Wanted by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones was Millar’s breakthrough work. He and Jones evoked a world that looked just like our own, but its familiar sidewalks and shopping façades hid a big secret that made horrible sense: Twenty years ago, all the supervillains had decided to gang up on the heroes once and for all. Overcoming their natural hatred and suspicion of one another for just long enough, they pooled mega-brains, billionaire resources, deadly technology, and a dozen foolproof plans for world domination. Thus armed, they overwhelmed the good guys before finishing the job with the help of diabolical superscience and evil five-dimensional magic and rewriting history so no one remembered that superheroes had ever been real. All that remained were their echoes in our comics and movies, mocking reminders of a world lost forever to corruption and greed. Wanted’s gleefully tawdry depiction of the world at its worst asked of its young media-literate audience some pertinent moral questions: If you were given a license that put you beyond the reach of all law and turned the everyday world into a Grand Theft Auto playground where any monstrous, violent, or depraved crime you committed would be covered up, as long as you surrendered to a quasi-Masonic “fraternity” of supervillains with VIP access to the best clubs, the coolest weapons, and the dirtiest birds … How far would you go, fan boy?
Wanted showed an abyss of horror beneath the comforting lies of our everyday world, where a successful coup by comic-book villains explained every rotten politician, every smirking gangster and puffed-up tyrant on the nightly news. For all his growing reputation as a shallow sensationalist, Millar was an altar boy at heart; he used the language of the lowest common denominator to preach hellfire. Wanted was an epic attempted exorcism, but its raw admission of Millar’s own dark-side dreams and its flirtation with a genuinely nihilistic endorsement of every antivalue as the way to “make it” in this world suggested a demon big enough to leave sizable bite marks in any Augustine cassock.
Wanted articulated a new myth for the hordes of suddenly cool under-achievers who’d been lionized by the rise of “nerd culture.” Big business, media, and fashion were, it seemed, so starved of inspiration, they’d reached down to the very bottom of the social barrel in an attempt to commodify even the most stubborn nonparticipants, the suicide Goths and fiercely antiestablishment nerds. The geeks were in the spotlight now, proudly accepting a derogatory label that directly compared them to degraded freak-show acts. Bullied young men with asthma and shy, bitter virgins with adult-onset diabetes could now gang up like the playground toughs they secretly wanted to be and anonymously abuse and threaten professional writers and actors with family commitments and bills to pay.
Soon film studios were afraid to move without the approval of the raging Internet masses. They represented only the most minuscule fraction of a percentage of the popular audience that gave a shit, but they were very remarkably, superhumanly angry, like the great head of Oz, and so very persistent that they could easily appear in the imagination as an all-conquering army of mean-spirited, judgmental fogies.
In the shadow of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s immensely influential book on social networks and marketing, nobody wanted to risk bad word of mouth, little realizing that they were reacting, in many cases, to the opinions of a few troublemakers who knew nothing but contempt for the universe and all its contents and could hardly be relied upon to put a positive spin on anything that wasn’t the misery and misfortune of others. Too many businesspeople who should have known better began to take seriously the ravings of misinformed, often barely literate malcontents who took revenge on the cruel world by dismissing everything that came their way with the same jaded, geriatric “Meh.”
The rise of the geeks, with their “SHORT ATTENTION SPANS AND HIGH EXPECTATIONS,” as one New X-Men character put it, was an unstoppable tidal return of the repressed. Wanted took upon itself to coldly lay bare the desires of the new elite—which far from being revolutionary were sleazy, self-serving, and viciously cynical. Reduced to numbers and screen names, souls stood out in stark relief, revealing an audience that seemed determined to portray itself as hostile, ignorantly self-assured, conformist, and forever unsatisfied in a world of staggering consumer excess. It is, of course, telling that I’ve never met any reader at a comic convention who behaved the way many do online, suggesting that the Internet monster is a defensive configuration, like the fan of spikes a tiny fish erects when it feels threatened.
