Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  When Millar’s script called for a spot of necrophilia involving the corpse of ex–Authority team leader Jenny Sparks and a British superhero called the General—drawn by Quitely to look like a debauched David Beckham, the soccer legend—publisher Paul Levitz pulled the plug. The strip was heavily influenced by the dark comedy of Chris Morris and The League of Gentlemen, but that strain of macabre horror farce was still an unfamiliar flavor that lacked context in the upper echelons at DC and seemed merely, indefensibly sensational.

  The Authority was castrated, reduced to a pallid shadow of its confrontational, hip, and cheeky glory. The comic hobbled along, sustained by a loyal audience who remembered the wonder years but knew deep inside they’d never come again. The fire was out. The Authority were finally no more, no less than the inhabitants of Earth-50 in a new DC Multiversal scale that came into being in 2007.

  For a while, it was exciting. In The Authority, the no-nonsense army toughs were on our side for a change, but it was a particular kind of power fantasy: that of impotent liberals, who feared deep down that it was really only force and violence that got things done and not patient diplomacy, and that only soldiers and very rich people had the world figured out. Irish writer Garth Ennis had occupied this territory for years; his soldier-hardman heroes influenced the new generation of supermen and women. These books were a capitulation to a kind of thinking that would come to dominate the approaching first decade of the new millennium.

  Soon the no-compromise bomb and “cripple what you don’t agree with” approach of the Authority would be put to practice in the real world with horrific results. And it wouldn’t be liberals doing the damage.

  The quirky Joe Casey (later part of the team that created the popular kids’ cartoon Ben 10), who’d contributed a thoughtful pacifist take on Superman and would join me on the spearhead of the next big shake-up at Marvel, reversed the dynamic with artist Sean Phillips, turning the evil-corporation theme on its head with a radical reinvention of Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.S. as a progressive, world-changing corporation with a super-CEO and board of directors who re-created the world with one simple product: a battery that never ran out.

  CHAPTER 21

  ASIDE FROM THE ailing Batman franchise, superhero movies were few and far between in the nineties, giving no indication of what was to come.

  On one side were “dark” or Gothic offerings like Sam Raimi’s manically inventive, pulp-infused Darkman, The Crow, and Todd McFarlane’s disappointing Spawn, which failed to capture the Marilyn Manson goblin screech of the comic book. On the other side were bloated Dick Tracy–style living cartoons and period pieces with no discernible audience, such as The Rocketeer, The Shadow, and The Phantom, or interesting awkward oddities such as 1999’s Mystery Men, which featured a cast of misfits culled from Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot series, as portrayed by talented comedy and character actors like Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, William Macy, and voice actor in The Simpsons, Hank Azaria, who played the film’s best character, the turbaned Blue Raja, who could “do things” with cutlery.

  As the name perhaps suggests, Flaming Carrot was an indie black-and-white book starring a hero whose head was an enormous carrot, with a flame on top where the leaves would be. Burden’s Dadaist take on Golden Age superhero stories was genuinely inspired, and the book had enjoyed a season of faddish popularity during the first flush of the post-Watchmen wave of psychedelic superheroes. The Mystery Men from the back pages of Flaming Carrot were a disturbing bunch of redneck hobo loser supermen, and the movie failed to do them justice in spite of brave attempts by a cast that seemed uncertain as to the tone, which was never weird enough to truly honor its source or straight enough to keep the attention of a mainstream audience, who always felt cheated by “funny” superhero movies. The Batman franchise floundered in the same atmosphere of mockery and burlesque. No one had yet found a way to make superheroes convincing on-screen, but it was only a matter of time.

  X-Men led the cavalry charge in the summer of 2000. Technology had caught up with the comics and believing a man could fly was as easy as believing a giant could be a midget. Despite being at least a foot taller than the pint-sized scrapper of the comics, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine was a defining role to which the actor brought exactly the right balance of toughness and sensitivity. Patrick Stewart, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, cornering the market in “bald white men” roles, was born to play Professor Charles Xavier, and if Sir Ian McKellen was a little older than the comic-book Magneto, he brought a strength and a nasty twinkle to the role that pretty much stole the show.

