)

Next, there is comedy. As "...these creatures of near unimaginable power..." (p. 3) resume their fight, several captions solemnly proclaim that we will never understand these "...titans..." The captions conclude:

"...never know their pain, their love, their almost sexual hatred...
"...and perhaps we will be the less for that." (ibid.)

We are brought down to Earth by a British policeman:

"Bloody Nora! What the hell's going on here?" (ibid.)

Our familiar world and the world of the superheroes are starting to interact. When the policeman's colleague asks, "Are you going to ask them to come along quietly?" (p. 4), he replies, "Sod off!" and "They might be paying me to handle Brixton but I'm buggered if they're paying me to handle this..." (ibid.)

When this was written, there had recently been a riot in Brixton.

Miracleman 3

Marvel Comics Miracleman no 3 contains:

the next three episodes of Miracleman;
a two-part Warpsmith story;
Garry Leach art;
no Mick Anglo Marvelman.

This Marvel Comics series continues to be a surprise and worth its cover price. The Warpsmith story, like "The Yesterday Gambit," had not been reprinted by Eclipse Comics so we are getting something new. Even those who did read Warrior magazine in its entirety - not me - are seeing some of the Original Writer's works republished in color for the first time.

Initially, before she becomes alienated, Liz takes a keen interest in Mike's new powers. She reads American comics as "...research work." (p. 9)

Liz continues:

"I hadn't read any before. When I was a kid I had a girl's comic...'Sally' or something. Some of this stuff's better than you'd expect, but most of it's crap." (ibid.)

We feel that we could have written that - we have certainly said most of it - but, of course, we did not think either of writing such dialogue or of putting it into the mouth of a woman whose husband has become super-powered. It is so authentic that Liz does not quite remember the name of her girls' comic. I am not sure whether there was a "Sally"? (After a google check: There was. Like Sandie, June, Jinty and Misty, it merged with Tammy which later merged with Girl, the former companion title of Eagle.)

Liz has a check list:

flight - yes;
strength - yes;
invulnerability - yes (Mike feels stupid);
x-ray vision - no;
superbreath - (Mike looks puzzled).

Perfect.

Although the Marvel Families never had Superman's visual powers, Bates, his powers growing, has meanwhile acquired something like the dreaded "heat vision."

Further tests:

flight speed - at least mach two, too fast for stopwatch;
strength - "Very, very strong. Ridiculously strong. Christ." (p. 11)
invulnerable to a massive falling rock.

They seriously discuss the absurdities in a way that Mick Anglo's characters could never have done. Human skin cannot possibly be tough enough to be simply unaffected by that rock which should at least have driven his feet into the soft earth so maybe he has a force field which would explain his twinkling effect? A force field cannot explain the strength but neither can "...muscles like a ballet dancer..." so "Maybe it's all in your mind, Mike, the power." (ibid.)

In a thought balloon (rare these days), Liz thinks, "God knows I wonder if it's all in my mind often enough." (ibid.) Here is another possibility, not explored any further but nevertheless present: is one of the characters imagining all these strange events?

In an earlier post, I asked of atomic-powered superheroes: could it be that they mentally control the most basic subatomic forces, thus gaining telekinetic control of their environments which would make it an easy matter to fly, lift heavy objects etc? That sounds almost plausible.

Miracleman 2

Marvel Comics Miracleman no 2 contains:

the next two episodes of the Original Writer's Miracleman;

"The Yesterday Gambit," a future episode published out of sequence but never before reprinted in color (and I am not sure that I still have Warrior back issues in the cellar);

Garry Leach art;

the earliest account of "The Birth of Marvelman", which is curiously combined with the story of a film about Marvelman;

the first ever, four page, Kid Marvelman story, originally published in Marvelman, which has a caption explaining that KM "...has been appointed by Marvelman himself..." (p. 41) - no origin story and KM takes action not only against a crook but also against a prejudiced policeman.

Is all this worth the £3 that I paid for it? Yes, if that is what we have to pay these days. I particularly appreciate having "The Yesterday Gambit" and in color and in better color than Eclipse Comics. Since I found a 20 pence coin yesterday and a pound coin today, I can imagine that the gods have subsidized me by 40%.

