Gaiman changed the usual balance of power in comics with The Sandman—one of the first “writer's books” in a field that previously relied most heavily on its artists to sell a title. Though the title became one of DC's top sellers, Gaiman chose not to work with the big stars, relying instead on a revolving staff of competent but unremarkable draftsmen who simply told the stories clearly and coherently. This was a major innovation on Gaiman's part, since even Alan Moore and Frank Miller relied on flashy illustrators like Bill Sienkiewicz and David Mazzuchelli to put their work over the top commercially. On The Sandman, Gaiman was clearly the unchallenged star attraction.
In 1992, Gaiman created a new character for a mini-series called The Books of Magic. Its hero, young wizard Timothy Hunter, is widely cited as an unacknowledged prototype for Harry Potter. Both are young English urchins with tousled brown hair and glasses who inherit great magical powers and stand on the threshold of great destinies. Both use owls as familiars. Gaiman placed Hunter squarely in the DC Universe, using John Constantine, Phantom Stranger, Mister E, and Doctor Occult as his spirit guides in the first storyline. The Books of Magic soon became a regular series and ran for six years. Hunter also appeared in two spinoffs, The Names of Magic and Books of Magick: Life During Wartime.
Gaiman also worked extensively outside of comics, producing several bestselling novels, including the award-winning American Gods. This extraordinary book deals with the gods of the old world trying to make their way in the spiritual wasteland of modern America. The plot has Woden using an ex-convict named Shadow Moon to recruit the old gods for a last stand against the new American gods of commerce and the media. As preposterous as that premise may sound, Gaiman handled the material with utter conviction.
After a hiatus from comics, Gaiman returned to create 1602 for Marvel. This miniseries places the characters of the Marvel Universe in Elizabethan England on Her Majesty's Secret Service. The series introduced a new generation of readers to the same sort of Rosicrucian intrigues that Steve Englehart had presented in Doctor Strange. In a way, 1602 brought the Marvel heroes full circle, back to their British occultic roots. After 1602, Gaiman published another award-winning novel, Anansi Boys, and in 2005, directed a film in collaboration with Dave McKean and the Jim Henson Company called Mirrormask.
Gaiman returned to Marvel in 2006 for a revamp of Kirby's Vril-ya analog, The Eternals. Shunning Kirby's grandeur and extreme violence, Gaiman instead mined the territory explored by the TV series The 4400 and Heroes. In this mini-series, the Eternals live ordinary lives, only vaguely aware of their great potential. As of this writing, he is working on a computer-animated film of the ur-hero of English literature, Beowulf.
Even if he never writes another comic book, Gaiman's legacy is assured. More than any other writer, Gaiman rebuilt the once-extensive links between the fantasy audience and the world of the occult through the medium of comics.
GRANT MORRISON
Another Alan Moore acolyte to make an impact on mainstream comic books is Scottish-born Grant Morrison. Like Moore, Morrison began his career as an artist, but soon moved into writing. His big breakthrough came in 1987 with his own superhero deconstruction, Zenith, for 2000 A.D. magazine. Morrison sold DC on a revamp of the obscure hero Animal Man, which he turned into a surreal and often deeply personal meditation on themes like animal rights. The book earned a sizable cult audience, and DC set Morrison to work revamping another old title, The Doom Patrol.
Morrison's Doom Patrol became a nearly unreadable Dadaist parody of the very act of storytelling itself, a conceit that his energy and conviction made appealing to the more pretentious comics fans. Using his cult success as a springboard, Morrison cashed in on Batmania with his best-selling Arkham Asylum graphic novel. He cannily hedged his bets with his relatively conventional superhero thriller, Batman: Gothic, drawn by Klaus Janson, an explicitly occultic work that tells of a monk who sells his soul to Satan to gain immortality.
In 1994, Morrison created his magnum opus, The Invisibles, a Vertigo series that deals with a band of occult superheroes battling an interdimensional ruling-class conspiracy. Well, sort of. The series, which has a revolving cast of regular characters, acted mainly as a vehicle for Morrison to delve into every imaginable fringe idea or Internet conspiracy theory he came across. Morrison took Gaiman's lead and relied on a revolving staff of artists to illustrate the book, making himself the undisputed attraction of The Invisibles.
