I crossed the globe as a guest at conventions in San Diego, Lucca, Paris, Barcelona, Melbourne, Oslo, Reykjavik, Bristol, Aberdeen, London, Philadelphia—and as far as I could see, my readership was made up of mostly clever, earnest, and studenty or alternative young men and their generally even more clever girlfriends. They were, as I say, readers, not fans, for whom a good comic book was just one more item on their regular pop culture diet.
Stranger to me than the fans were the professional veterans of the convention circuit; former science fiction “babes,” ex-starship captains and Imperial Stormtroopers, cult-show survivors who spent their lives traveling from one event to the next, living off appearance fees as they endlessly circled the world signing old photographs and DVD boxed sets.
One sci-fi show stalwart, still stunning in her rubber dress, traveled with a twelve-year-old son who quietly, politely, and dutifully made sure that her makeup was ready for her on the tour bus after her riotous nights out on the tiles of another convention city, on a tab that never ran dry. It’s not all that difficult to mine this potential sitcom scenario for easy laughs, but I often think of that dedicated, uncomplaining boy with his world-weary look of resignation and his beautiful mum, squeezing the last of the juice from her time as a party girl space fleet pinup, on her way to the dark side of the MILF, staggering home drunk in her highest heels, immaculately wasted.
Another cult-TV regular who was hard as nails, witty, and cynical had this piece of advice to offer the budding sci-fi starlet: If you need to speed up a line of hovering fan boys, you must slowly open up the top button of your blouse, as if the whole thing was getting too much, too hot. To accelerate the flow of punters, pop a few more buttons, as many as necessary to achieve the desired turnover. Apparently, and this is from the mouth of an expert, shy fans become embarrassed by exposed cleavage and tend not to linger any longer than is necessary. This woman had achieved such precise control over the technique that it was like working a sluice gate.
My time on the merry-go-round rarely amounted to much more than a weekend of signings and panel discussions, but the diehards were heading on to Argentina, then Mexico, Singapore, Oslo, or Birmingham. A nomadic tribe of Flying Dutchmen and -women, committed to a potentially lifelong schedule of personal appearances. “Cult” TV and film audiences were all forgiving; no matter how many decades had passed since your last voyage to Arcturus, they still used your chain mail swimsuit shots as aids to masturbation. They created an atmosphere of ambiguous transaction, where it seemed somehow normal and not grotesque to present photographs of handsome musclemen to be shakily autographed by the geriatric actors they’d become, as if enacting The Picture of Dorian Gray in reverse.
Then there’s San Diego Comic-Con International, which is Rabelais and Fellini all rolled into one and fuel-injected into a twenty-first-century theme park where everyone will be a superhero forever. This particular taste of the future requires an entire book to itself, and it’s not going to be this one.
Suffice it to say that San Diego, as we call it, is the world’s largest pop media culture marketplace fringe madness festival, and every year it grows larger as more people come to experience an entire city peel off its civvies and transform into a science fiction/horror/sex simulation of Oz.
On my first visit as a convention guest, twenty years ago, I saw a young man dressed as Green Lantern being harassed down Main Street by hostile marines. This year it was as if the pages of the comics and fantasy novels, and the glass of TV screens had shattered, burst, and filled three aircraft hangar–sized halls, spilling out to invade and surrealize every hotel bar, every motel lobby, every city block for miles around with monsters, femmes fatales, and self-made superheroes. The San Diego Comic-Con is an event that everyone should experience at least once. It’s a big rehearsal for tomorrow, where Second Life becomes real.
I have to say that wherever I went, the audience was young, enthusiastic, polite, and intelligent. The people who connected with my stories were the sort of people I hoped would enjoy them, and I got on with pretty much all of them. I didn’t find them creepy, or nerdy, or geeky, or whatever the marketing labels became, but I suppose that’s what they were and what we all were.
And that’s why the gold medal will always go to Sheffield.
