Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  I carefully constructed adventures to allow the JLA to display its powers in clever combinations, and I was happy to draw inspiration from time-honored tales: for instance, JLA no. 5’s story about two mad scientists competing to create an artificial woman so complex that she developed a soul and betrayed them both was derived from “Blodeuwedd,” the eleventh-century Mabinogion tale of the sorcerers Math and Gwydion, who created a woman out of flowers to deceive and destroy the Welsh mythic superhero Lleu Llaw Gyffes. Set free from the leaden constraints of realism, JLA allowed me to perfect my own glowing, buzzing mutant strain of the superhero germ. If Weisinger represented Freud, it was about time for some Jung comics, I reasoned.

  It occurred to me that these characters, representing as they do specific human personality defaults, could function in a wider therapeutic context. The JLA were designed to solve any problem. Together there was no challenge, no matter how monumental or frightening, how unutterably nihilistic or ridiculous, that they could not overcome. In the realm of symbol, these, our imagined superselves, were indestructible. No god or devil could beat Superman and his pals in a fight. Ever. No heaven or hell could restrain them. Knock them down, blow them up, freeze them, lose them in time, brainwash them—and they came back stronger. So many ideas—fascism, pantisocracy, the mullet—fall apart under scrutiny, but the superhero meme refuses to die. Few flesh-and-blood heroes can stand up to the corroding effects of public scrutiny or simple age, but Superman, Batman, and their kin were conceived, designed, and unleashed to be unstoppable warriors on behalf of the best that the human spirit has to offer.

  “ARE WE DOING TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE?” Wonder Woman asked, cradling a dying bird in a dust-bowl landscape. “WHEN DOES INTERVENTION BECOME DOMINATION?”

  “I CAN ONLY TELL YOU WHAT I BELIEVE, DIANA,” Superman replied. “HUMANKIND HAS TO BE ALLOWED TO CLIMB TO ITS OWN DESTINY. WE CAN’T CARRY THEM THERE.”

  Then the Flash countered with: “BUT THAT’S WHAT SHE’S SAYING. WHAT’S THE POINT? WHY SHOULD THEY NEED US AT ALL?”

  “TO CATCH THEM IF THEY FALL,” said Superman, gazing nobly at the sky. Issue no. 1 of the relaunched Justice League of America in 1987 had depicted its characters from an overhead perspective, giving the reader an elevated position that allowed us to look down on a newly humanized and relatable group of individuals.

  At my request, Howard Porter drew our first cover shot of the JLA from below, endowing them with the majesty of towering statues on Mount Olympus, putting readers at the level of children gazing up at adults. JLA was a superhero title kids could read to feel grown-up and adults could read to feel young again.

  I asked Howard to open the book with an image that I felt summed up its themes, of a vast flying saucer hovering above the White House. Quite independently, the same image appeared on the promo for Roland Emmerich’s 1996 alien invasion film Independence Day, advertised, coincidentally, on the back cover of JLA no. 1.

  We launched that same year. Sales went immediately from 20,000 to 120,000, and JLA stayed as DC’s top-selling book for the rest of the decade. I had a genuine mainstream comic-book hit on my hands.

  Readers responded to the optimism of the book, as I suspected they might. We’d seen superheroes sobbing and rending their capes in anguish, and it wasn’t really what they did best. It was time to watch them wrestling with angels and tugging worlds on chains.

  It was time they got their act together and gave us something to live up to.

  It’s not so much that history is simply cyclical, it seems to progress via recursive, repeated fractal patterns with minute variations. Early Renaissance comics’ vogue for pastiche and the knowing reappropriation of kitsch objects to serve a deadly ironic purpose went hand in hand with the aesthetic of artist Jeff Koons, the young British artists, and writers like Mark (Et Tu, Babe) Leyner.

  Like the reassembling liquid robot Terminator, the superhero concept had endured and survived total disintegration. Now that we truly understood the engine and how it ran, there was nothing left to do but reconnect the pieces to make something faster and better.

  A new question would soon emerge: Was the superhero truly a Man of Tomorrow—a progressive image of futurity—or a nostalgic fantasy with nothing to offer beyond a sad, tired muscle show?