Wanted’s lead was Wesley Gibson, drawn by J. G. Jones to resemble handsome rapper Eminem with an eye on the movie potential, but who stood for every shy, overweight, underweight, misunderstood kid reveling in the power to trash, denigrate, and insult his imagined enemies—who were just about everybody, especially the creators of the comic books, music, games, and movies that brought to these miserable lives the only meaning they would ever know. Geek royalty. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Wesley acted out the new porn-fueled fantasies of dumping the fat girlfriend, hooking up with hot sex-mad assassin chicks, raping pretty newsreaders, and Getting Away with It All. At its best, reminiscent of the cool, amused cruelty of a Joe Orton play, the bludgeoning effect of Wanted’s uneasy satire exposed the horrible truth: The fragile, asocial, and different really just wanted to do coke, fuck bimbos, and bully people. The revolution had arrived.
When Millar and Jones concluded Wanted with a full-page close-up of the leering, triumphant Wesley Gibson screaming “THIS IS ME FUCKING YOU IN THE ASS!,” his was the grotesque, swollen face of an outsider culture given the keys to the kingdom and revenge access to all our asses, as endorsed by the same old brute hierarchies. This was a face that any self-respecting boot might wish to stamp down upon eternally, but it was too late. Wesley was instead what we would bow down to. Wanted was a searing hymn to the death of integrity and morality, and Wesley’s the victorious face of the New God.
I left the sweary adult superbooks to Mark and Warren and countered with a sugar-coated nightmare called Seaguy. In Seaguy, Cameron Stewart (an especially talented young Canadian artist I’d met through The Invisibles) and I created a dystopian not-too-distant future that was painted over with candy colors and storybook surrealism. Following an unspecified apocalyptic event at the climax of a final superheroic showdown between good and evil, the world was at peace. Repetitive isolated lives were played out under constant surveillance in designated “Comfort Zones”: retro-nostalgic model marina villages arranged around sinister theme parks, in which everyone was a self-proclaimed superhero but no one had any real purpose other than to consume the new wonder food XOO!, watch endless reruns of disturbingly violent Mickey Eye TV cartoons, and visit scary Mickey Eye theme parks. “Pacified, safe and supervised,” the inhabitants of Seaguy’s world were trauma survivors in deep denial. Alienated, lonely, confused, and self-important, they confided these fears to an anonymous voice in “Diary Rooms,” inspired by “Big Brother,” while pretending an outward happiness to the other self-absorbed people they encountered on their trips to the shops or the park.
The Romantic idea of the special person, the genius, the “superhero,” was dying before our very eyes. Our most successful movies starred children’s cartoon characters as we cocooned ourselves with nostalgia and repetition against the howling, incoherent darkness of ecological disaster, paranoid surveillance culture, terror, and financial collapse.
Ex-supervillain turned bureaucrat Captain Lotharius Lee offered this proposal for a future where the family unit would be replaced with more manageable module living in “Big Brother”–style compounds:
“EACH HOUSE WILL PROVIDE A COMMUNAL LIFESPACE FOR SIXTEEN INFANTILOIDS. THESE BICKERING PACKS WILL STAY AT HOME UNDER 24-HOUR SURVEILLANCE WATCHING ONE ANOTHER ON TELEVISION. THE RESULTING BEHAVIORAL FEEDBACK WILL ACT TO RAPIDLY STANDARDIZE HUMAN BEHAVIOR.”
Reacting against the realist approach for our own pet project at least, Cameron Stewart and I were digging out influences like Sinbad, Parsifal, and Don Quixote. We liked the idea of re-creating the superhero
in terms of medieval quest allegories, Celtic wonder tales, and picaresques, combining the aesthetic of 1984 and The Prisoner with Saturday morning cartoons, talking animals, and LSD bubblegum colors.
Seaguy asked how it felt to be a hero in a world with no more need for heroes and was, I felt, my first truly modern and inspired re-creation of the Siegel and Shuster formula since Flex Mentallo. But I had to recognize that it was a little out of time and doomed to appeal to only a small but much-appreciated cult audience of forward-thinking, early-adopting hipsters!
