Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  The O’Neal-Adams collaborations were state-of-the-art for maturing fans who wanted themselves and their passions to be taken seriously. Although a great deal of their “criticism” consisted of little more than sarcastic exposés of the logic flaws in stories, much of it had a learned collegiate twang. Along with acerbic critiques, fans offered the kind of wildly effusive praise and serious engagement with the work that made creative and editorial staff feel elevated and appreciated. These were teenagers who began to insist that comics could and should be for adults, mostly because they didn’t want to let go of childhood and had to find a new way to sell its pleasure back to themselves.

  These older comic-book hobbyists—often collectors of back issues, compilers of price lists, and publishers of DIY fanzines—favored work that was edgy and defensibly mature, distorting the scale of the adult-oriented superhero’s appeal with passionate and clever letters of comment, fan awards, and relentless rubbishing of everything that didn’t fit the strict diktat of a fan culture understandably keen to establish the art credentials of its beloved comics. Anxious to escape the mocking echoes of the Batman TV show and the disrepute it had brought upon the “serious” business of collecting and critiquing comics, these adolescent advocates were ready to embrace any development that validated their growing interest in politics, poetry, sex, and expressions of emotional pain. They preferred the artfully stressed and heightened photo-realism of Neal Adams’s illustrative technique to the expressionistic gut drawing of Kirby, or the classical power and weight of Curt Swan’s increasingly old-fashioned Superman work, where the figures had come to seem like waxy statues posed and reposed in a stuffy gallery of recycled, reheated Silver Age attitudes. They called loudly and relentlessly for superhero stories to be “relevant,” embrace a new realism, a new vocabulary, and a fresh engagement with the headlines; all of which undermined the success of the comics and drastically limited their mass-market appeal. Nevertheless, it was this retreat from the mainstream that gave the comics some quiet R & D time in which to hone a far greater sophistication and develop a “grounded” approach to superheroes that would make them perfect for Hollywood mass exploitation in the twenty-first century. As Superman himself might say, leading the charge on-screen with 1978’s big-budget Superman: “IRONIC.”

  Prickly and unself-confident, the new “fandom” especially liked its stories about powerful men and women in Day-Glo Lycra to come embellished with extended Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot quotes, and so more of these odd adventures began to appear—lumpen children of Roy Thomas’s grace notes from Shelley, strange chimeras, that were part cape-and-mask workouts, part campus polemic. At best, there might be a powerful recontextualization of familiar lines played against unfamiliar images. At worst, which was more often, the writers became ventriloquist dummies who relied on the proven excellence of others to elevate their ill-conceived and aimless efforts. Was it a superhero adventure or an English lit student bitching about pollution with Walt Whitman samples running in ironic counterpoint to the action?

  Aside from the gift to Hollywood of believable superheroes, perhaps the best that could be said for relevance was the way it eliminated any need to hide a comic book inside a poetry anthology for a sneak read in class; lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” were just as likely to appear in both. As far as I was concerned, the sincere products of the relevance movement helped me justify the excellence of superhero stories to sneering teachers. Although I was clearly well read and articulate, my ever-encouraging tutors regarded the comics reading habit as a warning sign that I was on a collision course with some catastrophic breakdown of literacy that was almost certain to leave me with a fifteen-word “ZAP! KER-POW!” space monkey vocabulary of neuronal pops and frazzles. So these thoughtful and informed comics were powerful ammunition for me, as they were for all the other earnest teenage fans so captivated by the imaginary universes of Marvel and DC that they’d lingered there past the age of twelve and become trapped like Lost Boys. It was easier to be caught reading comics at school if you could smugly direct an infuriated physics master to the award-winning Green Lantern/ Green Arrow no. 86, with its letter of thanks from the mayor of New York for helping to dramatize the scourge of drugs.

