How the fuck would I get out of this one?
As it happened, as in the best serials, it was some kind of dumb luck that saved me. The day after Jesus popped by, something odd occurred. My sister was in London, and her boyfriend Gordon was on his way down for a visit. He’d just missed catching up with my mum, who’d been looking in on me, with increasing apprehension. She’d correctly diagnosed my appendicitis when I was twelve and now she was sure that the doctor’s flu remedy was not what my damaged lungs really needed. She made it to her living room, looked out the window, and saw Gordon at the crossroads hailing a cab to take him to the station. She willed him to turn around, as she tells it, and he did.
Gordon came upstairs to collect a bundle of clothes for my sis. Mum told him about me, and he promised to mention it to his mate Graham, who had a good local doctor, apparently, a GP whose own bohemian temperament led him to specialize in the treatment of football stars, musicians, and artists.
When he got to London, Gordon was as good as his word. Graham immediately called his miracle doc, who agreed to visit me on short notice. To my shame, I’m not sure that I would have acted so promptly (or at all) in the same circumstances. Graham didn’t know me. He was five hundred miles away and had no idea how seriously ill I was.
The doctor checked my temperature and listened to my chest with growing alarm before contacting the hospital. I felt safe at last, as if a true guardian angel had arrived to rescue me from the mire of disease where I could no longer function. There were no beds at the Tropical Diseases Ward (my travel history made this the obvious first port of call), but with so many coincidences already flying around, another one was attracted to all the commotion: It just so happened that the receptionist had gone out with the doctor’s friend. Charm and nepotism swung me a room. Within hours, I was in a private ward in Glasgow’s Ruchill Hospital with a drip in my arm, while frantic doctors held me down as if I were devil possessed. They had to get the needle in when the tremors were at their most intense, so I lay shuddering, freezing, barely able to breathe as my arm was secured and blood drawn.
I was quickly and efficiently diagnosed with a tempestuous Staphylococcus aureus infection that had settled in my lungs, collapsing one of them. I was septicemic and severely lacking in natural salts and minerals, but the good doctors pulled me back.
Two days later, I had a painful tube in my arm, the vein was hard as wood, but I was alive, and I could feel the venom of the scorpion loa succumbing to the mighty medicine of antibiotics.
Staph aureus, or golden staph, derives its distinctive color from carotene, and when the bugs had been flushed from my system, I succumbed to an epic lust for raw carrots that could be satisfied only by a daily three-pound bag from the greengrocer. Depleted, I had to consume my weight in the power elixir, the golden superfood.
Not even the junkies outside the window prowling the hospital grounds for used or discarded needles could intrude on my sense of having been rescued from the brink. I settled back to recuperate, imagining ocean sets, distant beaches, and health.
I counted the days between episodes of Father Ted and Fist of Fun, enduring a battery of painful tests to discover if the staph infection had spread to my heart, and reading comic books my friend Jim brought me from the Forbidden Planet store he owns on Buchanan Street. It was one of a growing chain of pop culture emporia that rewrote the comic shop idea for the High Street consumer. For a few days, there was even an AIDS scare, followed by a test and then the obvious relief.
My dad visited every night and told me stories from the war, his presence a calm rock. He insisted that he was trying to bore me to sleep, but it never worked that way. I could have listened to him all night.
While the doctors got on with their work, I also decided to take matters into my own hands and elected to treat the living bacteria inside me as totem animals. If, I speculated, they had a physical existence and purpose, surely they could be endowed with a mythic or magical intent by a human intelligence. In the wee small hours, with the alcoholic night nurse on duty, I spoke to the germs and promised them a starring role as the baddies in my current magnum opus, The Invisibles, if they left me alone. This, I explained to them, would give them a far longer life and greater symbolic significance than any mere physical overthrow of my body could offer. I gave Staph aureus the chance to become fiction. It was a good deal, and they seemed to go for it.
As I waited nervously for test results, I wrote King Mob’s recovery into The Invisibles, spelling myself out of my own predicament by restoring the fiction suit to full health. If he could survive this and be stronger, so, naturally, would I. I’d made a magical model of the world, and by tweaking the model, I could seem to be able to effect actual changes in the real world.
