Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  Ditko’s tense, regular panel grids were like tenement windows that could sometimes open onto bizarre wonders. Where Kirby sought to explode, Ditko sought to contain; to stratify and regulate his world on the page with a metronomic, repetitive rhythm over which he could maintain complete control. Committed to conveying the ordinariness and truth of real life, Ditko made his characters thin, hunched, withdrawn, and plain. He drew them sweating, sobbing, and cowering, which only made it more moving when they overcame insurmountable odds to do the right thing.

  Ditko became a devotee of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, then a popular response to the disenchantment of the psychoanalyzed soul and the collapse of “values” into relativistic chaos. The bold, simple, and aggressive distinctions of objectivism appealed to Ditko’s analytical mind and gave him a new vocabulary around which to organize his world even more efficiently. More and more, his comics tended toward baffling, overheated polemic, like the hellfire tracts handed out by some dull, hectoring monochrome sect.

  It was inevitable that his uncompromising worldview would collide with Lee’s liberal, Playboy “Why can’t we all just make up and get along?” philosophies, and the two eventually parted company. This left Spider-Man in the hands of Lee and new artist John Romita, who made Peter handsome and gave him a choice of two drop-dead-gorgeous girlfriends (one of whom, Gwen Stacy, did literally drop dead). Even Aunt May got a makeover that chucked the death’s-door frailty and replaced it with robust actressy look that undercut her original role and purged the strip of the last echoes of Ditko’s run-down, mundane authenticity.

  Unlike the DC heroes, with their totemistic weaknesses to wood or fire (or the color yellow, as in the case of the new Schwartz version of Green Lantern), every Marvel hero had to have a psychological Achilles’ heel. If they didn’t harbor a deadly personal secret capable of destroying careers and marriages, they weren’t good Marvel heroes. And they fought constantly. Superheroes had battled against injustice in the 1930s and fought Hitler in the 1940s, while the 1950s superhumans had battled with monsters and aliens. The Marvel heroes of the 1960s fought one another in between epic clashes with memorably operatic villains such as Doctor Doom, Magneto, Galactus, Doctor Octopus, and the Green Goblin, all of whom had personalities and extra dimensions that elevated them beyond the traditional despots, hoodlums, and madmen. An emboldened Lee aimed for the heightened rhythms of iambic pentameter and found a way to re-create a pseudo-Shakespearean voice via Brooklyn so that Peter Parker could be riven by a guilt that made Hamlet look like an underachiever.

  Here from my own school jotter, detailing a fine day out for a seven-year-old in the Summer of Love, is my first recorded impression of a Marvel Comic:

  I got a kite and a magnet, I got thick comics too. I have got one with two people. One is called Wonderful Wasp and one is called Giant Man. They were fighting someone called the Human Top.

  And yet there was something I didn’t like about the Marvel superheroes. Those characters seemed constantly angry and weird, and I found stories of conflict between heroes exhausting. Spider-Man’s stressy life was a bit too grown-up, it seemed.

  After World War II, my dad had declared himself a pacifist. Both he and my mother agreed that I should be raised according to “nonviolent principles,” which meant that guns and military toys or uniforms were frowned upon. I didn’t miss them, and I actually liked being able to describe myself as a pacifist, because I thought it made me different and more interesting. When the Boy Scouts turned up at our school in search of new recruits, I stood up proudly, fixed the scoutmaster with a glare, and announced, “I refuse to be part of any paramilitary organization, and that includes the Boy Scouts.”

  I liked my heroes to come in and fix things effortlessly and hated even the slightest obstacle to be placed in the clear path of their success. I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on star-ships and Mars colonies.

  CHAPTER 8

  BACK FROM THE brink, it was time for a new superhero proliferation. Other companies joined in now that the pioneers had taken the lead and tested the waters. The superheroes caught the mood of the times—like the spies and spacemen, they offered a passport to sleek adventure.

