The attempt to be true to the underlying spirit of Superman, as we saw it, had brought out the best in all of us. Like a monk contemplating the deeds of a saint, I was elevated by the time I spent imagining how Superman might feel. The whole world seemed fragile, infinitely precious, all-connected, and ultimately worthy of, if not a happy ending, at least a To Be Continued …
All-Star Superman was turned into an animated feature in 2011, as one of a series of comic-book adaptations from DC. The script by the talented Dwayne McDuffie—who died tragically on the weekend the DVD was released—captured the episodic, mythic countdown of the comic book and demonstrated how to do a Superman that was lyrical and Romantic, as well as stoic and tough. As Superman hugged the woman who’d been with him since the beginning and spoke his final words—“I LOVE YOU, LOIS LANE. UNTIL THE END OF TIME”—before hurtling into the sky to die, our best-ever friend, in the service of humanity, it was hard not to feel a pang.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I mysteriously turned forty-five, which meant I’d been working long enough to qualify and became the recipient of the highest honor it was possible for the UK Eagle Awards for comics to bestow, scoring the outsize Roll of Honor Lifetime Achievement version of their famous Eagle statuette. In the heart of all this perfect symmetry, a magnificent handcrafted bird of prey with my name on it arrived in its box on the doorstep. Inside I found the emblem and totem of my life’s achievement in comics with one outstretched, gilded wing cleanly snapped off at the rib cage.
WE HAVE MADE YOU A CREATURE NEITHER OF HEAVEN NOR OF EARTH, NEITHER MORTAL NOR IMMORTAL IN ORDER THAT YOU MAY, AS THE FREE AND PROUD SHAPER OF YOUR OWN BEING, FASHION YOURSELF IN THE FORM YOU MAY PREFER. IT WILL BE IN YOUR POWER TO DESCEND TO THE LOWER BRUTISH FORMS OF LIFE; YOU WILL BE ABLE, THROUGH YOUR OWN DECISION, TO RISE AGAIN TO THE SUPERIOR ORDERS WHOSE LIFE IS DIVINE.
It’s 1486, almost half a century into the new Western dawn, and that’s one man’s idea of “God” having a quiet word with man. We’re at the beginning of the great European Renaissance of culture, the end of a long dark age, and here’s Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, aged twenty-six, seizing his moment in the piazza. This is it; his big chance to impress posterity and an audience of hostile clerics with his observations on philosophy and human nature.
“Born to a high position we failed to appreciate it but fell instead to the estate of brutes and uncomprehending beasts of burden.”
Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man is still regarded as the foundation stone of the “humanist” movement that strove to cast off the manacles of Church dogma, locked in place since the founding of St. Peter’s Basilica in AD 324, but for all its status as a humanist manifesto, the Oratorio is without a doubt urging us to go far beyond the human, into the realms of angels and gods. It asks us to accept the superhuman as an undeniable fact of our nature, and the goal of our future evolution as people.
As we draw close to the back cover, I’d like to think Pico’s time has come around again, one reason why he was given a cameo role in All-Star Superman. What he’s saying still makes sense, perhaps more than ever given the possibilities of our technology and medicine, because Pico is telling us about the power of stories and imagination to reshape our future. He’s doing me a big favor by explaining what this book is all about, in fact. Although his metaphors are Biblical, suggesting Cherubs and Seraphs and Thrones as our role models and intermediaries on the road to “God” or “cosmic consciousness,” we can just as easily call them superheroes.
Pico tells us that we have a tendency to reenact the stories we tell ourselves. We learn as much (and sometimes more that’s useful) from our fictional role models as we do from the real people who share our lives. If we perpetually reinforce the notion that human beings are somehow unnatural aberrations adrift in the ever-encroaching Void, that story will take root in impressionable minds and inform the art, politics, and general discourse of our culture in anti-life, anti-creative, and potentially catastrophic ways. If we spin a tale of guilt and failure with an unhappy ending, we will live that story to its conclusion, and some benighted final generation not far down the line will pay the price.
If, on the other hand, we emphasize our glory, intelligence, grace, generosity, discrimination, honesty, capacity for love, creativity, and native genius, those qualities will be made manifest in our behavior and in our works. It should give us hope that superhero stories are flourishing everywhere because they are a bright flickering sign of our need to move on, to imagine the better, more just, and more proactive people we can be.
