Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  Emergence is a simple idea. The universe is the way it is because it grew that way. It emerged piece by piece, like a jigsaw solving itself over billions of years of trial and error. When atoms stuck together, they naturally formed molecules. Molecules naturally grouped into compounds. People naturally formed tribal associations that made them look much bigger to predators from a distance, and as a result of clumping together and swapping experiences, they naturally developed specialization and created a shared culture or collective higher intelligence.

  Everybody’s heard writers talk about a moment in the process of writing a novel or story when “it was as if the characters took over.” I can confirm from my own experience that immersion in stories and characters does reach a point where the fiction appears to take on a life of its own. When a character becomes sufficiently fleshed out and complex, he or she can often cause the author to abandon original well-laid plans in favor of new plotlines based on a better understanding of the character’s motivations. When I was halfway through the seven-year process of writing The Invisibles, I found several characters actively resisting directions I’d planned for them. It was a disorienting, fascinating experience, and I eventually had to give in and let the story lead me to places I might not have chosen to go. How could a story come to life? It seemed ridiculous, but it occurred to me that perhaps, like a beehive or a sponge colony, I’d put enough information into my model world to trigger emergent complexity.

  I wondered if ficto-scientists of the future might finally locate this theoretical point where a story becomes sufficiently complex to begin its own form of calculation, and even to become in some way self-aware. Perhaps that had already happened.

  If this was true of The Invisibles, then might it not apply more so to the truly epic, long-running superhero universes? Marvel and DC have roots that run seventy years deep. Could they actually have a kind of elementary awareness, a set of programs that define their rules and maintain their basic shapes while allowing for development, complexity, and, potentially, some kind of rudimentary consciousness?

  I imagined a sentient paper universe and decided I would try to contact it.

  CHAPTER 10

  NEIL GAIMAN’S DESCRIPTION of Jack Kirby is the best: “Even when he was given someone else’s idea, he would build it into something unbelievable and new, like a man who was asked to repair a vacuum cleaner but instead built it into a functioning jet pack.”

  Jack was a pioneer, a one-man army, the unstoppable cartographer of new territory and new possibilities. Kirby had experimented with the cosmic before on Thor and Fantastic Four at Marvel, but this project was far more elaborate and he had no time for the past. His definitive statement proved to be contemporary, futuristic, and timeless all at once. He was at least forty years ahead of everyone else in his business at this moment of creative fruition.

  The unfinished epic, which came to be known as the Fourth World cycle, began in the unlikely pages of Jimmy Olsen, where Kirby recast the formerly buffoonish Olsen as a handsome young adventurer caught up in a breakneck thriller plot involving alien intervention, genetic engineering, and media manipulation.

  The launch of Kirby’s epic would require nothing less than a new creation myth that began with the end of the age of the old gods. A primal Manichean fracture caused a single world of gods to split into two worlds: sunlit, progressive New Genesis; and, spinning perpetually in its sister world’s shadow, Apokolips, the planet of evil and slavery, ruled by the tyrant god Darkseid. Kirby’s ambition was clear: He intended to revamp the Bible, the Kirby way.

  (illustration credit 10.1)

  The Fourth World story was a carefully constructed modern myth that encompassed everything from the gutters of the Lower East Side to transcendent dimensions that only Kirby could articulate in his mind-bending collages. Kirby’s new heroes were science fiction gods, machine-age archetypes designed to embody the fears and hopes of a secular world. There was Orion, the god of “techno-cosmic war,” and Lightray, the carefree photon-riding prince of Silver Age positivity. And in the black corner: Granny Goodness, the sadistic wire mother; Desaad, the god of torture and interrogation; the bestial Kalibak; and their dark master, Kirby’s monolithic personification of the totalitarian will to power, his god of absolute control, Darkseid, the greatest villain in comic-book history.

  The cover of the March 1971 New Gods no. 1 showed the warrior Orion sailing toward us through space on a contraption that resembled a high-tech walker for seniors. Orion was expressionless. Part god, part astronaut, part soldier. A man with a mission with red, laser-like pupils that burned through us into a higher dimension behind our backs.

  The banner read, “Kirby Is Here!” And for the first time on any of the covers we’ve looked at so far, the creator was the star.