  Wally Wood, an accomplished artist, writer, editor, and alcoholic, identified a waiting ecological niche, and combined the sixties spy fiction craze with superheroes to create T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves) for Tower Comics in 1967. Wood was a veteran of EC whose perfectly lit and composed panels showed a higher degree of skill than that of many of his contemporaries. Yet even they looked stiff and mannered next to Kirby’s Heavy Metal.

  His T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents were another disturbing bunch. As I’ve explained, I preferred my heroes straight jawed and uncomplicated. The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents were miserable men inhabiting a grim world of Cold War corridors, aircraft hangars, and concrete bunkers. NoMan, one of the central characters whose name suggested some existential afterthought, was an interesting concept, but his adventures were so pedestrian, he could have been a British superhero.

  Prefiguring the superheroes of the George W. Bush era, the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents’ powers came from gadgets provided by government sponsors. T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents gave me a very specific, unpleasant tingle that I find hard to articulate. Perhaps the paramilitary flavor was too troubling for a child from a pacifist household. Wood’s art for all its elegant precision seemed posed, always at a distance.

  I felt the same about Harvey Comics: the Fly, the Hangman, Bee-Man. An uninspired bunch of lifeless knockoffs, they lacked some solid foundation that DC and Marvel characters had. Gold Key Comics offered the aggressively dull Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom. Attractive painted covers in the pulp style and the lead character’s sleekly designed and attractive costume barely distracted from the desperate tedium of repetitive story lines. DC’s patchwork universe had been assembled into a comforting quilt over decades, Marvel’s was a fashionable mod suit woven from whole cloth by genuinely talented innovators and craftsmen. All the other comic-book universes seemed ill-tailored afterthoughts, cheesy attempts to cash in on something they barely understood. Even as a very young boy, I could sense the difference. I could taste the authenticity and missed it when it wasn’t there.

  They all wanted to channel the new energy that made young people feel like mutants and superheroes on the verge of a utopian future in space. Driven by sheer youth, the human race managed to send its little feelers to the moon and back, and left footprints where No Man Had Gone Before. Anything seemed possible, and the superheroes were exemplars of this horizonless possibility. They were what we all might become.

  Even the Archie Comics characters got in on the act when Archie Andrews became Pureheart the Powerful, and his rival Reggie Mantle transformed into the scheming Evilheart. Disney, too, was touched by the lightning, so that Goofy had only to swallow a few of his special power peanuts to summon his Super Goof alter ego, dressed in red long johns and a blue blanket cape. I took them all equally seriously, as happy to play at being Pureheart or Super Goof as Batman.

  The comics were once again exploding off the page and into electronic life. But with a twist. The Batman TV show of 1966–68 can be seen as a pure Pop Art creation: It borrows from a previous source—the Batman serials of the forties—but reframes its subject in a way that causes us to challenge all the preconceptions of the source material and makes someone rich.

  According to the best version of the story, Hugh Hefner had a few pals over to the Playboy Mansion, including Bob Kane and NBC producer Bill Dozier. I like to imagine that in between sessions of swinging Bunny humping in the grotto, they found time to screen the Batman serials. Like me, these imagined sophisticates saw in the serials an opportunity for cheap laughs and easy mockery. The serials intended to entertain children and idiots had, in short, become “camp.”

  Another version of the story has Dozier reading Batman no. 171, one of the early New Look books. He p
icked up immediately on the Pop Art influence and on Infantino’s bold new addition to Batman’s graphic appeal. By highlighting the bat silhouette with a yellow oval that recalled the Bat signal the police projected onto the clouds whenever they needed to summon the hero to action, Infantino had turned the chest emblem into a logo and a marketing tool.

  Perhaps the truth lay in some combination of influences. The New Look provided a visual template, and there was an undeniable influence from the UK TV show The Avengers.

  Dozier saw a way to make a Pop Art series that would appeal not only to kids but to hip teens and grown-ups. A hero pitched directly at the psychedelic youth who were recapitulating vaudeville, gramophones, and granny glasses. This Batman could play to fans of the Monkees and Beatles movies like Help! Dozier even provided a portentous voiceover narration that aped the style of the serials. What’s more, the story structure—two thirty-minute episodes stretched across consecutive nights with a cliff-hanger in between—was another nod in the direction of the serial format. Each half-hour episode had its own title.