In the late 1980's, when I started to read comics again as an adult, I found a pound and went to a newsagent. One DC comic cost 40p and a special with extra pages cost 60p. The news vendor gave me 20p change, not realizing that one comic was a more expensive special. 120%: the gods could afford to be more generous 30 years ago.

Realities Collide (Spoilers?)

(If anyone is reading Miracleman for the first time without any prior warning of how the story pans out, then maybe we are moving into spoiler territory.)

As Miracleman proceeds, casual references to then current events, notably to armed conflict in Northern Ireland and to Thatcherite cuts in the National Health Service, strengthen our grip on the real world while, at the same time, we learn what would be the reality if there were beings as powerful as Moran and Bates. Sooner rather then later, these realities, the real world and real superbeings, must collide - not coexist peacefully for decades as in regular superhero comics.

Regular comics neither accurately reflect the real world nor plausibly relate that world to super-powered beings. A super-villain appears above Washington/New York/Metropolis/Gotham City etc and issues an ultimatum with a deadline, thus giving the superhero plenty of time to apprehend him. The city-dwellers might panic for a while but their life soon returns to normal. In fact, an insightful writer might observe that Metropolitans or Gothamites become so accustomed to superhero rescues that they do not even panic. In a Superman novel by Elliot S Maggin, Lois Lane, trapped underground, merely thinks, "How long till Superman gets here?" In Watchmen, because Veidt, in his own words, is not a Republic Serial villain, he does not tell the other heroes his plan, involving multiple deaths in New York, until it has already been implemented.

Bates does not issue any ultimatum but simply destroys London and Londoners with horrific violence for several hours before Moran is even aware of it. Until then, superheroes did not have a public presence with secret identities. They were simply secret. Superpowered beings include the Miracle people, Firedrake, Warpsmiths and Qys (in a sense the equivalents of Kryptonians). The Law of Extraordinary Beings - that, on a planet where there is one extraordinary being, there will soon be many - reflects the fact that, when a company publishes one superhero, it soon publishes others, then brings them together in team ups, teams and crossovers.

Grounded In Reality

Several visual details ground Miracleman in familiar mundane reality before the title character flies into space:

a quiet British motorway very early while it is still dark;
a married couple prepares for a working day (we do not yet know what Liz does);
a railway station announcement and a hurrying commuter;
a train moving through the English countryside;
children demonstrating against the opening of a Nuclear Power Plant in the fictitious town of Larksmere.

The opening page of the second installment has six panels but we only notice the fourth, fifth and sixth and the speech balloons which partly cover the first three. These three panels are long and thin, although of increasing width, showing:

clouds and a star in a night sky;
more clouds and stars;
a building with lights in the windows.

Although we probably miss it, this is what Mike sees as he flies home. We gather that the Morans live in a London flat. Familiar reality persists, for a while, after Miracleman's rebirth.

The Death Of God

In recent posts, I have focused on Miracleman, no 1 (New York, 2014). However, having read the entire original run in Eclipse Comics, it is difficult not to reflect on the series as a whole.

Apart from the superman, another Nietzschean catchphrase is the death of God. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, God has died either metaphorically or literally, i. e., has either turned out never to have existed or has literally ceased to exist, I am not sure which. In either case, his death is a problem to which the superman is the solution.

In Miracleman, this sequence is reversed: the public regards the emergence of the Miracle Man as having caused the deaths of all the old gods and annually celebrates this collective divine death, I think on 25 December? (The answer as always is in a box in the cellar.) In a later episode, there is a right hand page on which Moran identifies himself with God, I think ironically, i. e., that he is articulating public perception, not necessarily self-perception. Nevertheless, the facing left hand page displays the chapter title: "Hubris."

Hubris is over-arching pride inviting Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution. The original writer ends his run ambiguously - was Moran right to change the world or was Liz right to reject his gift of superhumanity? Nemesis follows in Neil Gaiman's Silver Age which is to be followed by a Dark Age.

The phrase "God is dead" is the turning point of James Blish's two part fantasy, Black Easter/The Day After Judgment.

The Sound Of Thunder

As Michael Moran wakes from his recurring dream of flying:

"The last thing he hears is the sound of thunder..."
- Miracleman, no 1 (New York, 2014), p. 13.

