Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  The first shock came when I was told that the book had been canceled. Eager to embrace influences from Cabaret to the Theater of Cruelty, the Joker was to have been dressed in the conical bra worn by Madonna for her “Open Your Heart” video. Warner Bros. objected to my portrayal on the grounds that it would encourage the widespread belief that Jack Nicholson, the feted actor lined up to play the Joker in an upcoming $40 million Batman movie, was a transvestite.

  I wrote a long, impassioned letter to Jenette Kahn, and after some tense negotiations, we managed to keep the Joker in high heels at least, and Arkham Asylum went back on the schedule. I was sure that Nicholson would have loved it even more if he could have played the Clown Prince of Crime in a dress, but in the end, it was Heath Ledger who immortalized the tranny Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight, vindicating my foresight.

  Before the book went on sale Karen Berger called to tell me I was rich. Initial orders were for 120,000 copies, with Dave and me on a dollar royalty for each. To date, we’ve sold over a half million copies, making Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth the bestselling original graphic novel of all time.

  The book reads up and down rather than left to right, McKean’s tall, narrow panels evoke church windows, test tubes, the cracks between shutters, and many other things, and they create a bad fairy-tale sense of confinement and of toppling, falling dominoes set in motion a long time ago.

  Dave McKean was bearded and intense. I was beardless and slow to make friends, but we bonded on the Arkham Asylum tour and found some common ground in our love of art, fringe theater, and Dennis Potter drama. DC had never organized a countrywide signing tour before, so Dave and I became helpless glazed guinea pigs in an experiment to see how far, how fast, and how many stores we could visit in a week. I recall a delirium of snow-struck plane flights, fitful microsleeps in cars that rolled through backgrounds of endless fields that never seemed to change until it was time to decant into another cheesy hotel, another comic store. I remember Minneapolis and the statue of Ho Tai, the so-called laughing Buddha, in the restaurant where we had our only decent meal in the midst of a nightmare of fast-food joints and gas station kiosks. I still dream of the rotten stink of syrup and electricity that was my first impression of the United States. And I gagged on the inedible chocolate bars, but America was another world, another open door through which I could see a new version of my life. America was promise and adventure. I felt revitalized, inspired, as I watched ice crystals form within seconds in Dave’s beard while we scuttled across the icy sidewalk between our cab and the front door of some Chicago hotel looming in a blizzard.

  In winter 1989, with comics and their creators appearing in Britain’s The Face magazine and on TV, we crossed the American continent and back in the time it takes to scrawl a page or two of hallucinatory recollections. A day in Los Angeles, signing in Golden Apple on the exotic sidewalks of Melrose Avenue, where we discovered that actor Anthony Perkins—Norman Bates himself, and one of my pantheon of neurotic boy outsider heroes—loved Arkham Asylum. Then San Francisco, days after the big quake, with the lights of the Bay Bridge slicing by as REM played on the car sound system scoring my semiconscious awareness. I loved to travel. Hailing taxis on Broadway, black coated, newly born as the star of my own biography at last, I wondered where I could go next, what I could be. Jimmy Olsen’s “disguise kit” beckoned.

  Arkham Asylum seems to have maintained its appeal over a generation, inspired the most successful superhero video game ever, and is number five on the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list as I write this, two decades after its first release. Dave McKean, who has gone on to produce innovative fine art comics, films, and music scores, remains slightly embarrassed by it, but I’ve always secretly loved its shrill, suicide eyeliner version of the Dark Knight.

  Acclaimed by audiences outside the community, the book was often described as incomprehensible, meaningless, and pretentious by many of those within, who tended to get prickly when I insisted that there were no rules to making superhero comics. Alan Moore scored payback when he praised Dave McKean’s efforts but described the result as “a gilded turd” nevertheless. This was, I must add, after I’d cruelly dismissed Watchmen as “the 300-page equivalent of a 6th form poem” in a semispoof interview with style magazine i-D, so I felt compelled to take my lumps with a grin.

