Supergods Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Supergods Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  All DC Comics characters and images are ™ & © DC Comics.

  All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60346-7

  Front-case art: Frank Quitely, © DC Comics Back-case art (left to right, top to bottom): Batman (art by Frank Miller), Spider-Man, Dr. Manhattan/Watchmen (art by Dave Gibbons); Superman/Action Comics (art by Joe Schuster), Grant Morrison (art by Cameron Stewart, courtesy of Arthur magazine), Green Lantern (art by Carlos Pacheo & Jesus Merino); Wolverine, Captain America, Wonder Woman (art by Brain Bolland); WE3 (art by Frank Quitely), Cyclops, Superman (art by Frank Quitely); Hulk, The Flash (art by Francis Manapul), Aquaman (art by Jose Garcia Lopez)

  SUPERMAN, BATMAN, WATCHMEN, GREEN LANTERN, WONDER WOMAN, THE FLASH, and AQUAMAN are all ™ & © DC Comics.

  All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission. CAPTAIN AMERICA, SPIDER-MAN, WOLVERINE, HULK, and CYCLOPS © and ™ Marvel Entertainment, LLC. All Rights Reserved and Used with Permission.

  www.spiegelandgrau.com

  Jacket design: Will Staehle

  v3.1

  For Kristan, supergoddess

  Behold, I teach you the superman: He is this lightning, he is this madness!

  —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  PART 1: THE GOLDEN AGE

  CHAPTER 1: THE SUN GOD AND THE DARK KNIGHT

  CHAPTER 2: LIGHTNING’S CHILD

  CHAPTER 3: THE SUPERWARRIOR AND THE AMAZON PRINCESS

  CHAPTER 4: THE EXPLOSION AND THE EXTINCTION

  PART 2: THE SILVER AGE

  CHAPTER 5: SUPERMAN ON THE COUCH

  CHAPTER 6: CHEMICALS AND LIGHTNING

  CHAPTER 7: THE FAB FOUR AND THE BIRTH OF THE MARVELOUS

  CHAPTER 8: SUPERPOP

  CHAPTER 9: INFINITE EARTHS

  CHAPTER 10: SHAMANS OF MADISON AVENUE

  PART 3: THE DARK AGE

  CHAPTER 11: BRIGHTEST DAY, BLACKEST NIGHT

  CHAPTER 12: FEARED AND MISUNDERSTOOD

  CHAPTER 13: FEARFUL SYMMETRY

  CHAPTER 14: ZENITH

  CHAPTER 15: THE HATEFUL DEAD

  CHAPTER 16: IMAGE VERSUS SUBSTANCE

  CHAPTER 17: KING MOB—MY LIFE AS A SUPERHERO

  PART 4: THE RENAISSANCE

  CHAPTER 18: MAN OF MUSCLE MYSTERY

  CHAPTER 19: WHAT’S SO FUNNY ABOUT TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND THE AMERICAN WAY?

  CHAPTER 20: RESPECTING AUTHORITY

  CHAPTER 21: HOLLYWOOD SNIFFS BLOOD

  CHAPTER 22: NU MARVEL 9/11

  CHAPTER 23: THE DAY EVIL WON

  CHAPTER 24: IRON MEN AND INCREDIBLES

  CHAPTER 25: OVER THE EVENT HORIZON

  CHAPTER 26: STAR, LEGEND, SUPERHERO, SUPERGOD?

  OUTRO: ’NUFF SAID

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  FOUR MILES ACROSS a placid stretch of water from where I live in Scotland is RNAD Coulport, home of the UK’s Trident-missile-armed nuclear submarine force. Here, I’ve been told, enough firepower is stored in underground bunkers to annihilate the human population of our planet fifty times over. One day, when Earth is ambushed in Hyperspace by fifty Evil Duplicate Earths, this megadestructive capability may, ironically, save us all—but until then, it seems extravagant, somehow emblematic of the accelerated, digital hypersimulation we’ve all come to inhabit.

  At night, the inverted reflection of the submarine dockyards looks like a red, mailed fist, rippling on a flag made of waves. A couple of miles of winding road from here is where my dad was arrested during the antinuclear protest marches of the sixties. He was a working-class World War II veteran who’d swapped his bayonet for a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badge and became a pacifist “Spy for Peace” in the Committee of 100. Already the world of my childhood was one of proliferating Cold War acronyms and code names.

  And the Bomb, always the Bomb, a grim and looming, raincoated lodger, liable to go off at any minute, killing everybody and everything. His bastard minstrels were gloomy existentialist folkies whining horn-rimmed dirges about the “Hard Rain” and the “All on That Day” while I trembled in the corner, awaiting bony-fingered judgment and the extinction of all terrestrial life. Accompanying imagery was provided by the radical antiwar samizdat zines my dad brought home from political bookstores on High Street. Typically, the passionate pacifist manifestoes within were illustrated with gruesome hand-drawn images of how the world might look after a spirited thermonuclear missile exchange. The creators of these enthusiastically rendered carrion landscapes never overlooked any opportunity to depict shattered, obliterated skeletons contorted against blazing horizons of nuked and blackened urban devastation. If the artist could find space in his composition for a macabre, eight-hundred-foot-tall Grim Reaper astride a flayed horror horse, sowing missiles like grain across the snaggle-toothed, half-melted skyline, all the better.

  Like visions of Heaven and Hell on a medieval triptych, the postatomic wastelands of my dad’s mags sat side by side with the exotic, triple-sunned vistas that graced the covers of my mum’s beloved science fiction paperbacks. Digest-sized windows onto shiny futurity, they offered android amazons in chrome monokinis chasing marooned spacemen beneath the pearlescent skies of impossible alien worlds. Robots burdened with souls lurched through Day-Glo jungles or strode the moving steel walkways of cities designed by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and LSD. The titles evoked Surrealist poetry: The Day It Rained Forever, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Silver Locusts, Flowers for Algernon, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” Barefoot in the Head.