Here in the twenty-first century we’re surrounded by proof that we tend to live our stories. As I brought this section to a close, one last synchronicity directed my attention to an article in New Scientist’s February 12, 2011, issue about the work of William Casebeer of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Virginia. Casebeer, a neurobiologist, goes so far as to suggest that certain narratives are as addictive as cocaine, commenting on the effects a compelling yarn might have upon the minds of enemy soldiers or suicide bombers. He is convinced that we should be investigating the military potential of stories, by creating “counter-narrative strategies” engineered to undermine or oppose the religious or political storylines that inspire war, oppression, and greed. We may scoff and leave it to military experts to develop a technology whereby a cadet is told a story so convincing he believes he’s superhuman before a battle, but I’d like to think that magic words and spells belong to the rest of us as well. If Pico is correct, we can write new lives and new futures, and, more important, live them. Stories can break hearts or foment revolutions. Words can put electricity into our hearts or make our blood run cold. And the idea of Superman is every bit as real as the idea of God.
If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it’s only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean. Because the numinous is everywhere, we need to be reminded of it. We live among wonders. Superhuman cyborgs, we plug into cell phones connecting us to one another and to a constantly updated planetary database, an exo-memory that allows us to fit our complete cultural archive into a jacket pocket. We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen—the thermodynamic miracle of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass. We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn’t we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in—and we made Superman, after all. All it takes is that one magic word.
Somewhere, still, Pico is wrapping up his Oratorio. Somewhere right now Joe Shuster is putting pencil to paper and bringing Superman to life for the first time. If Superman stood on a hypothetical planet orbiting the ancient red star Antares in the constellation of Scorpio, he could watch the arrival of light from the cultural Renaissance and catch the Oratorio on its way past, going on forever. I can see 1489 just by looking up at the night sky where Antares is the fifteenth-brightest star. The photons traveling down my optic nerves into my brain were launched on their epic interstellar dash around the time Pico was clearing his throat, ending their journey in my eyes five hundred years later.
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be. They are a powerful living idea—a meme, to use the terminolog
y of Richard Dawkins that has propagated itself from paper universes into actuality, with unknown consequences. The Bomb, too, was only an idea that someone hammered into being.
But the superheroes showed me how to overcome the Bomb. Superhero stories woke me up to my own potential. They gave me the basis of a code of ethics I still live by. They inspired my creativity, brought me money, and made it possible for me to turn doing what I loved into a career. They helped me grasp and understand the geometry of higher dimensions and alerted me to the fact that everything is real, especially our fictions. By offering role models whose heroism and transcendent qualities would once have been haloed and clothed in floaty robes, they nurtured in me a sense of the cosmic and ineffable that the turgid, dogmatically stupid “dad” religions could never match. I had no need for faith. My gods were real, made of paper and light, and they rolled up into my pocket like a superstring dimension.
Superhero stories are sweated out at the imagined lowest levels of our culture, but like that shard off a hologram, they contain at their hearts all the dreams and fears of generations in vivid miniature. Created by a workforce that has in its time been marginalized, mocked, scapegoated, and exploited, they never failed to offer a direct line to the cultural subconscious and its convulsions. They tell us where we’ve been, what we feared, and what we desired, and today they are more popular, more all-pervasive than ever because they still speak to us about what we really want to be. Once again, the comics were right all along. When no one else cared, they took the idea of a superhuman future seriously, embraced it, exalted it, tested it to destruction and back, and found it intact, stronger, more defined, like steel in a refiner’s fire. Indestructible. Unstoppable. The superheroes, who were champions of the oppressed when we needed them to be, patriots when we needed them to be, pioneers, rebels, conformists, or rock stars when we needed them to be, are now obligingly battering down the walls between reality and fiction before our very eyes. There’s only one way to find out what happens next …
THANKS TO Jay Babcock, then editor of the counterculture magazine Arthur and a longtime friend, who got the ball rolling when he innocently suggested I should compile in a single book the interviews I’d done over the years on the subject of superheroes. It all sounded so easy until Peter McGuigan, my agent at Foundry Media, ventured that such a book might be enlivened by new material, and I looked up one day to find myself writing a personal overview of the superhero concept from 1938 until the present day. Fifteen months into the book, which had, by that time, already doubled its original projected page count with no sign of stopping, and beset with a dozen other writing deadlines, I began to wonder why I’d ever agreed to this epic folly. Now that it’s all over, I’m immensely grateful to Peter for talking me into it and selling the idea so effortlessly. Thanks also to Stephanié Abou, Hannah Gordon, and all at Foundry.
Thanks to Julie Grau and Cindy Spiegel at Spiegel and Grau for seeing the potential of Supergods and making me feel instantly welcome. My appreciation also goes out to my editors, Chris Jackson and Alex Bowler, and their teams, for such patient and sensitive sculpting of a sprawling, idiosyncratic text.
Thanks to DC Comics for the use of the images, and for decades of regular freelance work, too!
