Stuck with the problem, I found myself chewing it over with my JLA editor Dan Raspler at one in the morning in an airless hotel room overlooking the naval yards of San Diego harbor. We were there for 1999’s Comic-Con. To clear our heads, we went downstairs and crossed the street, an oddly landscaped liminal zone between the rail tracks and the city. We were deep in discussion, debating earnestly the merits and demerits of a married Superman when we both spotted a couple of men crossing the tracks into town. One was an ordinary-looking bearded dude, at first sight like any of a hundred thousand comics fans. But the other was Superman. He was dressed in a perfectly tailored red, blue, and yellow costume; his hair was slicked back with a kiss curl; and unlike the often weedy or paunchy Supermen who paraded through the convention halls, he was trim, buff, and handsome. He was the most convincing Superman I’ve ever seen, looking somewhat like a cross between Christopher Reeve and the actor Billy Zane. I knew a visitation when I saw one.
Racing to intercept the pair, Dan and I explained who we were, what we were doing, and asked “Superman” if he wouldn’t mind answering a few questions. He didn’t, and sat on a concrete bollard with one knee to his chest shield, completely relaxed. It occurred to me that this was exactly how Superman would sit. A man who was invulnerable to all harm would be always relaxed and at ease. He’d have no need for the kind of physically aggressive postures superheroes tended to go in for. I suddenly began to understand Superman in a new way. We asked questions, “How do you feel about Lois?,” “What about Batman?,” and received answers in the voice and persona of Superman—“I don’t think Lois will ever really understand me or why I do what I do” or “Batman sees only the darkness in people’s hearts. I wish he could see the best”—that seemed utterly convincing.
The whole encounter lasted an hour and a half, then he left, graciously, and on foot I’m sad to say. Dan and I stared at each other in the fuzzy sodium glare of the streetlamps then quietly returned to our rooms. Enflamed, I stayed awake the whole night, writing about Superman until the fuming August sun rose above the warships, the hangars, and the Pacific. I was now certain we could keep the marriage to Lois and simply make it work to our advantage.
Bumping into someone dressed as Superman at the San Diego Comic Convention may sound about as wondrous and unlikely as meeting an alcoholic at an AA meeting, of course, but it rarely happens at night, and of the dozens of Men of Steel I’ve witnessed marching up and down the aisles at Comic-Con, or posing with tourists outside Mann’s Chinese on Hollywood Boulevard, not one was ever as convincing as the Superman who appeared at the precise moment I needed him most. This is what I mean when I talk about magic: By choosing to frame my encounter as a pop-shamanic vision quest yielding pure contact with embodied archetypal forces, I got much more out of it than if I’d simply sat there with Dan sniggering at the delusional fool in tights. By telling myself a very specific story about what was occurring, I was able to benefit artistically, financially, and I like to think spiritually, in a way that perhaps might not have been possible had I simply assumed that our Superman was a convention “cosplayer.” Superman Now never happened, but I’d come to envisage a Superman project that would serve as the pinnacle of my work on hero comics, and a way to put all of my thoughts about superheroes into a single piece.
There is, you’ll be heartened to discover, a cruel, ironic counter to the tale of glory and grace I relate above. Coincidences came with fangs in the 9/11 decade. During the 2002 Comic-Con, artist Chris Weston was in full enthusiastic flow, telling me just how much he wanted to draw a story featuring Bizarro, Superman’s deranged “imperfect duplicate.” At that very moment, as they say, a convention goer, dressed as the deformed, backward-talking Bizarro, appeared in the street ahead of us. Chris, sensing an opportunity for a spirit encounter of his own, dragged the green-painted stranger along to a party but unlike the courteous Superman of 1999, Bizarro refused to leave Chris’s side, becoming ever drunker and more belligerent, raucous and true to character. The more drunk he became, the more authentically possessed he was by the Dionysian spirit of Bizarro. Clearly distressed, Chris wailed, “I can’t get rid of him! What am I going to do?”
In the end, much as Superman often found himself doing, we had to trick Bizarro into going home by using his own code of “uz do opposite” against him. On the topsy-turvy Bizarro world, we explained, a party was when you were alone, not with other people. Other people, in fact, ruined a party. He was forced to admit this made perfect Bizarro sense and marched backward up the stairs, blind drunk, while we all waved and yelled, “Hello, Bizarro!”
I imagined him being pulled over by the highway patrol an hour later, pissed at the wheel in his baggy costume, and flaking gray-green face paint. Running this fantasy to its inevitable conclusion, I couldn’t help but picture him on CCTV curled in a fetal position whimpering “Yes! Yes! Hit Bizarro again!” as his tormentors pummelled him back to sanity with rubber truncheons.