  Upon its debut in January 1966, Batman became the biggest show on TV, triggering a “Batmania” that for a short, intense period rivaled the Beatlemania that had greeted John, Paul, George, and Ringo upon their arrival in the States two years earlier. Played strictly for irony in the age of Pop Art, Batman the TV series had a simple gimmick: The ludicrously earnest dialogue was delivered absolutely straight by Adam West and Burt Ward. In this bright iteration, there were no shadows, no mention of why Batman did what he did, no flashbacks to his parents dying of gunshot wounds in a grimy alley. Adam West’s Batman was Batman because being Batman made perfect sense to him. His flat, earnest delivery may have amused the chortling Playboy set, but every child knew that was exactly how a superhero would talk.

  Matinee heartthrob Cesar Romero refused to shave his trademark mustache for his role as the Joker, so it was slathered over with white greasepaint, clearly visible in every shot. Watching Batman on a tiny black-and-white screen with such poor resolution that it mimicked the eyesight of a myopic man attempting to peer through time itself, I was oblivious to Romero’s whitewashed facial hair. It was the Joker on-screen, pure and simple. A leering, manic, evil clown. I didn’t see Burt Ward’s tights and would have sworn he was bare legged, like Robin in the comics. There was nothing funny, ironic, or camp about Batman for me. It was thrilling, scary, and completely addictive. It was an absolute guarantee of a good time.

  If Batman in the sixties seems ridiculous, consider 1967’s James Bond movie, a free-form adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale. The same story was remade in 2006 as a violent, “naturalistic” thriller with Daniel Craig in the Bond role. But in the Summer of Love, Casino Royale became a psychedelic, absurdist, virtually plot-free romp.

  The 1967 Bond, like Batman, was an outmoded Establishment stooge, played strictly for laughs. What was camp ultimately but the serious attitudes of a previous generation as seen through the rose-colored lenses of hash and LSD? Even the story logic crumbles as the characters stumble across a film set where they are revealed as mere players, encountering cowboys and Indians who have thundered in from another movie, another soundstage, or another parallel universe. It’s a flower-power Bond; druggy, fashion conscious, tongue in cheek. It’s a film that would be inconceivable in the ruthless world of today’s rigorously constructed three-act screenplays.

  Everything was up for grabs. The establishment heroes of an earlier age were being lined up as the targets of lampoon. If recipients of LSD and mescaline could scarcely sit through Holocaust footage without laughing, what chance did the earnest, square-jawed heroes of the past have, now exposed to the harsh scrutiny of the young as hysterically deluded dupes of conformity and reaction? Mr. Terrific was a TV show about a nerd in a silver flying suit, while Captain Nice brought the weekly adventures of a bespectacled half-wit into homes across America. The superhero was one more clown on the bus, one more Haight-Ashbury spook with fire in his eyes and tinfoil on his head, and even kids knew that “funny” superheroes didn’t work.

  But for me, shows like Mr. Terrific were the real thing—as close as TV could come to making my beloved comics move, and therefore serious by their very nature. I was so hungry for any sight of superhero activity that I was willing to overlook the obvious stupidity of these characters and tried to take them seriously.

  In 1990 I stood in line at the Virgin Megastore to have my videocassette copy of Batman: The Movie signed by Adam West. As he scribbled his spoor, I told him I’d just had my own Batman book, Arkham Asylum, published to some acclaim. He looked at me the way you’d look at a floater drifting across the viscera of your eye and grunted.

  That was good enough for me.

  In 1966 my family had moved a few miles south from Govan to a working-class residential development known as Corkerhill. It was a pretty model-railway village of Victorian red sandstone cottage-style houses—which would be devastated by planners and replaced with concrete crack houses several years later. The lovely station, whose stationmaster won awards every year for his spectacular floral displays, became a frightening dead zone strung with lethal power cables for electric trains. Shorn of its personality, electro-shocked and lobotomized, Corkerhill Rail Station was dressed like a Maoist Chinese worker in regulation council orange and plastic, with chipped Formica and graffiti where once flourished overstuffed bouquets and pride. The romance of the train line was brutalized into hard facts made of wire and cable and grilles by people who knew nothing of romance, only function.

