“ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO GO THROUGH WITH THIS, LOIS?”
“YES, SUPERMAN!” replied the blank-faced Lois emphatically. “CLOSE THE BODY MOLD AND SWITCH ON THE POWER!”
The central wordless panel showed Superman operating the lever on what had to be the Body Mold’s control box, while turning to look back over his shoulder at the closed door of the sarcophagus, through which we could now see the X-ray outline of Lois Lane, radiant and ghostly inside.
The third panel reversed the composition of the first, with Lois stepping from the sarcophagus while Superman fiddled with his controls and tried not to think about how he’d ended up here, endorsing this declaration of intent:
“IT’S IMPORTANT THAT I LIVE THE NEXT 24 HOURS AS A BLACK WOMAN!”
And, indeed, Lois Lane, emerging from her techno-cocoon, was now a black woman. Her Alice band now contained a neat, clipped Afro, and her skin was a rich coffee-and-cream color. To emphasize the point, the eye-catching title banner in big letters below the triptych composition read:
“I AM CURIOUS (BLACK)!”
The title, of course, referred to the art house sensation of the permissive age, I Am Curious (Yellow), a Swedish film made in 1967 and infamous for its extended graphic sex scenes. Using the name of what was considered by many at the time to be a notorious work of pornography disguised as left politics was confrontational enough in the context of a Superman comic book, but the paraphrase added a new touch of perversity.
Perhaps now we’re grown-up enough to see Lois’s attempts to be Everywoman and to bear every burden for at least eight pages as poignant, but I suspect in this case that relevance is a mask for a lack of originality and the kind of shock tactics editors hoped might draw attention to a book, like Lois Lane, with falling sales. Liberated Lois had turned her back on an obsession with supermatrimony that was now considered sexist and moved on to sci-fi-lite international adventures as a hard-nosed investigative superjournalist in a style that almost came close to justifying the premise of “I Am Curious (Black).” Unsurprisingly, the new, edgier stories were too adult for Lois Lane’s traditional Silver Age audience of tomboys and kid sisters, and without the teen readership that kept “boy books” afloat, the book drifted wildly off course toward cancellation.
The relevance movement was short-lived, but stories like these, which legitimized superhero comics for older readers who’d begun to see not less but more depth and meaning in the pleasures of childhood, inspired a generation of teenage readers-cum–comics creators to restore and refine the methods of the realist school into purer and more potent forms in the eighties. The realist approach to superheroes appealed to teenaged male fans, but the general audience tended to look to comic books as a way of escaping from the mundane into worlds of the imagination possible only on paper. Pandering to the specialized tastes of older fans in lieu of the children, who began slowly but surely to drift away from these often stark and hectoring stories, was ultimately counterproductive for DC sales. Poor response to the award-winning experimental titles registered a general discontent that would soon be felt across the line, but the fan audience, small, articulate, vocal, prevailed for the moment, and comics began to be tailored to their requirements.
Marvel Comics led the way with its intensified development of an out-and-out virtual-reality fantasy world that came complete with maps, concordances, and charts of respective heights, weights, and power levels. It sold itself to collectors, geeks, and boy savants who prided themselves in knowing the secret identities of every single hero and villain, along with hair color, religious affiliation, and social security number. For all its free-form atmosphere of chaotic creativity, the Marvel universe could be trusted upon to make sense, and it even had a participatory dimension in the form of the letters pages, where mistakes could be pointed out and corrected, with praise or blame apportioned and appropriate steps taken. With its limited interactivity (fan opinion could guide story direction), the Marvel universe—and to its own lesser extent, DC’s—prefigured the immersive worlds of computer gaming, such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.
Britain, meanwhile, was in a spiraling social free fall that would bottom out in three-day workweeks, with uncollected refuse piling in bin bag mountains and a nationwide electricity shutdown starting at six in the evening every day.
My own life, which had seemed generally golden, carefree, and ignorant, developed an acrid verdigris of cruelty and confusion. Dad’s marital betrayals were more than Mum could handle. Like the cracked vases that she chucked in the bin for any sign of imperfection, Dad was irreparably fractured. He’d always dug the broken pieces out of the trash and painstakingly Scotch-taped them back together, but in his case the damage was irreversible.