  (illustration credit 11.1)

  Thus superhero comics began their slow retreat from the mainstream of popular entertainment to its geek-haunted margins, where their arcane flavors could be distilled and savored by solitary, monkish boys and men—rarely women or teenage girls, who tended to outgrow Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, while their weird brothers were still taking comfort in those pages. (Unsurprisingly, given my profession, I do know a disproportionate number of otherwise reasonable women who grew up reading or still read the better superhero comics as part of a general diet of pop culture adrenaline, but as the scorecard element—the collecting crowd—came in, the demographic skewed heavily toward introverted males in their teens and twenties.) Color TV, too, played its part in the decline of comics sales, but comics still offered the best, most immersive superhero stories available and showcased the work of some genuinely talented artists. By 1970, the field had become flooded with brilliant and restless young innovators like Jim Steranko, Mike Kaluta, Bernie Wrightson, and Barry Smith, and O’Neil opened the door to other “relevant” writers such as Elliot Maggin and Mike Friedrich. Maggin wrote the classic, collegiate “Must There Be a Superman?” in which the Man of Steel’s very role was questioned as if he were real, with no clear resolution.

  Stories about Indian land rights, pollution, overcrowding, and women’s lib proliferated like toxic algae across the willing suspension of disbelief that allowed us to accept the existence of flying, godlike characters in a world not too different from our own. The new anxieties of America and the West at the end of the sixties were stamped directly onto the pages of the comics.

  When Green Lantern/Green Arrow teamed DC’s most prominent green-themed crusaders, the Dark Age crystallized. It was all here: the photorealistic artwork, the social and political awareness, the superhero divided into agent of the Establishment or rebel anarchist.

  Sales had been declining on Green Lantern as the square-jawed Kennedy daydreams of the Silver Age degraded into a sequence of daring manned missions to the moon that were each more resolutely ignored by humankind than the last. Julius Schwartz turned O’Neil loose, trusting the young radical to bring a new fire to the book’s pages. Pairing Green Lantern with a green-themed Justice League colleague seemed like an interesting combination that would draw attention to the new direction, and Green Arrow was a pet character redesign of artist Neal Adams. It’s often books like this, on the way out, that become energetic breeding grounds for new ideas and directions. When a title or character is unpopular, it’s easier to defend drastic changes.

  To make the big concept behind Green Lantern/Green Arrow work, unfortunately, O’Neil was required to overlook fifteen years of work on the character of Hal Jordan, the self-assured Green Lantern of Broome and Fox, who began his adventures as a test pilot before giving it all up for life on the road—first as an insurance salesman, then as a traveling rep for the Merlin Toy Company. What may have seemed like erratic character revision made sense as Broome’s carefully orchestrated depiction of a man’s search for meaning in mundane things after his induction into an extraterrestrial police force. Like the astronauts who’d found God in orbit, Hal had flipped and discovered himself anew. The Hal Jordan of Broome and Fox was a beatific Kerouac Dharma Bum, but in O’Neil’s hands, he became a soul-searching, bewildered representative of every dumb-ass cop who ever pounded the beat; the unthinking stooge of geriatric authorities from a galaxy far, far away.

  Recruited as a hip foil to Green Lantern’s boneheaded knee-jerk conservatism was Green Arrow, stripped of his fortune and his faux Batman trappings and remade as a jive-talking, Douglas Fairbanks–style Lothario with a goatee, a bachelor apartment on the Lower East Side of Star City, and a newfound love of rock ’n’ roll. “I USED
TO THINK IT ROLLED OUT FROM UNDER A ROCK,” quipped the ex–millionaire businessman turned ghetto champion in one wince-inducing scene. The bland, gimmick-driven Green Arrow found a voice at last as the title’s fiery liberal conscience, O’Neil’s “lusty, hot-tempered anarchist.” Oliver Queen—Ollie to his fans—was a man who’d lost his fortune and lived in the ghetto yet still generously donated a dollar to every charity that dropped a flyer in his mailbox.

  In retrospect—and as the subject of a sharp and pungent series written by Tom Peyer in 1999—Green Arrow seems the cruel archetype of the born-again midlife man of the sixties. But in 1970 Ollie was the Dude, a long-awaited return to the lost notion of the working-class hero who wasn’t afraid to tell the man where to shove it. For thirteen issues that are still regarded as landmarks, he became Virgil to Green Lantern’s conflicted Dante, road-tripping through the dark side of the American Dream as a pitch-perfect “buddy” team who argued and fought but learned from each other what each man needed to know. Together these unlikely allies—the Simon and Garfunkel of crime fighting—faced Manson-style death cults, feminist harpies, the menace of overpopulation, the threat of pollution, and two villains drawn to look like President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew.

