The following month brought Heroic Age, which was branded across the line and promoted with 2008 buzzwords like mythic and iconic in a hasty attempt to adapt and improve upon the big science fiction formula of the DC books. Whether or not Marvel’s Heroic Age about-face also represented a simple capitulation to more family-friendly market forces driven by mouse diktat remained to be seen. The result for the superhero inhabitants of the Big Two comic-book universes was the same.
The long night was over.
Had the brief, angry, sex-mad, and individualistic adolescence of superhero comics come to a close at last? Comics were no longer some last-chance hotel for fantasy-prone mavericks who found other entertainment outlets too tame or too restrictive for their visions. They were now a respectable stepping-stone to Hollywood and big money. Cleaned up, hair cut, prepped for a settled life in the suburbs. No more noise, no more corrupting the kids or making them think about stuff they shouldn’t.
At least for now. Nothing stays the same and everything stays the same for the superheroes of DC and Marvel. They won long ago.
Perhaps the final shock is this, the terrifying lesson of 2010’s gleaming new superhero story:
The bad guys didn’t win after all. We did.
Now what?
CHAPTER 26
THE SINGER ROBBIE Williams had, in his spare time, developed an interest in magic and the occult and, in 2005, he got in touch with me in my capacity as a “chaos magician” to ask if I could walk him through some of the basics.
He was a textbook forward-thinking dissatisfied Aquarian, and he knew—years ahead of everyone else in his business—that superheroes were the next big thing. He asked if we could turn him into a superhero for his next tour, so Frank Quitely drew up some Super-Rob sketches before we all decided he’d look ridiculous in a cape and circus suit and went to work devising a more twenty-first-century Elizabethan “occult” approach for the record sleeve, which would be packed with secrets and hidden meanings in the Magical Mystery Tour puzzle tradition. He would become a British superhero in a coat and scarf, a time-traveling shaman, the “Good Doctor.”
Quitely and I created a sequence of “alien abduction” tarot cards for the album Intensive Care, but far from provoking the hoped-for tabloid screamers—“Robbie in Black Magic Shock!”—the talismanic images and witchy hieroglyphs were completely overlooked by a usually prurient media. Not a single “What’s he gotten himself into now?” story. Even when I wrote my own article for the Sun newspaper, it was rejected on the grounds that no one would be interested in Robbie Williams’s dalliances with the powers of the pit! I planted a sigil on the cover, which can be activated by finding the CD in the shops or pulling the cover up on-screen and pressing Rob’s finger. If enough of us do this the world will most certainly enter a new Golden Age of peace, creativity, and prosperity! …
Gerard Way, the lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance, was a very different kind of entertainer, a New Jersey art-punk rocker who’d been an intern at Vertigo back in the days of The Invisibles and a fan of my Doom Patrol run, although we’d never crossed paths.
In mid-2006, with Final Crisis on my mind, I caught the video for his band’s song “Welcome to the Black Parade,” a searing slice of punk psychedelia I was primed to like anyway. What really made me sit up were the outfits the band was wearing.
Dressed in black-and-white marching band uniforms as they led a procession of sexy walking dead through a bombed-out city, My Chemical Romance looked like a glamorous postmortem Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They had fused the images of two opposites—the tough soldier and the frail emo kid—to create an image of what was to come. Nor was the sound morbid or dark; it was triumphal, chiming, imperial rock. The new psychedelia would learn to make friends with darkness. It would come from the Goth and alternative frontiers of the last twenty years into the mainstream, laughing at cancer as it put a beat to the Dance of the Dead and began to have fun again, however dark that fun might seem to grown-ups.
That fall, I listened to The Black Parade over and over and over again, to inspire cosmic mortuary scenes for Final Crisis and Batman’s mental breakdown. MCR had shown me a picture of the new superhero, posttraumatic, postwar, the hero with nothing left to believe in. The supersoldier was home from the front, jumping every time a car backfired, staring at his hands.
Neil Gaiman put me in touch with Gerard, and we met in Glasgow before a gig, forming an instant connection. He led a new young generation of musicians who had grown up with superhero comics and had no qualms about saying so. He walked the walk too, with Umbrella Academy, his own award-winning re-creation of the superhero formula with artist Gabriel Ba. It was a kaleidoscopic tour de force. There was no shaky start, no cramming of balloons with words (a common tyro error), and none of the familiar missteps that dogged so many other celebrity-fan forays into the comics biz. Umbrella Academy was the end result of years of reading and thinking about superheroes and science fiction: Funny, scary, cerebral, arty, and violent all at the same time, it harvested all the fruits of Gerard’s own “iconography tree.” The heroes of Umbrella Academy were a group of outsider kids who grew up to be the world’s greatest superheroes. It was the story of his band. It was my story too. It was a premonition of where we were all headed.