CHAPTER 24
THERE WERE MORE and more superheroes now, roosting on the billboards at the local Cineplex, straddling buildings, bigger than Ultimate Giant Man. Marvel made the most of it, unleashing a conga line of titles that translated their appeal from the page to the screen and fed a growing hunger. Scary times and superhero movies go together like dirt and soap.
Daredevil in 2003 successfully captured the atmosphere of Catholic suffering and guilt that had enlivened Frank Miller’s Born Again, the book on which it was loosely based, but the wire work was tired, giving every character the same high-jumping fight style. Miller’s pulp vision would be better served by later adaptations of his graphic novels like Sin City and 300. Although Daredevil offered a bold stab at developing Miller’s stained-glass noir into a convincing street-level neighborhood superhero franchise, the underlying tone of the movie was whiny and petulant. In our first introduction to the hero, he wrecked a dive bar and beats to a pulp almost all of the seemingly innocent regulars on his way to the real crook, with no explanation or apology for the severity of his behavior.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was next on the production line. Unlike Daredevil or Spider-Man, who were from the sixties, this was a new title, an Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil coproduction. But although published in 1999, it was set in 1898 and starred several famous characters of late Victorian adventure fiction—many of them archetypes for later heroes of the Marvel Comics universe, in particular, and banded together as a kind of gaslit society of champions with the opening epigram:
“The British Empire has always had difficulty in distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters.”
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen assembled H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man with H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, Mina Harker, the heroine of Dracula, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (done here as a proto-Hulk), and Captain Nemo, under the guiding mitt of Campion Bond, grandfather of James, and his boss, M, for Moriarty, to stand against the enemies of Empire.
Like the awe-inspiring zoological grotesques fashioned from stray beaks and lemur tails by Victorian taxidermists, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a delightful, outrageous platypus of many parts. The series is still running, gobbling up the entire continuum of fiction and knitting it all into one seamless canvas where The Story of O is an unrevealed chapter in the life of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and where Billy Bunter went to spy school with Emma Peel’s dad and Orwell’s O’Brien. The most recent League adventure, 1910, brought characters from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera together with Raffles the Gentleman Thief, Carnacki the Ghost Finder, and Iain Sinclair’s time-displaced Norton.
The movie, unsurprisingly, was far less ambitious than Moore’s book and its fin de siècle steampunk trappings were at odds with a vogue for the down-to-earth and contemporary. It was scripted by the English comic-book author James Robinson and produced by Don Murphy (husband of my friend Susan Montford, who had directed me as Roman Polanski in her short film Strangers). Better books than mine will be written about Don (they already have been, in fact, and I recommend Killer Instinct, Jane Hamsher’s account of the filming of Oliver Stone’s wonderful Natural Born Killers), but suffice it to say that not for nothing is his production company known as Angry Films. The Murphy I know has a tender side too, but I’d hate to put a dent in his fearsome reputation with any tales of his kindness and humor. The afterparty for League brought me within feet of Sir Sean Connery, Scotland’s own absent father, but I didn’t say more than hello to him.
Ang Lee’s Hulk was an ambitious attempt to do something adult with Lee and Kirby’s anger-management metaphor. Distinguished by its beautiful and inventive CGI scene transitions, it lacked a strong sto
ry, sympathetic characters, and, most important, the Hulk-style tank-tossing mayhem that audiences, especially those weaned on the comic-book adventures of “Ol’ Greenskin,” had come to expect. By the time The Incredible Hulk was released a mere five years later, in 2008, Marvel Entertainment had perfected a formula for introducing its characters on-screen, in which the lead would invariably encounter some bigger, more numerous, or meaner version of himself in the last reel, which meant, in this case, act 3: Hulk versus Abomination.
As superheroes regained their popularity, some filmmakers cottoned on to the fact that there was nothing stopping them from launching their own new creations without relying on the DC and Marvel standbys.
