Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  The opening page of The Authority no. 1 showed Earth as seen from space accompanied by a single caption.

  “They think there’s no one left to save the world.”

  The story announced its intentions to operate in the big-budget Independence Day idiom, with a three-page sequence set in a Moscow convincingly re-created from photographs. The freeze-frame skeletons detonating to ash and cinders were straight from Terminator 2’s swing park apocalypse scene. The use of black panel borders instead of white gave the impression of an auditorium with the lights down. These clever visual quotes reminded us that we were reading a comic that was meant to be read as a movie. This storyboard style became the standard layout for twenty-first-century comics as they tried to emulate the look and feel of $200 million movies, even copying filmic narrative structures that didn’t always suit the ongoing serial nature of comics and were already looking old hat in the face of the new immersive narrative forms that computer games had trained audiences to expect.

  The villain of the first Authority story was Kaizen Gamorra, a terrorist who explained his devotion to violence with a speech that had a cold, prophetic ring:

  “BECAUSE I AM A WOLF IN A WORLD OF SHEEP. BECAUSE TERROR IS THE BLOOD OF LIFE AND ITS GUIDING PRINCIPLE. I HAVE NO POLITICS TO ESPOUSE THROUGH MY TERROR, NO IDEALS TO FORCE THROUGH. TERROR IS ITS OWN REWARD. YOUR MISSILES AND BOMBERS MEAN NOTHING TO ME.”

  Fortunately for the world, Gamorra was up against the coolest, hardest new superheroes available, and it was obvious from issue no. 1 that he didn’t stand a chance.

  The Justice League never resorted to lethal force, but Ellis’s heroes would happily cut off your head and beat you to death with it if that’s what it took to stop you from being a dictator or a “bastard.” These hombres meant business, and the bad guys could no longer rely on that handy code against killing, which had kept superheroes in check for so long.

  These bolshy new superheroes spoke for all of us in the counterculture; on the outside at the moment, it became the inside. It felt like we’d won. When I took to the stage with a drunken victory yell as a speaker at New York’s Disinformation Convention, organized and presented by culture commentator, publisher, and TV host Richard Metzger in 2000, it was to make that point.

  For just a moment, there on the hinge of the millennium, it seemed as though the whole world wanted what we’d got. They’d seen how much fun we were having with our aliens, our Tantric sex, superhuman dreams, and glossy vinyl clothes, and they all wanted to join in.

  Especially Warren’s “bastards.” They’d caught the glint of gold in a quiet corner they’d always shunned and laughed at. In the quirky, enchanted, self-absorbed, collector underworlds of geek fandom and fantasy, there lay a picture of the human future. One day, someone thought, consumers will all be geeks, chained to computer screens, entangled with enthralling game worlds, surfing porn or squirreling through eBay as the seasons turn outside. One day soon, we would all be cyborgized by a rapidly evolving communications network of iPhones and iPads and their descendants, these portable exo-minds bonding like prostheses to more and more of us at a younger and younger age. Soon they’ll be implanting phones and cameras in the womb, to get us addicted to the ads early on. In a world-to-come like that one, we might all be persuaded to buy into the fantasies of geeks. A growing population of “kidults” could be sold on boys’ toys and the new, improved on-screen adventures of Batman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Green Lantern, helped along by books like this one—which would suggest some hidden value in the smeary power fantasies of the disenfranchised. And so it was.

  But there on the brink, drunk on the victory wine of ’99, it looked like a big win. I’d reconnected with Kristan, and life was fine. The twenty-first century would surely see the triumph of our sci-fi ideals along with the death of grim, old, outmoded conservative power structures, and The Authority spoke for that dream. We’d all be recognized as pioneers, imaginauts, weaving the bright myths of a brand-new day.

  I knew the Justice League of America was suddenly obsolete. This was the future, and it was time to move on. The superhero story had grown through its stormy Dark Age adolescence into a kind of assured twenty-something confidence at last. There was a grown-up, nonexploitative sexuality and a healthy dose of smart humor too. The whole package seemed designed to make superheroes palatable to a nonfan audience once more, although sales on The Authority never quite reflected its mass-market potential.

