Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  Having defined the image of my hero, I attempted to become him by rewriting and editing my own life as if it were one of my stories. I began by combing my seventies side-parted mental-patient fringe across my forehead to make a sleek Beatles mop. One velvet jacket, some very tight trousers taken in by my sister, and a pair of Chelsea boots later, I looked like Jerry Cornelius, my nihilistic hero from Moorcock’s stories and Robert Fuest’s 1974 film of The Final Programme, starring Jon Finch as the main character.

  Soon I was no longer a fan, queuing for tickets and autographs, but a guest at the big comic conventions. I was able to meet my heroes over dinner, on terms that put us on an equal footing. Somewhere in the tin-plated predawn hours of a Birmingham morning, I found myself stumbling from an all-night film show, in a construction site, waiting for the sun to come, wondering how it had come to this so quickly.

  Superman vs. Muhammad Ali was released by DC, and turned out to be disappointing, marking the end of my teenage affair with superhero comics for a while. In hindsight, Superman vs. Muhammad Ali is a perfectly acceptable piece of daft science fiction well drawn by Neal Adams and his studio. But the shine was off. Comics and superheroes were boring. I was a sci-fi punk. Fuck you.

  Ali won, by the way, but they shook hands at the end.

  CHAPTER 12

  AS THE DARK AGE progressed, the old superheroes coasted, reliving Silver Age glories in ever-diminishing circles. A set of gestures had hardened to become rules of the game, and the best hope seemed to gesture in the direction of operatic science fiction.

  Star Wars borrowed from the comics as well as from a hundred other tried-and-tested sources, and expanded the appetite for fantastic and mythic storytelling.

  Chris Claremont’s X-Men was an early beneficiary of the sanction that Star Wars gave to science fiction stories. Bolting this aesthetic to Marvel’s successful superhero soap formula yielded another winner. The world of X-Men was far from plausible, but Claremont cannily grounded his wide-open imagination in the engrossing and convincing emotional lives of his cast.

  The mutant X-Men could be adolescents, or gay or black or Irish. They could stand for any minority, represent the feelings of every outsider, and Claremont knew it. He knew that there was a tidal wave of disgruntled teenagers out there ready to embrace antiestablishment victimhood and feelings of persecution and disillusionment.

  The ever-inventive Len Wein started the ball rolling when he revamped the ailing X-Men title with the introduction of a new group of international heroes. Foreigners as well as mutants, they would be true outsiders in America. The twist revived interest in the book, but the concept really caught fire when it became a showcase for the talents of the flamboyant and theatrical Claremont, a young Marvel up-and-comer who had mastered the sleek and contemporary sci-fi pacing that was in vogue after Star Wars. Claremont took advantage of the possibilities that comics offered by embracing the widest possible canvas, sending his heroes across space and time and into the center of the earth. He created a new and even more compelling take on Roy Thomas’s endlessly unwinding, self-revealing model of narrative inflation, enlarging the Marvel universe with a wealth of new concepts and characters. And when artist John Byrne replaced the departing Dave Cockrum, the writer was gifted with a partner whose clean, attractive lines and spacious layouts were state of the art in 1979 and made X-Men the best-looking superhero comic in the world—and the first in a long time that could also appeal to young women.

  Claremont adored his female characters with a love that burned like that of Dante for his Beatrice. Women of all kinds—from idealistic teen Kitty Pryde; to the haughty, glorious Storm; to the witty, wicked psychic dominatrix Emma Frost—were richly drawn and allowed to drive the emotional twists and turns of stories that portrayed them not as background figures like the jealous girlfriends or calm, reserved Silver Age professionals of the past but as friends, warriors, mothers, goddesses, geniuses, and role models.

  The same delicate touch transformed the Wolverine character from a one-note “feisty scrapper” to a layered portrayal of a man torn between nobility and savagery. Claremont gave a soul to his modern samurai, and Wolverine became a breakout hit character: Young men wanted to be him, while women wanted to tame him and cure his loneliness.