  Nevertheless, the accusations of pretension stung horribly. I was a working-class dropout pretending to be the art student he never was. I was full of big talk, but big talk was all I’d ever had. The moon mirror of Arkham Asylum, held up to me, revealed the grotesque mask of snide contempt I’d constructed to mask my uncertainty. The obsession with art and fashion, myths, and popular music with which I’d separated myself from my roots now seemed as false as Granny’s teeth. No more “influences,” I decided; no more plagiarism or quotes from the Romantics. I would shave my head before male pattern baldness could ruin my Beatles cut and be my own naked self.

  CHAPTER 15

  IN HIS INTRODUCTION to the Graphitti Designs collected edition of Watchmen, Alan Moore had bid a typically thunderous farewell to superheroes, declaring Watchmen to be his last word on the subject: “I wish the superhero well in whatever capable hands guide his flight in the future, but for my part, I’m eager to get back to earth.” It turned out to be only the first of a series of hyperbolic retirement announcements that would enliven Moore’s career as a writer of superhero comics, but there was no doubting the intent; if Alan Moore was closing the book on a fifty-year story, there was nowhere left to go. After pushing his fastidiously logical approach to two very different conclusions in Marvelman and Watchmen, there was, Moore implied, simply nothing left worth saying. Both books were complete and definitive statements, both absolute in their finality. One took the realistic strand to its natural limit; the other took the poetic, utopian strand to its own logical conclusion.

  Most professionals in the superhero comic-book industry gloomily agreed with Moore’s sonorous valedictory address; the endgame had been played, conceptually, formally, thematically. After Moore, there was nowhere to go that didn’t feel stupid and self-conscious. The big man had spoken. The superheroes had been cast from Eden by their bearded judge, made to confront their silly clothes and denounce their own outmoded values. Condemned from the pulpit, stripped of their protective, self-deceiving masks and hoods, they stood naked, ridiculous, and obsolete.

  How would they get out of this one?

  A kind of exhausted resignation soaked in as the comics industry tried to deal with Watchmen by stoically refusing to recognize what made it great, concentrating instead on the violence and sex and perceived realism. Themes of brutal urban vigilantism were playing out in an increasingly stylized set of post-Miller gestures. It was felt that no one could possibly follow these great milestones without asking why anyone should have to. The smart money had moved on to create graphic novel projects aimed at a fondly imagined emerging market of adults with no real interest in superhero stories. People were making comics inspired by literature, theater, and poetry, and I wanted to be part of that too. But I was also accepting well-paid superhero projects at DC and had no intention of approaching them as the last embers of a spent blaze, or the dying coals of the house that Moore Burned Down.

  Some of the earliest notable responses to Watchmen offered very different attempts to frame the superhero concept in adult terms.

  Pat Mills was one of the team of writers responsible for creating 2000 AD. He had a Kirbyesque world-building talent and was capable of effortlessly generating massive, well-thought-out fiction with iconic, memorable central characters, unique story locations, and original plots. A vicious streak and a strange sense of humor completed the picture. It was Mills who turned the sixteenth-century painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch into a spooky and unnerving role-playing adventure for the comic Dice Man.

  Where Watchmen was scholarly and elegiac, Marshal Law by Mills and his regular 2000 AD collabor
ator, artist Kevin O’Neill (first published by Epic Comics), specialized in spite and savagery. The logo was contained in a US flag shaped like an automatic pistol. Mills and O’Neill’s Superman stand-in, the Public Spirit, was shown injecting himself in the arm on a grubby toilet. The sole mordantly spare caption read, “I’M WORRIED ABOUT BUCK.” Another opening page had a crucified Jesus painted on the underside of a US bomber as it rained napalm death on a South American village. The saga was a tortured, frantic torrent of Mills and O’Neill’s primal scream storytelling. Since the days of Weisinger, no superhero stories had come this close to bugging out on the analyst’s couch. Mills seemed too intelligent to be serious, but there was something raw and real about the psychological insights of Marshal Law that gave its cynicism a genuine, edgy authority as Marshal Law worked through his hatred of women, his job, and, above all, superheroes.