  If The Authority was the child of a Stormwatch, Independence Day, and JLA liaison, then Ellis’s Planetary had traces somewhere in its complex ancestry of a type of superhero metacomic about comics in the vein of Flex Mentallo and Alan Moore’s Superman pastiche Supreme. Planetary was an action lecture, a living, plot-driven treatise on pop culture that worked as well as an adventure story as it did as an ode to imagination and the odd. Typically, these comics offered insights into the creator’s (usually the writer’s) personal philosophies and ideas about time and space, comics, and myth. In a sequence of minimalist, mostly single-issue tales, Ellis and John Cassaday reworked and recombined the raw material of the pulps, fifties sci-fi movies, Japanese monster films, and superhero comics into a cohesive long-form complete story of “good” imagination—the Planetary team—versus “bad” imagination in the form of the Fantastic Four analogue the Four, who played the part of amoral corporate interests strip-mining the world of its extraordinary hidden wonders and secret artifacts. Analogues of Thor’s hammer and Green Lantern’s power battery were used as totemic icons to explore the power and persistence of pulp dreams, treated as if they were Arks of the Covenant, Holy Grails, or Shrouds of Turin—forgotten artifacts of a lost commonwealth of wonder and hope.

  With the tagline “It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way,” Planetary sought to create a single all-encompassing map of the territory of the fantastic, weaving together its every strand into a single vision of the entire field of superhuman literature.

  It had a timeless quality. The three principal characters—“mystery archaeologists” who mapped the secret, fantastic history of the twentieth century—were barely drawn plot drivers, but Ellis knew when to play out just enough backstory, enough texture, to keep them somehow human and relatable without burdening any of the three (one-hundred-year-old hard man Elijah Snow, superstrong Wonder Woman–manqué Jakita Wagner, and a communications savant known only as “the Drummer”) with the problems or issues of ordinary people. They were superhumans in the noncostumed, hard-as-nails Brit-com tradition that Ellis had honed to a knife edge, dressed in white suits, leather catsuits, and hoodies.

  In Cassaday, Ellis had another pitch-perfect collaborator. He knew how to freeze and compose the intricate snap and tag of dialogue and double-page image. Cassaday, a handsome Texas film school graduate, brought a director’s eye to his perfectly composed frame-ups. Like his peers, he favored long, horizontal panels that re-created how the cinema screen looks from the audience’s point of view. The artists who were able to adapt to this new trend were masters of scale and perspective, and they framed their shots like the directors of Hollywood spectaculars and science fiction blockbusters. Comics muscled up to compete with the effects-driven action movies of the nineties, adding their own brand of deft characterization to the eye-popping action and multibillion-dollar visions realized with pencils on paper. The artists became a new royalty: Ross, Cassaday, Hitch, Quitely.

  A major contributing factor to the tailored excellence of the Ellis brand product was the color artistry of Laura Martin (DePuy in 1999, before her marriage). She brought an unprecedented naturalism to her color palette, rendering subtle lighting conditions and regional skylines with a fidelity to the real that made Hitch’s mind-boggling Independence Day–style battles between air force jets and alien fighters look even more like production stills.

  My own desire was to see stories about how it felt to be the man who never failed and never gave up. What new perspectives might superhumanity bring that I hadn’t co
nsidered before? I knew what it was like to be human, but I was determined to live up to my role models and was fascinated by how it would feel to think like a superhuman. Not the inhuman, neurotic, flawed, detached characters my peers seemed so attached to but superhumans: emotionally healthy mature beings who came complete with all the reasoning abilities, compassion, inventiveness, and humor that made us special and lovable but added to that the new faculties, new philosophies, and fresh perspectives that would surely characterize Human Plus. I couldn’t help noticing how embarrassed Brits were by optimism and decided to make it a feature of my new work.

  I was taken to see The Matrix by my new friends, the Day-Glo-crested “Pleazure Terrorists” of Melbourne, Australia, and saw what seemed to me my own combination of ideas enacted on the screen: fetish clothes, bald heads, kung fu, and magic, witnessing the Gnostic invasion of the Hollywood mainstream.

