Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  Alan Moore was self-taught, ambitious, and fiercely, flamboyantly clever, and his greatest trick in an arsenal of great tricks was to appear utterly new, as if there had been no history of comics prior to his emergence. His witty, articulate, self-deprecating public voice—“I’m not saying I’m the Messiah …”—skipped hand in hand with a radiant self-assurance that renewed the comics scene. And his startling visual impact—six-foot-four, bright eyed, with a prophet beard that exploded in every direction, and cascading masses of abundant hair—gave fans a potent and charismatic figurehead. Moore became, in his own words, “Fandom’s first girlfriend,” and the love affair was intense and all-consuming. Not since the days of McGregor and Englehart had any writer been the center of so much attention and anticipation, but the adoration was so fervently uncritical that those antecedents and all others were forgotten in the flashbulb blast. Fans swooned, as if honored that someone so confident and funny had come along to prove they’d been right about the potential of comics all along.

  Moore’s work brought the superhero closer than ever before to reality with Marvelman, serialized in the United Kingdom’s Warrior magazine starting in 1982. The strip that had ended in 1963 as a picaresque replacement for Captain Marvel’s adventures on the British newsstands had been reborn into Thatcher’s Britain, shivering under the cold arc lights. Carefree young Mickey Moran was now Mike Moran, a middle-aged, married reporter burdened by the nagging suspicion that once upon a time he’d been something more. Haunted by a mystery word he could no longer recall, Moran found himself covering an antinuclear demonstration that recalled the black-and-white grubbiness of Steel Claw, but updated for the eighties of Greenham Common, Trident, and Windscale.

  Kidnapped by terrorists and manhandled through a glass door, Moran caught sight of the word Atomic written there in reverse. Mumbling the oddly familiar incantation “Kimota!” (the “keyword of the universe,” once shouted out proudly by Mickey Moran), the shabby hack was transformed, in a blast of atom light and thunder, into the glorious superbeing Marvelman. The art of Gary Leach, combining the painstaking photorealist detail and precision ink lines of the British school with images of flying, battling superhumans in the tradition of the US comics, defined a look for “serious” superhero stories that would endure into the twenty-first century. Leach suddenly made American comics artists look as dated as Moore did their writers.

  Moore neatly reversed the dynamic of Captain Marvel and his derivative, the original Marvelman. Moore’s Mickey Moran had aged in real time so that Mike Moran was now an older man whose long-forgotten word of power made him young and perfect. As Marvelman, he was more graceful, more intelligent, leaner, and more muscular than his alter ego, the pudgy Everyman Mike Moran. Mike couldn’t give his wife Liz a child, but after one magical night in the clouds with Marvelman, she was pregnant with a superbaby that regarded her with the disdain of an angel born from the steaming loins of a gorilla. (In Miracleman no. 13—the strip and character were both renamed for US publication at the request of Marvel Comics lawyers—readers found themselves with ringside seats as the simple miracle of birth was depicted in slow-mo, close-up, anatomical vérité style by artist Rick Veitch, with life-affirming poetic captions courtesy of Moore.)

  Unlike the hero fantasy of the orphaned Bill Batson, Mike Moran longed with wistful, bittersweet nostalgia for the surging vitality and confidence of his youth. Captain Marvel and Marvelman were wish-fulfillment figures for children, but Moore transformed Marvelman into the dream of flying that haunted their older, more responsible selves.

  Moran stood for the comics’ aging demographic, its shrinking fan market composed of people in their late teens, twenties, and even thirties who’d grown up with these heroes and still found it hard or unreasonable to let go. Marvelman became the wish-fulfillment figure for a midlife crisis; a dream of the perfected self that eventually destroyed Moran the man, leaving in place of that frail, relatable character a supergod named Marvelman and a world that was barely recognizable.

  Alienated and undermined by his own higher self, Moran eventually committed a kind of suicide by saying “Kimota!” for the last time and changing places with his magnificent alter ego forever. Marvelman’s world of tomorrow would have no room for Everyman.

