I can think of no more potent image of this union of real and imaginary than the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
How many times had we seen those towers fall? How many times had this soul-wrenching vision been rehearsed in our imaginations, and repeated in our fictions, almost as if we were willing it to happen, and dreaming of the day?
From the moment the towers were completed in 1973, they became a target for a sequence of imaginary demolitions.
King Kong was the first to climb them in Dino DeLaurentis’s pointless 1976 remake of the giant gorilla classic. They’d been smashed by tidal waves, blasted by aliens, shattered by meteor strikes, and pulverized by rogue asteroids. The terrible fall of the World Trade Center towers on September 11 had the curious inevitability of an answered prayer or the successful result of a black magic ritual.
Adding to the aura of the uncanny surrounding that day and its aftermath were the creepy clairvoyant comic books published in the weeks and months prior to September 11, all of them haunted by eerie images of planes and ruined towers. Garth Ennis’s Punisher depicted a hijacked 747 on a suicide dive into twin silos. Adventures of Superman no. 596, a book written by Joe Casey several months earlier but published on September 12, began with a scene showing Lex Luthor’s twin LexTowers in the aftermath of an alien attack. It mirrored, almost exactly, the photographs on the front pages of the same day’s newspapers. So accurately did the pictures match that DC made the book returnable in the event of any inadvertent offense. My own New X-Men no. 115 with Frank Quitely, published in August 2001, ended with a scene in which an airliner, fashioned into the shape of a giant fist, was flown through the side of a skyscraper. The cover of the following issue, released on September 19, 2001, but written and drawn months before, had X-Men character the Beast in close-up, weeping, with an opening sequence of rescue workers searching through the dusty rubble of fallen buildings for bodies.
Who knows? In a universe where time is fundamentally simultaneous, the idea that events that have already occurred in the future might influence the past may not be entirely far-fetched.
Marvel Comics responded to the tragedy in its hometown with a genuinely heartfelt tale in which the superheroes aimlessly assembled at Ground Zero. They were compelled to acknowledge the event as if it had occurred in their own simulated universe, but they hadn’t been there to prevent it, which negated their entire raison d’être. If al-Qaeda could do to Marvel Universe New York what Doctor Doom, Magneto, and Kang the Conqueror had failed to do, surely that meant the Marvel heroes were ineffectual. September 11 was the biggest challenge yet to the relevance of superhero comics.
The disorientation of the time was captured by a single giddy moment wherein Marvel’s ultimate evil dictator cum terrorist supervillain Doctor Doom arrived on the scene at Ground Zero only to be moved to tears by the devastation. This was the “World’s Greatest Super-Villain” who had himself attacked New York on numerous occasions. Doctor Doom was exactly the sort of bastard who would have armed al-Qaeda with death rays and killer robots if he thought for one second it would piss off the hated Reed Richards and the rest of his mortal enemies in the Fantastic Four, but here he was sobbing with the best of them, as representative not of evil but of Marvel Comics’ collective shock, struck dumb and moved to hand-drawn tears by the thought that anyone could hate America and its people enough to do this.
As the events of 9/11 demonstrated, heroes were real human beings doing the right thing for the best reasons. Next to policemen, firemen, doctors, nurses, and selfless civilians, the superheroes were silly, impotent daydreams, and for a moment, they seemed to falter, aghast. They hadn’t been prepared for this and had nothing useful to offer. It was, again, the darkness before a triumphant dawn. In the ontological confusion surrounding the descent of the thirty-second path, superheroes had tried very hard to be “realistic,” and reality had bitten back. They couldn’t cope with an event so raw that it seemed to lie beyond the reach of the kind of metaphors in which they usually traded.
It would take the superheroes a few more years to sort out their priorities. They would come to realize that they were a different kind of real and best served the needs of the inner world. They would soon grow stronger and more ubiquitous, but for a moment at the end of 2001, they were knocked from the sky and left wounded.
