Supergods

  Assigned to write the monthly Avengers title, Thomas seized on Lee’s self-conscious literary flourishes—the asides to the reader, the Thees and Thous, the metered rhythms—and cultivated them into a narrative technique that positively bloomed with deadpan self-importance. With Lee’s direct-to-reader flourishes of showmanship as his starting point, Thomas evolved a style that took his readers by the hand and welcomed them in, as if to a ballet or musical recital, in the manner of John Lennon’s “Let me take you down,” or “Picture yourself in a boat on a river.”

  There was the same Pied Piper–ish invitation to the dance in Thomas’s comics: “COME WITH US NOW, GENTLE READER …” It’s the whispered offer of the pusher, the dream-monger, offering tickets out of consensus reality. In the case of both Lennon and Thomas, the gentle personal invite helps to make us comfortable before the artist leads us through the looking glass into his world of “plasticine porters with looking glass ties,” or in Thomas’s case, “THE SOUL-SEARING HOLOCAUST OF SUPERNOVA SUN AND CASCADING HEAT.”

  Thomas took the language of semi-ironic bombast and hyperbole that Marvel was becoming famous for, then superinjected it with classical references, knowing pop-culture in-jokes, and bleedingly emotive exchanges that left readers fighting back tears. Thomas’s approach to superheroes was different from that of the men who’d created them. Even Stan Lee dreamed of writing the Great American Novel, and for a long time, he tried to pretend that comics were only his day job. For Thomas and the writers and artists who followed him, there was no such stigma. Like the British and American Beat groups who’d taken rock ’n’ roll and Tin Pan Alley to the gates of art, Thomas didn’t have to fake his love of low culture; he lived and breathed it. Comics were in his blood, and he came to these characters with a genuine reverence and an absolute belief in their ability to be profound. Lee delivered his proclamations with a wink, but Thomas was for real.

  Unlike the Justice League’s static pantheon of gods, the lineup of Marvel’s rival superhero team the Avengers was in constant, and constantly exciting, upheaval, a trick that has helped to keep the comic a bestseller for the last fifty years.

  In 1968, Thomas had introduced a troubled android called the Vision, who quietly became the hero of emotionally armored introverts everywhere as he began a long and turbulent journey toward humanity. Thomas even ended one story with an extended sequence that paced out the lines of Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” across artist John Buscema’s panels.

  For many of us, this was our first introduction to Romantic poetry. For me it led to a lifelong pleasure and provided some wonderful floppy-cuffed and swooning role models when I needed them most. Roy “the Boy” Thomas, that teacher turned longhair, was far more effective than any of my own teachers when it came to turning me on to the literature and culture of late-eighteenth-century Europe.

  Thomas and Buscema’s lyricism was nakedly emotive in a way newly empathic, stoned teens could easily relate to, and the stories were well written enough to justify the attention of older hipsters too. Their otherworldly vistas and increasingly sophisticated artwork were a perfect accompaniment for tripping. Their simple archetypal psychodramas, exotic settings, and endlessly morphing plots within plots were far more engrossing than the DC alternative.

  Thomas’s stylistic advances reached their peak in his masterpiece, 1970’s The Kree-Skrull War, a typically ambitious multipart story based around a simple, thrilling idea: What if Planet Earth became a cosmic Midway Islands, a strategic outpost trapped in the crossfire between two immensely powerful warring space empires?

  On one side were the vile, shape-shifting Skrulls, who wanted to enslave us, prompting McCarthyesque witch hunts and a disbanding of the Avengers. On the other, the fascistic but handsome Kree, who’d visited our planet in prehistory to evolve a strain of humans into the bizarre race of Inhumans (another Kirby concept).

  Shot by both sides, the superheroes of the Marvel universe faced their biggest challenge ever as Thomas set about creating the superhero equivalent of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He cranked up the emotion, tension, and trust-no-one paranoia by increasing the bewildering number of interweaving plots. Stories had no real beginning or end. Thomas was plugged into the unfolding continuity, the timestream of the Marvel experience, and it often seemed as if it was all he could do to stop transcribing the rush of images and sounds when he hit the last page of any given issue. If he could have written every Avengers script on one continuous, seamless roll of paper, like Kerouac, or Ann-Margret in 1966’s The Swinger, it would have summed up the energetic fluency, the finger-popping urgency that drove his never-ending hypersoap.