  The Claremont-Byrne X-Men effect was of a seething virtual reality built up using accurate photo references and up-to-date travelogue descriptions of the exotic locales that the X-Men would visit in the course of each new headlong adventure. Claremont would often establish a foreign scene with the worldly, sophisticated air of a bore at an airport: giving his readers population data, climate statistics, and rundowns of main exports and imports. This kind of detailed scene setting, combined with an ever-open window into the ongoing thoughts of every single character, gave the comic a texture that was sticky like flypaper. It was impossible not to get caught up in the perfectly crafted, maddeningly compelling soap opera twists, turns, and shocking cliff-hangers. No story came without a shock revelation to rival Darth Vader’s “No, I am your father.” In X-Men, everyone was someone’s father, long-lost brother, evil twin, estranged lover, mother, wife, or descendant from the future. Soon there was nothing random in the lives of these international mutant outcasts, which made the introduction of any new character a source of fretful speculation. Could this mystery masked man be Nightcrawler’s missing sister or uncle? Or was it Colossus’s evil counterpart from a parallel world? Or perhaps the long-lost son of Professor X?

  If O’Neil, McGregor, and Gerber had been Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola, Claremont was Steven Spielberg: the bridge between the fan-favorite auteur and the high-earning superstars of the eighties and nineties. His dedication to his characters was legendary and allowed him to weave a nightmarishly convoluted but internally consistent tapestry, or “canon,” as he referred to it, that kept X-Men books at the top of the sales charts for more than twenty years. (Much to my distress, my teenage hero was unhappy when a new editorial regime at Marvel hired me to “reimagine” the X-Men franchise in 2001, and I became personally responsible for inadvertent irreparable damage to the canon. Ah, punk!)

  When the time came to create Britain’s very own Marvel superhero, Captain Britain, the avowed Anglophile Claremont was first in line for the job. Claremont, the pioneer, had intuited perhaps where the lightning would strike next. Something that felt like a movement was stirring in the fields of Albion and Caledon. Soon we wouldn’t need Chris Claremont.

  As film producer David Puttnam had proudly announced after the Oscar success of Chariots of Fire at the 1981 Academy Awards, the British were coming.

  My beloved uncle Billy added another significant piece to my personal jigsaw puzzle with his gift for my nineteenth birthday (“Soon I’ll be twenty! Thirty! Dead dead dead!” my diary entry wailed) of Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris’s beautiful tarot deck and its accompanying The Book of Thoth. I decided that I would become a magician and sent away for The Lamp of Thoth magazine, my gateway into the postmodern “chaos magic” scene that was reinvigorating the occult underground. I liked the sound of the chaos method, which dispensed with traditional gods and rituals and encouraged practitioners to create their own personal systems of magic. Skeptical but willing to try anything that might improve my luck, I performed a traditional ritual and on cue witnessed the appearance of a blazing, angelic lion head, which gave me quite a jolt when it started growling out the words “I am neither North nor South.” However, it confirmed my suspicions: There were states of mind that my education had scarcely prepared me for—and easily available printed instructions for how to trigger them using “ritual” behavior.

  Alongside the free-form stories for Near Myths, which I considered my “personal” work, and the commercial jobs writing Starblazer science fiction adventures for the demanding ex-army editors of the august Scottish publishing giant D. C. Thomson, a third strand of paying work brought me back to superheroes when my dad scored me a gig with the local newspaper,
the Govan Press, a paper that often provided him with another outlet for his incendiary social commentary. I was hired to provide the newspaper with its first ever homegrown comic strip, Glasgow’s very own superhero.