Nevertheless, I’d become fascinated by the power and the existence of the evil-has-won narrative and resolved to explore it further in a major DC universe crossover event. I was asked to complete what Dan DiDio was now calling his Crisis trilogy with a wrap-up book to be called Final Crisis. Dan wanted to use this series as a showcase for Kirby’s New Gods characters, and if I was excited by the idea of having to improvise on that theme, I was even more overjoyed to know that I had access to Darkseid himself, the ultimate supertyrant with his Anti-Life Equation. As far as I was concerned, the Anti-Life Equation was being rammed down my gullet every day in the papers and on TV, and I was sick of it; sick of being told the world was dying, and it was all because I’d forgot to turn off the bathroom light; sick of Fina(ncia)l Crisis, the War, and the teenage suicide bombers willing to die for the promise of a cheesy afterlife that sounded like a night out with the lap dance girls at Spearmint Rhino.
With J. G. Jones and later Doug Mahnke on art, we set about dramatizing the breakdown of the rational enlightenment story of progress and development as it succumbed to a horror tale of failure, guilt, and submission to blind authority.
(illustration credit 23.1)
I brushed up on the cheerful literature of apocalypse and doomsday, refamiliarizing myself with the various revelations, Ragnaroks, and myths of the end times to construct a thoroughly modern Armageddon in which half the human race was possessed by an evil god who announced his arrival in the form of Anti-Life Equation e-mails and small acts of cruelty that grow to consume the world. What would it look like if a comic-book universe died, and what could it tell us about what we were doing to ourselves?
The “final crisis,” as I saw it for a paper universe like DC’s, would be the terminal war between is and isn’t, between the story and the blank page. What would happen if the void of the page took issue with the quality of material imposed upon it and decided to fight back by spontaneously generating a living concept capable of devouring narrative itself? A nihilistic cosmic vampire whose only dream was to drain the multiverse dry of story material, then lie bloated beneath a dead sun, dying.
I tried to show the DC universe breaking down into signature gestures, last-gasp strategies that were tried and tested but would this time fail, until finally even the characterizations would fade and the plot become rambling, meaningless, disconnected. Although I lost my nerve a little, I must confess, and it never became disconnected enough.
This, I was trying to say, is what happens when you let bad stories eat good ones. This is what it looked like when you allow the Anti-Life Equation to turn all your dreams to nightmares.
In the end, there was nothing left but darkness and the first superhero, Superman, with a crude wishing machine, the deus ex machina itself, and a single wish powered by the last of his own life force.
He wished for a happy ending, of course.
Final Crisis was a bestseller, but it divided the Internet crowd like Alexander’s sword. One outraged reader even confidently predicted that I would, someday soon, be brought to account for the “evil” I had done. For a comics fan scorned, it seemed, the measure of evil lay not in genocide or child abuse but in continuity details deliberately overlooked by self-important writers, of plot points insufficiently telegraphed, and themes made opaque or ambiguous.
If only one-tenth of the righteous, sputtering wrath of these anonymous zealots could be mustered against the horrors of bigotry or poverty, we might find ourselves overnight in a finer world.
That’ll catch on.
As a popular writer, I was often invited to signings and got to see the inside of more comic shops than anyone would care to. They ranged from chain store emporia like Forbidden Planet to mom-and-pop stores or head shops run by creepy stoners and eccentrics.
Once the location was Sheffield, a postindustrial, heavy metal Goth town in the north of England. It was 1989, and I was one of five or six comics professionals arranged along a trestle table like a panel of judges at a young offenders court hearing. The only people who’d come to see us were five outlandish individuals, each with his own eccentric dress and appearance, each more freakish than the last. There was a painfully shy, long-haired, and wild-bearded giant. Another man was a tiny, furtive character with the twinkling jet-black eyes of a water vole. The others are shapeless in my memory; an identikit lineup that’s part Wallace from Wallace and Gromit, part Punch and Judy, arranged along the wall like a parade of suspects for a fairy-tale crime, the witnessing of which would make unlikely any cordial relationship with sanity.