  The story opened with a bedraggled, beaten vision pushing two vast doors open and staggering into Avengers Mansion. His fellow Avengers were seen turning, awkward, off balance as they reacted to the super-android’s uncommon arrival. They were drawn in foreground from a perfectly exaggerated angle that put the reader in the position of a child looking up at adults. Scared adults. The image alone, with its startling new level of naturalism, would have been enough to guarantee our immersion, but the writer wanted us to hear this one, too. The caption was vintage Thomas, with covert Shakespeare references embedded in the writer’s willingness to hit the loudest power chords he possibly could:

  “SOUNDS: WE LIVE IN A COSMOS OF CACOPHONY AND CADENCE. BLEATING CAR-HORNS—BELCHED OBSCENITIES—STACCATO JACK-HAMMERS—A THOUSAND OTHER NOISES THAT CIVILIZED FLESH IS HEIR TO—AND PERHAPS ONCE IN A DOZEN LIFETIMES—A SOUND WHICH RENDS THE FABRIC OF FATE ITSELF—AND TOLLS THE DEATH-KNELL OF AN ERA—!”

  After this buildup, the accompanying sound effect THOOOM seems almost tame and unambitious and hardly matches the noise in our heads, of which the final piano chord of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” is only a faint echo.

  That sound, the very crack of doom itself, reverberated through the story and was heard again and again on its multiple scales. Thomas knew he was doing something new and turned the script into a kind of libretto, a Joycean running commentary that was completely new to comic books.

  The amnesiac king of the Inhumans was Black Bolt, the ultimate metaphor, a leader whose spoken voice was literally a devastating weapon of mass destruction. In fact, Black Bolt’s least audible whisper could shatter mountains. It was the whole concept of monarchy itself wrapped in a devastatingly pure Kirby design. Black Bolt wore a beautiful black and dark blue costume that appeared to have been designed for a twenty-fifth-century Mayan god. His crown was reduced to a single stylized flourish in the center of his black hood: a tiny tuning fork that carried the note, the voice. It was Roy Thomas reminding us always to listen.

  The story begins with the jittery stream-of-consciousness narration of Ant-Man lecturing a character directly:

  “YES HENRY PYM—TALK TO YOURSELF—LET BIOLOGICAL CHARTS AND MATHEMATICAL FORMULAS RACE THROUGH YOUR TRAINED MIND LIKE WILDFIRE—FOR THEREIN LIES THE ONLY TRUE SUPERIORITY OF THE EDUCATED MAN—THAT HE ANALYZES—DISSECTS—PROBES—RECONSTRUCTS.”

  From there the flow continued into a third-person perspective; spoken-word balloons merged with flashback captions or thought bubbles depicting inner processes. At any moment, all of these multiple voices could be gathered up by the soothing, omniscient narrator, who held the reader’s hands through this kaleidoscopic superhero hall of mirrors. There had never been anything like this before for sheer sensory overload. Thomas was determined to make you hear his comics, and he was entirely successful. I can still quote passages from memory.

  As the Beatles gave sound a visual dimension, Thomas brought sound to the comic page.

  From that first crack of doom on, everything in The Kree-Skrull War was cranked up to near intolerable levels of brittle hyperawareness. From ants and antibodies to hovering armadas made of a thousand space warships, the focus could zoom in an instant between the infinitesimally micro and the unimaginably macro—from the plastic vein of an android to the edge of galactic space, in a furiously choreographed Alice in Won
derland, mescaline-trip collision of scales and multiple voices in perfect harmony.

  “YOU HAVEN’T HEARD AN ANT SCREAM. WELL I HAVE—AND IT’S A SOUND TO HAUNT A LIFETIME’S WORTH OF DREAMS! A SOUND LIKE LOST SOULS IN TORMENT OR THE WAILING OF A FORSAKEN CHILD.”

  This was up there in the electric blue arc-light mushroom frequencies where everything glowed in an overlit high-definition so sharp and so distinct that it hurt. Every sound had a thousand pinpoint echoes, and even the tiniest cry of an ant was as loud as the death roar of a god. Thomas gave us an elevated, giddy, 360-degree perspective roller-coaster vision, a phosphorescent synesthesia that blended his words with the drawings of Neal Adams at his peak (with that extra polish and glaze that only inker Tom Palmer ever gave him) into a reverberant whole. It was the narrative equivalent of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, but Thomas never let the feedback become disorienting. There were always touchstones, familiar voices, the returning third-person chorus to remind us this was all a wonderful story told by expert storytellers.