These days, it’s no longer enough to be a star or even a superstar. Today even the most slender and ephemeral talents are routinely described as “legends.” There’s no need to slay ten-story sea beasts, endure complex and life-threatening quests or epic military campaigns: Simply release a couple of dodgy records or do some stand-up, and you too will be elevated to the ranks of the mythical King Arthur, heroic Lemminkainen, or mighty Odysseus. You too will become legend.
With our superlatives and honorifics devalued so that star, legend, and genius will suffice as descriptors for any old cod with half a good idea he stole from someone else, what lies next on the upward trajectory of human self-regard from star to superstar to legend? Once upon a time, a star was an individual of exceptional sporting, musical, or acting talent. Then it became every child who could grip a crayon and scrawl a daisy for Mother’s Day. When we all became stars, stars became superstars to keep things straight, but they were swimming against the tide. In a time of Facebook and Twitter, where everyone has a fan page, when the concept of “genius” has been extended to include anyone who can produce a half-competent piece of art or writing, where is there left to go but all the way? We may as well crown ourselves kings of creation. Why not become superheroes? Supergods, in fact. Isn’t it what we’ve always known we’d have to do in the end? Nobody was ever going to come from the sky to save us. No Justice League; Just Us League.
Back in 1940, Ma Hunkel, the Red Tornado, was the first attempt to depict a “real-life” superhero in comics. Not a spaceman from Krypton, not a billionaire playboy with a grudge, Ma had no powers except for her formidable washerwoman build. She wore a homemade costume to dish out local justice in the stairwells and alleyways of the Lower East Side in some aboriginal memory of the early DC universe.
She was joined by characters like Wildcat, the Black Canary, the Mighty Atom, the Sandman, and other tough but good-hearted vigilante crime fighters who took to the mean streets in nothing but their underwear. They had no special powers, just fists, and an attitude—at best, a gun that shot darts or gas or bees.
Seventy years after Ma Hunkel, sixteen-year-old Dave Lizewski, the hero of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass, asked the question “WHY DOES EVERYONE WANT TO BE PARIS HILTON BUT NOBODY WANTS TO BE A SUPERHERO?” Leaving aside the cynical response that nobody in their right minds wanted to be Paris Hilton, Dave’s question had already been answered by a handful of brave souls, real people in the real world who dress up in capes and masks to patrol the streets and keep people safe. You can read all about them online if you type “real world superheroes” into a search engine. They even have their own registry, like Civil War veterans who fought on Iron Man’s side.
The TV and film hopefuls, the half-baked actors, are easy to spot. But to the others, fierce behind homemade masks and hoods and helmets, the superhero’s calling is as important as religion, or at least as important as the youth cult demographic you conformed to at school. They are the future.
Who are these valiant harbingers, concealing their identities behind colorful masks and costumes to serve their communities as best they can? There’s Portland’s Zetaman, who patrols the city with gifts of food and clothing for the homeless. Atlanta’s Crimson Fist hits the sidewalk of his city twice a month “to help those in need.” There’s Geist, “the Real Kick-Ass.” Thanatos, Phantom Zero, the Death’s Head Moth, and the Black Monday Society, a team of activists including Insignia, Ghost, and Silver Dragon. Captain Prospect. The list echoes the mesmerizing lullaby of Golden Age character names except for a lightning-stroke realization that these are real people, with curtains and light switches. This is what it’s like to be a superhero with no plot, no Aristotelean thematically interconnected story arcs, no cliff-hangers, no tidy resolutions. Only raw motivation.
Many of them, like Entomo, the Insect Man, construct their own personal continuities on elaborate websites with animated graphics and voice-overs that hint of adventures we will never know or comprehend. These are florid private worlds glimpsed to best effect—like Phil Sheldon’s photographs of Marvel heroes—from a distance, and fleetingly, but they speak of the power of pretend to ennoble ordinary lives. These real-life superheroes are waiting for a world that’s not quite here, but one day soon they might be recognized as pioneering neonauts, part human, part story.
