The first of these twenty-first-century event series to be a defining milestone in the development of the superhero narrative was 2004’s Identity Crisis. Readers were assured of a story so shocking that it would change everything we knew about the DC universe, including our memories of the comics we’d loved as children.
Identity Crisis was a mystery that began with a brutal rape and murder, and one could hardly think of a single DC character less deserving of the victim role than the one chosen. One image will be branded into my brain folds forever: of the formerly breezy Sue Dibny sobbing in her husband’s wraparound arms on the reflective floor of the Justice League satellite headquarters—a beloved childhood locus of excitement and opportunity—with the arse ripped out of her tights after what looked like forced back-door entry by Doctor Light.
Crooked physicist Arthur Light, famed for his manipulation of lenses and photons, had launched his career as an enemy of the Atom, who also played a major role in the story. Light was a typical Science 101–based villain of the Julius Schwartz Silver Age, devised to teach kids some basic physics in the sly guise of gimmick villainy. He’d gained a little extra depth and personality from his stint as a bumbling Teen Titans antagonist, but nothing in his previous record—including several counts of botched luminosity-related larceny—suggested an aptitude for forced sodomy until Identity Crisis chose to make this previously neglected facet of his appeal into its driving engine. Soon all the stalwarts of the DC hero community were living in fear for the rectal security of their own loved ones as Doctor Light’s behavior spiraled out of control. He became more lascivious in every subsequent appearance, culminating in his rise from the dead as a lewd zombie.
As for Sue Dibny, you may remember Sue and her husband, Ralph, the Elongated Man, from the Silver Age as wisecracking mainstays of the lighter fringe of the DC universe. Drawn to resemble Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, Ralph and Sue Dibny were DC’s answer to Nick and Nora Charles, the mystery-solving couple played by Dick Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man movie series. (The Elongated Man, see?) A charming nonslapstick take on the Plastic Man stretchable-hero concept, The Elongated Man ran as a backup feature in The Flash with tidy eight-page puzzle and solution stories of the kind that Julius Schwartz favored. Ralph and Sue traveled the world as a happy couple, solving Ellery Queen–flavored science fiction parlor mysteries with very little fuss and typically smoochy endings that made married life seem like an endless honeymoon. They were young, they were in love, they were happy.
And then came Brad Meltzer.
Meltzer, a published novelist and longtime comics fan, knew his stuff, and it was clear he’d waited a long time to get his hands on these characters. Articulate, unassuming, and bookish, he seemed the boy least likely to immerse DC’s stable of heroes in a queasy world of dubious ethics, paranoia, ultraviolence, and sexual assault, but he did. The effect was astonishing; it was like hearing “All You Need Is Love” performed by a satanic death-metal band from Norway.
(illustration credit 25.1)
Its opening was a challenging, bravura statement of intent that brought Meltzer’s novelistic intentions to the foreground before showing his mastery of the comic format:
DR. FATE ONCE TOLD ME, “LIFE IS A MYSTERY.” BUT IT ISN’T. EVERYONE KNOWS HOW IT ENDS. IT’S JUST A QUESTION OF WHEN. IN A NOVEL, IT’S DIFFERENT. THERE YOU START WORRYING ABOUT THE MAIN CHARACTER’S SAFETY ALMOST IMMEDIATELY. OF COURSE, IT’S A FALSE WORRY. NOTHING BAD EVER HAPPENS TO THE MAIN CHARACTER IN A NOVEL. BUT IF THE STORY OPENS WITH A MINOR CHARACTER OR TWO—
Which, of course, Identity Crisis did, with Elongated Man and Firehawk perched on a rooftop stakeout. The captions were measured out across the whole sequence, set in exquisite counterpoint to the visuals and dialogue between the two characters.
On page 4, the scene moved to a kitchen in Smallville, with Clark Kent and his adopted parents and a new narrator we instantly recognized to be Superman.
These and further Joycean shifts of POV were accomplished by the use of multiple color-coded captions. A two-page sequence of green boxes, indicating Green Arrow’s interior monologue, might be followed by a string of light-blue captions for the Atom, gray for Batman, or yellow for Robin, and yet, remarkably, Meltzer’s story was never confusing. Every voice was so distinct and memorable that even with fifteen separate monologue strands in addition to dialogue and an authorial scene-setting voice, the colors were scarcely needed, even when taut, heart-stopping editing of scenes meant that sometimes four or five voices were in counterpoint across a single scene—the nearest anyone had come in years to the orchestral “sound” of Roy Thomas.