  When Black Bolt finally did open his mouth, we heard no words. Thomas and Adams spoke for him:

  “AND NOW—THE WORD—THE SINGLE WHISPERED SYLLABLE WHICH GROWS INTO A WHINE—A SHOUT—AN INCESSANT WORLD-SHAKING ROAR THAT MAKES THE MOUNTAINS TREMBLE.”

  Here was the language of the Eddas and the Old Testament, retooled for the baby boom. The high-flown dream sprech of bombast with which the archetypes expressed themselves in dreams and stories, according to Carl Jung in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, was given a new gloss. How about this stirring, precise evocation of the bright, righteous spirit that burns best in adolescent hearts:

  “NO TRUMPETS HAWK THEM FORTH TO BATTLE—NO SLIGHTEST SOUND ECHOES IN THE NEAR-VACUUM OF SPACE—YET, TRUE HEROES NEED NO ALARUMS, NO PIPING OF PIPES OR ROLLING OF DRUMS—ONLY A CAUSE TO BELIEVE IN—SUCH AS FREEDOM—NAY, LIFE ITSELF—FOR A WORLD STILL YOUNG ENOUGH TO CHERISH IDEALS.”

  Visually, The Kree-Skrull War was miles away from the rough-hewn architecture of Kirby. Adams’s cosmos was shiny and reflective, his men were impossibly handsome, and his women looked like sixties models. We’d seen alien invasions before, but never like this, not with hundreds of individual spaceships floating in perfect perspective. We’d seen Marvel superheroes but never so real: never with such expressive emotion or dynamic, foreshortened flying poses. They were 3-D Sensurround comic books.

  And just as the Beatles, Kinks, Beach Boys, and others had tooled their nostalgia for the Jazz Age, vaudeville, and the British Music Hall tradition into lysergic concept albums, Thomas revealed that Avengers mascot Rick Jones had the power to manifest his thoughts in the form of Golden Age comics characters. As the final curtain fell on the Kree-Skrull war, Rick unleashed a horde of figures from his mind: Timely Comics superheroes of the “Fabulous Forties” like the Patriot, Blazing Skull, and the Angel, who beat the Skrulls senseless, giving the Avengers the time they needed to regroup and save the day. After all the buildup, it was pure dumb imagination that came through in the end. The unexpected, the impossible, the illogical.

  Thomas had struck a gong and the reverberations are still being felt. A recent Marvel Comics event series entitled Secret Invasion was a direct sequel to The Kree-Skrull War but without any of the dazzling narrative tricks that made the original so remarkable.

  Central to the Kree-Skrull epic was Captain Marvel, the rebel Kree soldier. Retooled in a striking blue and red uniform, he was awarded his own new series, which is where I discovered him.

  After school, I’d wandered into a bookstore on Buchanan Street that had a slightly disreputable air. They kept their comics separate from the porno, at least, in a fat vertical stack on the lowest bookshelf, like discards. I was a DC fan and never picked up Marvel Comics, but there wasn’t much else to check out, and one cover in particular caught my eye: Captain Marvel no. 29, with its hero in a dramatic red and black costume soaring up against a hyperreal star field, courtesy of Wayne Boring via Steve Ditko.

  “DON’T DARE MISS THE BIG CHANGE IN MAR-VELL, IN THE THRILLER WE CALL—METAMORPHOSIS! HE’S COMING YOUR WAY! THE MOST COSMIC SUPERHERO OF ALL!”

  Many covers of the seventies showed the questing hero in space, the cosmic seeker. No longer on the streets or even in the air between city skyscrapers, superheroes were head-tripping, off on journeys, finding themselves while the world got its own act together.

  The writer-artist on Captain Marvel was ex–navy photographer Jim Starlin, who was closer to the experiences and temperament of his young audience than Kirby. Like many of his peers, Starlin was an acidhead, and he made it plain in his stories. His mythology was more pop psych than Kirby’s, but it synthesized everything about the Marvel style in a new, easy-to-digest package that absorbed the lessons of New Gods, flattened out the spiky edges, and made Kirby look as old-fashioned as Gunsmoke on black-and-white TV.