  I’d been visiting my Doom Patrol editor Mark Waid’s office on the day he was fired by Karen Berger for allowing a particularly tasteless joke to slip into the background of one of his comics. It seemed excessive, but Waid’s career was one of pivotal moments. Mark came across as an almost stereotypical owlish geek from Birmingham, Alabama. He could have been Jupiter Jones of the Three Investigators grown up. At his best, he brought to his work a burning, compassionate humanity, a literate voice, an edgy humor honed in stand-up, and an honest sense of justice that helped define the Renaissance superhero, born of Waid’s humility, fierce intelligence, and a childhood spent, like so many of us, osmosing Superman’s moral code.

  Now, six years later, he’d returned to DC as a writer, bent on restoring a sense of joyous, inventive acceleration to the adventures of the Flash. His stories were never less than ingenious, with old-school heart-stopping climaxes, genuine romance, and a dozen never-before-seen tricks every issue. They were the grown-up inheritors of the Julius Schwartz tradition, heartfelt bulletins from a southern geek with the steel-trap mind of a lawyer and the faraway eyes of a Silver Age boyhood never quite outgrown. Superheroes had been Waid’s best friends, and there was no way he would allow them to become grizzled antiheroes, reduced to snapping spines or endlessly justifying themselves. He gave Wally West, the onetime kid Flash, a piece of his own soul that turned a B-list sidekick into a rounded, sympathetic young protagonist you could root for easily. As the Flash had rescued superhero comics from the dead darkness of the fifties, he was here again to jump-start a new age of recapitulation, restoration, and Renaissance.

  (illustration credit 19.1)

  Waid’s defining nineties blockbuster was Kingdom Come, an epochal, stress-filled collaboration with Alex Ross, the artistic sensation of the decade who had just completed Marvels. Ross was a staunch Silver Age traditionalist, and in spite of his early attempts to create an unhinged public persona—wild hair, shaggy beard, bulging eyes—he was a minister’s son at heart with a ferocious discipline that showed itself in an attention to detail that forced his readers to slow down and reach for their scanning tunneling microscopes just to catch every carefully considered, meaningfully placed item of minutiae. Ross cast models, built props, and created costumes for his comics, posing his friends as Spider-Man or the Human Torch to create images that went beyond merely naturalistic into realms of the superreal. Closer contact with the undying heroes of Marvel and DC brought out the real Ross, who began to appear with neatly clipped hair as a star at conventions, dressed in a Clark Kent fedora, trench coat, and suit combination that suited his tall Baptist frame.

  The Silver Age hero redux could assume a new guise as guardian of vanishing values. The superheroes as conformists had returned. They were representatives of a dream, a fantasy, that was losing more and more ground as each day passed without a manned mission to Mars, and now they knew it.

  Ross’s lush watercolors were the nearest that comics had come to film stills. His breakthrough project, with writer Kurt Busiek, was entitled Marvels and offered street-level, worm’s-eye images of a towering Giant Man stepping almost delicately across the tops of skyscrapers overhead, which became instantly iconic and put familiar characters at a remove that paradoxically reconnected readers to the wonder, the marvel of these creations. First contact with an Alex Ross painting was genuinely astounding, as if someone had found a way to broadcast color TV from a real Marvel universe spinning somewhere in hypertime. The first pictures showed well-known superheroes as they might actually look from a human POV—suddenly, mind-bogglingly given the blurred veracity of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. The Marvel way had always been to drag the reader into the heart of the action, but decades of
repetitive poses and setups had given the old meaty punch-ups a groaning familiarity that was taken for granted until Ross reminded readers how it was supposed to feel. He composed superhuman struggles not in the Kirby manner but as distant flashes in the sky, with tiny green figures facing towering tidal waves. Ross showed superheroes the way ordinary people might see them—briefly, and in all their strangeness—as meteoric streaks, distant explosions, and rainbows. Everything was lit for mood, and for the first time, the reflections across the Silver Surfer’s chrome face and body were convincingly re-created, showing accurately distorted cityscapes. Or, for added excitement, an oncoming Human Torch.

  Kurt Busiek, too, described the Marvel heroes as if we’d never seen them before, as here, when a character named Phil Sheldon encounters the first of them, the android Human Torch from 1940:

  “IT LOOKED ALIVE—AS HUMAN AS YOU OR I—BUT IT WAS ON FIRE. AND I SWEAR—IT LOOKED STRAIGHT AT ME.”