  The time of the punk superhero had come. Artists Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti had been given charge of the Marvel Knights imprint and steered it to great success with more grown-up takes on Marvel superheroes like Daredevil and the Punisher. When Joe asked me to join in, my idea was to create something I’d never tried: a quintessential Marvel superhero who would arrive with clockwork timing to embody the antiestablishment, anticorporate movement and the spirit of Naomi Klein’s No Logo. The young hero was Noh-Varr, a diplomatic envoy of the Kree supercivilization, and the book had the ironic title Marvel Boy, named for an obscure Bill Everett character. I reached back to the original Marvel hero—Everett’s wild, teenage Prince Namor—and found the template for the antiestablishment superman. Kal-El of Krypton’s rocket had been found by a kindly couple, representatives of the best midwestern values could offer. What if he’d been found instead by a representative of America’s corporate dinosauric military-industrial nightmare, as personified by the monstrous armored Doctor Midas and his zipped-up bondage babe daughter, Oubliette the Terminatrix, representing the entertainment media?

  After enduring torture at Midas’s hands, the young alien superhero chose not to fight for America or even for human values but to wage a one-man war on planet Earth from his underground lair in Times Square. It was the superhero as terrorist, and its hero was an idealistic boy from a better place who had seen firsthand the results of human cruelty and stupidity and could take no more.

  “I’LL SHOW YOU PEOPLE WHAT PARADISE LOOKS LIKE IF I HAVE TO LEVEL EVERY CITY ON EARTH AND REBUILD IT STONE BY STONE.”

  Artist I. G. Jones and I positioned him too as an embodiment of the Egyptian god Horus, in his ferocious aspect as the Lord of Force and Fire. Horus was considered by Aleister Crowley to represent a youthful, ruthless, and revolutionary current that would sweep through human affairs when the two-thousand-year Aeon of the Lawgiver, the Father God of the Book, the Middle Eastern desert boss Jehovahallah himself, that inner voice, that imaginary playmate that whole cultures had mistaken for a giant, invisible overlord, was overturned by the unstoppable forces of the Aeon of the Conquering Child. According to occult author Ramsey Dukes’s interpretation of this doctrine, any fool who prayed to “God” in the twenty-first century without realizing that He’d been replaced by a capricious divine brat would be assured of receiving no longer wise instructions for living but violent manifestoes for change. I like to think any Conquering Child would be fond of superhero stories, and perhaps the rapid growth of a superhero movie industry in the first decade of the twenty-first century can be understood as some attempt to entertain or divert this turbulent new child-of-zeitgeist with spectacle.

  Noh-Varr’s power was expressed not in the service of the status quo but as insurrection and anarchy. More frightening than his destructive capabilities were his beliefs.

  We imagined our hero’s creed as a strange, unthinkable, untranslatable mix of seeming opposites, described in the text as “Zen Fascism.” We’d all seen what ray guns and flying saucers could do, but what if the alien had a belief system so seductive, so powerful and ultimately corrosive that it could destroy our own social structures? In a move that seems prescient, Jones and I had him attack Manhattan, burning the words FUCK YOU into the street grid, big enough to be read from space.

  The third issue introduced Hexus the Living Corporation, an alien entity that arrived on our planet in the form of a mysterious logo. Hexus would root itself in a small office space somewhere and start spawning recruitment flyers—“DO YOU SINCERELY WANT TO GET RICH?”—to attract employees, who would then be swiftly assimilated into its workforce. Hexus traded up to bigger and bigger headquarters as it proceeded through its lifecycle. It was a naturally occurring “wild” corporate intelligence, a superpredator that began to gobble up the market territory of our own synthetic corporations, like Fox and AOL, on its way to devouring our planet’s entire resources before sending out its spores in the form of spaceships carrying Hexus flyers. In the end, Noh-Varr defeated the creature by leaking its secrets to its competitors, who then tore the pretender apart on the international stock exchange.