  Marvelman’s former junior partner Kid Marvelman, aka Johnny Bates, was depicted as a satanic corporate success story, a predatory superpowered yuppie in a tailored suit and tie who ultimately wiped out London in a savage onslaught that depicted the horrific consequences in the real world of a Marvel Comics–style all-out battle between superhuman beings as something akin to Pieter Brueghel’s gruesome sixteenth-century painting The Triumph of Death. In a two-page aftermath-of-the-battle tableau, an eyeless woman stumbled through the ruins with her children clinging to her shredded dress, while thousands of Londoners were shown dead or dying, impaled, burned, or crushed in their cars. The villain even took the time to individually strip a family of their skins before pinning each of them like sheets to the washing line outside their terraced home. Moore wanted to show that cruelty too could have a superhuman dimension and to demonstrate the abject horror of what a psychopath with Superman’s powers might do to ordinary people given a few hours to indulge his vast perverse imagination. It would be hard to look at a Marvel Comics superhero slugfest again after this. (The elemental climactic battle in a thunderstorm between Marvelman and his evil protégé was homaged extensively in the screen duel between hero Neo and the sinister Agent Smith in The Matrix Revolutions, but the filmmakers left out the severed heads and sodomy.)

  The villainous corporate CEO with his smart black suit and tie was to become the default big, bad wolf of eighties comics. (Even mad scientist Lex Luthor was reinvented as a ravenous mega-tycoon.) The annihilated wasteland left in the wake of Bates’s rampage showed us a world raped and violated by big business, greed, and self-interest. Following the epochal, culture-changing conclusion of the battle against the former Kid Marvelman, Moore’s band of superhumans went on to establish a liberal-utopian new order on Earth, allowing the writer to indulge in the wish-fulfilling power fantasies of disenfranchised working-class intellectuals everywhere. Readers in Britain cheered when Marvelman and Marvelwoman gently removed a sobbing, disoriented Margaret Thatcher from office before rehabilitating Charles Manson to work with children. Marvelman closed with its beautiful, ageless hero gazing wistfully from his stainless-steel Olympus across a world redeemed into wonder, where the fantasies of the comic books had become the stuff of everyday life in a permanent, orgasmic Silver Age. Moore left his sexualized but still spandex-clad superhero stranded in a never-ending teenage dream world of flight, immortality, and supersex, mourning the ordinary and the everyday in a utopia too perfect to ever want to grow up.

  The antics of the Marvel and DC superheroes who mindlessly and repetitively preserved the status quo were exposed as clichéd and dated by this masterly social sci-fi reevaluation of the basic assumptions of the comics. Marvelman can be seen to derive from the American superhero concept in much the same way that electronic dance music in the eighties evolved from rock ’n’ roll, as unearthly, futuristic, and radical a departure from the template as Visage’s “Fade to Grey” from Elvis’s “Return to Sender.” Moore argued that the arrival of a genuine superhuman being in our midst would quickly and radically alter society forever. The Justice League or Avengers could not be assimilated into any recognizable world as they appeared to be in the Marvel and DC universes. Superhumans would signal the end of the human and deform history itself with the gravity of their presence.

  Moore’s command of his material brought the disciplines and structures of drama, literature, and music to superhero comics in a way that made the familiar suddenly fresh. His was a challenging and articulate voice in a complacent field. Mike Moran’s story began in a world that was recognizably Thatcher’s Britain of nuclear power stations, strikes, terrorists, and moral ambiguity. Its hero was a shuffling, scruffy Everyman with bills, headac
hes, and dreams of flying.

  I was drawn back to comics. For me, Marvelman was the next stage beyond the kitchen sink naturalism of Captain Clyde, and I couldn’t wait to explore the new frontiers that were opening ahead. With my dream of adult pop comics becoming a reality, it looked like a good time to get back into the scrum. Perhaps at last, this could be a way of making enough money to quit the dole and get noticed doing something I loved. And I wasn’t alone.

  And so we arrived in our teens and twenties, in our leather jackets and Chelsea boots, with our crepe-soled brothel creepers and skinhead Ben Shermans, metal tattoos, and infected piercings. We brought to bear on the ongoing American superhero discourse the invigorating influence of alternative lifestyles, punk rock, fringe theater, and tight black jeans. We rolled up in anarchist hordes, in rowdy busloads, drinking the bars dry, munching our hosts’ buttocks (artist Glenn Fabry drunkenly assaulted editor Karen Berger’s glutes with his molars), and swearing in a dozen or more baffling regional accents. The Americans expected us to be brilliant punks and, eager to please our masters, we sensitive, artistic boys did our best to live up to our hype. Like the Sex Pistols sneering and burning their way through “Johnny B. Goode,” we took their favorite songs, rewrote all the lyrics, and played them on buzz saws through squalling distortion pedals.