  The ultimate accolades were saved for the two “drug” issues, Green Lantern/Green Arrow no. 85 and no. 86, in 1971. On a cover as eye-poppingly melodramatic as any Reefer Madness cult movie poster, Green Arrow’s young ward Speedy was shown in the act of shooting up. DC had “bravely” decided to let Adams show Speedy’s full kit of syringe, spoon, and wrap.

  “MY WARD IS A JUNKIE!”

  Perhaps Speedy’s choice of a code name was an early warning sign of substance abuse, but now it was Green Arrow’s turn to have his values challenged. Revealed as an absent father figure to his troubled ward, he was forced to confront his own narcissism, man up, and help his boy. The story began with this articulation of the “relevance” credo:

  SOME WILL SAY THE FOLLOWING STORY SHOULD NOT BE TOLD … THERE WILL BE THOSE WHO ARGUE THAT SUCH EVENTS HAVE NO PLACE IN AN ENTERTAINMENT MAGAZINE—PERHAPS THEY ARE RIGHT! BUT WE DON’T THINK SO—BECAUSE WE’VE SEEN THESE NOBLE CREATURES, HUMAN BEINGS, WRECKED … MADE LESS THAN ANIMALS … PLUNGED INTO HELLS OF AGONIES! WE’VE SEEN IT—WE’RE ANGRY—AND THIS IS OUR PROTEST!

  The ultimate villain of the piece turned out to be not the junkies and pushers but their supplier: a modish and witty multimillionaire named Solomon, who swanned around dropping bon mots in the company of willowy fashion models before being beaten senseless by an enraged Green Lantern. Like detective Popeye Doyle in The French Connection 2, our heroes were even pumped full of heroin (the unnamed drug in the story appears to be heroin but is often referred to as “snow,” suggesting cocaine) and forced to fight crime on the nod for one or two pages.

  “BROTHER—WHY DO PEOPLE USE THAT STUFF?!” moaned Green Lantern with his head in his hands.

  After scrolling through its menu of hot-button issues, Green Lantern/Green Arrow eventually ran out of social problems to confront. It ended with its protagonists changing places and showed the damage an anarchist with a power ring might be capable of, when a Christlike environmental protester named Isaac (“YOU’RE AS BAD AS THE REST … RELEASING FOULNESS INTO OUR PRECIOUS ATMOSPHERE!”) expired after crucifying himself (!) on the tail of a jet aircraft and Green Lantern’s patience with the Man finally snapped. With a shattering SSCHHAAAAKKKKKKK, he raked his green energy beam along the full length of the plane, reducing it to shrapnel.

  “WHAT’S THE IDEA?” sputtered an outraged official. “THAT WAS A NINE MILLION DOLLAR AIRCRAFT!”

  To which a sickened, disillusioned Green Lantern, raising antiauthoritarian cheers across the Free World, replied: “SEND ME A BILL!”

  One of the biggest and most significant achievements of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series was its introduction of race issues into the comics in an unprecedented way. A heavily praised scene from 1970’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow no. 76, the provocative opening chapter of the O’Neil and Adams run, drew the blood of the times with razor precision and was often cited as an example of a fresh willingness to engage with real-world issues in serial superhero fiction. After rescuing the tenants of a tenement block from a fire orchestrated by the unscrupulous landlord, Green Lantern, and by extension the whole Silver Age of superheroes, was called to account in no uncertain terms by an elderly black man who turned out to be less than impressed with our hero’s showy antics and had this to say:

  “I BEEN READIN’ ABOUT YOU … HOW YOU WORK FOR THE BLUE SKINS … AND HOW ON A PLANET SOMEPLACE YOU HELPED OUT THE ORANGE SKINS … AND YOU DONE CONSIDERABLE FOR THE PURPLE SKINS! ONLY THERE’S SKINS YOU NEVER BOTHERED WITH … THE BLACK SKINS! I WANT TO KNOW … HOW COME?! ANSWER ME THAT, GREEN LANTERN!”

  (For the first time in DC superhero comics, black people actually looked black and not like the traditional white men colored brown or loose-lipped caricatures that were more common. Adams’s photographic accuracy left no doubt as to the ethnicity of his characters. Italians, Orientals, Native Americans—all were given respect, dignity, and convincing bone structures by Adams’s talent and sense of inclusion.)