  The story wisely dumped Claremontian soap gymnastics, opting instead for a taut science fiction plot about the next stage in evolution trying to find a place in a fearful, threatening human world. Here was a superhero film that didn’t rely on powers and trademark costumes. In fact, X-Men uniforms had changed radically over the years, and here they were overhauled as black leather flight suits unlike anything seen in the comics. It was about characters we could identify with and a theme that resonated particularly well on the cusp of the new century: old versus new. Tradition versus tomorrow.

  Director Bryan Singer’s X-Men was the film that made everyone in the comics business sit up and take notice, but comics were still the only place to find serious, well-made, and realistic superhero stories on a regular basis.

  That too was to change a few months after X-Men, when the release of the masterly Unbreakable provided the first real hint of what was possible and what was to come. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan had seemed to materialize fully formed with 1999’s powerful twist-ending ghost story The Sixth Sense. In Unbreakable he cast a lugubrious Bruce Willis as David Dunn, whose alliterative name immediately fingered him as a potential comic-book hero. Dunn began his journey as the sole survivor of a horrific train wreck. He was unable to understand how he’d managed to survive until the measured unwinding of plot compelled him to face the impossible truth that he’d never been hurt, never been injured in his life. David Dunn, the ordinary Joe, married with a kid and a mortgage, was the world’s first superhuman, and he’d lived to be forty without ever noticing.

  Shyamalan gave the superman the full indie-auteur treatment. Piece by patient piece, he reassembled the building blocks of hero fiction to create what remains, in my opinion, the high-water mark of the cinema’s treatment of the superhero theme.

  The pivotal scene where Willis pumped more and more weights, testing his limits to find there were none, seemed to reach into the beating, golden core of what the superhero represented. Willis gave us a muscular, sweating Everyman hero, but it was Dunn’s intense stillness, his self-doubt turning to conviction, and his character depth that made him feel like a Dark Age hero written by a Renaissance writer.

  Even Dunn’s tormented relationship with his young son—whose soul became the movie’s battleground between forces of good and evil—was beautifully resolved in a compact, touching, and completely silent scene that set up a whole series of potential “Security Man” and sidekick movies—then judiciously left the sequels to our imagination. One hopeful rumor suggested a trilogy, continuing with Breakable and Broken. A scene in which he carried his wife upstairs was shot to look as if they were flying in a romantic, real-world echo of Lois Lane’s “Can you read my mind?” scene from 1978’s Superman.

  Subtle, satisfyingly grounded in the everyday, Willis, with his Security rain cape and hood, even had his own secret identity, costume, and logo. But it was only if we recognized the tropes, or watched a second time, that we saw how matter-of-factly they’d been deployed in the expert construction of a definitive superhero origin story that was faithful to the form in a way we’d never seen before on-screen or in comics.

  There was the ultimate exquisite death trap, which used three simple ingredients—a flexible plastic sheet stretched across a swimming pool, body weight, and deep water—to encapsulate the suffocating, no-way-out, black-hole horror of the most thrilling comic-book cl
iff-hangers.

  There was a monster: in this case, the sociopathic inhuman beast with no name who turned up in an orange boilersuit on the doorsteps of nice middle-class family folks with the words “I like your house. Can I come in?”

  Cue screams.

  There was Dunn’s climactic fight with the psycho, which managed somehow to re-create the explosive high-stakes impact of a Kirby cosmic slugfest using a bedroom, a terrified hostage, and two men whose explosive releases of breath took the place of sound effects. And then there was Mr. Glass, the mastermind, pulling the strings since day one. The transformation of Dunn’s friend and adviser Elijah Price into the supervillain Mr. Glass was accomplished in plain sight, but only in those last moments did it all make as much sense to us as it did to the horrified hero. Elijah’s stylish purple suits and long leather coat, his wheelchair and spiked leg brace, and his private office with its multiple computer screens and memorabilia all assumed a grotesque new significance: He had become a cyborg master fiend in his secret lair. He needed someone to fight, to give his broken life meaning, and so he made big, strong David Dunn into his own personal superhero nemesis.