What was real had slipped and become uncertain, fantastic. It would surely serve symmetry if the fantastic could become more real in response. In the confused mingling of two normally contradictory modes of being, comics fans were demanding more realism from their fantasy books. Writers like Warren Ellis attempted to “explain,” using scientific language and sound contemporary theory, how preposterous powers like Cyclops’s devastating eye beams or Iron Man’s “repulsor rays” might actually work, as if that could help to restore our belief in the superheroes, like some collective clapping of hands for the fading Tinker Bell in Peter Pan. With no way to control the growing unreality of the wider world, writers and artists attempted to tame it in fictions that became more and more “grounded,” down-to-earth, and rooted in the self-consciously plausible. And so was born Ultimate Marvel.
The idea was simple: Retell the great stories of the Marvel universe with a contemporary twist. Brian Bendis brought movie and TV storytelling to Ultimate Spider-Man. Bendis came from the independent comics scene and, influenced by playwright David Mamet rather than Stan Lee, he made alarmingly convincing dialogue the focus of his style and broke the rules of comic-book storytelling by having characters exchange multiple balloons in a single panel. His dialogue had a call-and-response rhythm that captured each voice perfectly, like the strains in a chorus, and soon he was Marvel Comics’s premier writer, dominating the sales charts for the next ten years with no sign yet of slowing down. When Bendis committed to a title, it was like swans mating, with ten-year-plus runs on his pet books.
Marvel stepped into the post-9/11 breach with global-political thrillers that acknowledged contemporary events without dwelling on them. The Ultimates, re-created with Mark Millar’s gleefully right-leaning heroes, gave a voice to Bush’s America’s posturing, superheroic fantasies of global law enforcement in a posttraumatic world. It was both a glorification and a satire of those attitudes, and Millar was savvy enough to maintain the ambiguity to the end.
The Justice League was a pantheon, the X-Men was a school, but the Avengers were a football team. I advised Mark to take an opposite tack from his work in The Authority, suggesting he look instead at the Roy Thomas–John Buscema Avengers where the superheroes often convened in Tony Stark’s kitchen, sometimes wearing raincoats over their costumes. I suggested that he do The Ultimates “real,” as a convincingly paced story of what might actually happen in a world with superheroes but no villains. What would be the result if America created supersoldiers with no one to fight but one another? What if Thor couldn’t prove he was from Asgard and was seen as a David Icke–style New Age guru? What if the Hulk became not only enraged but also sex crazed on hyperdoses of testosterone, and a Bride of Frankenstein–style reluctant She-Hulk was engineered to keep him under control? Even Giant Man was forced to contend with the real world’s square-cube law, which capped his growing ability at sixty feet, after which his thighbones would snap under his own weight (something I’d remembered from a Flash Fact page).
The Ultimates was stuffed with articulate pop culture references, which dated the books instantly but made them seem intimate and knowing at the time (e.g., the double-page splash “HULK SMASH FREDDIE PRINZE JNR!”).
President George W. Bush himself turned up to welcome Captain America to the new millennium with the words “WELL, WHAT’S YOUR VERDICT ON THE 21ST CENTURY, CAPTAIN AMERICA? COOL OR UNCOOL?,” to which the Captain replied, “COOL, MISTER PRESIDENT. DEFINITELY COOL.” With photographic renderings of George W. Bush embracing an equally believable Captain America, there could be no mistaking the dizzying, stifling collapse of fact into fantasy.
Life became art became life when Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., was recast in the image of Samuel L. Jackson, following a scene in The Ultimates in which the character of Fury himself had actually suggested Jackson as the ideal actor to play him, in a Möbius-loop of such self-referential, cross-dimensional complexity, my powers of description fail me. The circuit was closed and the current sparked from page to screen to life when comics fan Samuel L. Jackson was asked to play Ultimate Nick Fury in Iron Man.
Millar and Hitch neatly encapsulated the mood in America when a shape-shifting alien Nazi demanded the surrender of Captain America, whereupon the undaunted hero pointed to the initial on his blue helmet and snarled, “YOU THINK THIS ‘A’ ON MY HEAD STANDS FOR FRANCE???” His bluster gave heart to an injured nation.