From the ashes of Superman Now, I started work on what became All-Star Superman after my return to DC in 2003. The story I had planned was to deal with Superman’s mortality, depicting his final days, and the twelve heroic labors he would perform for the benefit of all humankind. When my dad died the following year, he gave a part of his spirit to the book. Walter Morrison’s exit was a long and hard battle of the kind he’d loved best when he knew such battles were winnable; first came a stroke that disorganized his vision so that he saw restless moving figures flickering in the corner of his eye; “the passing show” as he called it. Then the cancer struck, and left him unable to walk, unable to fight, unable to speak. During the early period of that final sequence of events, he composed a short book about his beloved Corkerhill community, his own achievements there, and how best the needs of its people might be served by local government. I edited the result, correcting his lapses in spelling and grammar, with the understanding that I was collaborating with him on his final statement. We fought when he didn’t think my first attempt was good enough, and I blamed him for not doing it properly in the first place, but he was right and we made it better. By the time I brought the bound and finished books—made up by a local printer—in a box to his bed, he was barely capable of acknowledging their existence. By then he was robbed of the ability to speak, to write, or to read. His last, barely there, yet still defiant scrawl appeared in my forty-third birthday card: “I’LL BE BACK.”
My sister maintained an almost twenty-four-hour, seven-day vigil at his bedside, but by the time we finally got him out of the hospital and into a calm hospice on the banks of the Clyde, Dad had only a day left to live. His face looked strange and somehow raw, and we finally realized the hospital had shaved off the moustache he’d had since the age of sixteen as a soldier in India, his badge of pride. My dad would never have wanted this, could never have deserved it, and yet here was this grinding, epic deconstruction. Cancer didn’t give a flying fuck for the warrior socialist; the principled, honest fighter for justice; the funny, insightful, out-of-the-box thinker; the activist; the soldier; the dad. There was no one in charge; there could be no appeal, no reward or censure. As we sat holding his hands in what felt like some anteroom of the afterlife, his breathing changed tempo, then ceased, and Walter was gone.
Just in case the Tibetans were onto something, I’d made up my mind to follow Dad into the bardo in the hope of helping out if I could. In the event that Walter’s disembodied consciousness really was still hanging around like a slowly evaporating thought balloon, I didn’t want him to drift out there alone. I read up on, then performed the tonglen meditations for the dead, and experienced vivid visions of Indian jungles and a voice telling me that my dad was having an adventure among “snakes that walk and trees that talk.” When I slept, I saw him young, in the steaming Burmese rain forest of dreams.
On the day of the funeral, a troop of drummers turned up like warriors, in kilts, carrying bodhrán drums emblazoned with Celtic knot work. It was the funeral of a chieftain, a fig
hter, and as the coffin descended, the bodhráns started up a defiant storm. I tried to follow instructions by visualizing a glowing miniature sun above the descending coffin. I saw my dad, young, reaching the top of a flight of overgrown stairs and the wide-open doors of a temple, where he turned and waved once before disappearing into the darkness under the arch, and we all filed out of the crematorium through a blurred-glass haze of tears, a cannonade of drums.
In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, it’s said that only a rainbow remains when an illuminated master dies. True to form, I went outside after the service, and there in the fragile blue sky above the chimney was a perfect rainbow.
Later that year, Kristan and I got married in Mauritius and honeymooned among the soaring World of Krypton star-scrapers of deeply sinister Dubai. That felt like something from a Superman annual, too. The Death. The Wedding. It could have been an “80-page Giant” special edition featuring “Superman’s Red-Letter Moments!” All we needed was our own Fortress, and that came along in its turn, quite unexpectedly, in the form of the house we found to live in together. Things felt epic, ordered, possessed of an architectural quality that suggested, at least to the crazy-ass mind of the superhero writer, the careful hand of some higher-dimensional storyteller working his pet themes and images into a mandala made of my life. The structure of All-Star Superman was intended to have a foursquare solidity, a kind of mystical Masonic architecture, and our new home seemed to concretize the same principles. The house even had a tall stained-glass window depicting the history of life on earth, with a central, zodiacal tree-of-life panel surmounted by the blazing sunshine-yellow face of a young, beardless God with a streaming solar corona for hair. Just below him were the words “Deus Pater Omnium.” Even without my determination to find meaningful resonances in everything, it was hard to ignore the confrontational nature of the way the house so perfectly crystallized the themes and structure of All-Star Superman, and so much else about that time, into quarried stone, timber, and glass, a spell made so manifest you could trip down its stairs and break your neck.
I wrote my personal best story of the world’s greatest superhero, for my favorite artist to draw, overlooking a loch where Trident submarines still sailed in all their stately satanic splendor, with black bellies full of hellfire sufficient to blind and vaporize me in a fraction of a heartbeat, even as it liquefied the ancient stones of my walls, cracked Scotland in half, and turned the world into a refrigerated postnuclear litter tray. I wrote it scant miles from the former American navy base, where my parents had protested, where Dad had been arrested, and where American comics had arrived in Scotland with the sailors and submariners. It felt like ground zero, the center of a web of coincidence and personal mythology that was as ordered and symmetrical, as self-referential, as an issue of Watchmen.
The writer Alvin Schwartz worked on Superman and Batman strips for eight years during the Golden Age. Like so many of the writers who found a welcome in the comic books, Schwartz had close ties to the underground radical scene of his time and moved in a circle with Jackson Pollock and Saul Bellow.