Morrison claimed that The Invisibles was actually dictated to him by an alien race he encountered in the Himalayas (shades of Blavatsky!). This alleged extraterrestrial origin failed to help the series reach a large audience, however, and sales of the title faltered. Morrison's response to this was unprecedented. He used the letters page of the comic to encourage his readers to take part in a worldwide occult ceremony that involved ritual masturbation. Whether through magical intervention or to keep a star writer happy, DC gave the series another chance, this time as a reverse-numbered limited edition meant to count to down to January 2000.
For all the excitement generated by Morrison's esoteric foibles, his greatest success by far lies in his work on Marvel and DC's crown-jewel characters. Morrison revamped The Justice League in 1996, making it a top seller during at a time when comic sales were in free-fall. He leveraged this success to earn himself a fat contract with Marvel, who immediately put him on the faltering X-Men series. He also helped revive interest in the Fantastic Four with his Fantastic Four 1234 miniseries. Morrison stunned the industry with a messy split with Marvel in 2004 and went to DC for a number of esoteric projects and a marquee run on All-Star Superman with fellow Scot Frank Quitely. In 2006, he began a back-to-basics make over of Batman with artist Andy Kubert.
Cynics may say that Grant Morrison is more style than substance; sort of an amalgam of Alan Moore, Timothy Leary, and Sammy Glick. But in a field where the top sellers are still old warhorses like Batman and The X-Men, Morrison has generated genuine excitement with his occult/situationalist provocations. He has taken ideas and concepts from extremely marginal groups like chaos magicians, Burning Man cyber-hippies, and alternative comics fans and created the illusion of a new breed of comics geek. Although playing to a small audience, Morrison made his fantasy vision of the tuned-in and turned-on cyberpunk superhero seductive to less-adventurous superhero fans, who live vicariously through Morrison's carefully presented interviews and personal appearances. If Alan Moore's magic is basically hermetic in nature, then Morrison's is pure prestidigitation.
MIKE MIGNOLA
Hellboy creator Mike Mignola occupies a space different from that of the other wizards of comicdom. His work is about history—occult history, to be precise—and he uses a Golem-type hero to immerse himself and his readers in the dark corners of our past. Mignola began his career submitting illustrations to fan magazines like The Comic Reader. He eventually turned pro at Marvel, and made his bones with the 1988 mini-series Cosmic Odyssey, written by the death-obsessed Jim Starlin. Odyssey delved deeply into Kirby's Fourth World material and also featured the Justice League. Mignola's eyes were set on the past, however, and his 1989 graphic novel Gotham by Gaslight, which featured a Victorian-era version of Batman battling Jack the Ripper, caught the eye of Francis Ford Coppola, who hired the artist as production designer for his 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula. Mignola also illustrated a comic-book adaptation of the film. Wading even deeper into occult waters, Mignola was production designer for Disney's 2001 animated opus Atlantis: The Lost Empire, a production that clearly spoke to Mignola's obsessions.
In 1993, Mignola brought forth his signature creation, Hellboy (San Diego ComicCon Comics #2), a young demon summoned by a reincarnated Rasputin to work for the Nazis in the closing days of World War II. The demon is taken by the Allies, who train him to be a classic occult detective. In concept, Hell-boy is little more than a hijacking of Jack Kirby's Demon, with a personality on loan from Ben Grimm, but Mignola's elegant and moody artwork, as well as his encyclopedic k
nowledge of the occult, made Hellboy by far the most remarkable superhero of the 1990s. Mignola leavens his stories with heavy doses of humor that, paradoxically, only make them more arcane. He also adds heavy doses of Lovecraftian horror and a morbid ambiance that displays a strong Poe influence.
Mignola's stories are impeccably researched, and his explorations of Nazi occultism are at once remarkable and chilling. Mignola also incorporates horrors like leprechauns and werewolves from old European folktales, and more esoteric beasties like the Homonculus. He makes his comics tantamount to magic spells by decorating his pages with various sigils and icons borrowed from ritual magic. Unfortunately, Mignola's involvement in the Hellboy comics has recently diminished and the art work has been handed off to others.