Then came Civil War, which gave Millar a chance to develop his knowing update on the relevant approach within the playground of the Marvel universe itself. Civil War’s release was expertly timed. It had, in its writer, the perfect man for the job, and artist Steve McNiven was Bryan Hitch with the last of the rough echoes of Neal Adams smoothed away to a liquid finish.
Readers in the first decade of the twenty-first century were raised on DVD high-definition CGI, HDTV, and airbrushed glamour and they wanted to see that familiar aesthetic reflected in their comics: less cartoony, more illustrative, less graphic, more photographic. Flawless skin, lit as if from within. The new school aimed for a luminous photo-realism, a beyond-natural 3-D simulated style where faces were Botoxed to a masklike sheen. At the extremes of this approach, every female Marvel character appeared drawn in poses derived from original photographic images of swimsuit or porn models. Sometimes the same unfortunate superheroine could resemble four or five completely different, completely lifelike women in a single issue, depending on how many different pictures of pouting odalisques the artist had light boxed from Maxim or FHM.
Civil War began with a skillfully drawn, immediately involving scene in which rookie superteam the New Warriors was shown converging for a covert raid on a supervillain safe house in Stamford, Connecticut. The teenage heroes had a film crew on their tail, and we soon learned that they were taking part in a reality-TV fly-on-the-wall series about their exploits. In terse exchanges, the young heroes worried about how they’d come across on-screen, fretting about zits, repeating cool one-liners for the cameras, and making sure they’d got their good side during fight scenes. The dialogue was witty, naturalistic, and lulling.
The raid, which should have been routine, went tits up when obscure Captain Marvel villain Nitro exploded and killed 612 civilians, mostly schoolchildren, leading to pointing fingers and a reassessment of the wisdom of allowing superhero vigilantes to run around flouting the law wherever they pleased.
The only survivor of the Stamford incident was the happy-go-lucky Speedball. Originally developed by Steve Ditko as his last original creation for Marvel, he was teenage Robert Baldwin, mysterious other-dimensional energy source blah blah accident at research lab blah blah ability to bounce off walls like a rubber ball, and so on. Of all the possible superhuman powers you might have received in the Marvel universe, you’d be entitled to feel quite disappointed with this one, but Baldwin did his best with a chipper and upbeat personality.
Never quite in line with the times, Speedball came to serve as Marvel’s central casting version of the breezy, goofy, likable teenager, the Ringo of any team he joined, a cartoon stereotype of youth that was no longer in vogue.
By the time of Civil War, Speedball, whose very name evoked drug culture, could be understood as representative of the previous pop generation’s experience of smiley rave, ecstasy, and shallow, hedonistic self-interest. But as the only survivor of the Stamford school disaster, Speedball became stricken with the guilt of a generation, a shame so profound it could only be assuaged when he donned the all-in-one agony-gimp suit of his new superhero persona, Penance. Fortunately for him, his superpowers could now be activated only when he felt pain, so the suffering, haunted, hated Robbie created a new costume that would hide his identity, activate his powers, and, most important, punish him mercilessly. Sewn onto the inside fabric were 612 spikes, one for each of the Stamford victims, to cut and score his flesh.
As Penance, the formerly lighthearted hero embodied the rise to mainstream of Goth and alternative-culture strands. The suffering Penance became the twenty-first-century teenager monstrous, pierced, tattooed, armored, and expressionless on the outside, bleeding and lost on the inside.
At the time, I found this character laughably “on the nose,” as they say, but reading the stories again, he seems a poignant, distressing embodiment of those times and those young people. Penance stood for the cutters we kept hearing about in the news, the emo kids, the outsider vampires squirming in the pop culture klieg lights as they acted out the remorse of their culture in wartime. They’d been told that outsiders were cool now, geeks were heroes, and there was money to be made prizing them out of their cobwebby, culty corners and stealing their arcane shit, while pretending to attend to their obsessive trivial chatter. They were final proof that even death, despair, and loneliness could be commodified and repackaged as an overpriced Hot Topic satchel. There were online chat rooms now to herd, socialize, and normalize the weird kids, to smooth out their eccentricities among conformity-enforcing groups of the like-minded. Porn sites specializing in rebel girls, Goth girls, and punk sluts began to proliferate, while young men and women were bleeding and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. The bloodletting, the sacrifice of youth to some dark ideal, seemed to repeat itself across scales.