Schwartz, who wrote libretti for two Superman operas, went on to write An Unlikely Prophet, a book about his own spiritual experience, in which he claims to have encountered Superman in the form of a tulpa. Tulpa is a Tibetan description for a solid object, or person, created from thought alone; i.e., literally and deliberately willed into tangible form from nothing. His Superman, he reported, was all made of one substance: hair, skin, costume, molded from a single material; like a creature formed of resplendent talking clay. Alvin Schwartz insisted that Superman was an idea that had become strong enough to manifest itself as a material entity, and after my experience with the real Man of Steel in 1999, I found myself inclined to agree with at least a portion of what he had to say, although I didn’t have to meet Superman in the flesh to believe in him. He was already real for me, in glorious 2-D continuity, in the DC universe. A comic book, like any object created by human minds and hands, is already a tulpa: What else is it but a thought so perfectly condensed from brain electricity onto paper and ink that someone can hold it in their hands?
It’s surmised that many, if not all, of the cave paintings dating back to our remote prehistory, and to the beginnings of human self-awareness, were created not simply as Paleolithic wallpaper but with magical intent. The comics share some of the primitive vitality of early art and often a sense of the same deliberate spell-casting at work. Sympathetic magic involves making a scale model, a simulation, or isomorphic mapping, of the real world, and by causing changes in the model—whether by sticking pins through the heart of a voodoo doll or painting spears in the hides of a herd of cave-wall aurochs—real-world events can be persuaded into a synchronous relationship with the magician’s will or intent. Will, as anyone who has ever tried to give up smoking or start exercising should know all too well, is the power humans have to act against our tendency toward inertia. Will motivates us to undertake hazardous journeys, build cathedrals and jet aircraft, and change our lives. With strong enough willpower, we can alter our behavior, our surroundings, our beliefs and ourselves.
Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world. A story can make us angry enough to change the world. We know that medical placebos work when a trusted authority figure, in the form of a doctor, simply tells us they will. There is even a “nocebo” concept to explain why some people get sick or die when they are cursed by a witch doctor or wrongly diagnosed by a medical doctor. We know that hypnosis works. There is observable evidence to suggest that what we believe to be true directly affects how we live. As the first few years of the twenty-first century wore on, I wondered just how badly people, especially young people, were being affected by the overwhelmingly alarmist, frightening, and nihilistic mass media narratives that seemed to boil with images of death, horror, war, humiliation, and pain to the exclusion of almost everything else, on the presumed grounds that these are the kinds of stories that excite the jaded sensibilities of the mindless drones who consume mass entertainment. Cozy at our screens in the all-consuming glare of Odin’s eye, I wondered why we’ve chosen to develop in our children a taste for mediated prepackaged rape, degradation, violence, and “bad-ass” mass-murdering heroes.
And so All-Star Superman: our attempt at an antidote to all that, which dramatized some of the ideas in Supergods by positioning Superman as the Enlightenment ideal paragon of human physical, intellectual, and moral development that Siegel and Shuster had originally imagined. A Vitruvian Man in a cape, our restorative Superman would attempt to distill the pure essence of pop culture’s finest creation: baring the soul of an indestructible hero so strong, so noble, so clever and resourceful, he had no need to kill to make his point. There was no problem Superman could not solve or overcome. He could not lose. He would never let us down because we made him that way. He dressed like Clark Kent and took the world’s abuse to remind us that underneath our shirts, waiting, there is an always familiar blaze of color, a stylized lighting bolt, a burning heart.
With Frank Quitely on board to perfectly realize the stories and inspire me to my best efforts, the coloring job went to Frank’s studio buddy Jamie Grant, another Scot, whose intense, saturated computer effects made Superman’s world glow like a rose window. America’s greatest hero had fallen into the hands of three Scotsmen as if, at last, we were being given a chance to pay back the debt of all those Yankee mags, harvesting the fruit of the wondrous seeds they’d left growing in our skulls, and sending it all back Stateside where All-Star Superman became the most successful Superman comic of the new century.
Dan DiDio’s All-Star trademark harked back to the venerable showcase title of the 1940s and hoped to suggest the caliber of the writers and artists he planned to assign, but Quitely and I chose to take it literally. We put the blazing sun at
the very center of our tale and made All-Star Superman the story of a solar hero, a man who quite literally becomes a star. The twelve-issue format allowed us to present Superman with a mythic twelve labors, following the sun’s path across the day, as well as the changing seasons in a year. Each issue featured a complete story, and they all connected to make a twelve-part final adventure for Superman, facing his death, composing a last Will and Testament while settling his affairs and trying to ensure the world would prosper when he was gone. Halfway through, in issue no. 6, which was set at Christmas, in midwinter, we plunged Superman into the nightmare backward world of Bizarro, in a classic “night journey” of the kind mapped onto the mythology of every culture by Joseph Campbell.
We aimed for the pared-down clarity of folktales: stories of a world where intimate human dramas of love, jealousy, or grief were enacted upon a planetary scale by a group of characters whose decisions could shake worlds. In the grand arena of All-Star Superman, a broken heart, a tear, or a single good deed would inevitably unleash massive, cosmic consequences. All-Star Superman was a divine Everyman, Platonic man sweating out the drama of ordinary life on an extraordinary canvas.