152 A very similar story is being played out on NBC's Heroes with the character Sylar in the Drumm role.
153 Steve Englehart, Doctor Strange I: Marvel Premiere 9-14, Doctor Strange 1-18. steveenglehart.com.
154 Jennifer Contino, “Englehart Chats Coyote & Scorpio Rose,” PULSE News, October 10, 2005.
155 Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear, Mythology (no pagination).
156 Quoted in Les Daniels, DC Comics, p. 248.
157 Quoted in Les Daniels, DC Comics, p. 248.
158 Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear, Mythology (no pagination).
CHAPTER 21
THE DREAM LAB: COMICS AND THE FUTURE
Why have comics survived? Why are they still so powerful and influential? Why do so many adult men spend up to 100 dollars a week keeping up with their favorite titles? Part of the answer is that comics are a profoundly intimate form of storytelling. They are something you can hold, something you can possess, something that speaks only to you. Comics have a special magic that affects the brain in ways prose does not. Comics fans develop intimate relationships with their favorite characters—a relationship they jealously guard. Fans of some obscure Indie band seek each other out, but comics fans are more wary, treating their obsession as part of their private space.
Clive Barker observes that comics happen in the reader's own time frame, noting that a comic story “unfolds in your personal time, just like a dream or nightmare.”159 Readers control the visual timeline in a way that's hard to replicate in other media, even with video freeze-frame. Each visual moment is suspended forever in comic-book time and space. Comics fans control the flow of events, so every single moment belongs to them. No other artform can do this. It's as if, by reading the comics, you become a kind of deity. The impulse is brilliantly incorporated into the film The Matrix with the freeze-frame and “bullet time” sequences. It's also cleverly alluded to in the TV series Heroes, where comic-book fan Hiro has the ability to freeze moments in time.
Comic-book fans are a small, but highly dedicated and influential, group. They usually develop an intense, intimate relationship with the comics medium at an early age, often as a result of childhood trauma. Many have a general disposition toward shyness or social awkwardness that tends to cement their dedication to the form, turning them into, in Stan Lee's words, “true believers” indistinguishable from your average theology student or seminarian.
Hardcore comics fans are very reverent to their heroes and woe betide the artist or writer who doesn't share in their worship. If a creator appears insufficiently devoted to the characters or fails to imbue their work with the prerequisite religious awe, they will suffer at the hands of the fans, who, like ancient pagans, take special delight in killing their kings. Even Jack Kirby fell from grace when more realistic artists like Neal Adams came to prominence in the 1970s.
Because of their intense devotion, many fans want to become creators themselves, and the increased accessibility and affordability of tools for creating comics—particularly online—has created an explosion of independent and self-published work. Many fans expect that they will eventually “break in” to the major publishers, and the competition for the top books is murderous. Some give up when they realize that they will never reach the big leagues; others keep plugging, hoping for the impossible.
The World Wide Web has created a perpetual 24/7 comics convention, with its thousands of message boards, chat rooms, and Web comics. And creators continue to self-publish, whether in mini-comic form or in the cheap black and white formats. These conditions have created a pressure-cooker test market for a new popular culture that has inevitably branched out into other forms of storytelling. Today's comics fans are all connoisseurs, and the contemporary superhero culture is exclusively of, by, and for hardcore, highly educated fans.
Of course, this means that comic books are no longer a mass medium. Instead, they have become a highly charged laboratory for pop culture, developing themes and ideas that are picked up in television, movies, and video games. Many of Hollywood's top creators—Steven Spielberg, Bryan Singer, James Cameron, George Lucas, Chris Carter, Sam Raimi—are hardcore comic-book fans who adapted themes and ideas from the comics in their work. Today, movie people write for comics, and vice versa. The same applies to fiction, with best-selling authors like Brad Meltzer and Jonathan Lethem working for the Big Two.
The symbiosis that has developed between comics and Hollywood extends to video games as well, to the point that the content and storylines of games are essentially indistinguishable from comics. This is a recent phenomenon, concurrent with the amazing advances in digital imaging technology. Computer rendering has allowed the visual punch of comics to be translated on screen in games and on film. The cost of special effects is no longer prohibitive, and the limitations of even the best pre-digital effects have been overcome. Digital imaging technology now brings the kinetic energy of comic-book action to the screen, especially in films like Sin City and 300, based on Frank Miller's graphic novels.