  Or here, summing up the glory days of Marvel over sunlit shots of old-school Thor and Iron Man drawn as if from life.

  “IT WAS LIFE OR DEATH—IT WAS GRAND OPERA—IT WAS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH—AND WE—EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US—WE HAD THE BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE.”

  The lead in Marvels was a typical Busiek witness to wonder: an ordinary Joe named Phil Sheldon, a Daily Bugle press photographer who’d been on hand to capture with his camera all the significant moments of Marvel’s fictional history—from the elemental wars between the Human Torch and Prince Namor in the 1940s, to the discovery of Captain America frozen in Antarctic ice, to the arrival of Galactus and the death of Gwen Stacy at the hands of the Green Goblin at the beginning of the seventies. As his photo album grew, we experienced Sheldon’s own life with his family across three tumultuous decades, a conceit that played well to Ross’s great strengths.

  Marvels had been so stuffed with startling, paradigm-shifting images of familiar characters that readers were eager to see what Ross could do with the DC lineup next. They didn’t have long to wait. Ross had a driving work ethic, an all-consuming devotion to intricacy and tradition. By creating images that made it possible to believe in the reality of flying, burning men, Ross was perfect for a generation losing its strength to dream. Crude sketchy drawings would no longer cut it. Image Comics cartooning was out, and literalism had returned.

  And in the manner of conquerors recasting the old gods as new devils, many of the early Renaissance-era books blamed the Image superhero for everything, especially the drastic plunge in sales that had all the usual pundits and pessimists predicting yet again the death of comics. So the villains of this period were caricatures of the savage, testosterone-driven heroes who’d slashed or gunned their way through the post-Watchmen story lines of a few years previously. This was the dynamic that informed Ross and Waid’s epic Kingdom Come.

  Kingdom Come was all a-trumpet with signs and portents from page 1, with a bold expressionistic painting showing a bat and an eagle at war in a symbolic sky. The opening captions only multiplied the sense of dread with Bible quotes that had been reliably terrifying the shit out of people for centuries:

  “THERE WERE VOICES … AND THUNDERINGS AND LIGHTNINGS … AND AN EARTHQUAKE …”

  Pages 2 and 3 offered a single ominous spread, upon which a terrible battle was already under way or over. Red lightning, green flame, a vast broken cup, and half-glimpsed, potent images of hands grasping Zeus-like bolts of electricity were the only clues to what might have occurred. It was elemental, doom laden, like a blind date with Saint John the Divine.

  “AND THERE FOLLOWED HAIL AND FIRE MINGLED WITH BLOOD. THERE FELL A GREAT STAR FROM HEAVEN BURNING AS IT WERE A LAMP … AND I BEHELD AND HEARD AN ANGEL … SAWING WITH A LOUD VOICE … WOE, WOE, WOE TO THE INHABITERS OF THE EARTH.”

  Opening with these, the doomsday prophecies of a dying Golden Age Sandman and set in the DC universe twenty years from now, Waid and Ross introduced us to the next-gen superhumans of Kingdom Come. They were cast as violent, unprincipled superhooligans, Image-style heroes who didn’t always care who got hurt in battles that left whole city blocks pulverized and, in issue no. 1’s inciting incident, obliterated the entire state of Kansas when Captain Atom got into trouble and went off like a bomb. The core premise was expressed on page 10 by Norman McCay, the troubled elderly minister who narrated the story from the perspective of an ordinary man bearing witness to the end of the age of superheroes and the transfiguration of history:

  ACCORDING TO THE WORD OF GOD, THE MEEK WOULD SOMEDAY INHERIT THE EARTH. SOMEDAY. BUT GOD NEVER ACCOUNTED FOR THE MIGHTY. THEY NUMBER IN THE NAMELESS THOUSANDS … PROGENY OF THE PAST, INSPIRED BY THE LEGENDS OF THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE … IF NOT THE MORALS. THEY NO LONGER FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT. THEY FIGHT SIMPLY TO FIGHT, THEIR ONLY FOES EACH OTHER. THE SUPERHUMANS BOAST THAT THEY’VE ALL BUT ELIMINATED THE SUPER-VILLAINS OF YESTERYEAR. COLD COMFORT. THEY MOVE FREELY THROUGH THE STREETS … THROUGH THE WORLD. THEY ARE CHALLENGED … BUT UNOPPOSED. THEY ARE AFTER ALL … OUR PROTECTORS.