The Incredibles was Pixar animator Brad Bird’s foray into the costumed hero arena, with a typically slick, witty, and accomplished piece that swiftly established a whole new universe of characters and possibilities and remains the most successful of cinema’s original superhero creations. For longtime comics fans, however, there was nothing new: The Incredibles borrowed from Fantastic Four, as well as Superfolks and Marvelman’s vision of an out-of-shape, middle-aged superhero, and even quoted Watchmen’s hero ban, but its intended all-ages audience and high standards of writing and animation gave it a refreshing Silver Age exuberance. The film’s color and charm hid a lack of originality, but it was hard not to enjoy the effortless character work and the adrenaline-powered fight scenes that played out like childhood memories made real (although why Mrs. Incredible never used her stretching power to tighten the spreading butt she complained about was never adequately explained).
As for Marvel’s First Family, they had their own live-action shot at the big time with Fantastic Four, a shallow, uncool, family-oriented crack at updating the quintessentially Cold War hero team. Its sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, maintained the kiddie tone and unforgivably copped out of showing Galactus, but its eerily realized CGI Silver Surfer, particularly as seen during a breathtaking aerial chase sequence through the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, was a genuine triumph that, for the first time, came close to the purity of Jack Kirby’s vision, and offered a foretaste of what might be possible when the moviemakers finally caught up to the King’s best work.
The year 2005 also served up the most interesting new approach to the superhero movie formula since Unbreakable, with Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, more on which later, while 2006 brought the much-anticipated but unsatisfactory Superman Returns, the last installment of the X-Men trilogy, and another Fox Studios original, which made the most of Uma Thurman’s leggy Hollywood glamour for My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Unfortunately, this uneasy romantic comedy about a superwoman scorned, which might have been hailed as a breakthrough graphic novel, made little impression and was memorable only for one genuinely nightmarish and alarming scene in which Thurman as G-Girl tossed a live shark into her boyfriend’s bedroom.
Hancock had the most startling flying effects since the first Superman, and the eye-popping opening sequence with Will Smith whizzing between moving traffic as a scuzzy alcoholic superman was satisfyingly big-budget. But after that, it was all downhill; the big origin reveal, with its near-incomprehensible tale of angels and reincarnation, killed what should have been a tent pole, a potential franchise, and a groundbreaking black superhero series, collapsing the premise under the weight of its own ludicrous mythology.
But it was Iron Man—a B-list Marvel star—who gave notice of a new kind of superhero film, one that could reach a bigger audience than ever before, without a big brand name; no longer genre bound but universal in its appeal and held in place by great supporting actors and a bravura central performance by the remarkable Robert Downey Jr. There may have been a certain self-satisfaction to the Downey Jr. smile since his stint in rehab, but no one could have summoned to life the Tony Stark of The Ultimates with the flair and insight that he brought to the role. Iron Man was the perfect breakthrough superhero for the blankly aspirational first decade of the twenty-first century. He was the millionaire man-and-machine cyborg we were all becoming, grafted to our phones and VDUs, our poker faces like locked and polished doors.
Iron Man reminded us that our man-machine future was more than a simple triumph of soulless technology but involved an exchange, an eroticization and softening of metal’s contours. Iron Man was no robot, as he may have appeared at first; the impenetrable armor concealed a soft center and those melting puppy dog eyes. The man of metal had a shattered heart of shrapnel. Tony Stark became the tender center, the wounded soul in the military machine that helped to sell a war and humanize its warriors.
At an advance screening in Los Angeles of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, I found myself sitting next to Jim Lee and David and Victoria Beckham, along with their sons. Halfway through the movie, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne took his brand-new Lamborghini Murcielago for a spin through the streets of Gotham.
“He’s got your car, Dad!” yelped the elder Beckham boy over the blissful sound of illusion crashing headlong into reality.
The day after, I was invited to the Warners office of Zack Snyder to watch some Watchmen footage. High-definition CGI technology had caught up with Dave Gibbons’s hyperreal freeze-frames, his profusion of tiny meaningful details and infinite depth of field. Doctor Manhattan, in all his cock-out glory, could now be rendered completely digitally, as Alan Moore himself had suggested many years before. The film was released to a lukewarm reception, but I suspect its reputation will grow.
