Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  In the end, old-school Captain America won the fight but gave up in disgust and turned himself in.

  When the mother of one of the Stamford victims was drawn in the final page scene so that her eye line all but challenged the viewer directly, it was hard not to feel the tension of the satiric venom coiled in every line:

  “YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, TONY STARK. YOU RISKED EVERYTHING TO GET US TO THIS PLACE, BUT I TRULY BELIEVE YOU’VE GIVEN PEOPLE HEROES WE CAN BELIEVE IN AGAIN.”

  A haunted, conflicted Tony Stark inherited a nation’s burden of pain and self-recrimination with a wry glint and a patronizing assurance that rang hollow. The final affectless image of the book showed two tiny anonymous silhouettes in an observation blister beneath the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier as the sun went down dutifully:

  “OR, THE BEST IS YET TO COME SWEETHEART … THAT’S A PROMISE.”

  Shortly afterward, Cap, that now impotent symbol of twentieth-century US frontier spirit, was shot, assassinated on the stone stairs of history like John, Bobby, Martin, and Bonny Jock Lennon. In 2007 Captain America vol. 5, no. 25 was Steve Rogers’s last tour of duty—until his inevitable return, better than ever, with a new costume and a new role as world cop in 2010’s Steve Rogers: Super Soldier.

  Another result of 9/11 meant that the wanton destruction of fictional representations of real cities that had made The Authority so much fun was no longer acceptable. Stories had to stay with the survivors, examine the repercussions, and treat formerly gratuitous scenes of carnage with some sensitivity.

  The return of realism was under way, a change that, as I hope to have convinced readers by now, can be seen to be purely seasonal and predictable. A generation of writers who’d come of age reading Alan Moore in the 1980s began combing the headlines for material. The fear of a sinister military-industrial underworld that haunted Moore’s Marvelman was inverted to become a joyous embrace of Republican America’s undeniable access to the best guns, the best soldiers, and the best superheroes in the world. For Mark Millar, it was a given that any real-world superhero would be co-opted by the powers that be and recruited as a soldier. The Moore-Miller Superman of the eighties, that helpless, unreconstructed tool of the ruling class, became the template for a new generation of reengineered characters. In The Ultimates, everyone worked for the government, but it was all cool. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, superheroes strove to preserve and embody the values of a defiant military-industrial corporate complex or they didn’t work at all. The brief era of The Authority had passed and left the “bastards” in charge as usual.

  Stories had to be about “real” things. As a result, more and more Marvel comics, including some of my own, had scenes set in the Middle East or on board hijacked aircraft. The emphasis veered away from escapist cosmic fantasy, nostalgia, and surrealism toward social critique, satire, and filmic vérité wrapped in the flag of shameless patriotism and the rise of the badass-motherfucker hero. The formal experimentation of the eighties and nineties had bred out a powerful strain of streamlined Hollywood-friendly product that came road tested and shorn of rough edges.

  In this decade, craft improved in immense, unprecedented leaps, but creativity could be lost. It was often far easier and much more lucrative to steal an established character idea and rename it than to make up a completely new one. Everyone strove to learn the rules of Hollywood screen-writing and apply them with due care and diligence to perfectly built stories, while the opportunities for mistakes, fortunate accidents, and self-indulgent experimentation had diminished almost to zero, except for some of us, the “superstars.” The last pirate art form had swapped its Jolly Roger for the Stars and Stripes once again, and this time it looked as if there was no turning back. Superheroes were big business as geek dreams became movies, TV, and games—and a license to print money until the ink ran out.

  New X-Men began life in my notebooks as a direct follow-on from the joyful utopianism of The Invisibles and the more militant futurism of Marvel Boy. It was a three-year stint on a set of popular characters, detailing the rise and fall of mutant culture by treating it like any other minority struggling toward recognition. I felt awkward and angular again in this new decade, and although I’m still proud of my work, New X-Men became more like a prison than a playground.

  I chose to cast the X-Men not as the victims “feared and hated” by a world that refused to understand them but as out-and-proud mutant representatives of the inevitable next stage of evolution. We hated them for the same reason we secretly hated our children: because they were here to replace us. The plot premise was that a newly discovered “extinction gene” was activated, dooming the human species to obliteration within several generations, and for the first time, the mutants were on the rise, poised to inherit the earth.