  I had a sister now. She enjoyed reading Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and any story with Superbaby or Bizarro in it. Then there was the Legion of Super-Heroes, written by a precocious and—based on his adult height of seven-foot plus—presumably gigantic thirteen-year-old named Jim Shooter. He would go on to become a feared editor at Marvel Comics in the eighties. But the young Shooter’s stories were fast paced, punchy, and filled with genuine teen earnestness, humor, and romance. With a cast of convincingly drawn and individual characters, the sprawling Legion roster of up to thirty superheroes never seemed enough, let alone too much. Shooter introduced Marvel-style high-tension situations and terrifying, seemingly unstoppable villains into the now predictable world of Superman and his extended cast. He lacked the arch sophistication of the middle-aged Stan Lee but more than made up for it with verve, invention, and a deft talent for creating situations of escalating jeopardy.

  I liked those stories, and The Flash and Justice League of America. I knew American comics as “thick comics.” Otherwise I had cheaper, flimsier British weekly comics competing for my attention. There were funny ones like the Beezer and action-adventure titles like Valiant or Lion. The latter type tended to feature World War II adventures, which I read dutifully, sensing in them the deadening weight of a history I’d narrowly avoided. The Second World War was now entering its fourth decade in comics, and the plucky chaps of the boys’ papers could be relied on to continue the relentless killing well into the eighties. The German death toll in British boys’ papers surpassed by several factors the actual casualty statistics of both world wars.

  “HE MAY WEAR SPECS BUT HE’S A CRACKING GOOD SHOT!” came the approving cry as bespectacled conscientious objector “Four-Eyes” Foster admitted the error of his ways and rose to the challenge of murdering Germans with a glee and vigor his previous life as an accountant had denied him.

  Comics were only a part of it. There were a lot of children around and lots of space for playing for long hours without adult supervision.

  I was obsessed with space, astronauts, constellations, UFOs—anything in the sky. My mum enrolled us both in astronomy classes to feed my need for knowledge, and there I sat diligently, converting dry lectures about magnitude and albedo into science fiction vistas in my head. I was only there for the telescope and for the sense all this gave me of being special and a little otherworldly. Jupiter. The rings of Saturn. Passing comets. I saw them all. I saw
a V-shaped flock of geese that I was certain were cruising saucers. I saw a group of what I was assured were urban Satanist swingers dressed in hooded robes and carrying candles up the back stairs of the big house across the road. Or maybe they were penitent monks. All that mattered was the story potential in everything.

  In the same year, my eighth, Mum took me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey three times in fairly rapid succession, which was certainly enough to create a powerful imprint and to reinforce the sense of a cosmic dimension to my own life. I began to look for the same feeling in comics and eventually found it in Jack Kirby’s work at Marvel. The Bomb became less important. By the time I was five years old, I’d decided I wanted to be a writer. It was that, astronaut, or cowboy.

  But things changed all the time. President Kennedy had already been shot dead out there somewhere on the threshold of my awareness, and now it was his brother Bobby’s turn, in June 1968. My mum cried that day, as she had two months earlier when Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis. It was getting dark outside, and the flower children had begun to notice how creepy the woods were at the end of Penny Lane.

  My dad was unemployed again. I didn’t know what to write when my teacher asked me what he did for a living. He wasn’t doing terrazzo flooring anymore, and he’d been kicked out of his shop steward position at the Factory for Peace, a workers-run collective, after triggering all-out war between the shop floor and “management.”

  Soon I was making regular appearances in the papers, waving a picket sign outside one or the other of my dad’s former places of employment. There would be my mum, my sister, and me, immaculately dressed and waving placards condemning the sacking of our family breadwinner from yet another utopian socialist cooperative. My mum kept up her part-time job as a shorthand typist, supporting everything Dad did until he made the mistake of having an affair with a teenage Ban the Bomber, and the fallout slowly blew the family apart.