A fist-shaking Moore disowned this loving tribute to his most famous book and gave his share of the movie money to Gibbons. His experience on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had been a step too far, after a lawyer working for Universal Pictures dragged him into a plagiarism case that saw him accused of basing his first volume of League stories on a prior screenplay entitled Cast of Characters. Moore was not above borrowing ideas, as the very concept of the League proved, but the indictments were as ludicrous as they were convoluted, eliciting another grand exit, which saw him sever all remaining ties with Hollywood and mainstream comics and return to his roots in music, small-press publishing, and the underground arts scene.
Watchmen, the book, which had become DC’s single most lucrative publishing venture ever, sold one million copies in 2008–9 alone, which must at least have kept the writer in cigarettes and scorpion rings.
Mark Millar’s Wanted, directed by the Russian action stylist Timur Bekmambetov, barely survived its translation to the screen (the writers boasted how they’d only bothered to read the first issue of the comic book), but despite the loss of its central premise, the film did remarkably well at the box office and opened the doors for Millar’s subsequent page-to-screen translation, Kick-Ass. Wanted began its journey as a proposal for DC’s Secret Society of Super-Villains title, and every character was a variant on a DC stalwart, so the Joker became the diabolical Mister Rictus. Clayface was reborn as Shit-Head, Two-Face was Johnny Two-Dicks, and—you get the picture. With its roots in DC history and superhero revisionism, Wanted may have seemed an unlikely choice for Hollywood, but its core story—of the nerd who seizes his chance to be the big man at all costs—had mass appeal. And the addition of Angelina Jolie to the cast list gave it a cachet beyond its humble beginnings.
Wanted the movie bore only the slightest relation to the comic book, but there was enough. The engaging superhero plot was replaced by a bizarre “secret society” angle. Millar’s supervillains became a shadowy and barely comprehensible league of assassins, or “Weavers,” who worked apparently for the “Loom of Fate” to remove undesirable elements from society. It had taken forty years to get Spider-Man off the page, but the new superheroes were hitting the cinemas barely months after their comic-book adventures came hot from the presses. The comic book was just a pitch now, a stepping-stone to celluloid validation.
TV jumped back on the superhero bandwagon with Heroes. The first season was tight and engaging, although every single plot element appeared to have been lifte
d from some familiar comic-book story, but the show lost its way rapidly. The highlight was the origin reveal of the villain Sylar with a script as elegant, satisfying, and involved as the Watchmen episodes it so fondly quoted and drew upon for its inspiration. Heroes combined the innovations of the Dark Age and Renaissance into a TV-friendly stew with an ensemble cast of noncostumed superhumans.
The United Kingdom’s No-Heroics took a lo-fi look at the pointless lives of Z-list superhumans, who congregated in a London bar with pictures of Warren Ellis and me on the walls. It was played for laughs, but there was an attention to detail, a world-building that showed the influence of the best “serious” superhero titles.
As I write, The Cape, Misfits, No Ordinary Family, and Alphas are the latest additions to the growing gallery of hero shows and are unlikely to be the last. Superheroes add an extra level of spice to any genre they touch, and we can expect to see their presence enliven all kinds of otherwise ordinary scenarios.
Even Edgar Wright’s film of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic-book series Scott Pilgrim vs. the World played a shallow teenage relationship as a series of titanic superhero battles, on the understanding that this was how it felt to be in love: It felt like being a superhero. These days everything felt like being a superhero. They were everywhere now. They walked among us.
CHAPTER 25
A NEW TYPE of story began to dominate the comic-book universes, as if in response to the challenge from film and games. “Event comics,” as they were called, had existed since Marvel’s Secret Wars and DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. They were an excuse to feature every company character in panoramic summer stories that could be hyped like Hollywood blockbusters.