  “Captain Clyde” was a name suggested by the paper’s editor, Colin Tough. If we’d lived in Newcastle, he’d have been Captain Tyne, of course. If this had been a New York local newspaper, perhaps he’d be Captain Hudson or Captain East River. The word Captain followed by any other word was an easy way to generate a new superhero: Captain Discount, Captain Clean, Cap’n Crunch. My friends and I thought the name was only slightly less pathetic than the kind of music our dads liked, but I’d already decided to redeem it by taking a new and more believable approach to the material, giving the stereotypical title an ironic kick. My editors imagined a “camp” superhero, with a secret headquarters under Glasgow’s George Square and a spunky kid sidekick, but I was on a mission to show them how much superhero books had changed since they’d last looked, while testing some of my own ideas about how they might be developed into the future. I was determined to bring the self-important adolescent heat of my favorite comics into the traditional newspaper format.

  When I presented the first completed episode in November 1979, my Captain Clyde was created to be a superhero I could relate to. Chris Melville was a twenty-three-year-old unemployed man living in the west end of Glasgow. A hiking holiday in the Peak District, tracing my own lonely steps earlier in the same year, brought him into direct contact with the ancient magic of Britain’s pagan countryside. The “Goddess of the Earth Energy” endowed our hill-walking hero with the power to fly, superstrength, damage resistance, and speed, giving birth to a Glasgow Superman—a sensitive, witty young man on the dole who thought small and fought small.

  As for me, I took the job and my six-pound-a-week salary dreadfully seriously. Captain Clyde began with a sci-fi-flavored, research-heavy story about mysterious monsters tearing up the newly renovated and reopened subway station in Govan. I jumped from there to the introduction of a tweed-jacketed headmasterly villain called Quasar, thence to the secret origin story of Captain Clyde. In time-honored fashion, I had my hero killed and restored to life with a new and better uniform and much-improved artwork.

  As the strip progressed and my own fashion sense and social life began to improve, Chris got a sleek haircut and started to wear cooler clothes. He even went to nightclubs. His girlfriend Alison mirrored his transformation and blossomed from mousy student to styled sex kitten in high heels and tight jeans.

  In one early episode, Captain Clyde made a visit to the dentist, who couldn’t understand why his patient’s teeth had become so tough and resistant to the drill. To keep it real, I referenced photographs of my own dentist, Mr. Paul, at work in surgery. The drawings stand as a record of a not-too-distant era of dental torture implements that appear to have been designed by experts for the exclusive use of psychopaths in haunted lunatic asylums or snuff porn films.

  Chris liked to talk to himself about current TV shows and records as he flew around real-life city landmarks on his crime-fighting patrol. He shopped at local stores in Glasgow and tossed cars around the familiar streets of Renfrew, Clydebank, and Govan before widening his scope to the city center of Glasgow itself and finally to the surrounding countryside—including an adventure on a North Sea oil rig held hostage by superpowered terrorists. Fortunately for Captain Clyde, his enemies, no matter how powerful, tended to instigate their insane bids for planetary domination in the immediate environs of Chris Melville’s rented flat in Hillhead. The madman Quasar, our schoolteacher turned star-powered monster, even dared to declare, “TODAY GLASGOW! TOMORROW LONDON! THEN THE WORLD!” without a trace of irony.

  The stories turned darker and quirkier as I burned through material on a strict weekly deadline. Baby-eating demons and murderous skull-faced horrors began to stalk the pages of this newspaper aimed at the elderly, the chronically unemployed, and other vulnerable members of society.

  In the end, in 1981 the captain himself succumbed to full-scale diabolic possession before assuming a new identity as the self-proclaimed “Black Messiah.” Poised to destroy the world, until redeemed by Alison’s unswerving devotion, he killed the Devil himself before tumbling from the sky to expire in the arms of his beloved, accompanied by portentous valedictory captions. My rain-soaked, lightning-wracked epic of Fall and Redemption was a far cry from the real-life-local-hero strip that had started in 1979, and it was time to hastily move on, to be replaced on the paper’s funny page by a syndicated, bloodless Tom and Jerry—a relief, no doubt, to traumatized readers who could once more consult the TV listings without being assaulted by satanic imagery and blasted skeletons. By the time of the overwrought operatic finale, I had reached the limits of Captain Clyde as an idea and was eager to create new and more contemporary heroes.