We allow people to tattoo themselves and even change sex: Can we deny these supervestites the opportunity to take it all the way and physically become the lunar-dwelling, light-speed-racing amphibians they’ve always wanted to be? Like a flock of wingless, fabulous missing links on a hostile shoreline, they seem to await the day when the skies will be filled with their kind, when they’ll be able to hurdle tall buildings (one-eighth of a mile will do for a start) or stick to sheer glass the way nature intended. Ask real-life superhero Angle Grinder Man from England if he awaits the holy day as he goes about his business breaking council wheel clamps on behalf of grateful motorists. Does he dream that one day he’ll be called upon to shatter the restraints on Batmobiles and Fantasticars?
In one notable respect, the real-life superhero fraternity differs from its Justice Society predecessors: The majority of our embryonic champions have so far avoided any rash assaults on the entrenched might of organized crime, international terrorism, or even the most rudimentary of deranged master-fiend behavior. With the exception of one or two hard men like Seattle’s Phoenix Jones, who uses his martial-arts skills and Taser weaponry on drug dealers and other street criminals, most of today’s early-adopting real-life superheroes prefer to keep an eye on the homeless or prowl around deserted warehouses looking for “clues.”
“Every man and every woman is a star,” wrote Aleister Crowley, little suspecting how literal those words might become in his prophesied new Aeon of Horus. With cameras everywhere, even on our personal computers and phones, we may as well be actors, performers, and stars in some filmic archive of the microscopically commonplace—every gesture, every frown recorded, filed away in some CCTV surveillance central AI that might as well be Brainiac, recording us down to the last byte and love bite before he shrinks Las Vegas into a jar and routinely demolishes Earth on December 21, 2012. Anything’s possible on the thirty-second path where the real and the imaginary convene and collide in a sex club atmosphere of danger and masquerade.
If the superheroes come too soon from the 3-D screen to our material world, might they lose the privileges of fiction and run the risk of growing old and useless like the rest of us?
In his fascinating book Becoming Batman, E. Paul Zehr worked out exactly what kind of real-life training, diet, and exercise regime would be required to produce a physical specimen in the Batman mold and how long it would take to become a superhero, calculating that a real-world Batman might prepare his entire young-adult life for a window of physical and mental effectiveness that was barely five years long. Consider then the active life of Citizen Prime, the Watch Man, or Metro Woman, brave recension of Ma Hunkel and Pat Parker, who hands out mass transit information in Washington, DC. What white-hot collector’s item award-winning six-issue prestige series will re-create her for a new generation of fans when the cartilage goes in her knee?
I KNEW THE IMAGE WAS RIGHT. PEOPLE LOVE SUPERHERO MOVIES. I KNEW ALL THAT BUT YOU KNOW THE RIDICULOUS THING WAS THAT EVEN AFTER ALL MY SURGERY AND TRAINING, EVEN AFTER THE THERAPY, I STILL … I JUST DIDN’T LOOK RIGHT. MY BODY NEVER SEEMED TO GET BIG ENOUGH OR IMPRESSIVE ENOUGH TO MAKE MY MESSAGE CONVINCING. IT WAS FUN TO POSE IN MY OUTFITS IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR BUT THE IDEA OF ACTUALLY GOING OUTSIDE BECAME MORE AND MORE TERRIFYING. I KEPT MAKING PLANS TO LEAVE THE APARTMENT … BUT CAN YOU IMAGINE SOME WEIRD GUY WITH MUSCLE DYSMORPHIA PROCLAIMING HIMSELF THE WORLD’S FIRST SUPER-HERO? THEY’D ALL JUST LAUGH. THAT’S THE REAL TRUTH.
That was Max Thunderstone—the self-styled “Man-Made God” from The Filth, my sci-fi series with artist Chris Weston—the world’s first superhero. Thunderstone was a geek who’d spent a massive lottery win improving his body and mind. Filled with big marketable ideas about how to save the world, Thunderstone succumbed to self-image problems and an obsession with the unlikely shape of his penis.