  With her beloved Noh-Varr banged up in an inescapable superpenitentiary, which he’d vowed with a smile to transform into the “CAPITAL CITY OF THE NEW KREE EMPIRE,” Oubliette was pictured in the bombed ruins of Disneyland with Donald Duck lying facedown behind her, while the voice of Horus echoed loud and clear:

  “THIS IS THE END OF THE WAY THAT WAS. COSMIC JIHAD HAS BEGUN. YOU ASKED FOR THIS.”

  A horrified President Bill Clinton stroked his chin, perhaps suspecting he wasn’t long for office:

  “… IT WAS THE WAY SHE KEPT SHOOTING THE POOR DUCK GUY IN THE BACK LIKE THAT. I DON’T BELIEVE I’LL EVER FORGET THAT IMAGE.”

  And in hindsight, Marvel Boy, like The Authority, seems almost to be a transmission from a very different world that was waiting for us all across the millennial barricade.

  Ellis and Hitch ended their run on The Authority after twelve issues. It was enough. They’d said what had to be said and showed the way, but the book was too good to waste, as Warren Ellis and I discussed when we met in New Zealand. It was agreed that the book should be handed to Mark Millar. I’d been showing Ellis some of Frank Quitely’s pages from JLA: Earth 2, which I’d written the previous year as a ninety-six-page original graphic novel intended as a bridge between the work I’d been doing with JLA and the work I intended to do in the new century. Then and there we had our new team on The Authority.

  I suggested to Mark that he play to his strengths with a punkier, funnier, and more shocking take on The Authority to really take advantage of the cycle 23 zeitgeist, and that’s exactly what he did, making the title even more controversial and popular. Millar played down Ellis’s utopian science fiction and dialed up the tabloid shock and controversy when he took the reins on the title’s second volume. The gay subtext was made explicit, culminating in a white wedding between the superpowered hunks that even made it to the tabloids.

  I met Mark Millar when he was eighteen years old in 1988. He turned up at the door to interview me for the comics fanzine Fantasy Advertiser. Unlike Warren, Mark truly loved superheroes, and we got on immediately, sharing a surreal and gruesome sense of humor.

  Soon we were speaking on the phone every day, usually for four-hour stretches, in hysterics. I suppose I was flattered by his attention and his ability to find everything I said funny, so I overlooked the potential for disaster in our unequal partnership.

  Through Mark, I reconnected with my roots in the working-class West of Scotland, embracing black humor, intoxication, and an unlikely end as the birthright of our people. We had such fun working together on the satirical Big Dave strip for 2000 AD that we decided to do it again. As it all worked out, that was probably a mistake; Big Dave was two like-minded friends having a laugh, but as soon as we were working together on American superhero dramas, the division of labor became lopsided.

  When I was offered the Swamp Thing series, I took the assignment on the condition that I would cowrite the first four with Mark to establish a new direction tha
t he would continue under my supervision. I worked out a large-scale thematic structure based on a journey through the four elements and talked him through individual story arcs, even supplying dialogue and caption suggestions, which he applied diligently. Millar-Quitely’s The Authority was a big hit with the cool kids, which led to Mark being hired, on my recommendation, to spearhead Marvel’s new “Ultimate Universe” initiative, along with another new boy with attitude named Brian Michael Bendis.

  I worked with him on the plots of the first five issues of the book and even ghostwrote one when Mark was ill and behind. As Mark’s star began to rise, however, our collaboration fell by the wayside and he went his own way.

  What Ellis had begun and Millar had completed was to make the Justice League and Avengers look out of date and out of touch. The threats in The Authority were enormous: insane tyrants commanding armies of genetically modified suicide supermen, a parallel world expansionist empire of courtly cannibals, and God itself. Millar’s run brought in analogues of Marvel’s Avengers, recast as baby killers and homosexual rapists before introducing an omnipotent pedophile sadist who caused the sky to rain dead pets and abortions. In the hands of a Dark Age writer, or in the pages of Spawn, this kind of thing might have been unbearably gruesome. Millar played it all for laughs.

  His last four-part story line, however, went too far when big business concerns contrived to overpower and replace the Authority with a team of superpowered right-wing puppets. Brainwashed and degraded, the female members of the team were plunged into humiliating scenarios inspired by the online pornography that was now becoming a feature of most men’s lives as the Internet got its hooks in deep.