Issue 1 ended with Ralph’s discovery of Sue’s corpse, shown in no uncertain terms. The breezy detective was pictured kneeling, his ridiculously extended arms wrapped several times around the violated, burned remains of his beloved wife, while thick comic-book rain cataracted down on his anguished face. His head thrown back, his mouth stretched open like a freshly dug grave for a pet guinea pig, tears rivered down his rubbery cheeks. It was a far cry from the anniversary cruise to Cairo, where he and Sue had solved the riddle of the Sphinx and Ralph almost put his back out. The death of innocence had a new face, a new iconic image. This was the hideous promise of Watchmen’s bloodstained smiley-face badge made manifest as a rubber detective cradling a murdered rape victim, his wife. For the Dibnys, the Silver Age was well and truly over. The death of dreams was becoming a defining myth of post–Trade Towers America. Writers like Meltzer saw in the champions of their untroubled youth a bold metaphor for American innocence, and they savagely expressed the death of that hopeful naivety in a blast-radial discharge of explosive venom and expert cruelty. This was punk superheroics, American style.
The art was by up-and-comer Rags Morales, who cunningly orchestrated his compositions for maximum emotional symbolic impact and ramped up the pliable expressiveness of his characters’ faces, pushing them to the new extremes of suffering that suited the story’s pedal-to-the-metal disregard for propriety. Morales’s specialty was superheroes at the absolute end of their tethers. He drew them sweating, sobbing, unmanned, bereaved, and paranoid—sometimes all at the same time if the story’s roller-coaster acceleration demanded it.
The solution to Meltzer’s murder mystery when it finally came was bizarre and a little anticlimactic, but it scarcely mattered and even had more impact on the third reading. What was important was the texture, the believable human voices, the sense of absolute danger and outrage that made Identity Crisis riveting. The cumulative effect of the series was to bring a new intimacy and vulnerability to the DC heroes. If they could cope with this and emerge intact, they could handle anything. The sales were spectacular, the buzz was electric, bringing DC to a middecade peak, as Marvel reconsidered its approach. One of the first reactions was a series entitled Identity Disc. Nu-Marvel was nothing if not shameless.
The final issue even quoted playwright Arthur Miller—“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted”—as it laid to rest the assumptions of the Silver Age.
A rejuvenated DC followed the controversial success of Identity Crisis with a crowd-pleasing celebration entitled Infinite Crisis, a twentieth-anniversary sequel to the first great event comic, Crisis on Infinite Earths. Written by Geoff Johns, with a frightening eye for detail, the comic was an arcane encyclopedia of dense data, where decades of plot twists might be explained in a single panel, or histories of entire universes and countless characters condensed into walls of tiny text. All the while, the action never let up, as Johns and his artists orchestrated a literal cast of thousands of heroes and villains, with emotional moments, soap opera beats, and character development that seemed to streamline the entire DC style into a single voice. Johns often seemed possessed by the animating spirit of the DC Comics universe and had a facility for compressing years of continuity into a single telling line, such as in Batman’s bitter dismissal of his old ally:
“LET’S FACE IT, ‘SUPERMAN’ ??
? THE LAST TIME YOU REALLY INSPIRED ANYONE—WAS WHEN YOU WERE DEAD.”
Infinite Crisis was dense and arcane, a combination of guidebook and comic book that both thrilled and comforted DC’s core audience. Geoff Johns’s work was always perfectly tuned to the exact sensibilities of the DC fan-boy demographic, and he knew when to roll out characterizations they were familiar with and when to add shock or novelty. But it was hard to imagine this concordance appealing to a wider audience. Its raisons d’être were specialist concerns, lacking mainstream appeal, although as an introduction to the expansive, bewildering DC virtual reality, it was hard to beat.
Alongside Infinite Crisis, DC was publishing my Seven Soldiers project. This was the mega-series I’d been building like some madman’s matchstick cathedral while I was still at Marvel, and it was all about exploring the underbelly of the DC universe: the therapy groups for superheroes with low esteem; the wannabes who’d bought their magic rings off eBay; the men who watched superporn where girls poured steaming sulfuric acid over perfect, invulnerable breasts.
