Marvelman aka Miracleman is a character wrapped in more controversy than you can shake a stick at. A longstanding feud between Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane held the character in limbo for neigh 2o years but back in 2009, Marvel announced they had purchased the rights to the character. Three years later, we still have yet to see Marvelman make his debut.
Here's a little history on the character with the useful assistance of Wikipedia:
In 1953, the American company Fawcett Comics, which was the U.S. publisher of Captain Marvel, discontinued the title due to the court action of lawsuit from DC Comics. As a result, Miracleman was transformed into Captain Marvel.
Marvelman was very similar to Captain Marvel: a young reporter named Micky Moran encounters an astrophysicist (instead of a wizard) who gives him his superpowers based on atomic energy. To transform into Marvelman, he has to speak the word "Kimota" (phonetically, "atomic" backwards; rather than "Shazam"). Instead of Captain Marvel Jr. and Mary Marvel, Marvelman was joined by Dicky Dauntless, a teenage messenger boy who became Young Marvelman, and young Johnny Bates, who became Kid Marvelman; both of their magic words were "Marvelman". They had fairly typical, unsophisticated superhero adventures.
In March 1982, a new British monthly black-and-white anthology comic was launched called Warrior. Until issue #21 (August 1984), it featured a new, darker version of Marvelman, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Garry Leach and Alan Davis, and lettered by Annie Parkhouse. Of course Marvel Comics objected, since they had trademarked the use of Marvel in comics so the series would be retitled Miracleman in all reprints.
Moore had been fascinated by the notion of a grown-up Michael Moran, and this was the Moran presented in the first issue: married, plagued by migraines, having dreams of flying, and unable to remember a word that had such significance in his dreams. In his initial run of Marvelman stories, Moore touches on many themes that would be present in his later works, including the superhero as a source of terror, the sympathetic villain, and exploring the mythology of an established fictional character. In summary, Moore's run on the character revealed that the 50's run of Marvelman comic stories were actually hallucinogenic dreams induced by the government who had injected Moran and others with alien technology in order to create the first superheros. Sounds very Alan Moore'ish right? But that just scratches the surface, the series would get a whole lot darker under Moore's run and would end with Miracleman and his allies having totalitarian control over the entire Earth.
In 1990, entered a young Neil Gaiman. He planned three books, consisting of six issues each; they would be titled "The Golden Age", "The Silver Age" and "The Dark Age".
The first part, "The Golden Age", showed the world some years later: a utopia gradually being transformed by alien technologies, and benignly ruled by Miracleman and other parahumans, though he has nagging doubts about whether he has done the right thing by taking power. Gaiman's focus in "The Golden Age" is less the heroes themselves than the people who live in this new world, including a lonely man who becomes one of Miraclewoman's lovers; a former spy ; and a robot duplicate of Andy Warhol.
Two issues of "The Silver Age" appeared, but issue #24 was the last to see print. Issue 25 was completed (apart from colouring) but due to the collapse of Eclipse Comics, it has never seen light. #23 and #24 saw the resurrection of Young Miracleman and would describe the beginnings of trouble in Miracleman's idyllic world, and #25 would have reintroduced Kid Miracleman. "The Dark Age" would have seen the full return of the character of Kid Miracleman and completed the story once and for all.
So in summary that's-
Captain Marvel===>Marvelman====>Captain Miracle====>Miracleman====>Man of Miracles=====>and then back to Marvelman
and the character has enjoyed runs of some prolific writers of the industry including-
Mick Anglo===>Alan Moore ===>Neil Gaiman====>Marv Wolfman (a few short stories)
In 1996, Todd McFarlane purchased Eclipse's creative assets, including the purported Miracleman rights, for a total of $40,000. In 1997, McFarlane and Neil Gaiman allegedly reached an agreement in which Gaiman would cede his ownership stake in characters he created for the Spawn comic book, in exchange for the rights to Miracleman. McFarlane later backed out of this deal resulting in a long legal battle between McFarlane and Gaiman.
At the San Diego Comic Con in 2009, Marvel Comics announced they had purchased the rights to Marvelman, "one of the most important comic book characters in decades" from original creator Mick Anglo. However Marvel has not done much with the character since the announcement. Although, some conspiracy theorist think that Sentry was really Marvelman and that the House of Ideas was originally planning to use that storyline for that particularly unpopular character.
Axel Alonso, in his weekly column over at CBR responded with the following when asked about Marvelman happenings in 2012:
ALONSO: "Sit tight. We'll have some additional news soon."
While it's not much, it does offer hope to fans that have been 'jonesing' for new Marvelman material for a long, long, long time. Might this be Marvel's counter to a new Watchmen series? Time will tell.