  Samuel L. Jackson, himself a celebrity comic-book fan, was expertly cast as the troubled Price, a comic-book enthusiast with a disease that had left his bones brittle and easily broken—hence the cruel “Mr. Glass” nickname he’d been given at school. Price, who owned an art gallery with framed superhero originals on the walls, was the nerd pal of the hero: At first Jimmy Olsen, he became Lex Luthor, as admiration turned to hatred.

  There was no pompous, triumphal march soundtrack, no striking of poses or corny melodrama. Willis was a world-weary, blue-collar Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders, setting the standard for a new decade of realistic superfiction with a stylish, original, and intelligent re-creation of the form.

  ————

  Superman died in 1993 in the pages of Superman no. 75, beaten and bludgeoned to death by a giant alien engine of destruction called Doomsday, who resembled the unfortunate collision of Marvel’s Hulk with a truck-load of slate, dinosaur bones, and broken tusks. Over twenty-four full-page shots of unrelenting punch-up combat, the last son of Krypton finally succumbed to the sheer battering brainless thuggery of his bestial opponent. It was bare and uncomplicated, and it left readers in no doubt: Superman had died saving the world.

  There was very little about Superman’s latest death that could be described as elegant or lyrical, but the response was phenomenal. A gullible media, happy to believe that DC Comics might actually kill off a lucrative trademark, created an intense buzz around the story of Superman’s death, which resulted in record-breaking sales.

  When he inevitably erupted from the grave eight months later, Superman came complete with a mullet, which he’d presumably picked up in hell. For several years after, the battle to restore Superman’s traditional short back and sides caused fierce and ridiculous arguments in the halls at DC. But the Fabio do hung on grimly until 2000, by which time Superman had been turned into a blue electrical energy Superman for a year before splitting into a red and blue electric Superman in a thin-blooded, overstretched homage to 1963’s classic utopian fantasy “Superman Red/Superman Blue,” which had inspired book 3 of Marvelman to much greater effect. The run of increasingly desperate stunts—the death, the replacements, the comeback, the marriage, the new powers and costume—had begun to give an impression that no one really knew how to write a straightforward, contemporary Superman story anymore. The best Superman comics were all special projects: limited-run series such as Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s pastoral Superman for All Seasons, Mark Waid and Leinil Yu’s passionate early-years tale Superman: Birthright; and Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son, a neatly constructed alternate history in which Superman’s rocket landed twelve hours later, in Communist Russia instead of the Kansas wheat fields. Superman sales went into a slow decline, as if gliding in to land on the runway of oblivion. Superman’s best hope for survival as a concept now lay with other media.

  Nineteen eighty-eight’s Superboy, by Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the producers of the Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve, was the first of a run of television series that kept the character if not in the public eye, then at least in the back of its mind. A Screen Writers Guild strike meant that a group of DC writers, including Denny O’Neil and J. M. DeMatteis, were given a chance to contribute stories with a more authentic comic-book feel. When John Haymes Newton, who played the Boy of Steel, asked for more money, he was unceremoniously replaced with Gerard Christopher, a Superman enthusiast and fan who took the show to greater heights of popularity. Effects improved over time, and the show, later retitled The Adventures of Superboy, was able to bring in characters like Bizarro, Mr. Mxyzptlk, and even the Golden Age Earth-2 Superman, as portrayed by Ron Eli.

  In 1993 Superman scored an even bigger television hit with Lois and Clark, which translated the well-to-do urban professionals of the Byrne remake into a network-friendly romantic adventure show that followed the classic Superman-on-TV formula by keeping him on the ground until the last ten minutes. Unlike Superboy, it steered away from comic-book stories, and the dabblings in sci-fi were of a lightweight, uncomplicated nature, with themes designed to appeal to a general couples audience. Like most of the Superman shows, it did very well. Stars Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher became instant heartthrobs, and at a time when Superman was dead in the comics—replaced by four substitutes—he was more alive than ever in the public consciousness. It ran for four seasons, faltering when producers decided it was time for Clark and Lois to tie the knot. Immediately, the sexual tension that had given the stories their edge just bled out, and the audience evaporated.