  Where Alan Moore had peered beneath the masks to find frightened, confused, hopeful people very much like the rest of us, Mills found only deviants, perverts, liars, and monsters. He saw superheroes as emblematic of regressive reactionary forces and disastrous foreign policy. They were America’s self-delusion, a fantasy of US omnipotence that Mills despised and set about eviscerating with the glee of a revolutionary on a purge. If superheroes were the face of mythic America, Mills planned to rub their noses in the shit of real-life America—which he exposed with meticulously researched, coldly delivered info-dump captions detailing a world of CIA dirty tricks, torture camps, denial, vivisection, corrupt politics, and ruined lives. This was hard-core lefty comics, taking the superhero back to his socialist roots with a shot of sleazy antisocial satire.

  Weisinger’s were the fantasies of a buttoned-up postwar drive to act normal and get on with the future. Mills was bursting a boil. In Kevin O’Neill he had an artist who drew bursting boils like no artist before or since. Among his other accomplishments, O’Neill is the only artist whose style itself has been banned by the Comics Code Authority on the grounds that simply looking at his work is liable to disturb or offend! O’Neill follows in a tradition of the cartoon grotesque that goes back via Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman to William Hogarth and James Gilray rather than Jack Kirby. O’Neill’s scabrous imagination matched Mills’s volcanic outpouring of venom and he designed hundreds of distinctive costumed characters only to humiliate, burn, torture, eviscerate, hang, crucify, or drown them all in scenes of visceral close-up violence descended directly from the excesses of EC. His malignantly ugly superheroes were covered with slogans, branded and colonized by semiotic debris in the form of boastful graffiti, reconstituted ad jingles, and filthy nursery rhymes. O’Neill’s world, a riot of jagged stained glass, faces, and distorted stressed anatomy, mocked the athletic hero body with drawings of engorged steroidal deformities that mirrored the ruined personalities beneath. Heroes and villains alike could contort on a beat into Francis Bacon’s screaming popes, all teeth and gums and pain, bulging, veiny muscles, and cracked bug eyes.

  Mills plunged the ponderous, trendy self-analysis of superheroes past its ultraviolet limit and on into the crazy black beyond. He dragged the corpse of superhero comics into a dark alley and mutilated it with exquisite finesse.

  Marshal Law’s credo might have been Mills’s own: “I HUNT HEROES. HAVEN’T FOUND ANY YET.” And, like Mills, the hero was unable to deny his unhealthy entanglement with a world he despised.

  In Marshal Law Takes Manhattan, Mills and O’Neill gave us barely obscured parodies of the Marvel heroes in therapy, deconstructed into a set of pop-psych complexes as a parody of Arkham Asylum. With customary relish, they dissected the Marvel stable, all of whom were conceived and sold as “heroes with problems.” Mills and O’Neill set about making these problems explicit, forcing them into seedy, contemptuous close-up. Their “Spider-Man” became a compulsive masturbator; a shy science student who only came to life when he dressed in his bristling bug suit and sprayed spurts of sticky white webbing across the rooftops, ejaculating wildly as he somersaulted across the Manhattan skyline. The “Daredevil” character was ruthlessly mocked for his blindness and dressed in clashing colors. “Doctor Strange” spouted glossolalic gibberish while his hands jerked in cruel spastic parody of the original’s magical passes and gestures.

  Mills’s attitude toward the US-inspired nostalgia market that was keeping outmoded, outdated characters alive was no more unambiguous than when Marshal Law went up against a plague of superzombies, all drawn to resemble Golden Age characters, and portrayed Zenith/me as a character called Everest, who was morbidly obsessed with cadaverous American heroes. This definitive story produced the single line that seemed to encapsulate the entire series when our hero split the skull of an undead hero with a cry of “EAT SHIT AND LIVE, ASSHOLE!”

  With Mills unable to sustain his rage, Marshal Law sputtered off the boil in a series of unfinished stories. The pressurized avalanche of righteous pus had to drain eventually. A crossover with Clive Barker’s Hellraiser characters delved into pleasure and pain like a letter to Forum magazine written by a middle-aged man experimenting with S/M for the first time.

  It was said of Marshal Law that Watchmen killed the superhero but that Marshal Law danced on its corpse.

  Yet try as they might, the superhero would simply return from the dead with new powers, as he always did, to wreak vengeance on his would-be destroyers. Far from killing the superhero, Watchmen had opened up the concept for examination and reinvigorated its potential. My friends and I were young enough to feel quite differently from the old pros. We didn’t think the superheroes in their gaudy outfits looked stupid at all. We thought they looked cool, and, like Ken Kesey in the 1950s, we saw them as vehicles for the transcendent spiritual values that were coming back into vogue in a connected global-travel culture after the fall of the Berlin Wall at the dawn of nineties.