In the winter months before the family tore apart, an injury I suffered in a sledding accident drew my doctor’s attention to what turned out to be a seriously infected appendix. If not for the fall, the pain of the swollen abscess would have gone unnoticed until it burst. Within moments of diagnosis, I was in the back of an ambulance on the way to Southern General Hospital. Two hours later, I was shuddering out on cold lungfuls of sickly anesthetic oblivion. While I slept, they edited my appendix and preserved it in a jar, on account of the organ’s misshapen, monstrous abnormality. I came to in a recovery ward in the threadbare hours of Monday morning, with raging thirst, a flat, green nightlight brooding over me like an alien eye, and a savage four-inch scar. Next day, Aunt Ina brought a stack of DC comics to my bedside, and I clung to them like a lifeline during the monotony of recovery and its endless bowls of hospital cornflakes. As if in solidarity, the cover of Action Comics no. 403 showed a single file of men, women, and children of all races wending all the way to the horizon as the inhabitants of planet Earth lined up to gratefully offer their blood to a dying Superman, who lay awaiting supertransfusion on a hospital gurney.
There followed weird, decelerated days of recuperation at home as spring broke through in that last, strange year at Mosspark Primary School, where the girls I’d known all my life became somehow hauntingly, achingly beautiful. There was still a big stigma around divorce, so I had to keep my parents’ breakup secret from all but my closest friend. I don’t even remember what our excuse was for no longer living at home after we moved to a little flat above the Finefare supermarket on Glasgow’s busy Great Western Road, but my sister and I kept it up for years.
The Dark Age outspread its shadowy wings. In my formative years, I’d bought wide-eyed into Star Trek and the promise of an Aquarian revolution of space travel, head trips, free love, and superscience. These visions had been sanctioned by the media, with color supplement pictures of London in 2001 as a city of jet-packed men in bowler hats, and artists’ impressions of domed colonies flying the flags of the United Nations on Mars in 1985. I’d watched men leave footprints on the moon and saw no reason why humankind couldn’t proceed to the immediate construction of time-traveling hyper-arks, but now everything was running in reverse. With no excuse or apology, I was being offered instead of Starfleet a bleak tomorrow of fuel shortages, urban decay, and economic and social unrest. If anything drove the anger of young punks like me with our disaffected “no future” rhetoric, it was partly this sense of absolute betrayal.
The superheroes were feeling it too. The antidrugs issues of Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Spider-Man had brought about the first relaxation of the Comics Code since its inception in 1954. Code-approved stories could now depict drug use, as long as it was shown in a negative light. Those perennial rascals the undead were also back in favor, and presumably a general permissiveness was responsible for their rehabilitation too.
Just as it had with EC after the first hero boom, the early Dark Age zeitgeist was for nonsuperhero fare that tended toward the shadowy, violent, and sexual. Horror comics became popular again, with Warren Publishing’s successful Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella titles leading a boom in black-and-white non-Code magazine publishing. The trend was for “weird” heroes, and characters
such as Swamp Thing and his Marvel rival Man-Thing soared in popularity. Morbius the Living Vampire, Werewolf by Night, Phantom Stranger, Tomb of Dracula, Ghost Rider, Weird Adventure Comics—these were only some of the DC and Marvel universe titles as vampiric gloom descended.
The new superheroines clumsily explored the seismic shifts of women’s liberation. The Black Orchid had no secret identity, no core personality, but assumed a series of masks and wigs, trying on and rejecting a parade of possibilities, role models, identities. Who was this new woman? Was she the glamorous enlightened Buddhist Moondragon, whose shaved head looked to the fetish catwalks and rave chanteuses of the nineties? Was she green-haired Polaris of the X-Men, ferocious Tigra, or rabid feminist Valkyrie in her tin bra?
Rose and the Thorn, was the perfect embodiment of the shape-shifting heroine. She was a schizophrenic vigilante heroine who snapped from timid blond Rose to feral sex goddess Thorn whenever the shadowy criminal organization called the 100 flexed its menacing tendrils. As drawn by Dick Giordano, she had a pouting, curvy sensuality that saw her slipping effortlessly into languid cheesecake poses every time she shrugged into her brief green hot pants, bra, and spike-heeled thigh boots—an outfit that turned out to be so remarkably effective in the crime-fighting arena, it’s a surprise that policewomen didn’t pick up on it. She seemed unable to prevent her naked back from arching provocatively whenever she had a shoe or a glove to put on, turning the hoary old comic-book cliché of the changing-to-costume scene from a private moment to a raunchy peep show, a slo-mo striptease of the Self. Peeling off her identity as shy, gentle Rose Forrest and replacing it with the flame-colored wig of the Thorn, her deadly and ruthless alter ego, she brought soft-core superheroics into the Vaseline-lensed age of Emmanuelle and Bob Guccione. Meanwhile, the modest Girl Scouts of the Legion of Super-Heroes were being made over by the artwork and costume design skills of artist Dave Cockrum into Studio 54 disco bunnies with bell-bottoms and bunches, belly cutaways, plunging necklines, and high-heeled, thigh-high Paco Rabanne space platforms. It was an equal-opportunity era and the Legion’s substantial gay following was catered to with new costumes for characters like Element Lad, Cosmic Boy, and Colossal Boy that emphasized lurid cutaway panels and acres of rock-hard exposed muscle.
At school I vented my own teenaged libido in ferociously inarticulate rebellion. Every day was a tight-lipped war with authority, a crusade against learning that left furniture in splinters and resulted in the savagely orchestrated nervous breakdown of one gentle old physics master. I’d won a scholarship at one of Scotland’s most prestigious boys’ schools, but as the hormones began to kick in, a dawning horror confirmed that I’d exiled myself from sexual normality.
I didn’t know any girls my own age. I lived a life far from the friends I’d grown up with at primary school, and my new friends at Allan Glen’s School for Boys were in the same boat as I. We all converged on the school each day from the four corners of the city, so the chances of meeting up in the evening anywhere locally were few and far between, involving epic bus trips. As if to rub it all in, my mum broke off her affair with a glamorous Swiss airline pilot and I lost my opportunity to move to Zurich as the son of a millionaire. Had I become this alternative-life “ski-boy,” surrounded by girls in bobble-hats and goggles, I’d probably never have written comics, or this book. With dreams of escape on the wane, learning to make a friend of isolation and introspection was the only answer, and a rich and vivid inner life my only salvation.
With nothing normal to do in the evenings after school, I cooled my fevered imagination in the pages of fantasy novels and superhero comics, and compulsively created my own stories—my own evolving inner worlds—on pieces of folded cardboard and paper my dad supplied. Identifying more and more with the odd, the deviant, the different, I felt like a supervillain but tried to forge a moral code and some sense of an adult male self—with only comic-book heroes, barbarian warriors, and my dad’s offscreen brand of committed proactive socialism to guide me.
My first serious attempt at creating an original superhero who could encapsulate this miasma of teenage angst was Monad, created when I was fourteen. He was a UK hero, who derived his powers from his “emotions.” In his secret identity, he was a marine biologist who lived a lonely life in a cottage on a beach in the west of Scotland until a gorgeous hippie girl turned up on his doorstep, pursued there by a demented supervillain rapist. Our hero Iain Kincaid (named for my two best friends at primary school), aka Monad, wasted no time in thrashing the priapic bastard and sending him on his way.
With the rape plot and the shameless knight in armor fantasies of a teenage boy done and dusted, the story shifted wildly in tone and location to Northern Ireland, before swelling with angst and my own brand of strained, uninformed “relevance”—in what I imagined was the O’Neil style. Northern Ireland was in the headlines every day, and my message was as heartfelt as it was ignorant: Not even a superhero could make sense of those awful Troubles. It was the first comic I almost completed after drawing twenty-five minutely detailed pages, some of which had up to twenty-six panels. (Most comics, you’ll recall, have somewhere between five to nine panels per page.)
On weekends, I visited my dad, who, left to his own devices, had a habit of boiling all food; he preferred to boil whole chickens rather than roast them in the oven or fry them in a pan. He would boil steaks and lamb chops and liver, reducing even the most succulent cuts of meat to the pallid, gray, fibrous consistency of zombie cutlets. Hermetically sealed into my own little world for protection, I had no way of understanding how badly he was taking his divorce from my mum. He was drinking more, but I don’t think I even connected his behavior to what we’d all just gone through.
I’d rejected the music of my peers—Tangerine Dream and Gong on one hand; REO Speedwagon, KISS, and Meat Loaf on the other—and found my own cockeyed route to authenticity via Tony Capstick’s Folkweave radio program on a Wednesday night. Deep into the solitary hours, I built my own world to the skirl of the bagpipes and the crystalline cascades of Alan Stivell’s Celtic harp. I encouraged my friends to draw their own comics and create their own characters and stories. On Saturdays we’d sit together in silence in Dad’s bedroom, each painstakingly sketching out a new adventure for the others to read.