I wanted these disillusioned, half-trained supernobodies to have to face the kind of epic villainy that tended to be the preserve of big-time superheroes in the Justice League. It was one thing to watch a powerless mystery man go into action against a few thugs, but another to watch him take on an alien empire armed only with a shield and a nightstick. My villains in this were called the Sheeda (after the Celtic Sidhe, or fairy folk of the Otherworld, those mysterious “others” who turn up in the folk tales of most cultures), a rapacious carrion race of pointy-eared spindly goblins, riding huge, genetically engineered flies and spiders, like some eruption from a Richard Dadd canvas into the modern world. The Sheeda were revealed to be humanity’s last descendants from one billion years in the future, evolved to become the final ferocious survivors on a doomed earth under a dying sun and using stolen time machines to keep themselves alive by eating their own history.
“WE ARE THE END RESULT OF NATURAL SELECTION, THE WINNERS OF A SAVAGE AND BLOODY STRUGGLE FOR PLANETARY DOMINION.”
Led by Gloriana Tenebrae, the apple-chomping Queen of the Fairies, the ultimate Wicked Witch, the Sheeda periodically sent their multitudinous armies back through time to “harvest” ripe civilizations by stealing their cultural, scientific, and environmental treasures, leaving whole centuries fallow only to return en masse when the next high culture had bloomed.
HERE THEY CLING TO A SPECTACULAR HALF-LIFE IN A GROSS AND CLAUSTROPHOBIC IMITATION OF CULTURE AT THE END OF ALL THINGS. THE CREEPLE-PEOPLE—THE UNHOLY SHEEDA. HERE HAS ERUPTED, LIKE A JEWELLED ABSCESS, THE ULTIMATE EARTHLY EMPIRE—STEAMING IN THE SQUALID, LUSCIOUS DECAY OF THE REFUSE-LITTERED SLOPES AT SUMMER’S END WHEREIN ARE NOURISHED THE FAIRY HARVESTERS OF UNWHEN.
Another bold format experiment, 52 (2007), was a yearlong mega-story published in fifty-two real-time weekly installments, cowritten, TV-show style, by DC’s big four writers at the time—Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid, and me—with layouts and story breakdowns by artist Keith Giffen and finished art by a cast of up-and-coming DC talent.
It was a huge hit, and despite the difficult and demanding schedule, we all bonded quickly and were able to go into far greater depth than was usual with our core cast of C-list DC heroes and villains. We celebrated the completion of 52 with a trip to Las Vegas, where Greg Rucka suggested a visit to the shooting range. He was keen to sample a semiautomatic rifle, but as a confirmed pacifist, I’d never even held a real gun, let alone fired one. I found the pistol’s thudding kick of pressure unexpected but not unappealing, and soon both Kristan and I were coldly pumping bullets into the sneering paper face of Osama bin Laden. The strange allure of cold-blooded murder seemed a little clearer in that roomful of whooping rednecks and nervously tittering first-timers.
Marvel parried with its own events. Civil War, as I’ve already discussed, was the best of them. But Brian Bendis also contributed the lukewarm House of M, and Secret Invasion—his sequel to the Kree-Skrull war in which the aliens won, Earth was conquered, and some slightly hamfisted attempts to compare Skrulls to radical Islamists were made, borrowed wholesale from TV’s Battlestar Galactica.
Next came Dark Reign, in which the deranged, medicated Norman Osborn, aka Spider-Man archfoe Green Goblin, replaced Tony Stark as director of S.H.I.E.L.D. before assuming a new armored identity as the Iron Patriot and drafting members of the supervillain community to serve as violent substitutes—“Dark Avengers”—for the Marvel superheroes. The series was notable for its subtle, multifaceted character study of Osborn as a bad man doing his best to live up to his onerous new role as a good guy, even as it fell apart all around him. Anyone who’d ever suffered the stress of too much work, too many hard decisions, and the cruelty of crushing deadlines could feel Osborn’s pain as he struggled to hold together his unruly team and his country. This led directly into Siege, another epic chapter in the same enormous, ongoing story that proved, if nothing else, that Bendis was a one-man event machine and quite indispensable to the smooth running of the modern Marvel universe.