  We arrived under the patronage of radical progressives on the publishing and editorial side at DC, like Jenette Kahn, Dick Giordano, and Karen Berger. We flourished in a culture where risk-taking women with taste were in charge—including Marvel editors such as Bernie Jaye, who worked with Alan Moore on the Captain Britain strip, and Sheila Cranna, who edited some of my own early work for hire on Doctor Who monthly. Most important for me, we were encouraged to be shocking and different.

  Our arrival came at a time when the business practices of the comics industry were changing for the better, and in favor of the creative people for the first time since it all began with Superman. We were the first generation who could expect regular, lucrative royalties for our work and to see what had been ephemera validated in enduring hardcover bookstore collections. Karen Berger’s Vertigo imprint was introduced and developed as a “mature readers” niche outside the “all-ages” DC universe. The Vertigo deal allowed creators to own a percentage of their own new creations and to profit from their exploitation in ways that Siegel and Shuster or Jack Kirby could never have dreamed of.

  We arrived, most of us from the British Isles, from Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales, dreaming of an escape from the dour drizzle of seventies Britain, the paranoid, war-haunted epic of the Thatcher years. America was jet cars and spacemen and film stars, and America wanted us. America’s superheroes welcomed us and lay back while we took our scalpels to their sagging, exhausted bodies. We provided a lifesaving transfusion of nihilistic humor and wild invention, and restored a deadly serious, poetic narrative style that could veer effortlessly between the nightmare excesses of the grammar school prodigy and the genuine brevity and insight of those pop lyricists and Beat poets beloved by so many of the British New Wave. We dragged superhero comics out of the hands of archivists and sweaty fan boys and into the salons of hipsters. In our hands, the arrogant scientific champions of the Silver Age would be brought to account in a world of shifting realpolitik and imperial expansionist aggression.

  The relationship of Britons to the figure of the US superhero came with a great deal of antagonism. Many of us were out for revenge and powered by the insurrectionist energy of the seventeen-year-old, sneering and demanding. The critique was often barbed, and, in some cases, clearly intended to be fatal. We had US missiles on our soil, at Greenham Common and Faslane and the Holy Loch, and that made us a red-pin target flashing out the seconds of an unending Cold War cold-sweat stalemate. We had good reason to be suspicious of America’s power and influence, but there was the “special relationship” to consider and the fact that we’d grown up with best friends like Superman, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman guiding our youthful senses of justice and equality. Now here were the proud Americans handing us their dream children, like Romans in Britain delivering their gods into the hands of the Celts for a revamp. The gray skies over Britain split. The superheroes arrived to save the day, and when the cape was dangled, we grabbed hold and were lifted into the golden clouds above the lengthening dole queues. We became known as the British Invasion.

  It wasn’t just Brits who were testing their wings on the winds of progress: One of the first of the predatory fledglings was a young writer-artist from New Hampshire. Skinny, hunched, and furtive, angular as a jangle of coat hangers in a trench coat, he plunged on past territory cleared by McGregor and Doug Moench (another thoughtful, well-read, and assured writer whose collaboration with artist Paul Gulacy on a title created to cash in on the Bruce Lee craze, The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu, evolved into a delicate, literate, and perfectly composed fusion of cinematic techniques, zooms, interweaving inner monologues, and in-your-face symbolic content that only the comics page could safely contain) to uncover previously unsuspected vistas for exploration. His new adult superhero narrative drew as much from Jim Thompson, Sam Fuller, and Peckinpah as it did from O’Neil or Lee.

  His name was Frank Miller.

  CHAPTER 13

  READERS MAY BE familiar with Frank Miller as the man behind Sin City and 300, both of which began as acclaimed graphic novels before making the transition to the cinema screen. By 1985, he had established himself as the Boy Most Likely To in his field with a gripping, hard-boiled crime fiction take on Marvel’s Daredevil, which he followed with experimental work like the science fiction epic Ronin at DC—an attempt to fuse Japanese manga, the influence of the French comics artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud, and Jack Kirby. When the wunderkind announced that his next project would be a radical reinterpretation of Batman, fans held their breath and feared for their bladder control, such was the anticipation.