  Running from 2001, the most successful of all the small-screen Superman series was Smallville. This look back at a teenage Superman’s formative years before he chose to wear the familiar suit and move to the big city introduced the character to a whole new audience, and proved that his brand of boy-next-door-handsome heroism never went out of fashion. And even that he could work just as well without the costume. This young Superman wrestled with tough decisions and wore ordinary clothes.

  The persistent notion that Superman is an unpopular or dated character comes mostly from comic-book fans, who, pointing to the poor reception for Superman Returns in 2007, tended to overlook his appearance in hit TV shows since the eighties.

  The film series that really kicked down the doors and brought superheroes into the mainstream began with Spider-Man in 2002. Until The Dark Knight swooped into town, the Spider-Man movies were the top three highest-grossing superhero films of all time, and they’re still in the first four. What was it about Lee and Ditko’s Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man that allowed him to connect with the new global audience that Hollywood was eager to cultivate?

  Parker was no badass motherfucker, he was a nice guy; gentle, shy, misunderstood, self-deprecating, and neurotic but funny, and brave, too. Parker was the nerd hero in excelsis, as he’d been when he was created in 1962 to connect with awkward, bookish high school students. Now we were all geeks, torn between duty and desire, freedom and responsibility, and Peter Parker, wrestling with his conscience on a daily basis, had become one of us again, a twenty-first-century Everyman.

  Perhaps it was the mask, too; Spider-Man’s face, completely hidden, allowed us to project ourselves onto its blank surface. Fully costumed, he had no nationality, no color, making him as popular in Bangalore, India, as he was in Boise, Idaho.

  Taking a few cues from the Superman and Batman movies, Sam Raimi and his team also followed Brian Bendis’s lead on the Ultimate Spider-Man series by slowing Peter Parker’s origin story down a little and building up his rich supporting cast so that Peter’s civilian life was at least as interesting as if not more so than his exploits in the Spidey costume. The scenes with Peter and Mary Jane Watson, his obscure object of desire, had a gawky adolescent tenderness and poetry that was refreshingly honest and youthful. Played by Tobey Maguire an
d Kirsten Dunst, the two leads shared a fragile, hopeful, high-pitched relationship that made us want to hug them, except that they both looked as if they’d break into pieces on contact.

  Spider-Man’s tumbling, weightless loops and falls through the spires and glass-walled ravines of Manhattan had an agreeably dreamlike rhythm that was even more fun than flying. First-person chase scenes down Fifth Avenue gave the films a rolling, kinetic energy that left the comics in the dirt, but there was something unconvincing about the normally dependable Willem Dafoe’s hunched, by-the-numbers mental case portrayal of Norman Osborn’s Green Goblin, and the set-piece fight during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was too reminiscent of an almost identical scene from Tim Burton’s Batman. The setup was so good that the villain plot seemed almost an afterthought and was developed to far greater effect in the third installment of the series, when Peter’s best friend Harry Osborn (actor James Franco) assumed his own villain disguise to avenge his father’s death, without realizing that his attempts to kill Spider-Man were assaults on his own pal’s life.

  Spider-Man 2 brought the trilogy to its peak with nail-biting soap-operatic twists and action-fight scenes of a kind that had never been attempted before. The bright-eyed, enthusiastic Alfred Molina’s tragic, roller-coaster breakdown on his way to becoming Doctor Octopus was a tour de force of villain acting that never lost its affecting human core, never pitched into scene-chewing pantomime.

  By the time of the third film, the energy was dissipating. Peter, possessed by an alien, turned into a black-clad joke Goth version of himself in a move that was reminiscent of Superman 3’s evil doppelgänger fight sequences. Spider-Man 3 felt like too many films at once and offered little that was new, except for an astonishing CGI re-creation of the shape-shifting human beach known as the Sandman (not DC’s Sandman, the Lord of Dreams, but a man who actually turns into sand). Nevertheless, it too was a box office juggernaut, and the superheroes were here to stay.