  The face of the stern, helmeted warrior was repeated for emphasis in a circle at the top left. Below, a box read, “DC THE NEW GODS,” then “WHEN THE OLD GODS DIED—THERE AROSE THE NEW GODS.”

  “AN EPIC FOR OUR TIMES” only underscored Kirby’s ambition and his willingness to back up his grandiose statements with work that left his contemporaries in the dust of another century.

  “ORION FIGHTS FOR EARTH!”

  Oddly, for a hero, Orion was placed to the left in the image. It was to indicate the canvas, the immensity of the backdrop, that mattered now.

  Kirby was refining his comics into emblematic gestures, outstripping his competitors effortlessly and leaving his audience behind him too. Like the fifties teenagers left speechless and motionless when time-traveling Marty McFly plays Jimi Hendrix guitar in Back to the Future, they had no reference point for this.

  New Gods’ principal story line began on the eve of war. A pact of non-aggression had been in place since the devastating god wars, ratified by an exchange of sons between the rulers of New Genesis and Apokolips. Darkseid’s bestial brat, Orion, was raised on pacifist, creative New Genesis, while Scott Free, the gentle son of New Genesis, went to Hell. Darkseid had broken the rules in his search for the ultimate weapon, the Anti-Life Equation, an ultimate mind control formula, “THE OUTSIDE CONTROL OF THOUGHT,” which could enslave all living things to a dark mathematician’s will.

  The elements of the equation were hidden within the minds of human beings on an otherwise insignificant planet called Earth. When Darkseid’s intervention in human affairs revealed his intent, it triggered absolute war between New Genesis and Apokolips. Freedom versus repression, to the death.

  As the monster-child, Orion, grew to manhood on New Genesis, his life dramatized debates of nature versus nurture, good versus evil, youth versus age, tyranny versus freedom. Kirby was dealing with the big dualities and had assembled his own gleaming pantheon to help him articulate the questions of the age.

  Kirby told us that humanity’s better nature would inevitably prevail. That was the story, and we all knew it deep in our hearts. Kindness and understanding could turn even a demon into a holy warrior, but an angel could never be broken to the Devil’s service and would always find ways to soar and to be free. The war would never end, but the outcome was never in any doubt.

  He has been criticized since the publication of the Fourth World books for being a ham-fisted writer who should have left the words to a professional like Stan Lee. His dialogue was and still is mocked for its lack of naturalness and conversational flow, as if those dull virtues could ever produce anything as expressive or powerful as Kirby’s creativity in full spate. To dismiss his voice is to miss out on the pounding heavy metal that is the true music of Jack Kirby unleashed. Don’t think of the streets: Think of Ginsberg when you read Kirby. Listen to the lofty Hebraic cadence, as shown here from the remarkable antiwar story “The Glory Boat”:

  AS IF IN ANSWER TO ITS ATTACKER, THE WOODEN SHIP BLASTS OPEN! AND SOMETHING INSIDE RUSHES OUT INTO THE CALAMITOUS NIGHT—SINGING AND SHINING AND SLEEK AND DEADLY!!! WHAT LIGHTRAY HAS “IMPRINTED” ON THE “LIFE CUBE” IS NOW FULLY “GROWN,” AND IT CARRIES ON ITS GLISTENING W
ARHEAD, THE LIVING—THE DEAD—AND THE FIERY TRUMPETS OF THE SOURCE!!!

  Or listen to the voice of Darkseid himself, talking to his propagandist Glorious Godfrey, Kirby’s golden-coiffed, silver-tongued amalgam of Joseph Goebbels and Billy Graham:

  I LIKE YOU, GLORIOUS GODFREY! YOU’RE A SHALLOW, PRECIOUS CHILD—THE REVELATIONIST—HAPPY WITH THE SWEEPING SOUND OF WORDS!

  BUT I AM THE REVELATION! THE TIGER-FORCE AT THE CORE OF ALL THINGS! WHEN YOU CRY OUT IN YOUR DREAMS—IT IS DARKSEID THAT YOU SEE!

  And understand how perfectly these simple but sonorous declamations complement their accompanying monumental, eerily crackling drawings of gods.