The 2004 Hellboy movie, directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) and starring Ron Perlman (Beauty and the Beast), was a serviceable action picture completely devoid of the magical ambiance and creeping dread of Mignola's comics. Mignola's work is about the beauty of decay and the purity of terror—themes that don't always translate well on screen. His best work taps directly into the deepest recesses of the collective imagination; the deep shadows and dark stares that give his drawing such intensity in print are hard to translate to film.
ALEX ROSS
If Jack Kirby is the prophet of the new gods and Alan Moore the comics' sorcerer supreme, then Alex Ross is the foremost apostle of the new superhero religion. His father was Protestant minister and his mother worked as a successful illustrator. Being a preacher's son put special pressures on Ross, who poured all his youthful energies into his art. After moving with his family from Portland, Oregon to a new home deep in the heart of Texas, Ross sought inspiration in the graceful, idealized heroes of artists like Neal Adams and George Perez, as well as the classic magazine illustrations of Andrew Loomis and Norman Rockwell. By age 12, he was already more talented than most of the Nineties hacks whose work wounded him so deeply.
Ross seems to have latched onto DC's heroes for the same reasons other fans abandoned them in the Sixties and Seventies. The heroes of The Justice League were aloof and Olympian; they were better than normal Joes. In other words, they were gods. In his monograph, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, he explained this appeal: “As an adolescent you need order in your world, and superheroes have that, a sense of ethics that would never change—they would never be less than perfect, fighting for their ideals,” adding “they deal succinctly with moral issues, in a way that religion doesn't. Or rather, religion does, but in a much more complicated and often confusing manner.”155
After a stint in advertising, Ross landed an opportunity to draw a Terminator miniseries for Now Comics. In 1993, he got his first job for DC—appropriately enough, a book cover for a novelization of the dying-rising Superman saga entitled Superman: Doomsday and Beyond. His work caught the attention of editors at Marvel and, in 1994, he illustrated his graphic love letter to the superheroes of old, Marvels. Ross' art electrified fandom and snapped comics out of their cynical 90s decline. All of a sudden, superheroes actually looked heroic again. Indeed, looking at Ross' Marvels is almost like seeing those characters for the first time. As Chip Kidd said of Ross' later depictions of Superman, “the effect was like finally meeting someone you'd only ever heard about.”
Ross leveraged his success with Marvels to get his hands on the Justice League. DC was floundering at the time, its editors playing a perpetual game of catch-up with Marvel and Image. Ross set out to revitalize the entire line with his epic Kingdom Come, in which he sought “to bring a sense of morality back to the comics.”156 Comics had never seen anything like Kingdom Come, which captivated fans and fellow creators alike. Ross was acknowledged as a prophet, shouting down the fatuous corruption of the Chromium Age. No one yet realized it, but when the Kingdom came, the New Age had begun.
Kingdom Come was almost a decade in the making. In his original notes for the series, Ross perceptively equated the 40s Superman with Samson and the 60s version with Jesus Christ. “Superman as a fictional character is just as important as if he existed in flesh and blood,” he claimed. “Either way he is inspirational, and that's what's relevant” Indeed, Ross wanted to put “Superman in the same role” as Jesus Christ.157
Ross made his father a star of the show in Kingdom Come, renaming him Pastor Norman McCay as a tribute to Winsor McCay. His father proved an excellent model, bearing a strong resemblance to Alec Guinness in Star Wars. In the story, Jerry Siegel's occult hero, the Spectre, appears before McCay and anoints him as a witness to the coming Apocalypse. McCay protests against the Apocalypse using the tepid language of liberal Protestanism, but regains his religious fervor (and his congregation) after helping the gods of the League save humanity.