(illustration credit 18.1)
I came home, a stone and a half lighter, and promptly shaved my head for good. I wrote the final issue of Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery shortly afterward on a balcony in Portugal, as the sun set, three years after writing the first one. The cover showed the hero falling through space in a scattered collage where dozens of tiny square images like Polaroid photos spilled, strobing and almost animated. Entitled “We Are All UFOs,” it was my look ahead to the superheroes of the coming Renaissance, pouring down out of the sky in their hundreds on the final page.
My girlfriend sat in the room behind me, working on an online counterculture magazine. Suspicion, boredom, lack of commitment—our long-distance relationship couldn’t take another aimless year, but it broke my flowery atomic heart when she sent me the letter that ended it all. I’d never been dumped before, and it really was about time. Now I had some idea of how Judy must have felt.
All of it went into the comics. Every breakthrough, every breakdown, became art and dollars. My diary had become my story.
The dark tunnel of the breakup year opened into sunshine when my beloved ginger cat Vinegar Tom, who’d appeared on the cover of Animal Man no. 26, developed a bone growth on his chin. Cancer was the immediate diagnosis, and other suspect lumps were found in his stomach. The cats were my constant companions and a powerful lifeline to responsibility. I saw them as beloved familiars who’d been with me faithfully since the beginning of my career. Although I loved them all, Tom had a special place in my heart—a tiny rescue runt who’d grown up cool, confident, and friendly. I wasn’t prepared to let him go without trying every angle, so I revisited the Spiritualist Church to ask them if they knew of anyone who specialized in healing animals.
I left my number, and a very nice, very normal Glasgow woman named Lettie Moodie called the next evening with the news that it was all down to me to heal my cat. Her spirit guides were very clear about that, and she felt sure that I’d been chosen as a healer. She outlined the basic Spiritualist healing method for me, and I went home to give it a try, feeling slightly bitter that the whole thing had been left in my hands but willing to follow it through. I held my hand over a photograph of Tom and fervently asked the “healers and helpers on the Other Side” to work their magic through me. My diary records—and I’ll still swear to this day—that I saw foggy white mist around my fingertips that came with a surge of emotion that brought tears to my eyes. The next day, I took my scrawny pal in a taxi from the vet surgery to the vet school, where a biopsy was expected to reveal cancer. I tried the technique again in the taxi and was again overwhelmed by tidal surges of love that seemed to be channeled directly into Tom’s basket.
When the biopsy results came in, he was fine. There was, inexplicably, no trace of the alleged cancerous lumps in his stomach, and the bone growth in his jaw was benign.
I carried him home in his basket through the burnt-out winter afternoon, overjoyed. More than overjoyed, I was buzzing on some kind of euphoric frequency, like a guitar still ringing on its stand after being played by a genius. I experienced what I assumed to be inflation, in the psychological sense; I was filled to bursting with radiance, in touch, alive, and happy. I was sparking and streaming with an immen
se messianic sunshine energy. I woke up every day feeling like I’d necked two tabs of E, except this was a prolonged, unprecedented, and wholly natural high-altitude state of consciousness with no grungy comedown.
After passing on the healing technique to Jill Thompson, who also used it successfully on her own cat, I felt ready to embark on a new career as a savior of pets, just as Mrs. Moodie had predicted for me. But no one ever asked me to try again, and my belief in my own access to these powers faded when I was unable to prevent Tom’s sweet-natured tortoise-shell sister B.B. from dying of kidney failure a year later.
After a year that was the longest I’d spent on my own since the teenage wasteland days, I was eager to join civilization. I’d taken up swimming to go with the weight training, martial arts, and yoga classes once a week. I ate only the best food, stir-fried in first-cold-pressing virgin olive oil. I wore PVC jackets and Frankensteinian Bunker boots, and I’d even become so slim during my illness that I could fit back into the ultranarrow snakeskin pattern ladies’ shirts I’d worn in the band when I was nineteen. I’d seen beyond the last fading glow of irresponsible rave-era hedonism to the New Dark that was coming. I could almost smell the approach of The Matrix. I felt like a prophet.