  I imagined mutant culture not as a single monolithic ideal or the warring ideologies of “evil mutants” and “good ones,” but as a spectrum of conflicting viewpoints, self-images, and ideas about the future. Artist Frank Quitely and I tried to imagine the emergence into our midst of a weird new culture, with mutant clothes designers creating six-armed shirts or invisible couture, mutant musicians releasing records that could by heard only on infra- or ultrasonic frequencies, art that used colors only mutant eyes could see. Instead of just a team, or even a tribe, we imagined a fully formed Homo superior society finally emerging into the light of emancipation. New X-Men would be about the dawning of a future with new music, new dreams, new ways to see and live. The Xavier Institute would be an outpost of tomorrow in the here and now, as well as a headquarters and a school. I thought I could use the comic to talk about the positive and negative aspects of geek culture hitting the mainstream.

  To undercut the confrontational paramilitarism that haunted previous portrayals, we chose to recast the X-Men themselves as a Gerry Anderson–style volunteer rescue and emergency task force, pledged to use their mutant powers to help both mutants and humans at a difficult time of transition. Then, shortly into the project, came the artistic reverberations of 9/11.

  The story became about the lengths to which people might go to annihilate their own children, the beautiful and strange new Midwich Cuckoos who had come to replace them, redecorate the walls, and move around all the furniture. Over its forty-issue run, New X-Men turned into a diary of my own growing distrust of a post-9/11 conformity culture that appeared to be in the process of greedily consuming the unusual and different.

  In “Riot at Xavier’s,” a mutant mash-up of personally formative narratives from If …, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and A Clockwork Orange, Quitely and I depicted nerds as fascist thugs, chugging back power-enhancing drugs that came in the form of asthma inhalers. It was the dark side of Spence’s imperial youth Stormer generation: sickly, vengeful, ignorant, and dully predictable in their demands.

  “Planet X,” my penultimate story arc, was a step too far for both me and long-term X-fans when I “ruined” Magneto (leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, as played in the movie versions by Sir Ian McKellen). The Master of Magnetism’s high standing in an organization unafraid to use the word Evil on its business cards notwithstanding, Chris Claremont had spent some considerable time developing the archvillain from his origins as a one-note terror merchant in 1963 to a sensitive romantic antihero. Claremont’s Magneto was a tragic, essentially noble survivor of the death camps, a man who had witnessed more than his fair share of sorrow and hardship and knew how to make hard choices. He had depth and dignity, so I turned him into a demented drug addict, unable to connect with a younger generation of mutants who wanted only his face on their Magneto Was Right T-shirts, like a latter-day Che Guevara.

  By this time, I was coming into regular conflict with Marvel’s new firebrand publisher Bill Jemas over the direction and execution of my stories. He’d been brought in to modernize along with Joe Quesada as EIC, and we’d all started out on the same page. But slowly I began to feel that Bill misunderstood the fashion aspect of mainstream hero books and thei
r need to constantly change with the times.

  The old war between groovy Marvel and stuffy Brand Echh intensified into playground name calling. Jemas expertly manipulated the Internet crowd, stirring up controversy to draw attention to his books. He referred publicly and disparagingly to “AOLComics” and called his DC rival Paul Levitz “Lol Pevitz” over and over in interviews and inflammatory press statements, as if repetition could eventually make it funny. Mark Millar, now embedded at Marvel and still smarting over the censorship of Authority, posted on his website a photograph of Levitz next to a passport shot of a then notorious Euro pedophile and asked browsers if they could tell the difference. Levitz, who had elected, in old-DC style, to play the role of gray-templed gentleman, resolutely ignored the ruffians hurling their excreta at his drawing room window, but quietly placed his tormentors on a DC blacklist. For a while, the new nastier, sleazier version of the old rivalry made Marvel seem even cooler. DC was Dad Comics, and Nu-Marvel stood for all kinds of awesome. It was working, too; Marvel sales were up, Spider-Man was huge in the cinemas, and the muttering specter of bankruptcy began to recede, bringing a new braggadocio to the geek squad.