Whether we realize it or not, we are programmed by pop culture. Television and film and video games are part of our collective consciousness, perhaps even more so than our dreams. The great comic creators sensed this and deliberately wove the threads of past, present, and future into their work. Jack Kirby recognized that he lived in a society “without the kind of gods that used to exist, or the legends that used to travel back and forth with tribes. The tribes each told the same stories in their own way,” Kirby observed. “I gave those stories the power of the old concepts with characters from our own day.”160 Alan Moore worked from the same vision and articulated what may be the core truth of the comics culture: “There is something very magical at the heart of writing, and language, and storytelling. The gods of magic in the ancient cultures … are also the gods of writing.”161
159 Clive Barker quoted in Mike Benton, Horror Comics: An Illustrated History. (Dallas: Taylor, 1991.), p. 3.
160 Quoted in Les Daniels, DC Comics, p. 164.
161 Quoted in Bill Baker, Alan Moore Spells It Out (Michigan: Airwave, 2005.), p. 10.
CHAPTER 22
CONCLUSION: THE GODS WITHIN US
Superheroes were once vigilantes against organized crime or soldiers in the war against fascism. Now they have become something else. They address a greater anxiety—the universal feeling of powerlessness in a new technocratic world order. The proliferation of technology and the dramatic rise in world population makes people feel marginalized and insignificant—isolated and powerless against the invisible systems that control every aspect of their lives.
We live in extremely depressing and disheartening times, in which old certainties vanish before our eyes. The world we once knew is either collapsing or being systematically dismantled, and there is nothing we can do about it. The daily political and economic bad news and the constant drumbeat of war and terrorism are making superhero fantasies more relevant and visceral, as well as more comforting and reassuring, than at any time since World War II.
American religion seems unable to provide a viable salvation myth in this time of crisis. Most denominations have become nothing more than badly disguised political movements, interested only in money and power. On the other hand, our bloodless secular culture has no room in it for wonder. It should not surprise us, then, when Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The X-Men step in to fill the void.
Superheroes provide escape, but from what and to where? From the mind-numbing mediocrity of most modern life. To a space where greater potentials and possibilities exist. But it's no longer enough for us simply to root for these heroes. Deep down, we want to become them.162 This is the impulse behind the role-playing popular today at comic conventions, in which fans dress like their favorite characters and act out their adventures. Costume contests are also popular and some fans write reverent parodies of their gods or make home videos based on their favorite characters. The same impulse is driving the increasing popularity of Halloween with adults. People want to enter into
the mythic realm and become someone else in an attempt to shed their mundane problems. This phenomenon is a survival of the mystery cults of ancient times, with their rituals and festivals in which pagans dressed like their favorite gods and acted out their dramas.
Entertainment Weekly claims that the TV series Heroes is proof positive that what was once considered cult pop is now mainstream thanks to a decade defined by the Spiderman and Harry Potter film sagas.”163 The question now becomes this: Will a society so immersed in Heroes, Harry Potter, and The X-Men settle for the limitations of the human body? Or will fascination with these stories raise new expectations that we will try to meet through cloning and genetic engineering? Shows like Heroes and The 4400 feature superpowers made manifest in the real world, not in the Spandex world, and the virtual environments of some video games suggest the possibility of entering other realities. Are these trends shaping our future? Are we beginning to wonder how to manifest these new possibilities?
The superhero culture has become much more than comic books. The superheroes of today are actually changing our expectations of the human machine, especially in the minds of the young. Hollywood wizards are making Harry Potter's magic and the X-Men's mutant powers almost tangible. How much longer will young audiences be satisfied with the ordinary? How long before they demand increased or supernatural powers for themselves? And will that lead to an expectation of greater human abilities that can only take the form of a totally new human reality? Are we facing the inevitable incorporation of technology into humanity itself?
Seeking to unlock the evolutionary conundrum posed by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jack Kirby came to the conclusion that man will send robots into space rather than risk it himself. He tried repeatedly to make sense of the Star Child, only to answer with Machine Man. Kirby's character was not a cybernetic man, but an artificial intelligence alienated from human life. Today, however, we increasingly see efforts made, not to turn machines into people, but to turn people into machines.
Some observers label this projected reality “transhumanism,” or “posthumanism.” Its goal is to use cybernetics and nanotechnology (microscopic computers and robots ) to “perfect” the human organism. Through neuroscience, we can now control the human brain and its processes. But this sort of dabbling alarms many scientists, theologians, and philosophers. What direction will this extraordinary technology take? Will human beings end up as automatons, serving a computer-controlled hive mind like the Borg in Star Trek? Will artificial intelligences become self-conscious, making human beings obsolete, as in the Terminator films? If the 20th century has done nothing else, it has proven to us how dangerous science can be when pressed into service for inhumane purposes. There are so many questions we need to ask. Who is creating this technology? Who's paying for it? Do these people have our best interests at heart? Are they guided by love and compassion, or by power and profit?
By the same token, technology empowers and liberates us. It acts in defiance of the limits set by natural law. Science describes the boundaries and the limits of gravity—or of distance, or of brainpower—and technology allows us to rebel against them. In the 19th-century, the myth of the ubermensch expressed our desire to transcend our human limitations. Yet, in Spider-Man's first adventure, Stan Lee warned that “with great power came great responsibility.” And in Kingdom Come, Alex Ross showed how dangerous transhuman power could be without a moral foundation. The new mythology of the comics gives us a model to follow, a moral compass to guide us through incredible new possibilities by allowing us to play out the potentials of super or transhuman power in a fictional setting.