  In any real world where the laws of physics and some interstellar immortal judiciary permitted his existence, Green Lantern’s response would be all our responses to the same accusation: “I’VE BEEN SAVING THE ENTIRE PLANET EARTH AND EVERY LIVING THING ON IT, REGARDLESS OF RACE, COLOR, POLITICAL AFFILIATION OR SPECIES, SINCE GREEN LANTERN ISSUE NUMBER 1!” Instead he hung his head in shame as O’Neil subverted believability to hammer home his powerful indictment of the superhero’s role as weapon of the status quo and the ruling elite. Green Lantern’s sudden awareness of people suffering below the poverty line may seem almost farcical, but we can also choose to view the Lantern as a representation of the typical white-middle-class young reader and to see in the politically engaged Green Arrow a “fiction suit” or mouthpiece for O’Neil, using his art to open a few young eyes to some important facts of life.

  Changing values have lent a hollow ring to O’Neil’s sermonizing, but in May 1970, when the only nonwhite face in a DC comic belonged to the “glowing silhouette” character Negative Man, this felt like a challenging and provocative call to arms—a timely demand for the paper universes of DC and Marvel to acknowledge the human diversity of the real world in which they continued to grow and develop.

  The following issue was no less controversial, as O’Neal-Adams introduced a new substitute Green Lantern in the form of “Square” John Stewart, a black, inner-city architect with a chip on his shoulder, whose first mission was to protect a racist presidential candidate. This led to some slightly predictable but always amusing fun at the expense of “whitey.”

  The potential for tokenism was there, but Stewart was a strong character and has survived to the present day as a popular Green Lantern Corps member. As the acting Green Lantern in the turn-of-the-century Justice League animated shows, he reached a wider audience, on television, than any of his predecessors.

  Stewart was DC’s first out-and-proud African American superhero. Marvel, ahead of the curve on most things, had already introduced its Black Panther character in 1966, and by 1973 he was starring in his own title. Jungle Action, written by the radical Don McGregor (more about him later), and drawn by Billy Graham, a talented young black artist, became infamous for a controversial 1976–79 extended story line, “The Panther vs. the Clan,” which landed McGregor in hot water with the right wing.

  The undeniable dignity and majesty of the Panther (T’Challa, the proud king of Wakanda, a wealthy, culturally rich, and technologically advanced Marvel universe African nation that was as far from the stereotypical image of mud huts and scrawny goatherds as could be imagined in the sixties), was only marginally compromised by his failure to represent; T’Challa wore a full black body suit with a hood that covered his entire face. The completely masked black-hero trick was copied and improved upon to gruesome effect and great
success decades later in Todd McFarlane’s Spawn comic and its associated transmedia spin-offs, but without the taboo-smashing impact of the Black Panther and John Stewart.

  Aiming a wink in the direction of the Black Panther’s modesty, John Stewart made a show of ditching his Green Lantern Corps domino mask in the panel after he received it:

  “I WON’T WEAR ANY MASK! THIS BLACK MAN LETS IT ALL HANG OUT! I GOT NOTHING TO HIDE!”

  After architect Stewart tore down the barriers, Marvel revved up the relevance bandwagon with its own next-level take on the Green Lantern/Green Arrow formula, teaming Captain America with a flying Harlem social worker who fought injustice as the Falcon. June 1972’s Hero for Hire introduced blaxploitation hero Luke Cage, aka Power Man, whose dialogue bowdlerized urban argot into Marvel universe–friendly oaths like “SWEET CHRISTMAS!” “MOTHER!” and “JIVE TURKEY!” Cage was a rough-and-tumble enforcer with steel-hard skin and the semipermanent grimace of the framed and wrongly accused. He wore a length of chain around his waist to remind us of history’s cruelties but soon outgrew his origins to develop as a rich and enduring character, still central to the ongoing Marvel story decades past Shaft and Jim Kelly.

  DC earned progress points for John Stewart, but elsewhere in the line, the response to social upheaval was uncomfortable and tasteless. Leave it to Lois Lane to resonate most perfectly with the high-pitched confusion of the times in Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane no. 106. The cover illustration was a striking triptych with three vertical panels framed against a dramatic jet-black background. In the first, Superman was shown sealing Lois Lane inside some kind of sarcophagus perfectly molded to her size and shape. Both Lois and the Man of Steel appeared perfectly calm. Her face, in fact, was doll-like, expressionless. She’d dressed for 1970 in an orange minidress, orange Alice band, medallion, fishnets, and ballet pumps. Superman was talking: