For me, the answer lay in pushing “realism” to its next stage. What was the proven tangible reality of comic-book superheroes? What was a superhero, really? What was the exchange—the relationship—between our real world and their printed universes? What was going on when we hung out with superheroes in our hands and in our heads?
If they were really real, what would they look like?
The answer turned out to be as simple as it was obvious.
In the real world, superheroes looked like drawings or special effects. As artist David Mazzucchelli would one day state so succinctly: “Once a depiction veers toward realism, each new detail releases a torrent of questions that exposes the absurdity at the heart of the genre. The more ‘realistic’ superheroes become, the less believable they are. It’s a delicate balance but this much I know: superheroes are real when they’re drawn in ink.”
My experiments on Animal Man were described by critics as “metafiction,” or fiction about fiction, and perhaps that was an easy way in for some readers, but I felt that I was onto something more concrete and less rooted in abstraction or theory. The fictional universe I was interacting with was as “real” as our own, and as I began to think of the DC universe as a place, it occurred to me that there were two ways to approach it: as a missionary or as an anthropologist.
I chose to see some writers as missionaries who attempted to impose their own values and preconceptions on cultures they considered inferior—in this case, that of the superheroes. Missionaries liked to humiliate the natives by pointing out their gauche customs and colorfully frank traditional dress. They bullied defenseless fantasy characters into leather trench coats and nervous breakdowns and left formerly carefree fictional communities in a state of crushing self-doubt and dereliction.
Anthropologists, on the other hand, surrendered themselves to foreign cultures. They weren’t afraid to go native or look foolish. They came and they departed with respect and in the interests of mutual understanding. Naturally, I wanted to be an anthropologist.
In Animal Man I created, with the help of my artistic collaborator, Chaz Truog, a paper version of myself that could be integrated with the 2-D DC universe. I sent my avatar onto the page surface to meet the Animal Man character and confirm suspicions he’d been having that his life story was being written by some demiurgic Gnostic overlord. I explained to my character how the people who wrote his life needed drama and shock and violence to make his story interesting. The implication was that our own lives might also be “written” to entertain or instruct an audience in a perpendicular direction we could never point to, interacting with us in ways we could scarcely understand but that could be divined in the relationship of the comic world to the world of the creator and audience.
I tried to condense the painful adolescent self-awareness that had come to superhero comics into a single image: as Animal Man’s alter ego, Buddy Baker, turned to look back over his shoulder, sensing the uncanny presence of the reader, he yelled, “I can see you!” It was the violated superhero finally confronting the voyeuristic reader. I wanted the superhero to face up to us—to challenge the zealous missionary work of Moore and his successors, who had inflicted real-world tortures and judgments upon the ethereal, paper-thin constructs of unfettered imagination.
Buddy’s face, filling the whole page so as to seem almost life sized, was drawn in a simple cartoonish style that ultimately made him seem more human: unshaven and unprepared, perpetually startled by the old intruder at the door.
Animal Man was dedicated to my childhood imaginary friend Foxy, as I entered what I can describe only as the freewheeling “shamanic” phase of my career. I wanted nothing less than first contact with fictional reality, so I set about making it happen by truly immersing myself in my work. The results were literally life altering.
I chose to take comic-book characters at face value. There was no Batman in the real world and probably never would be. The chances of a humanoid infant alien growing to maturity with extraordinary superpowers in midwestern America were infinitesimal. These were fairy-tale creatures; they could never be flesh and blood, and the breakdown in plausibility required to make the machinery of Watchmen work suggested that any further attempts to pursue that line of thinking would be fruitless.
I agreed that superhero comics could always use a little more realism, but that didn’t mean scenes of Batman on the toilet or the X-Men failing to feed the starving millions of Africa. It meant, instead, an acknowledgment that anything we could experience was by its nature real and a corresponding rejection of the idea that fiction had to behave like flesh. The presumption that superheroes could literally show us how to end hunger or poverty seemed as naïve as a belief in fairies.
There were real superheroes, of course. They did exist. They lived in paper universes, suspended in a pulp continuum where they never aged or died unless it was to be reborn, better than ever, with a new costume. Real superheroes lived on the surface of the second dimension. The real lives of real superheroes could be contained in two hands. They were so real they had lives that were longer than any human life. They were more real than I was. They say most human names and biographies are forgotten after four generations, but even the most obscure Golden Age superhero is likely to have a life and a renown that will last as long as trademarks are revived.
There was no physical Marvel universe New York. You couldn’t buy a ticket and fly there, yet you could buy a comic that would instantly transport you to the only real Marvel universe New York there could ever be—a paper-and-ink virtual-reality simulation—on the pages of the comic books themselves. A wholly alternative, fully functioning duplicate of New York now existed on the paper skin of the next dimension down from our own: a city populated by drawn figures of Daredevil, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four. That New York had its own history of alien invasions and tsunamis from Atlantis, but it also kept pace with changing fashions in the “real” world, and it had the capacity to grow in complexity and depth over decades. It had a continuity that was separate from our own. Its characters outlived real people, including their creators. The Baxter Building could outlast real houses made of stone. In my attempts to see beyond preconceptions to the undeniable actuality of things in Animal Man, I was drifting closer to what could only be termed a kind of psychedelic hyperreality. I used my next assignment to go deeper into the rabbit hole in search of a little conceptual allotment to call my own and cultivate. When I was offered the ailing Doom Patrol title, it turned out to be the perfect venue for my new approach.
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The Doom Patrol feature had been launched in 1963 in the pages of My Greatest Adventure as the brainchild of writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Premiani. A group of outcast, freakish superheroes, led by a genius in a wheelchair, they debuted almost exactly and quite coincidentally at the same time as the similar X-Men and had been revived in 1990 as a pallid imitation of the Claremont school. I went back to first principles in an attempt to define an alternative to the dominant X-Men superteam model.
Originally billed as “the World’s Strangest Heroes,” the Doom Patrol had always been played as misunderstood outsiders, so I gave them a new purpose as the only superheroes disturbed enough to deal with the kind of menaces to sanity and reality that not even Superman could hope to confront. With artist Richard Case and some design assistance from Brendan McCarthy, the spiritual father of my take on the book, Doom Patrol cornered the market in “strange” and picked up the baton Steve Gerber had passed in the form of The Defenders.
Carefully composed pastiches of Thomas De Quincey, Sylvia Plath, Italo Calvino, and F. T. Marinetti jostled for attention alongside fight scenes, wild action, and quotes from avant-garde art or the wilder frontiers of philosophy and the occult. Doom Patrol stories took childhood fairy tales (most of them from the gruesome school readers I’d had forced on me when I was six and too young to defend myself: monsters like the Scissor Man or the Hobyahs) and transformed them into grown-up nightmares
for my disturbed heroes to fight.
I kept dream diaries, and made characters of the imaginary friends with whom my real friend Emma had shared her own childhood. Emma had imaginary friends called Darling-Come-Home and Damn-All, and when she got old enough to tire of them, she took them both outside and shot them. “What did you shoot your imaginary friends with?” I asked her. “An imaginary gun,” said Emma, and it went straight into Doom Patrol.
I used material from fairy stories, and discovered the weird, paranoid fairy tales of Lucy Lane Clifford, whose cosmic horror tale “The New Mother” was written as a bedtime story for her children. After I brought the piece to Neil Gaiman’s attention, it went on to influence his Coraline and the movie that was based on it. I was using surrealist methods: automatic writing, found ideas, and even my word processor’s spell-check functions to create random word strings with syntax. I’d type in strings of nonsense words, which the computer would dutifully correct to the nearest equivalent, giving my dream horrors dialogue exchanges like this: “DEFEATING BREADFRUIT IN ADUMBRATE.” “CRASHLAND FOR AWARD PRIMATE.” “YUCCA OR PRIORITY?” “LEMUR NEVER HIBERNATE.”
The Brotherhood of Evil from the sixties Doom Patrol stories were re-created as Mr. Nobody and the Brotherhood of Dada, a group of absurdist supervillains who began their war on reason with the following words:
LOOK AT US! ARE WE NOT PROOF THAT THERE IS NO GOOD, NO EVIL, NO TRUTH, NO REASON? ARE WE NOT PROOF THAT THE UNIVERSE IS A DROOLING IDIOT WITH NO FASHION SENSE?
FROM THIS DAY ON WE WILL CELEBRATE THE TOTAL ABSURDITY OF LIFE, THE GIGANTIC HOCUS-POCUS OF EXISTENCE. FROM THIS DAY ON, LET UNREASON REIGN!
THE BROTHERHOOD OF EVIL IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE BROTHERHOOD OF DADA!
AND THE PANTS OF THE VICAR ARE CLOSING RATAPLAN RATAPLAN RRRRRRR.
Gaining possession of a mysterious painting, the Dadaists sucked Paris into its recursive structure. Each of the levels inside the Painting That Ate Paris was rendered in prose and illustrations evocative of different art movements, and even the storytelling structure was a recursive sequence of nested flashbacks. Encouraged by Doom Patrol’s cult following and a healthy readership, in 1990 we introduced Danny the Street: a sentient transvestite street, inspired by the popular British drag artiste Danny LaRue, that roamed around the world inserting itself quietly and unobtrusively into the street plans of different cities. This was the product of a conversation I’d had with Brendan McCarthy in Dublin.
I began to receive letters from MPD and abuse survivors or from gay kids thanking me for introducing them to the queer slang vocabulary of a hitherto unheralded aspect of their culture but familiar to anyone in Britain who’d grown up listening to the camp characters Julian and Sandy on the BBC radio comedy Round the Horne. I felt I was finally connecting with my own people, an imagined secret constituency of glamorous oddballs, and I pressed on deeper into the bush.
As a fan of the Beatles, the Doors, Jim Starlin, and Doctor Who, I also loved sixties movies, trippy comics, and more or less anything that could loosely be described with the word psychedelic, and so in 1988, after a lifetime’s puritanical denial in the face of this fascination, I took the plunge and sampled a fistful of psilocybin mushrooms. Listening to a preview tape of the Bachelor Pad’s first album while reading Doom Patrol brought about an epiphany right on cue.
In the eerie lantern-lit mushroom high—where every object in view had the lambent, numinous singularity of the murder weapons on Cluedo cards—I became aware of something new and interesting about the comic in my hands, and it brought the breakthrough I’d been seeking. Somewhere around page 17 of a particularly engrossed reading of Doom Patrol, a reference to an earlier plot point made me turn back to page 8. The shock was profound: It was as if I had time traveled backward. The characters had no idea I was there, but I had come from their future to observe their past, which I had already experienced in my own past. I flipped forward again, jumping to page 17, where the timeline of the characters was stalled awaiting my return to the exact moment I’d left and where page 18 was still about to happen.
Although each isolated panel seemed posed and angular, the characters were filled with life and charged with meaning. They interacted with us: made us laugh, cry, feel afraid, anxious, or excited. They were living characters, and their reality was pulp and ink. What real world was this paper slice of the living DC universe? A 2-D universe, hidden in plain sight, growing and breathing in a strange symbiotic relationship with its audience in the “nonfictional” world above it.
From what little reading I’d done, I concluded that I was possibly witnessing the activation of some kind of hologram. Inert materials primed by artists and activated by readers brought this universe to life and allowed it to move on another week, another month, another year. Every time you interacted with it, you were different, and it became different in response. You saw new things, gained new insights. The best comic stories never stopped delivering surprises.
I held in my 3-D hand a 2-D replayable slice of the ongoing DC universe continuum in module form. It felt like there was a whole new cosmology waiting to be explored. My dedication to a new absolute realism was unconditional, and demanded that readers acknowledge the object in their hands and their participatory role in generating the meaning of the story.
Comics’ fiery adolescence continued, and the turbulence subsided a little as the hunched defensive loner relaxed into his own skin, got laid, got a haircut, chilled out, and began to dance with cute girls. The brief era of art superheroes had arrived.
By the end of the decade, I was clambering out of my shell. I was earning a living as a comic-book writer, living in a flat in Glasgow’s West End with my beautiful girlfriend and the four cats, playing in a band, and making art with my sister and our coterie of glamorous and creative friends. I was successful. We dined in London restaurants with beautiful transvestite waiters. The French culture minister invited me to a dinner in Angoulême. I was courted by filmmakers, producers, and their glamorous assistants. Comics and the arts. Bridges were being built. The Brits would try anything. They had friends in bands. When Pop Will Eat Itself sang “Alan Moore knows the score,” it brought the full thrill of acceptance into the mainstream of the pop chart.
With Doom Patrol I was drawing on the art, culture, and hallucinogens I’d been exploring. With the fractured, angular art of Richard Case, Doom Patrol reconnected the World’s Strangest Heroes with their roots and gave me the freedom to be myself at last. My efforts attracted the attention of postmodern analysts like Steven Shaviro, whose book Doom Patrols drew flattering connections between my work and some of the great currents of postmodernist thought. This was what I’d always wanted. I appreciated the high-level engagement with what to me were high-level attempts to communicate. The old art school dream was coming true at last. The success of the graphic novel had created a demand for new material worthy of the superior format, and I had a project I thought might be appropriate. Watchmen, like the structured, precious films of Peter Greenaway, no longer suited my tastes. My peers and I were upstarts with big ideas and unlikely ambitions. The grim ’n’ gritty comics had nothing to say to me about my life anymore. I chose to turn away from the mean streets, the fire hydrants, and the steaming manhole covers of Miller, and I found what Mort Weisinger had found: gleaming gold in the underpants of the interior. While everyone else was struggling with the nuts and bolts of how superheroes might function in a strictly real-world setting, I decided I would plant my flag in the world of dreams, automatic writing, visions, and magic, where I felt suddenly more comfortable after the Puritan years. With its subtitle filleted from Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” my dark Batman story Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth was deliberately elliptical, European, and provocative. It was produced especially for the era of the coffee table superhero graphic novel and it looked like nothing DC Comics had done before.
Arkham Asylum, created in collaboration with artist Dave McKean, was pitched as a sixty-four-p
age story in the “prestige” format, as it was known, and aimed at the new mainstream audience for art superheroes. This meant better paper, cardboard covers, and a spine like a real book. The prestige format project was one of the new signifiers of success, and I hoped it would get me noticed. In the end, we had a new format created especially for the project, which broke ground in areas of production design and lettering, but which boasted a binding that came apart in the reader’s hands as soon as the shrink wrap was off one of these otherwise lavish $15 items, making it a cruel coincidence that the book’s story is set on April Fools’ Day.
I had a lot to prove, and I wanted to make my mark. Arkham Asylum would be dense, symbolic, interior—a deliberate response to the prevailing current of Hollywood realism. Instead of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Scorsese, and Roeg, we’d be influenced by Crowley, Jung, Artaud and Marat/Sade, by the Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, and by his English disciples, the Brothers Quay. Our story would be heavy with tarot meanings, allowing a hieratic, allusive, and quite deliberately un-American exploration of an American icon. A story of the mad and excluded. A story not of the real world but the inside of a head—Batman’s head, our collective head. Arkham Asylum somehow struck a chord.
(illustration credit 14.1)
It took a month to write, with very few distractions, in 1987. I stayed up late to induce delirium. Drug and alcohol free, I was forced to find derangement in all the old familiar places: At four thirty in the morning after fifty hours writing without sleep, I ransacked my dream diaries and my most frightening childhood memories for content. In the end, I delivered what felt like a coherent statement of intent. It felt like the kind of high-level comic book I knew was possible and showed that the serious superhero story didn’t always have to be realistic.