Ross' superheroes are the very embodiment of Nietszche's ubermenschen. Indeed, members of the League are referred to as “gods” throughout the book. Ross depicts Green Lantern in the armor of a Wagnerian knight, and returns the Flash and Hawkman to their original forms. No longer stand-ins for Hermes/Mercury and Horus, they are the exact look-alikes of those gods, their carriage and behavior leaving little doubt that they are their actual incarnations. Ross claimed “Hawkman would become Hawkgod … he's become a real birdman now, a new entity, a reincarnated Egyptian prince.”158
Ross' Wonder Woman, modeled on Lynda Carter, is a lioness, fierce in battle but tender to her man (Superman, in this case). In the book's final apocalyptic battle, Ross accentuates her divine nature by dressing her in golden eagle armor reminiscent of ancient figurines of the winged Isis and bathing her in sunlight (which he does throughout the entire story). When we first see the reconstituted Justice League descend from heaven, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Hawkgod are most prominent among them, drawing an irresistible parallel to Osiris, Isis, and Horus. The three seem to fly from the heart of the Sun itself.
The mythological tone and sense of majesty of Ross' Kingdom Come hark back to the Neoclassical, Romantic, and Pre-Raphaelite movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ross' worshipful sensibility has much more in common with Leyendecker, Waterhouse, or Alma-Tadema than that of even the most elegant cartoonists like Hal Foster or Alex Raymond.
Even the moronic Chromium Age-style heroes that Ross is seeking to exorcise are designed and rendered in a manner infinitely more creative and dignified than the wretched 90s characters that inspired them—although he still has most of them annhilated by a nuclear explosion.
Sprinkled throughout the series are passages from Revelations that underscore the apocalyptic events in the story and the sense of reverence and awe Ross seeks to reintroduce to comics readers, whose sensibilities were ruined by the deluge of Chromium Age garbage. Ross mounts a crusade against superheresy, and responds to the 90s decline with his vision of the one true faith. The cumulative effect of all this nobility, righteousness, and wrath is indistinguishable from that of any of the great ancient religious epics.
Make no mistake, Kingdom Come is a fundamentally religious piece of work, and the gods that Ross celebrates in it would easily be recognized by any ancient pagan or polytheist. The symbols and accessories of the ancient gods—whether Egyptian, Greek, Roman, or Norse—and motifs taken from Templarism, Freemasonry, and Neoclassicism are everywhere in Kingdom Come. If Ross did not set out intentionally to reintroduce the ancient gods and goddesses to a modern audience, then we must seriously contemplate whether some other supernatural force was working through him to do so.
The impact of Kingdom Come and Ross' tabloid-size graphic novellas featuring Superman (Peace on Earth), Batman (War on Crime), Captain Marvel (Power of Hope), Wonder Woman (Spirit of Truth), and the Justice League (Liberty and Justice) cannot possibly be overstated. It took some time to digest, but soon the better draftsmen in the field began to inject their art with Ross' realism and reverence. Now, most of the top artists at Marvel and DC make heavy use of photo reference and tell stories in a cinematic storytelling style that has come to be known as “widescreen.�
�� Artists who draw in the cartoon style of the Eighties or the hyperthyroid style of the Nineties are out of fashion—perhaps forever. Kingdom Come heralded the age of the superhero as god, and gods must be awe-inspiring or not exist at all.
143 Mine is, of course, a subjective analysis. Many other writers injected elements of occultism into superhero stories, but in my view the creators included here made the most crucial contributions.
144 Roy Wyman, Art of Jack Kirby (Orange, CA: Blue Rose, 1992).
145 Art Spiegelman, interviewed by Gary Groth, excerpted from The Comics Journal # 180.
146 Excerpted from “Kirby in the 80s,” Jack Kirby Collector #30, Nov. 2000; “Interview with Jonathan Lethem” JKC#47, November 2006.
147 James Van Hise, “Superheroes: A Talk with Jack Kirby,” Comics Feature, December 1984.
148 Jack Kirby, editorial in 2001: A Space Odyssey #1, December 1976.
149 James Van Hise, “Superheroes: A Talk with Jack Kirby, Comics Feature, December 1984.
150 Curious again that Aleister Crowley's first magical sect after leaving the Golden Dawn was called the Silver Star.
151 “The Super-Normals: Are They God's or Satan's Children?,” Silver Star #4, August 1983.
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