  When I read Kirby’s tales of shining contemporary gods walking the streets of Manhattan, I can even see beyond the Beats to Ginsberg’s solar sunflower muse, William Blake, whose titanic primal figures Orc and Urthona are given new dress as Kirby’s Mister Miracle and Mantis. The dark fires of Urizen burn again in the firepits of Darkseid’s death planet, Apokolips. In Blake and Kirby both, we see the play of immense revolutionary forces that will not be chained or fettered, the Romantic revolution of the 1800s and the hip sixties.

  And like Blake, who harnessed the new technology of the printing press to mass-produce his visions, Kirby manipulated the four-color press and extended his art to the limits of the four-color reproduction process to deliver the incandescent harvest of a restless imagination in florid full pages and spreads. This artist of the interior had eschewed realism, creating monumental heroic figures to carry the energetic charge of his visions. He drew the infinite space inside his head, and, in his world, everything looked like it had been designed by Jack Kirby. Kirby machines operated in accordance with no known laws but sported Aztec zigzags and go-faster stripes. They look the way engines might dream of themselves. He created vivid and surreal collages that stressed the limits of the printing process but appeared to be actual blurred photographs from the depths of his numinous otherworlds.

  And the profusion of ideas! Kirby could throw away in one single panel a high concept that would keep others busy for years: Crippled Vietnam War veteran Willie Walker became the vessel for the New God of Death—a black man in full armor hurtling through walls and space on skis. The Black Racer was a twist on Kirby’s original idea for the Silver Surfer, here as an angel of death, not life. The Mother Box, a living, emotionally nurturing, personal computer was the fusion of soul and machine carried by all the inhabitants of New Genesis. Metron the amoral science god with his dimension-traveling Mobius chair. The Source was for Kirby the ultimate ground of being, like the Ain Soph Aur of Judaic mysticism, beyond gods, beyond all divisions and definitions. Genetic manipulation, media control, the roots of Fascism—Kirby was on fire and had something new to say about everything under the sun.

  The Fourth World cycle was to be a great interlocking mechanism of books combining to form a complete modern myth, while, as an afterthought, re-creating the very idea of the superhero from the ground up and infusing it with divinity. It might have run for five more years.

  But then the Fourth World spun off its axis. Carmine Infantino, promoted to DC’s vice president, allegedly looked at sales figures and canceled the books, which were doing well enough but not as well as had been hoped based on Kirby’s name. The king was hit hard, and the world lost the conclusion to a great work. He went on to create more titles, of course. Hundreds more original, quirky stories burst from that relentless mind, but the great mythographer had been thwarted in the midst of his masterpiece, brought down by dark forces and jealous gods. Kirby’s personal vision, his avalanche of novelty and energy, was too new for a culture in retreat, looking back to the fifties, dreaming of sock hops and ponytails, in the happy days before ’Nam and Richard Nixon.

  When Kirby returned in 1985, older and more wary, to complete his story, he was given only sixty pages to wrap up a saga that warranted thousands more. Imagine God halfway through Exodus having to hurry it up. The Hunger Dogs showed the passage of time and the footprints left by the relentless march of cynicism. Still the King delivered. As a dreadful elegy for the hopes of the baby boomers and the stark truth of their lives—growing older, facing Reagan and Thatcher—The Hunger Dogs, Kirby’s completion of the story, was bleak, unforgettable, and in many ways the only perfect end to the Fourth World saga.

  But by the time it was released, Kirby’s hand-to-eye coordination had deteriorated significantly, making some pages appear ugly and rough-hewn. A more generous approach might imagine the artist embracing a new primitivism, a shorthand in which scale and perspective played second fiddle to the immediate expression of the ideas. But too many of the drawings were doodles that told the story with the barest minimum of effort. And his audience had flown. Fashion had passed him by. He was “Jack the Hack” now, an old man mocked and derided by the same people who had hailed his genius twenty years earlier and would again ten years later.

  The epic had stalled and, like the great Aquarian youth revolution that had inspired so much of it, unraveled into world-weary cynicism. The Forever People had all grown up, gone bald, got jobs, and given up the struggle for a future among the stars. But Kirby had one final trick, one last visionary warning to leave his readers: A new superhero saga that would jump so far into the future that it’s still reverberating and is more relevant today than it was when it was published to little acclaim in 1974.