  For all that, Captain Clyde ran for three years. I’d written and drawn 150 weekly episodes, and the discipline had improved my artwork and storytelling to a much more professional standard.

  Odd or not, I was being paid to do what I loved. I continued to write Starblazer stories for D. C. Thomson, earning enough money to visit London on regular clothes-buying expeditions, while stocking up on musical equipment, comics, and sweets. My typical breakfast during these years was an ice-cream Arctic Roll and a family-sized packet of pickled onion flavor crisps. I ate this every single day in my first freelance period—or “unemployment,” as it was known back then—and remained as skinny as a pencil. I still wasn’t making enough money per year to be officially self-employed and was therefore technically a dole casualty, another of Thatcher’s victims, a statistic.

  The lack of traction on Near Myths and similar ground-level titles like Graphixus and PSSST! seemed to support the discouraging view that the market for adult comics in the United Kingdom was best described as “nonexistent.” I was playing in a band now anyway, and as the Mixers (the name borrowed from A Clockwork Orange), we started publishing our own fanzine, Bombs Away Batman, which featured my drawings and collages. This mixture of local band interviews, gig reviews, weird cartoons, PC-baiting surrealist humor, and angry rants was lovingly assembled, printed, and distributed by me and the boys in the band. In search of any outlet for our restless, creative urges, we became part of a loose network of musicians influenced by Television Personalities, the Byrds, the Times, Syd Barrett, Swell Maps, and the Modern Lovers.

  Our nameless, nebulous micromovement championed the band as lifestyle, as brand, anticipating Facebook and the spread of this variety of self-mythologizing into every corner of the networked life. The music was just a part of the show, along with the clothes, the homemade zines, and the photo sessions: a cargo cult re-creation of an imagined life where we were headlining stadia, not local cafés, with ten million screaming fans instead of no girlfriends and no money. So we made our own magazines, clothes, records, clubs, and private worlds of meaning and magic, hoping that our oddness would at least attract others.

  Maybe making music was a better option after all. I had to earn a living and find a place for myself somehow in this ungenerous world. Unsure where to turn, I gave up on comics and concentrated on building up the Mixers, but the failure of the adult comics boom of the seventies was only the darkness before the brightest creative dawn comic books had seen yet. Be careful how you name things: Near Myths turned out to be exactly what it said on the tin. A near miss. But there were other people just like me, all over the country, looking for an outlet for their anger and their creativity and finding comics.

  While my back was turned, as so often happened in those miserable teenage years, something wonderful happened.

  If Superman had a wet dream, would he flood the world with indestructible supersperm capable of tunneling through women’s bellies to reach the eggs packed within?

  The answer is “no,” if you believe that the Man of Tomorrow’s essentially alien sperm wouldn’t bother to seek out human eggs; and “yes,” if you think that
Kryptonian supersperm would naturally be capable of fertilizing anything, including cats, dogs, cattle, horses, and winsome squid—in which case we’d have a lot more to worry about than just undying spermatozoa.

  And another thing: Does Superman go to the bathroom? If so, what the hell does his shit look like?

  The slightly disturbing answer to that one is that Superman gets all the energy and sustenance he needs from the sun. When he does eat, his body is so efficient, it processes the food completely, leaving no waste.

  Does this mean that his arse could eventually seal up after centuries of misuse?

  Only time will tell.

  The first example of real-world logic applied to the ridiculous comes from a 1971 short story entitled “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex,” in which science fiction writer Larry Niven applied ruthless common sense to these questions of Superman’s sex life. Niven’s story influenced the next transformation of the superhero, turning at last to face the mirror and maturity.

  And here it was again. The word of power, the lightning flash, the zap of invigorating voltage that never failed to strike.

  The magic word was uttered, this time with a distinctly British regional accent, and the latest surge of imaginative current arced through the typewriter keys of a young, working-class writer from Northampton, sixty-seven miles north on the M1 from London.