  Miller’s first marketing masterstroke was to completely undermine the popular image of Batman as a camp pantomime. Much of the initial power of The Dark Knight Returns was derived from its bold dance with expectations. With their poker-faced insistence that the ludicrous Batman was worthy of this expensive, lavish, and tastefully packaged artistic accomplishment, Miller and DC intended to provoke a spectacular collision of opposites. This was how comics for grown-ups might look, using the cherished characters of childhood as a hook to draw in readers. Here was genuine American Pop Art. It was a masterpiece capable of reaching back into the mainstream, past the newsstands and onto the shelves of legitimate bookstores.

  The Dark Knight Returns so confidently and aggressively rebranded the Batman story as a violent operatic myth of eighties America—as much a definitive product of its times as Wall Street or American Psycho—that its influence became all-pervasive for decades, even bleeding into the style and tone of animated cartoons for children. The Dark Knight Returns portrayed the rise and fall and rise of a titan with a towering, nuanced portrayal of Bruce Wayne/Batman that was closer in spirit to Charles Foster Kane or Don Corleone than Bob Kane’s wooden original. Miller’s Wayne embodied the self-made American: ascendant, free, and accountable to no authority, yet haunted by guilt. In Miller’s assured hands, the superrich capitalist Übermensch Batman turned his wrath against the corrupt and ossified power structures of a near-future America still run by an ancient Ronald Reagan, still under the protection of a true-blue Republican Superman. From the gutters of savage street crime to the fetid corridors of power, Miller’s vengeful juggernaut Batman came complete with a Clint Eastwood sneer as he threatened pimps, kidnappers, neo-Nazis, and policemen alike with various kinds of beatings and/or permanent physical injury. He battled against steroid-enhanced monsters, muggers, armed soldiers, the Joker, and Superman with the same bloody-minded determination. In the fifty years since his creation, Batman had become a friend of law and order, but Miller restored his outlaw status to thrilling effect. A Batman wanted by crooks and cops alike made for a much more
interesting protagonist, as director Christopher Nolan understood when he ended his 2008 film The Dark Knight with the same tension-fraught scenario.

  Miller cut his narrative lean to the bone. Going beyond cinema technique to appropriate the rapid percussive editing of music videos, he crushed the ponderous narrative captions of the seventies down into hard-boiled nuggets:

  “SOMETHING EXPLODES IN MY MIDSECTION—SUNLIGHT BEHIND MY EYES AS THE PAIN RISES—RIBS INTACT—NO INTERNAL BLEEDING—”

  Frank Miller brought the Dark Age style into line with a newly confident right-leaning America. His monumental Batman was no bleeding-heart liberal but a rugged libertarian. Miller’s captions were staccato bullet bursts of hard-boiled grit. Compared to the florid poesy and hand-to-brow torment of McGregor, Miller’s writing was direct and unpretentious.

  (illustration credit 13.1)

  The first issue of The Dark Knight Returns was released in the new “prestige” format, with card covers and spine. Even the jacket illustration looked as if it belonged on a paperback novel, owing nothing to the frantic, brightly colored, and trashy graphic overload of a typical superhero comic in the 1980s.

  The cover showed a small Batman silhouette leaping down from the top-left corner across a blue background split by a single lightning bolt (of course). No flashy carnival logo, just a simple modern Deco sans-serif font with the title and the DC bullet in almost transparent white against the central elemental flare. Batman himself was reduced to a hieroglyph, a blank sign, with no detail of his costume visible. The ears and scalloped cape were enough. What was important was the megawattage, the lightning crack, with its promise of explosive energy and rejuvenation.

  To ensure that the story inside was as radically different and as sophisticated as the jacket, writer-artist Miller had developed a whole battery of new tricks with layout, pacing, and narration that seemed to utterly dismantle and rebuild the form. Although written and penciled by Miller alone, the series was inked by Klaus Janson and colored by Miller’s then wife, Lynn Varley, who replaced the traditional rainbow palette with somber blues, naturalistic grays, washed-out yellows, and shades of brown that perfectly evoked a dirty, crime-ridden city in high summer and inspired the look of every “dark” superhero and fantasy film of the early twenty-first century, from The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Twilight.