  Since 2002, I’d been building up material for a potential new DC series entitled Seven Soldiers, and starring some of DC’s least popular characters. I wanted to do a huge “team” comic where none of the heroes actually met up with one another but still managed to save the world. I’d written entire issues on my own time, fueled by sheer enthusiasm and the need to escape—if just for a little while—the increasingly mundane Marvel universe of 2002. It was like water piling behind a dam, accumulating new ideas of a kind I would never be allowed to do under the rapidly solidifying regime at Marvel.

  Dan DiDio had been recruited as DC’s new vice president executive editor from the groundbreaking computer animated series ReBoot, which featured Brendan McCarthy production designs and sharp comic-book-style story arcs. Dan was the same age as I, but bearlike and gregarious, with a Brooklyn tenor I loved to imitate when he wasn’t around. I liked Dan immediately and appreciated the respect he was showing my work, after Bill Jemas’s growing disinterest.

  Dan asked me to come work for him immediately, offering to publish Seven Soldiers as well as a twelve-part Superman project with Jim Lee.

  I still had six miserable months of my Marvel contract to play out, which meant that I missed out on working with Lee, although the Superman project went ahead with Frank Quitely. I tried to keep my head down, with the minimum of fuss, rounding out my X-Men epic on a collaboration with superartist and media mogul Marc Silvestri, which kept the book at the top of the charts for the duration of the entire farewell arc.

  Somewhere near the end of those six months, Marvel decided to re-reboot the X-Men franchise by bringing back the familiar superhero costumes and stories that were a little more faithful to the canon. Toy manufacturers had decided they didn’t like the rugged municipal worker outfits with fluorescent X logos that Frank Quitely and I had come up with for the 2001 relaunch. Trad was back, and the future had been quietly canceled like a date we’d all realized we couldn’t actually afford.

  It was announced at a DC panel at the San Diego Comic-Con—the industry equivalent of writing it on the moon in hundred-mile-high letters—that I would be returning to the bosom of DC Comics to accept a lucrative exclusive contract and a position as “revamp guy” in charge of rebooting dormant DC concepts. My notebooks had impressed Dan enough to throw in that last clause. As notice was given, one attendee sprang up from his chair like a Ping-Pong ball fired across a crowded Bangkok nightclub and ran out of the room, all the way to the Marvel booth with his news.

  Somehow Kristan and I tried to convince ourselves that we could skip away from this declaration of hostilities without a backward glance. The one backward glance I did risk had a sinking, Orphean inevitability and revealed Joe Quesada charging toward us down the hall. We kept walking, slower now, preparing for the heavy hand on the shoulder.

  I felt bad. I liked Joe a lot and told him so, blaming his boss for any breakdown in my brief relationship with Marvel Comics. I felt bad, but more than that I was excited. The dam was about to burst. I couldn’t wait to leave the febrile soap opera theater of the X-Men behind. I couldn’t wait to show what was possible with a handful of barely sellable DC archive characters, including some of King Kirby’s own C-list like the Guardian and Klarion the Witch Boy. To make the challenge even more exhilarating, I’d make a point of working with new and unknown artists. Some of the first words I wrote were these, in the voice of the doomed narrator of the story cycle Seven Soldiers, comprising seven interlinked four-issue miniseries, which was the cornerstone of my return to DC:

  “I DON’T WANT TO TELL HIM YET THAT IT’S ALL BECAUSE THE HIGHS AREN’T HIGH ENOUGH ANY MORE. BECAUSE THE BUILDINGS I JUMP FROM JUST AREN’T TALL ENOUGH. BECAUSE I’VE TAKEN THIS WHOLE MORALLY AMBIGUOUS URBAN VIGILANTE THING ABOUT AS FAR AS I CAN. AND NOW, GOD HELP ME NOW I WANT TO VISIT OTHER PLANETS AND DIMENSIONS AND FIGHT ROGUE GODS.”

  It was, I suppose, what I’d tried to explain to Bill Jemas, but it took Marvel another seven years to finally agree with me and inaugurate what editorial called the “Heroic Age,” and by that time Bill had moved on.

  I became the first weapon in the exclusive wars that followed as DC and Marvel struggled to tie down the services of the best writers and artists in the field. The barriers were up and sales were down. New blood was discouraged along with experimentation.