I looked in the mirror, and there was King Mob grinning back. My life and his fed together in a stranger loop: Where at first I’d followed his steps, now he was following me, relying on my biography to breathe life into his backstory. Space-age bachelor pad music and the latest CDs from Paris and Tokyo DJs played in my house of magic, swirling lights, and designer chairs. The band was back together, making music and making one another laugh. I had become invisible. I was King Mob, International Man of Mystery, the James Bond of the counterculture, hanging out with sleek girls in vinyl, backstage with indie bands, footloose. My world and his drawn universe had blurred at the edges, and blended together, and now that the whole death-and-rebirth thing was safely out of the way, I was really able to enjoy myself.
It seemed as though anything was possible. Money was flowing, and nothing was too odd or out of bounds to be tried. I wrote the kind of girls I wanted to meet into The Invisibles, and they’d turn up a few weeks later to defy all my expectations. Using sympathetic magic to attract partners has unexpected and often unpleasant consequences, but I felt it was my duty to experiment with this hypersigil I’d built; it had brought me to death’s door, I wanted to see what it could do that was more positive and life enhancing.
For a few years, the lovely things of the world synchronized into place all around me like fish in a shiny shoal. The world seemed made just for my tastes because I was writing it that way, somehow making it happen, like a cave painter drawing the hunt, or a god, or a wheel, and making it happen.
The King Mob experiment came to a close in 2000 with the concluding issue of The Invisibles, by which time I was more than ready to “kill Ziggy,” as David Bowie had once put it. It felt like some extended art installation was finally over. I could get up off the gallery floor and go home for my tea.
CHAPTER 19
FLEX MENTALLO MADE me think about new ways of writing American superhero stories that didn’t rely on British cynicism and self-conscious cool. The fourth issue of Flex hinted at the age beyond the Dark period. The signs were good. The new comics would be populated by relaxed, unashamed, confident superheroes, purged of Dark Age neuroses. There was also the small matter of my bank account. The money in comic books was in superhero comic books, and if I hoped to sustain the lifestyle to which I’d become accustomed, they were the future.
Still, I was single, newly confident, and wealthy. I was a globe-trotting freelance writer who specialized in a kind of neosurrealism that allowed me to get away with pretty much anything. I already had an articulate, enthusiastic readership, and I wanted to reach the widest possible audience, while avoiding the absurd arbitrary rewrites and malign editorial interference that often characterized my contacts with other media. Even in a bust period, comics could still be a lucrative and self-expressive business if you knew how to keep ahead of the trends.
I’d written the celebrity superhero, the outsider hero, and the freak team. I’d mined childhood nightmares and adolescent lonely nights. I was writing The Invisibles, which satisfied my desire to create the kind of progressive highbrow action-philosophy sex comics I loved most, and I wanted to remind prospective employers that I could still do something more mainstream. I wanted to do intelligent superhero comics that didn’t rely on sexualizing cartoons, excessive violence, or nihilistic gloom. It felt like time to plunge the desiccated, overanalyzed superheroes back into the molten four-color tar pit where they could stew for a while in their own incandescent juices and reclaim their collective mojo. I drew inspiration from the cosmic comics I’d loved as a teenager and determined to write for an imagined demographic of bright and inquisitive fourteen-year-olds.
I’d heard that the sidekick comic Teen Titans was about to become available at DC. The book had grown in popularity to rival X-Men in the eighties, only to sink back into a post-Watchmen oblivion with sales figures that were slowly settling into the sediment at the lower end of the charts. I made a pitch for it, convinced that I could use Teen Titans as a vehicle for my new way forward—only to find out it had already been assigned to another creative team. However, my desire to explore the DC universe came to the attention of another editor who was by sheer coincidence looking to revitalize the ailing Justice League title.