Then it was my turn to bat for DC on 2008’s Final Crisis. I’d considered Infinite Crisis to be the quintessential event book and felt slightly intimidated. Geoff had left no stone unturned and effortlessly woven hundreds of characters into a story that gave them all something meaningful to do or say while setting up new plotlines and characters for other creators to explore. In his hands, the DC universe actually felt like a unified, if crowded, place. He’d even managed to introduce some notes of genuine emotion, such as the moment where the Lois Lane of the Golden Age dies in the arms of the original “pre-Crisis” Superman of 1939. On Earth-2, they’d married and grown into touchingly romantic late middle age together. I would have to do a very different kind of sequel to Crisis, and I hoped I could add something new and say something worthwhile.
During Final Crisis, I was on double duty with another big, controversial title spinning out of my productive and lucrative death psychedelia phase. In Batman R.I.P., the Black Glove, a group of mega-wealthy international gamblers led by a sinister Dr. Hurt—who could have been the Devil or perhaps Bruce Wayne’s presumed dead father—set about breaking the Dark Knight’s will in every way, using his own mind and memories against him:
“NOTHING LESS THAN THE COMPLETE AND UTTER RUINATION OF A NOBLE SPIRIT.”
I had fun doing a vulnerable Batman, stumbling homeless through the streets on heroin, deranged and betrayed. The comeback when it came was sweet but short-lived fruition, removing Bruce Wayne from the Batman trunks and launching him through time.
Batman R.I.P. even made headlines on the BBC, and the collected edition was a big hit in the mainstream bookstores, where handsome “graphic novels” or comic-book collections were slowly filling more and more shelf space. Some people seemed to take R.I.P. very seriously, and I was accused of murdering one furious correspondent’s childhood—which, had it only been true, would surely have prevented that person from being around to make his complaint in the first place. It was almost funny, but when the death threats started to appear, we walked away from our website again and left the lunatics to their asylum.
Batman R.I.P. was no sooner cold in its casket than Frank Quitely and I launched our next event hit title, Batman and Robin—an acid-tinged modernization of the sixties TV show as if directed by David Lynch, which became DC’s biggest Batman book of 2009. Dick Grayson, the original Robin, was now a younger, more laid-back, and optimistic Batman, while the part of Robin was played by Bruce Wayne’s long-lost son, Damian, who’d been raised by assassins as a scowling, privileged chip off the old block. The reversed dynamic duo—grim Robin, cheerful Batman—went down so well that many readers were actually deeply disappointed when Bruce Wayne came back to reclaim his cape. Batman and Robin flowed naturally into the equally successful The Return of Bruce Wayne, Batman: The Return, and Batman Incorporated, event after event after event. Some readers protested, and the term “event fatigue” became common, conjuring images
of frail fans shuddering in darkened rooms as they attempted to recover from the exhaustion of reading stories where too much went on. But even when they complained, they couldn’t stop buying, addicted to a narrative equivalent of crack cocaine that made old-fashioned nonevent books taste like baby powder.
Hoping to drive the old nag so hard its heart burst, I decreed a new escalation of freelancer hostilities by condensing more and more story into fewer pages, declaring each arc, each issue, each panel an event!
Marvel closed the book on the last decade with the Heroic Age. The lights had come on again. The villains had been given their chance to rule the day, and it was over. All along the watchtower, all was well. The deliberate inversions of Earth 2 and Wanted notwithstanding, the superheroes always won in the end. The fears of 9/11 had been processed, exhausted, and left behind, or so it seemed.
Our Worlds at War, DC’s funereal turn-of-the-century alien war epic, which had shown two towers burning behind an anguished figure of Superman, set the dystopian tone for the decade. In this despairing image of a Superman who’d arrived too late to save the day, a new energy was found. He’d failed. Now what? Incredible new story potential!
DC ended the events decade with Geoff Johns’s magisterial, morbid Blackest Night, in which a cosmic villain resurrected DC’s dead superheroes and deceased supporting cast members as zombie “Black Lanterns,” then Brightest Day, which deepened the contrast and announced a new chapter in the long-running DC universe saga. Johns applied a child’s logic to his deft and engrossing expansion of the Green Lantern mythos, creating an entire spectrum of Yellow Lanterns, Blue Lanterns, Red Lanterns, and so on. This inevitably gave rise to the horrific notion of zombie Black Lanterns.
After a headline buyout by Disney in 2009, Marvel’s dark-trending “realistic” phase was brought to a deliberate conclusion in Brian Bendis’s Siege, where Asgard, the supercity of the Norse gods, as envisaged by Jack Kirby, was brought crashing to Earth, made solid, and then broken. From the rainbow ruins of the old mythology, a new myth could arise.