  Older heroes, like a retired Superman, still clung to their no-killing creed in a world where murder and mayhem in the name of “good” was no contradiction, but the irradiation of Kansas brought back the Man of Steel with one last mission to bring this unruly horde under control. His decision split the superhero community down the middle, with one side supporting Superman’s and his new Justice League’s strict enforcement of law and order, and the others siding with Batman to resist the imposition of a superhuman global police state.

  As Waid deftly laid out the steps on the road to planetary catastrophe and beyond, Ross’s art came packed with new levels of detail and meaning. Everything was significant, even more so than in Marvels, which now seemed a mere warm-up for this tour de force. Every fraction of the background referenced some prior comics history, or introduced a new character concept or item of obscure trivia, like the glass case in the Planet Krypton restaurant containing in perfect miniature background detail, a photographic and shockingly convincing “Hero Dial” from a charming sixties wish-fulfillment strip entitled “Dial ‘H’ for Hero.” This was story as museum, with Ross preserving the trophies and totems of the Big Two Universe forever in one place, capturing in uncanny trompe l’oeil clarity the flotsam and jetsam of his childhood reading.

  The Alex Ross hero was both monumental and somehow vulnerable, poignantly mortal, as if Leni Riefenstahl had filmed her proud fascist athletes ten years after their Olympic triumphs of the will. Ross liked to show heroes with bald patches, paunches, and different types of physiques, and Kingdom Come offered a rare peek at DC’s middle age. He used models to give each of the famous heroes a distinctive and realistic face, but as his models aged, his superheroes too grew more solid around the middle, more jowly of jaw. For all their Wagnerian lighting and megalithic posturing, these images of slightly out-of-shape, ordinary-looking men and women in ridiculous costumes came closest to how superheroes might look in “real life,” and the results were oddly moving. It was often as if we’d been given the power to watch the face of the Mona Lisa sag with wrinkles and age. After the first shock of the new, some felt that Ross brought realism at the cost of wonder. Did we really need to see out-of-shape superheroes with comb-overs? Perhaps. Kingdom Come showed that superhero comics could be unobtrusively “meta” with their combination of adventure, political satire, and cultural commentary.

  Kingdom Come climaxed with an operatic Superman–Captain Marvel fight, the outcome of which reduced 90 percent of the world’s superhuman population to skeletons and ash. Relinquishing his red and blue suit for the last time, an older and wiser Superman put his Clark Kent glasses back on and returned to his farming roots as a superfarmer dedicated to the restoration of the glowing Kansas wheat fields. The story ended with him and Wonder Woman announcing her pregnancy, while an aging Batman agreed to be the child’s godfather—all in plainclothes. It was a farewell not to superheroes but to costumes and to posturing, and to the never-ending Dreamtime that recycled their stories with no h
ope of lasting change. Clark Kent, Diana Prince, and Bruce Wayne were set free of their trademarks, the signs of their divinity, but the price they paid was immortality. Perhaps, like Bowie’s tormented gods in his song “The Supermen,” all they really wanted was to change, and age, and die.

  By the end of the nineties, I felt weary. My approach to JLA, which I’d imagined to be progressive, had instigated a wave of nostalgic “Dad comics,” as I came to call them, that thrillingly fought to turn back the tide to the days of Julius Schwartz or Roy Thomas. A cloying yearning for the “fun” and moral simplicity of the Silver Age was rife.

  In film and in music, James Bond and Oasis, respectively, were industriously ransacking memories of the sixties too. This was what happened when a generation of punks reached middle age, grabbed the reins of culture, and remade it in the rosy, glowing likeness of childhood. Pamela Anderson, a collagen- and silicon-implanted improvement on the Bardot look for the plastic age, personified the new supergirl android ideal. She was the “babe” goddess, the template for a fembot who was up for it with the lads emerged as a kind of ironic recapitulation of the sixties pinup girl: tousled, intoxicated, and up for anything. It was cool to admit that you liked pornography and football and dirty jokes, even when you didn’t. It was normal. In fact, it was almost compulsory, especially if you were a girl. The homophobia, racism, and sexism of the seventies male was reinstated with a tongue-in-cheek distance.