Buckingham, Mark - Miracleman by Gaiman & Buckingham, issue 2, cover (Nov 2015)

This is Mark Buckingham's cover for Miracleman by Gaiman & Buckingham #2 (Marvel), the issue that reprinted the "Skin Deep" storyline (originally Miracleman #18 from 1985) alongside the "Trends" and "Retrieval" chapters. The cover spotlights Miraclewoman, the principal figure of "Skin Deep."

I've wondered about Buckingham's choice of composition with this cover - Miraclewoman's profile portrait set against a flat, brilliant blue sky. She's rendered in a soft, painterly style while caught in the childlike act of blowing the seed head off a dandelion held in her red-and-gold gloved hand, the familiar "M" insignia of the Miracleman family at the very top of the piece acting as an anchor to the wider Miracelman mythos. The "seeds" scattering from the dandelion in the upper right draw our eye to a tumbling, black-silhoutted human figure who's only coloration is a red thumbprint on the figure's center mass. We'll eventually know from the story that the human fugure is the man with whom Miraclewoman enages in an affair and the thumbprint is hers.

So, what's this cover trying to communicate? Well, one of the core themes Gaiman and Buckingham (following Alan Moore) were exploring was the unbridgeable gulf between gods and mortals, and how a being of Miraclewoman's power experiences human life and death as something almost weightless. So, while a somewhat whimsical image of Miraclewoman graces the cover, does it speak to her casual acts becoming acts of destruction to the human beings she shares the world with? Is Buckingham trying to speak to the series' larger preoccupation with the human discomfort beneath utopian superhuman perfection? Is he letting us know that she can't feel much difference between the lives of ordinary humans and the dandelion seeds she carelessly disperesses to the wind? 

I really don't know, but given how much I loved the 'Skin Deep' story, I was thrilled to add this beauty to my collection.

The opportunity came via the mighty Mr. Melchior at BritComicsArt.com!