The result was to increasingly fetishize children and young people as if we were—all of us—adults colluding in some mass corruption and deformation of youthful idealism until there could be nothing left but curdled cynicism. The kids were force-fed images of fear, torture, pain, and madness, along with assurances that their lives were essentially meaningless unless they made the Pop Idol Final and embraced the Church of Showbiz. They were being sold a powerful vision of tomorrow in which the planet itself was doomed to die choking on waste, its fate to be a spinning, godless cinder eternally haunted by the screaming ghosts of nations of pedophiles.
Civil War’s Stamford incident precipitated a rapid and unprecedented reaction against Marvel’s superhero community, which was when things began to get exciting.
At the beginning of act 1, Millar asked the obvious real-world question: Why were superheroes, essentially deadly living weapons, allowed to run around outside the law in these types of stories? If cops had to carry badges and go through training programs, shouldn’t superheroes? It was the first major challenge to their outlaw-outsider status and had to be addressed. The series’ central premise, then, was built around a question that was being asked more and more often in the media: How much freedom were we willing to give up for security?
America’s rugged libertarian superheroes said, “No way!” to any state interference in their vigilante moral crusades. Led by an increasingly militant Captain America, who personified gung ho laissez-faire patriotism of the old school, one faction of heroes became divided from the rest over the question of a superhero registration bill that would require them to reveal their secret identities and answer to a central governing body.
The idea was not entirely original. Paul Levitz explained the last days of the Golden Age Justice Society with a similar story in which the “McCarthy Commission” forced the mystery men to unmask or retire. They agreed to disband rather than reveal their personal lives and secrets. Watchmen had its “Keane Act” banning superhero activity, and Zenith had the International Superhuman Test Ban Treaty forbidding the creation of new superpeople. However, Millar’s reframing of a superhero registration bill in the context of post-9/11 paranoia chimed with the headlines and made superheroes “relevant” once more.
With Captain America on the side of the dissenters, the conformist lobby was led by his longtime Avengers buddy and teammate, Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, as the milit
ary-industrial complex given sleek armored form. The opening scene showed these two facing each other as comrades across the rubble of Stamford: Iron Man on the left and Captain America on the right.
Billionaire tech genius Stark represented the twenty-first-century model of success in an America whose wartime symbol Captain America was an essentially outmoded picture of self-reliant rugged individualism, a pioneer spirit no longer welcome in a globally connected world. The first issue of Civil War concluded with Captain America on the run—a wanted outlaw in his own country—and it signaled the end of the vigilante hero.
Covers were designed to resemble book jackets, featuring a single central image framed by tasteful black borders with the words “A Marvel Comics Event” lending a further epoch-inducing gravitas to the sales pitch.
Civil War’s plot mechanics all served to initiate, in the penultimate issue, no. 6, a gigantic fight in the mighty Marvel tradition, which ended with the (by this point) highly anticipated, completely expected payoff. Cap’s masked dissidents faced off against Iron Man and the conformist registered heroes across a double-page spread—the Captain on the left, Iron Man on the right this time—and between them a wasteland of misunderstanding.
The whole series, and with it a fraught moment in American history, was condensed into one supercharged image demonstrating once again that the best way to tackle contemporary political issues in a superhero story was with bold metaphor and a good punch-up. This was political cartooning, using the trademarked characters of the Marvel universe to make its point, however broad. It may have borrowed liberally from Kingdom Come’s plotline: the exploding superhuman killing civilians as inciting incident, the internecine warfare between heroes, and the way both stories centered around the construction of a super-Gulag. But that book’s struggle between morally compromised, swaggering new heroes and the upright fictional role models of a previous generation was at heart a fan’s tale of good old comics versus bad new comics. Civil War’s conflict served its appointed purpose as an excuse for a money-making Marvel superhero dustup, but it had its living roots in questions that were being asked of our own lives in the real world.