SPIRIT IN THE SKY
We must not, however, forget the “x-factor” in all of this—the supernatural component. Before it was co-opted by opportunists like Shirley MacLaine, the New Age movement was concerned with the synthesis of ancient mysticism and modern technology.164 Even as the movement splintered, some groups sought to continue this work, most notably the New Edge movement that emerged from the 1990s cyberpunk underground. The movement, centered around the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, has also continued in this vein.
Modern-day alchemists dream of a New Age in which the occult sciences and technology are no longer in opposition—a time when things now unmeasurable can be understood and utilized. In this context, pop-culture stories of psychic powers and occultism need not be taken literally, but can be seen as a means to keep us aware of possibilities beyond the reach of our present understanding. These stories of supernatural power can act like a carrot at the end of the stick—forever elusive, moving us toward a mythical state of perfection.
Some argue that our present-day rationalist, reductionist viewpoint is a relic of the Industrial Age, a necessary but obsolete transitional phase to a more complex understanding. Our ability to track events in the world is increasing our appreciation of the fractal patterns of reality, what Carl Jung referred to as “synchronicity,” or meaningful coincidence. We have greater access to information, and thus have a greater capacity to recognize patterns in events that would once have eluded us. As our means of perceiving the world increase and expand, perhaps our appreciation of certain occult sciences will increase as well. Perhaps an increased understanding of Jung's synchronicity will lead us to a better understanding of divination systems like astrology and the Tarot. Perhaps we will come to appreciate the Zodiac, not as some spiritual force controlling our lives, but as a giant clock that helps us forecast conditions that reoccur cyclically during certain planetary conjunctions.
The collision of science, morality, and magic is being played out hundreds of times a month in comic books and other media, showing us the implications of superhuman potential. Is this an unconscious form of preparation for an inevitable shift in human reality? Should we pay more careful attention to the visionaries and lunatics who anticipate the future in comic-book storylines? In that supernatural realm called the human imagination, comic-book creators like Alan Moore and Alex Ross may be time-travelers, forecasting the future for us and showing us the way. It's funny how it all seems so similar to the ancient myths.
The past and future are always with us.
162 Stan Lee himself has his own reality show on the SciFi network entitled Who Wants to Be a Superhero? where contestants essentially audition to become gods.
163 Jeff Jensen, “The Powers that Be,” EW, #906, p. 32.
164 See Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy (New York: St. Martin's, 1980).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Bill. Alan Moore Spells It Out. Michigan: Airwave, 2005.
Benton, Mike. Horror Comics: An Illustrated History. Dallas: Taylor, 1991.
Bessy, Maurice. A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural. London: Spring, 1968.
Blackbeard, Bill and Martin Williams, eds. The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1977.
Bloom, Harold. The American Religion. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1993.
Bridwell, E. Nelson. Superman from the Thirties to the Seventies. New York: Crown, 1971.
———. Batman from the Thirties to the Seventies. New York: Crown, 1972.
Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch's Mythology. New York: Harper Collins, 1991 edition.
Budge, E. A. Wallis. Egyptian Religion. New York: Dover, 1959 reprint.
Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Edward. The Coming Race. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan, 2006 edition.
———. Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Edward. Zanoni. London: Saunders & Otley, 1841.
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. A Princess of Wars. New York: Modern Library, 2003 edition.
Carter, John. Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2004 edition.
Chandler, Russell. Understanding the New Age. Dallas: Word, 1988.
Coogan, Peter. Superhero: The Secret Origin of A Genre. Austin, TX: Monkeybrain Books, 2006.
Cranston, Sylvia. H.P.B.: The Extraordinary Life & Influence of Helena Blavatsky. New York: Put
nam, 1993.
Crawford, Hubert H. Crawford's Encyclopedia of Comic Books. Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, 1978.
Daniels, Les. Comix: A History of Comic Books in America. New York: Outerbridge, 1971.
———. DC Comics: A Celebration of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes. New York: Billboard Books, 2003.
———. Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics. New York: Abradale, 1991.
———. Wonder Woman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000.
Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. New York: Penquin, 1996 edition.
Gifford, Denis. The International Book of Comics. London: Crescent Books, 1984.
Goulart, Ron. Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1972.
———. Comic Book Culture: An Illustrated History. Portland, OR: Collectors Press, 2000.
———. The Adventurous Decade. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975.
Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2001.
Haining, Peter, ed. The Magicians: The Occult in Fact and Fiction. New York: Taplinger, 1972.
Herman, Daniel. Silver Age: The Second Generation of Comic Book Artists. Nesahannock, PA: Hermes Press, 2004.
Horn, Maurice, ed. The World Encyclopedia of Comics. New York: Chelsea House, 1976.
Howard, Michael. The Occult Conspiracy. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1989.
Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic, 2004.
Jones, Gerard & Will Jacobs. The Comic Book Heroes. Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1997.
Kerr, Howard & Charles L. Crow, eds. The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
Kidd, Chip & Geoff Spear. Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross. New York: Pantheon, 2003.
Our Gods Wear Spandex Page 20