I had given up on Monad and moved on after coming up with a barrel scraper in which a sexy alien warlord disguised herself as Hitler and attacked the world with space Nazis. I knew I’d hit a wall when I concocted this half-formed brain splatter of a story, and it never made it as far as the paper. Russ Meyer would have been all over it, though. I was more interested in barbarian heroes now, like Conan, King Kull, and Bran Mak Morn, and barbarian stories gave me an excuse to draw near-naked dancing girls on every other page. Superhero comics couldn’t compete.
By the midseventies, Marvel’s writers had the monopoly on the kind of sophisticated superheroes I liked best. Marvel creators never talked down to me, and they helped me navigate and map my troubled inner landscape. Best of all, Marvel had Donald McGregor:
“BUTTERFLIES TAKING WING, OBLITERATING THE NIGHT SKY. AN AVALANCHE OF COLOR, BLURRED, AS MEMBRANED APPENDAGES SLICE THE AIR, LIVING, PULSING STAINED GLASS ART EFFECTS. HE FEELS THE FIRST FAINT TRACES OF FEAR.”
The narration here is characteristically McGregor: overwrought, stretched to the limits of conventional grammar, with a pained, self-analytical edge. This was comics’ version of that progressive rock music my school friends liked and I despised—King Crimson, Greenslade, Yes—and yet I loved Don McGregor’s writing.
McGregor’s work burned with the holy fire of a just and loving wrath. His fan base was as passionate as its poet-shirted idol, and vocal too, but even it failed to save his arty books from cancellation when the ax came down at Marvel. The auteurs were replaced by businessmen establishing a house style where the rough experimental edges would be planed to a plastic finish. That made him even cooler, a martyr to his art, slaughtered on the altar of his stark refusal t
o compromise one drop of blood, sweat, ink, and tears. In interviews he was intense and clever, a hero to antiestablishment schoolboys everywhere.
THIS THEN IS THE FINAL WOMB. DEATH! LOOK! LOOK INTO THE PIERCING BLADES WITH A VULNERABLE EYE. M’SHULLA STANDS MIRED IN MARTIAN GORE … A WAGNERIAN MUSIC DRAMA COMPRISED OF VIOLENT LIBRETTOS THAT FLOW WITH WHIRLPOOLS OF MARTIAN DECAY. GO AHEAD, MINSTREL, EMBELLISH YOUR SONGS OF BARBARIC GLORY WHILE WE SIP THE SOUR GROG AND PRETEND OUR SLEEP WON’T HOLD NIGHTMARES!
Teetering off the razor edge of absurdity, lines like these (intended to evoke, in McGregor’s defense, the delirium of characters in an abandoned virtual reality machine) thrilled me with their lyrical allusiveness and the images they conjured of a visionary writer throwing words at paper the way Pollock threw paint. Though his name has been all but omitted from the consensus history of the development of superhero comics, McGregor’s influence on the next generation was immense. I grew up wanting to be the kind of writer who could let it all hang out like Don.
His Jungle Action no. 19 featured a brutal fight sequence—as T’Challa faced off against not the Klan but a Klan-like organization—set in a supermarket, during which the Black Panther’s skull was split by a spiteful old white woman wielding a tin of cat food. It was an astonishing sequence; after years of seeing planets smashed together, the horribly believable two-inch gash on the Panther’s head had a real visceral impact that Kirby’s thunderous but all-too-familiar masonry-shattering punches could no longer match.
McGregor had another labor of love, entitled “Killraven: Warrior of the Worlds,” the main feature in Amazing Adventures. He’d inherited the title from Roy Thomas and Neal Adams, who’d originated this sequel to H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which the Martian invaders returned to Earth one hundred years later, applying the lessons they’d learned in Edwardian England to a successful planetary takeover bid that reduced mankind to a cringing, demoralized race of slaves. In Killraven’s world, human beings were bred as gladiators for the entertainment of the Martian overlords or as food for their hellish dinner tables. Opposing the Red Menace was a band of ragged freedom fighters led by the red-haired messianic Jonathan Raven, aka Killraven—greatest of the gladiators—now doing the postapocalyptic Spartacus dance to great effect in a pre–The Road Warrior, prepunk leather-and-chains style that suggested a swiftly organized glam-rock response to the fall of civilization.