  I wanted more from my fictions. Naturally contrary, I’d tired of hearing about what superheroes would be like if they were real, only for it to be exactly the same as us at our worst: venal, corrupt, bemused, and stupid.

  Realism had become confused with a particularly adolescent kind of pessimism and angry sexuality that I was beginning to find confining.

  What would happen if all those macho men superheroes came out of the goddamn closet?

  Britain’s comic-book writers were comfortable with ambiguous sexuality, and they saw in the notion of the costumed identity—so fundamental to the appeal of the superhero—a strain of narcissistic display not too far removed from the world of the fetishist or transvestite. The performer.

  Our approach to gay superheroes was knowing and nonjudgmental. Alan Moore, after all, had slipped hints of an affair between Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis, two of his first-generation Watchmen heroes. Most comic-book creators had a natural sympathy for outsiders and underdogs, and support for the gay community tended to be decisive but often unobtrusive in the more progressive titles. The eighties saw a number of well-meaning attempts to introduce gay superheroes such as the ludicrously over-the-top Extrano (a kind of Rio Carnival twist on Doctor Strange) and the militant Northstar, who announced his tastes to the world in the heat of battle with a clarion call that set the gay cause back by at least thirty years.—“FOR I AM GAY!”—

  In Britain, Don Melia and Lionel Gracey-Whitman published Matt Black, the adventures of the UK’s first “out” superhero written and drawn by gay men, before launching Heartbreak Hotel—another Brit Com anthology title with comic strips and articles based around musical themes. When Don died of AIDS in 1992, it felt like another nail in the coffin of an era of art and experimentation. The Americans were already wresting control of their beloved superheroes away from the cynical Brits and rebuilding them for a future based on Hollywood action movies, not literature and poofy Euro cinema.

  Combining Detroit dance music with British psychedelia, offshoots of the acid-house music scene were infiltrating all areas of UK artistic culture. I’d always been too cool to dance, but this music had me o
n the floor, and I loved it.

  The new superheroine of the age was Tank Girl, drawn by Jamie Hewlett and written by Alan Martin (and eventually published by Dark Horse Comics). Tank Girl had a shaved head, lived in a strange cartoon Australia, and fucked a talking kangaroo. With its spiky, exuberant line, its influences from Saturday morning cartoons and manga, Hewlett’s work was fresh, sexy, and playful—miles away from the ponderous gloom and political pessimism of Moore and Miller, or the vicious cynicism of Mills. These were comics by bright and bushy-tailed young people designed to entertain others like themselves on sunny lysergic afternoons.

  Jamie went on to find further fame as one-quarter of the band Gorillaz, providing the artwork and animation for its videos, shows, and CD packaging.

  When Hewlett and Alan Martin ditched the Riot Grrrl elements and re-created Tank Girl with a dizzy, south coast Brighton beatnik style, out went the Doc Martens boots and in came minidresses, flowers, and Tree Top orange spiked with MDMA. The influence of ecstasy culture brought a fuzzed-out stream-of-consciousness raga-drone to the material that gave it a new direction, while alienating many of the tough girls and dykes who’d made Tank Girl an icon of their culture.

  The United Kingdom Comic Art Conventions (“Yoo-kak” as it was known) became riots of alcohol, drug abuse, and suspect behavior. There were more girls now, attracted by the youth, the energy, and the style-mag write-ups. I even had my own gang of friends—Steve Yeowell, Mark Millar, John Smith, Chris Weston, Rian Hughes, Peter Milligan, Jamie Hewlett, Philip Bond, Simon Bisley—and didn’t feel the need to hang about outside the hospitality suite anymore. We felt different, we felt like pioneers. We were making a wedge in the final years of the Thatcher Götterdämmerung, and we considered ourselves artists, free to express the new spirit of the age using the freshly sharpened tool of the comics. The now ponderous political seriousness of the eighties was about to be overturned by a new flippancy and a cartoon optimism that seems, in hindsight, poignant.