  Starlin’s Freudian universe, which echoed and reversed Kirby’s Fourth World, revolved around the power struggles of Thanos of Titan and his family of demigods, including, of course, the libidinous Eros. Starlin recruited the Captain Marvel character to play the Orion war god role, reaffirming the captain’s shamanic roots and his appeal to psychedelic voyagers everywhere. Marvel’s Captain Marvel had begun as an uninspired attempt to secure the trademark by rustling up a character from whole cloth. The only Captain Marvel allowed to use that name on the cover of his book was Mar-Vell, a dull warrior of the Kree, until Roy Thomas drafted Marvel’s ubiquitous sidekick-for-hire, Rick Jones, into the Billy Batson role. Jones was soon slamming his “nega-band” bracelets together to summon the hero in a blast of energy that recalled the original captain’s vocal detonation of occult thunder. In one sly scene, the meaning of which passed my young self by, a bored Rick Jones, adrift in the Negative Zone while Captain Marvel went to work, passed the time by dropping acid. Unsurprisingly, this affected the captain’s performance, and problems ensued.

  If Kirby’s Promethean dialectic was informed by his experiences in World War II, Starlin’s came courtesy of the post–Vietnam War counterculture. Thanos was Darkseid not as galactic tyrant but as thwarted lover, a gnarled and massive embodiment of the death wish that had overwhelmed so many young Americans in the sixties. To make sure no one missed the point, Thanos even courted Death itself in the alluring form of a robed, hooded, voluptuously breasted female figure that followed him around like some ghostly Benedictine groupie. Kirby’s Satan was a monster of tyranny; Starlin’s was a frustrated nihilist, wooing Death like a lovesick puppy. Thanos was a Gothic teenage villain who spoke to a generation that couldn’t care less about Hitler or the will to power. I was fourteen when I found Captain Marvel no. 29, immediately arrested by its front cover. We were punk chrysalids, and Starlin’s existential heroes spoke our language, as they overcame foes that we all recognized from our spotty, sleepless nightmares.

  In a story portentously entitled “Metamorphosis,” Captain Marvel found himself on a distant planet, about to be judged by the godlike Eon. We know Eon is godlike because he resembles an enormous, hovering potato with jelly hands, a stern human face, and a giant staring eye in an acidhead’s best approximation of an angel. His opening statement included these words:

  “WE ARE EON—HE WHO WAITS! SINCE THE DAWN OF OLYMPUS WE HAVE AWAITED YOUR COMING, AN ARRIVAL FORETOLD BY KRONOS, THE COSMIC BALANCE!”

  Starlin’s dialogue lacked Kirby’s percussive beat poetry but was more naturalistic and much easier for a fourteen-year-old to take seriously. If Kirby was the King James Bible, Starlin was the New English translation. Starlin smoothed Kirby’s rough edges into a solid, plastic finish. His figures were as massively proportioned and as given to sudden, violent action as the King’s but were drawn with a supple, clean line that gave them the springy believability of plasticine animation. The frenzied expressionist slashes of Kirby’s outlines were refined, mellowed out to a 3-D finish. Closer inspection revealed Starlin’s greatest innovations as a combination of Ditko and Kirby into one fresh new look
. From Ditko he borrowed his mind-bending psychescapes and grubby urban scenes, his abstract concepts rendered into anthropomorphic form, his sliced-time panel grids and formal page compositions. From Kirby it was the relentless action, the epic vision, the massive figures, and the brawling masculinity.

  “WHY ARE YOU TORTURING ME SO?” snarled Captain Marvel through gritted enamel as he balled his fists and glanced back over his shoulder at the impassive Eon.

  “BECAUSE KNOWLEDGE IS TORTURE AND THERE MUST BE AWARENESS BEFORE THERE IS CHANGE.”

  Before Captain Marvel or we the readers had any chance to ask for evidence to back this up, the booming inhuman voice of Eon continued.

  “THIS WE KNOW BECAUSE WE WERE CREATED TO KNOW!”

  Which placed us in no doubt whatsoever.

  And so his warrior spirit was subjected to a series of symbolic visions showing the futility of war: a montage of weeping children, limbless veterans, and sieg heiling Nazis. The universe needed a protector, not a warrior, Captain Marvel was informed, and his agonizing shamanic ordeal among the stars was designed to bring about the birth of a new “cosmically aware” superman, a being intimately connected to everything in the cosmos. An out-and-out psychedelic superhero had emerged from the chrysalis of Captain Marvel.