When he whispers "...the word..." (p. 16):

"The whisper is drowned by the thunder!" (p. 17)

To immobilize armed terrorists, he merely claps his hands:

"He swings his hands together, and thunder bursts from between them." (p. 18)

When he describes to Liz Moran his vision of twenty-seven years previously:

"His vision becomes hers...In her vision she hears the deafening peal of thunder..." (pp. 21-22)

Why are there so many references to thunder? The thunderbolt is the weapon of a god. Someone who is not killed but empowered by a thunderbolt must be favored by the god. In Captain Marvel's case, two gods are involved in his transformation, Zeus, who wields the thunderbolt, and Mercury. (Zeus is the Greek name for the chief god and Mercurius is the Latin name for the divine messenger but pantheons are mixed to generate the acronym SHAZAM. Indeed, Solomon, for wisdom, is Biblical although the Greek wise man, Solon, could have been used.)

Back to the thunder: Miracleman, previously Marvelman, was a British adaptation of Captain Marvel who in his very first appearance was named "Captain Thunder," a name that was dropped for copyright reasons, although it was later revived, both by Roy and Dann Thomas (see attached image) and by DC Comics who, having acquired Captain Marvel, then parodied him with a "Captain Thunder" whose magic acronym was THUNDER.

References to thunder in Miracleman evoke both divine power and the earliest form of the pivotal Captain Marvel.

1956 Revisited

The original writer of Miracleman (New York, 2014) created a perfect contrast between the PROLOGUE (pp. 1-10) and episode 1, "A Dream of Flying" (pp. 11-19). Each of these short comic strips presents an interaction between the mid-fifties and the early eighties but their perspectives are opposite in every respect.

The first strip, written by Mick Anglo, was originally published in 1956. When the writer of Miracleman adapted it as his Prologue, he revised it verbally though not visually. Thus, in the Prologue, science fiction villains from the future, in the revised version from 1981, invade 1956 and the Miracleman Family counter-attacks in 1981, whereas in episode 1, originally both published and set in 1982, Michael Moran, unexpectedly transformed into Miracleman, suddenly recalls his strange adventures of the fifties although, like everyone else, Liz Moran has never heard of a Miracleman.

Mick Anglo had looked forward to a science fictional future whereas his successor looks back to a simpler time. As I say, a perfect contrast.

1956 is significant year for me because it was the first year in which I remember noticing that we were in a year with a number and that that number would change after 31 December. I was seven. We lived in the Lake District in the North West of England and, in 1956, I began to attend a boarding school, now closed and the building demolished, in a small seaside resort that was also a "dormitory town" of Glasgow. I occasionally read Superman and Marvelman in comics and hard back annuals.

The Miracleman Prologue highlights 1956 and episode 1 mentions "...the Lake District..." (p. 14) so that reading these strips feels like coming home but as an adult.

Syllogisms And Triads

A syllogism is two premises and a conclusion, e. g.:

All men are mortal;
Socrates is a man;
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

A Hegelian triad is a thesis, an antithesis and a synthesis. e. g.:

being;
nothing;
becoming.

Imaginative fantasy is written within a syllogism or triad, e. g.:

the Golden Age of Baghdad, complete with jinns, flying carpets etc, existed exactly as described in the 1001 Nights;
Baghdad is now as we know it from the news;
so what happened?
Neil Gaiman presents a conclusion or synthesis in The Sandman: Ramadan.

Michael Moran remembers that he was Miracleman in the fifties and early sixties;
the world in the eighties was how we experienced it at the time with no knowledge or record of any Miracleman;
so where did Michael's memories come from?

The dialogue in Miracleman, no 1 (New York, 2014), expresses Michael's and Liz's bewilderment -

Liz: ...that's just so stupid!
Michael: I suppose you're right. Actually saying it out loud like that, it does sound...well...pretty unlikely. I never really thought about it before. But I had to believe it, don't you see? I was Miracleman. I was a being of almost unlimited power!!
Michael (later): This may, damn it...This does sound silly in 1982, but in the fifties it made perfect sense. This is how I remember it. This is how it happened. (p. 23)

Two realities meet and interact so what will happen next? The first thing that happens is that Michael shouts, "Damn you, Liz, you're laughing at my life!!" (p. 24) and puts his fist through the solid oak floor and she believes.