  Screenwriters, tried-and-tested storytellers from a more glamorous medium, were the only strangers admitted into the comics field during this time of withdrawal and consolidation. They were fawned over like good-looking girls who’d finally noticed us and who might attract other better-looking girls to our shabby party or invite us home to join theirs. Unsurprisingly they didn’t write comics quite as well or with the same freewheeling abandon as the people who did it for a living, and few lingered beyond their first few unimpressive checks. (To make good money in comics, it was necessary to write an awful lot of pages every month.) Joss Whedon, the creator of the long-running Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, stuck at it longer than most, with an emotive, extended run on Astonishing X-Men. Allan Heinberg’s short but effervescent burst on 2006’s nineteen-millionth Wonder Woman revamp was another rare exception, but the writer, who’d worked on the youth drama The O.C., couldn’t stand the poisonous atmosphere of comics fandom and made a swift, quiet exit after a promising start, leaving the field once more to the diehards.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE BIG TREND in the superhero comics of the twenty-first century was for the dystopian scenario, played out not as a moment of defeat for the heroes but as a moment of triumph for the villains and their embodiment of easily understood human vices.

  The first comic-book bad guys were enemies of the workingman: the corrupt bosses, machine men, and domestic tyrants of the early Superman and Batman adventures, or hoodlums, street thugs, and bullies. The 1940s brought a parade of goose-stepping maniacs like the Red Skull, Captain Nazi, and Baron Gestapo, along with leering Japanese killers like Captain Nippon. The fifties dealt with the menace of communism in the form of space aliens or shadowy, unshaven secret policemen from grim Eastern European countries with names like Slobovia. Silver Age DC superheroes preserved the safety of the sunlit sidewalks of fifties suburbia against an onslaught of flamboyant bank robbers with gimmick weapons. It was rare for even the most diabolical of Silver Age supercrooks to kill anyone. These bad guys were antisocial schemers, slightly disturbed troublemakers constantly working to keep busy superhuman beings who would otherwise have no outlet for their show-offy superpowers and small ambitions. In the sixties, Marvel comics added a pro wrestling dimension to superheroes, having them fight one another, on the slightest pretext, with the same verve and enthusiasm they brought to their showdowns with Marvel’s stable of science fiends, space gods, and towering, mindless monsters.

  Criminals in the seventies were often k
illers, muggers, polluters, junkies, and deceivers of youth. On the other end of the spectrum, they were Ernst Stavro Blofeld types with their own two-hundred-bedroom luxury headquarters in orbit or under the sea, and an immense retinue of security and science staff, along with catering and cleaning personnel, the upkeep and maintenance of which were rarely factored in.

  The eighties saw the rise of the sleazy, amoral corporate predator, the bastard in a suit and ponytail, clutching his FiloFax as he glared down on the lesser mortals crawling in the mud of mortality below. This Wall Street tiger was an Ozymandias, dividing with his gaze the world and everything and everybody in it, a dead ham dressed for a butcher’s chart.

  Doom Patrol and Shade gave us walking nightmares, like the Scissormen, the American Scream, the Truth, and the Pale Police: living, crawling complexes and neuroses, incoherent, broken-backed abominations from the id. “DISCARDED CHILDHOOD TOYS GROWN BITTER AND DEFORMED AND HUNGRY FOR REVENGE!” as one of the “Archons of Nurnheim”—a Mr. Punch glove puppet on the hand of a lifeless marionette—put it.

  Midnineties villains were Image louts and boneheaded Frank Miller knockoffs, violent unscrupulous remnants of the eighties adolescent rush that were now rounded up and brought to account.

  It wasn’t until the turn of the century that a new approach to comic-book villainy crystallized around a single terrible idea that seemed to resonate with the exhausted resignation of the Western imagination: What if the villains had already won? What if the battle between good and evil was now over, with good bleeding and broken in the corner while evil pissed in its old rival’s sobbing face? In a world of catastrophic, knee-jerk war politics, typified by moronic medieval terrorists, the apish antics of George W. Bush, and the spinning of his eager-to-please sidekick Tony Blair, it was easy to get on board with this gloomy new paradigm. Better yet, it was a scenario that reinvigorated the superheroes by giving them a real challenge to face. Stories could begin at what was traditionally the end of act 2, with the hero on his knees while a cackling adversary seized his moment to launch the missiles, waken the dead, or threaten the girl. What would we learn by pitting our supermen against the day after the day they let us all down?