The Justice League of America had been assembled in 1960 to feature all of DC’s best and most popular superheroes in epic battles against foes that no single superhero, not even Superman, could hope to face alone. By 1995, the epic battle was against reader apathy, and in response DC had marshaled a team of Z-list heroes so defiantly useless that they often wasted entire issues doing nothing but eating and going to the toilet. This book seemed to be aimed at an audience embarrassed by superheroes who wouldn’t be buying it anyway, leaving a regular readership of somewhere around twenty thousand a month. The last time the once mighty Justice League title had dominated the bestseller charts was in the eighties. That league had been played as a witty soap opera, filled with dysfunctional, bickering superheroes. But it could easily switch gears to reflect cosmic horror and deadly seriousness, which kept its twists fresh and unanticipated. Its cowriter with Keith Giffen was J. M. DeMatteis, a smart and literate Brooklynite who nursed a mean streak but was also a devotee of Indian mystic Meher Baba. His dialogue played a dense and relentless sitcom call-and-response game that often obscured the artwork, and alternated between exhilarating and exhausting in the space of a few pages. It didn’t take long before the emphasis on humor caused the Justice League books to devolve into a series of increasingly unfunny, played-out shticks that snapped along like a slick, self-satisfied television hit on its final season prior to cancellation.
By 1994, the year Jack Kirby died of a heart attack, the book was crawling on all fours with kryptonite around its neck, and in spite of writer Christopher Priest’s best efforts, the characters were creepy preforgotten no-hopers with names like Mystek and Bloodwynd. (And, no, it’s not just you: He does appear to have based his superidentity on some alarming rectal trauma.) DC’s flagship had simply lost its way, as the cataclysmic drop in sales confirmed. The Justice League title had been created to showcase the incredible adventures of the World’s Greatest Superheroes, so, as with Doom Patrol, I did the straightforward thing and went back to first principles. But this time I couldn’t get away with my own creations or characters based on my madcap, sometimes troubled, Bohemian friends. This time I was working with DC Comics’ biggest and longest-running franchise characters, with faces on lunch boxes and duvet covers.
The 1960 Justice League comprised Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Lantern, and Flash, a pantheon of Pop Art divinities. Together with the 1950s stalwart, the green-skinned and noble superalien J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, this was the roster of champions to which I immediately re
turned.
I had to fight to restore this original lineup and then put them front and center in a superhero title that sought to restore a mythic dimension to the DC universe. My quite reasonable demands were supported by my editor Ruben Diaz, a human fusillade of passion and positivity who teamed me with artist Howard Porter and the best inker in comics at the time, John Dell, whose thick, creamy black line could render incredible focal depth and create an illusion of 3-D. Porter combined the stocky solidity of the Image artists with a snarling gigantism that came from Jack Kirby and was well suited to tales of contemporary gods. Ruben even fought for us to bring Batman into the team against the wishes of Denny O’Neil, now in charge of the Bat-office and determined to make the Dark Knight’s adventures as real and convincing as possible. This meant no fighting aliens or visiting the moon. Diaz kept his creative team safe from the madness and made sure that we could do exactly what we wanted, and JLA no. 1 hit the racks as an instant success story.
There would be no obtrusive postmodern meta-tricks in JLA, just unadulterated, gee-whiz, unadorned sci-fi myths in comic form, giving back to the superheroes the respect and dignity a decade of “realism” and harsh critique had stripped away. We awarded the team a modern Mount Olympus in the form of the new “Watchtower” on the moon, Earth’s first line of defense against invasions from beyond. What’s more, we added a few new members to adhere more closely to the lineup of Greek gods: Superman was Zeus; Wonder Woman, Hera; Batman, Hades; the Flash, Hermes; Green Lantern, Apollo; Aquaman, Neptune; Plastic Man, Dionysus; and so on.
The wounded, sneering reject heroes of Doom Patrol had been easy for me to write, but the JLA crowbarred me into the mind-set of the traditional DC American superhero, where I had to bend my head to think on their level. It turned out to be powerful fun. By taking the characters and their world at face value, I hoped to show how the superheroes pointed to something great and inevitable in us all. We’ve always known we’d eventually be called upon to open our shirts and save the day, and the superhero was a crude, hopeful attempt to talk about how we all might feel on that day of great power, and great responsibility.
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