By the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade, the entertainment industry had become increasingly democratized, the renaissance concept of genius had been expanded to include everyone, and the idea of the star had been worn flat by reality TV. It was inevitable that superheroes would be subjected to the same process. Suddenly they were real again, ordinary people like the rest of us. The comic-book superheroes who’d begun the decade as soldiers and celebrities, VIPs, ended it as everyday people dressing in the colors of their dreams to defy the mundane. We real-life organisms began the new century as ordinary, frightened people and ended as potential superheroes, inspired by our fictions to surpass our limits. To get close enough for contact to happen, like Michelangelo’s God assuming the form of a man to better touch Adam’s extended finger, the superheroes gave up even their special powers and their wealth. They became ordinary boys like Kick-Ass or fucked-up delusional losers like the Crimson Bolt, the “hero” of Super. They had deep, involving emotional histories, opinions, sexuality. They became real enough for us to rise to meet them, stretching out to receive the spark, the lightning bolt that signaled contact.
That divine electricity connects lowest to highest, the real to the fantastic, and fuses the streets and the sky together as one seamless whole. We’ve seen what happens when superheroes become us. What happens when we become them?
New technologies allow people to move remote-controlled cars just by thinking about it, a precursor of the Green Lantern ring. The Chinese government has just endorsed the use of genetic-engineering technologies still considered dubious in the West to “improve” the Chinese people in the direction of a superhuman ideal. We can divide atoms, track particles so small and so ghostlike they could scarcely be said to exist at all. We can fly across the Atlantic in hours, access any information instantaneously, see the world from space or zoom in our own rooftops, like Superman home from a mission. We have online secret identities, other lives, missions. Everyone is special, everyone is a superhero now. Even the president of the United States.
At the end of 2008, Barack Obama, the president-in-waiting, courted the geek vote by joking about his birth on planet Krypton. Even Alex Ross, who’d painted a controversial Rolling Stone cover with George Bush as a vampire feasting on the exposed jugular of the Statue of the Liberty, depicted Obama in classic Clark Kent pose, tearing open his shirt to reveal an O insignia on his chest. It was too early to tell if this was pop politics disguised as a millennial promise of superhuman salvation or simply an invitation to fill the cipher on
his chest with hopes and dreams to give it meaning.
The “real-world” approach to superhero movies that spawned the likes of Kick-Ass began to reverse itself in 2010, when the cycle was ready to move from realism back toward the phantasmagorical. Unsurprisingly, expansive, fantastical films like James Cameron’s eco-tribal hippie extravaganza Avatar, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, or Chris Nolan’s cryptic, elliptical Inception were all immensely popular that year, and it will be interesting to see how well the cosmic Green Lantern will fare with audiences in 2011. If Ryan Reynolds proves popular in the role of Hal Jordan—test pilot inducted into an intergalactic police force—we may see further evidence that a decade of uniformed, militant psychedelia has arrived. Marvel characters appear in three movies planned for summer 2011, and two of those—Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger—are based around some of Jack Kirby’s outré concepts, like the reality-warping Cosmic Cube and his Asgardian techno-deities.
From the heads of artists and writers, to print, then to moving images, and slowly off the screen into our real lives, the men and women of tomorrow marched closer, racing toward us out of the future.
Mark Millar, Tom Peyer, Mark Waid, and I had approached DC in 1999 with the idea of relaunching Superman for a new generation in a series to be entitled Superman Now or Superman 2000, depending on which version of the story synopsis you read. We’d spent many enjoyable hours in conversation, working out how to restore our beloved Superman to his preeminent place as the world’s first and best superhero. Following the lead of the Lois and Clark TV show, the comic-book Superman had, at long last, put a ring on his long-suffering girlfriend’s finger and carried her across the threshold to holy matrimony after six decades of dodging the issue—although it was Clark Kent whom Lois married in public, while Superman had to conceal his wedding band every time he switched from his sober suit and tie. This newly domesticated Superman was a somehow diminished figure, all but sleepwalking through a sequence of increasingly contrived “event” story lines, which tried in vain to hit the heights of “The Death of Superman” seven years previously. Superman Now was to be a reaction against this often overemotional and ineffectual Man of Steel, reuniting him with his mythic potential, his archetypal purpose, but there was one fix we couldn’t seem to wrap our collective imagination around: the marriage. The Clark-Lois-Superman triangle—“Clark loves Lois. Lois loves Superman. Superman loves Clark,” as Elliot S. Maggin put it in his intelligent, charming Superman novel Miracle Monday—seemed intrinsic to the appeal of the stories, but none of us wanted to simply undo the relationship using sorcery, or “memory wipes,” or any other of the hundreds of cheap and unlikely magic-wand plot devices we could have dredged up from the bottom of the barrel.