  OMAC (One Man Army Corps) was a manic update on the Captain America concept. The wealth of new and provocative ideas in OMAC would be staggering if this was any artist other than Jack Kirby.

  Lila was a Build-a-Friend “synthetic playmate” in kit form. Before the story ended, she and her kind would be turned into walking bombs as part of a plan to assassinate the world’s leaders.

  The faceless, masked agents of the Global Peace Agency were representative of all nations and none, Kirby explained in captions. The world of OMAC was monitored and policed by Brother Eye, an all-seeing satellite surveillance system.

  OMAC presented a near future where gangsters could rent entire cities for weekend parties; an empty world in which “test parents” in the form of lonely old couples were paired up with rootless young superheroes by the state. Office buildings had Silent Rooms for meditation and Destruct Rooms where frustrated white-collar workers could act out their rage by kicking mechanical “pseudo-people.”

  “THEY’VE MADE A MOCKERY OF THE SPIRIT … OMAC LIVES … SO THAT MAN MAY LIVE!”

  Sporting a prepunk Mohican crest as an echo of the plumed helmet of the war god Ares, and a watching-eye motif on his chest that looked forward to TV’s Big Brother, OMAC embarked on a series of wild science fiction thrillers set in “THE WORLD THAT’S COMING!” Reminiscent of Philip K. Dick, The Prisoner, and 1984, OMAC saw Kirby at his incandescent peak and should be immediately greenlit as a movie by the first DC Entertainment executive to read these words.

  (illustration credit 10.2)

  Stan Lee and his team had stripped down and rebuilt the superhero concept in a dozen new ways. With minds like Kirby’s on overdrive, they’d been able to innovate at a furious rate, throwing out Day-Glo mega-concepts that it would take generations of writers and artists decades to fully mine. They were still creating stories that would be retold again and again, sharpened, freshened, and rebuilt to suit the fashions, technology, and storytelling styles of each new age.

  Kirby’s cosmos was as rugged and warlike as the Norse myths that inspired him, but Lee’s own flirtations with the ineffable tended toward a New Testament sermonizing crossed with existential self-examination among the stars. Together they had created the contentious Silver Surfer character, which would come to embody their growing divisions.

  Kirby saw the Surfer as an inscrutable alien intelligence, but for Lee, the character was a personal mouthpiece. His Surfer was the first emo superhero, shackled to Earth by a celestial curse. Forbidden to roam his beloved “spaceways,” he sulked around the world, a gleaming target of mankind’s hatred and ignorance. Lee�
��s vision of the sentinel of the spaceways was more Suffer than Surfer, and the character was given to endless gnarled-hand outbursts that questioned his very being or expressed his infinite agony in the form of one more claw-fingered gesture in the direction of a mute and merciless firmament. Every issue saw him hurling himself vainly at one insurmountable barrier after another before fizzling back to Earth, limp and futile, but just in time for one more miserable monologue on a lonely mountaintop far from cruel nonsilver bastards. I suspect the yearning warble of Stan Lee’s own tortured teenage soul. Somewhere behind the reassuring huckster image of Smilin’ Stan lay this sobbing mask of chrome, but readers found the hand-wringing lyricism uncomfortable. The Silver Surfer series lasted eighteen issues before it was put to death with the same ruthless efficiency as Jesus himself.

  More to my taste was Lee’s eventual successor as Marvel’s editor in chief, Roy Thomas.

  Thomas was twenty-six when he joined the Marvel team in 1965. An erudite, lusciously verbose ex-teacher of English, he’d been instrumental in creating the original Golden Age fan movement when fans of the lost heroes of the first age of supercomics banded together using a pre-Internet web of snail mail and homemade magazines—fanzines, like Thomas’s Alter Ego—to share their passion. This same network connected him with men like Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger, so when Thomas decided to try his luck in the comic-book industry, he first accepted an offer as an editorial assistant in the Superman office. The job with Weisinger (it was Thomas who coined the phrase “a malevolent toad” to describe his boss) lasted all of a week before Thomas cut his losses and went to work with Stan Lee at Marvel. It was the best thing he could have done.