Big love to my wife, Kristan, who spent many days proofing the first edit, while thrashing out contracts and putting up with my hermitlike gloom during the lost summer of 2010. And to the cats, who kept me company all the way with their clever quips and dry repartee.
Thanks to my mum for the sci-fi and comic books, to my dad for providing me with the tools to express myself, and to both of them for their constant encouragement and the high value they placed on creativity and self-expression.
My deepest apologies to all the great comic-book writers and artists of yesterday and today whose contributions to the ongoing development of the superhero story would have made the final book three times as long if I’d included them all. I had to be selective with a few specific examples to illustrate each superhero “Age,” and a great many of my favorite stories, characters, and creators were left out. If this book has done its job, however, I hope readers will be encouraged to make their own investigations into the secret history of the superheroes and their creators.
I suppose I should have suspected Superman hadn’t quite finished with me. How could a book that set out to chart the journey of a solar superhero across a hundred years of sky fail to end on some profound image of circular symmetrical closure? It’s not the sort of thing you can just manufacture. And yet, with only moments to spare before the deadline of the final edit, the Man of Tomorrow returned to my life with a wink and a very special gift.
In summer 2011, a newly invigorated regime at DC, spearheaded by Jim Lee, Dan Didio, and Geoff Johns, decided it was time to defy doom, gloom, and declining comic-book sales in a defiant flourish of bravado that would include the relaunch and reimagining of the company’s most venerable titles and characters, including the Zeus, the Allfather, of superhero books, Action Comics itself.
Action Comics will return and begin again in September 2011 with its first number one issue since 1938, and the debut of a new-look Superman completely redesigned and retooled for a contemporary audience. The artist is Rags Morales, of Identity Crisis fame, and the delighted writer of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to restart superhero history … would like to thank you all very much for reading Supergods.
BOOKS ON COMICS
The Comic Book Heroes: The First History of Modern Comic Books—From the Silver Age to the Present Comic, Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs
Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Book Revolution, Ronin Ro
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, David Hajdu
Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, Douglas Wolk
The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, Arlen Schumer
Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics, Les Daniels
DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes, Les Daniels
Superman: The Complete History—The Life and Times of the Man of Steel, Les Daniels
Batman: The Complete History, Les Daniels
Wonder Woman: The Complete History, Les Daniels
The Encyclopaedia of Superheroes, Jeff Rovin
The Encyclopaedia of Super Villains, Jeff Rovin
Encyclopedia of Comic Characters: Over 1200 Characters, Dennis Gifford
The World Encyclopedia of Comics, Volume 1, Maurice Horn
ESSENTIAL COLLECTED EDITIONS
This is by no means a comprehensive list of the best superhero comics available, but no one with any interest in the subject should miss these books. Each of them is an exemplar of its time. Modesty forbids me from adding any more of my own books, but obviously you should buy those first!
GOLDEN AGE
Superman Chronicles, Volumes 1–9, various authors
Batman Chronicles, Volumes 1–10, various authors
The Wonder Woman Chronicles, Volume 1, William Moulton Marston and Charles Paris
The Shazam! Archives, Volumes 1–4, various authors
Captain America: The Classic Years, Volumes 1 and 2, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby
SILVER AGE
Superman: Man of Tomorrow Archives, Volumes 1–2, various authors
The Flash Archives, Volumes 1–5, John Broome and Carmine Infantino
Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four, Volumes 1–12, various authors
Marvel Masterworks: The Amazing Spider-Man, various authors
Essential Avengers, Volumes 1–7, Roy Thomas, John Buscema, and Neal Adams
Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, Volumes 1–4, Jack Kirby
Jack Kirby’s O.M.A.C.: One Man Army Corps, Jack Kirby
The Life of Captain Marvel, Jim Starlin
DARK AGE
Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Volumes 1–2, Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams
&nbs
p; Black Panther, Don McGregor and Billy Graham
Killraven, Don McGregor and Craig Russell
X-Men, Chris Claremont and John Byrne
Strange Days, Peter Milligan, Brendan McCarthy, and Brett Ewins
Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
Batman: Year One, Frank Miller
Daredevil: Born Again, Frank Miller
Zenith, Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell
Batman: Arkham Asylum, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean
Rogan Gosh, Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy
Enigma, Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo
Marshal Law, Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill
Astro City, Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson, with Alex Ross
Spawn, Todd McFarlane and various authors
RENAISSANCE
Marvels, Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross
Kingdom Come, Mark Waid and Alex Ross
The Authority, various authors
Planetary, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday
Marvel Boy, Grant Morrison and J. G. Jones
Wildcats Version 3.0, Joe Casey and Sean Philips
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
New X-Men, Grant Morrison and various artists
The Ultimates, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch
Wanted, Mark Millar and J. G. Jones
Supergods Page 46