And there they stood silently, waiting, allowing the awkwardness to build into a mute, motionless pressure that soon became intolerable. I could see the now sweating giant’s mind calculating furiously behind his gentle, frightened eyes. I could see that he felt personally responsible for the embarrassed, dumbstruck silence of the others. I could see the tension in his body as he built toward some kind of primordial release so that when his outburst came, it was in the form of a high-pitched yelp. “I’m so sorry! I don’t have a question!” He had done what none of the others seemed capable of and overcome a lifetime’s worth of introversion to make his mark, and now the whole thing was over in a kind of grunt and spew—the noise you’d get from the last of its kind finally giving in to the future and extinction’s call. Then, as if on a visit from another world in a Ditko cupboard, the smallest man looked around as if to let us know that he was in on some immense joke and had nothing to do with these others whom he seemed only now to be aware of. He was one of us, an understanding that the brute boundary of the trestle table between us could never truly grasp or define. He was, he explained, a professional writer of comedy. Then, with a knowing glint, he presented his credentials in the form of a tiny wrap of paper, pushed with one finger across the table toward me.
“Here’s one for you,” he said, then retreated, backward—a special effect in a Cocteau film—to assume his previous position against the wall. His eyes twinkled, a micro-nod of encouragement anticipating my response. And while the corners of his mouth flirted with the wry knowing smile of Mr. Mxyzptlk, the fifth-dimensional imp, I defolded the paper again and again and again and again until infinitesimal pencil marks, small as the inscription on a fairy knight’s tombstone, could be read:
“The Campaign for Surreal Ale.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. After an hour and a half of being stared at, the baffled, embarrassed proprietor led our mildly traumatized group out to a waiting car, anxious to be rid of the embarrassment.
As we huddled outside the shop, like last night’s curry leftovers, with our dreams of fame and groupies cast into callous relief by an unforgiving Sheffield afternoon, a tiny, fierce, bald man wearing platform shoes, flared trousers, an open-necked shirt, and a leonine chest medallion strode past like an engine on a track, then stopped, froze, turned, and snarled in our faces.
“You fucking Tory bastards! I’ve been to Barbados, I have!”
Superhero comic-book fans often struggled with the unflattering stereotype of the unloved, awkward, and ugly, and while there was and still is some element of truth there, it should be remembered that the same accusations can be just as easily leveled against film fans, music fans, or football fans—with examples to prove it. Zealous fans of anything, as well as hobbyist types and collectors of all kinds of memorabilia, often share traits with comics fans. But I have to say that I only ever encountered Sheffield-class levels of physical and
behavioral freakishness once again in Auckland, New Zealand, but there it came with a dull aggression, and only one young and bloodlessly pale yokel from miles away in sheep farming country came close to matching his English counterparts for Lewis Carroll levels of tomfoolery. With rolling eyes behind lenses that Sherlock Holmes could use to solve crimes on the cellular level, his hair was oddly whipped up into the exact shape of an inverted ice-cream cone and left behind the haunting, disconcerting impression that it was made all of one awful, congealed synthi-substance the texture and color of mashed potato. His rapid-fire, high-pitched questions and abrupt body language suggested some missing link between man and an ostrich, and I have never seen any living thing that resembled him again. I can only pray that country boy who fell to Earth had a kind word for us when he testified to his machine-ostrich alien masters.
Even the loud and crazy, sex-starved fan boys of snowbound New Jersey, with their confused cries of “She-Males! Best of both worlds!” and the voluminous Goth girls, victims of some unspeakable abuse, were unable to compete. These physical marvels tended to heave into view like stricken Zeppelins cradling grotesque homemade Sandman dolls—imagine a cutout of Neil Gaiman’s face pinned to a boxing nun hand puppet or adorned with a crown of pressed black roses. But they were essentially kind souls and more or less harmless, like news reports of disasters on the other side of the world.
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