  On television, images of pioneering astronauts vied with bleak scenes from Hiroshima and Vietnam: It was an all-or-nothing choice between the A-Bomb and the Spaceship. I had already picked sides, but the Cold War tension between Apocalypse and Utopia was becoming almost unbearable. And then the superheroes rained down across the Atlantic, in a dazzling prism-light of heraldic jumpsuits, bringing new ways to see and hear and think about everything.

  The first comic shop in the UK—The Yankee Book Store—opened in Paisley, home of the pattern, just outside Glasgow in the years after the war. With a keen sense of ironic symmetry, the comics arrived as ballast alongside the US service personnel whose missiles threatened my very existence. As early R&B and rock ’n’ roll records sailed into Liverpool to inspire the Mersey generation of musicians, so American comics hit in the west of Scotland, courtesy of the military-industrial complex, to inflame the imaginations and change the lives of kids like me.

  The superheroes laughed at the Atom Bomb. Superman could walk on the surface of the sun and barely register a tan. The Hulk’s adventures were only just beginning in those fragile hours after a Gamma Bomb test went wrong in the face of his alter ego, Bruce Banner. In the shadow of cosmic destroyers like Anti-Matter Man or Galactus, the all-powerful Bomb seemed provincial in scale. I’d found my way into a separate universe tucked inside our own, a place where dramas spanning decades and galaxies were played out across the second dimension of newsprint pages. Here men, women, and noble monsters dressed in flags and struck from shadows to make the world a better place. My own world felt better already. I was beginning to understand something that gave me power over my fears.

  Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an Idea.


  Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better Idea.

  It’s not that I needed Superman to be “real,” I just needed him to be more real than the Idea of the Bomb that ravaged my dreams. I needn’t have worried; Superman is so indefatigable a product of the human imagination, such a perfectly designed emblem of our highest, kindest, wisest, toughest selves, that my Idea of the Bomb had no defense against him. In Superman and his fellow superheroes, modern human beings had brought into being ideas that were invulnerable to all harm, immune to deconstruction, built to outsmart diabolical masterminds, made to confront pure Evil and, somehow, against the odds, to always win.

  I entered the US comics field as a professional writer in the mideighties at a time of radical innovation and technical advance, when the acknowledged landmarks of superhero fiction like The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were being published and the possibilities seemed limitless, along with the opportunities for creative freedom. I joined a generation of writers and artists, mostly from a UK working-class background, who saw in the moribund hero universes the potential to create expressive, adult, challenging work that could recharge the dry husk of the superhero concept with a new relevance and vitality. As a result, stories got smarter, artwork became more sophisticated, and the superhero began a new lease on life in books that were philosophical, postmodern, and wildly ambitious. The last twenty years have seen startling, innovative work from dozens of distinctive and flamboyant talents in the field. The low production costs (pen and ink can conjure scenes that would cost millions of dollars of computer time to re-create onscreen) and rapid publication frequency mean that in comic books, almost anything goes. No idea is too bizarre, no twist too fanciful, no storytelling technique too experimental. I’ve been aware of comic books’ range, and of the big ideas and emotions they can communicate, for a long time now, so it’s with amazement and a little pride that I’ve watched the ongoing, bloodless surrender of mainstream culture to relentless colonization from the geek hinterlands. Names that once were arcane outsider shibboleths now front global marketing campaigns.

  Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men, Green Lantern, Iron Man. Why have superheroes become so popular? Why now?

  On one level, it’s simple: Someone, somewhere figured out that, like chimpanzees, superheroes make everything more entertaining. Boring tea party? Add a few chimps and it’s unforgettable comedy mayhem. Conventional murder mystery? Add superheroes and a startling and provocative new genre springs to life. Urban crime thriller? Seen it all before … until Batman gets involved. Superheroes can spice up any dish.

  But there’s even more going on beneath the surface of our appetite for the antics of outlandishly dressed characters who will never let us down. Look away from the page or the screen and you’d be forgiven for thinking they’ve arrived into mass consciousness, as they tend to arrive everywhere else, in response to a desperate SOS from a world in crisis.

  We’ve come to accept that most of our politicians will be exposed, in the end, as sex-mad liars or imbeciles, just as we’ve come to expect gorgeous supermodels to be bulimic, neurotic wretches. We’ve seen through the illusions that once sustained our fantasies and know from bitter experience that beloved comedians will stand unmasked, sooner or later, as alcoholic perverts or suicidal depressives. We tell our children they’re trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.

  Traumatized by war footage and disaster clips, spied upon by ubiquitous surveillance cams, threatened by exotic villains who plot from their caverns and subterranean lairs, preyed upon by dark and monumental Gods of Fear, we are being sucked inexorably into Comic Book Reality, with only moments to save the world, as usual. Towering, cadaverous Death-Angels, like the ones on the covers of Dad’s antinuke rags, seem to overshadow the gleaming spires of our collective imagination.

  Could it be that a culture starved of optimistic images of its own future has turned to the primary source in search of utopian role models? Could the superhero in his cape and skintight suit be the best current representation of something we all might become, if we allow ourselves to feel worthy of a tomorrow where our best qualities are strong enough to overcome the destructive impulses that seek to undo the human project?

  We live in the stories we tell ourselves. In a secular, scientific rational culture lacking in any convincing spiritual leadership, superhero stories speak loudly and boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longings, and highest aspirations. They’re not afraid to be hopeful, not embarrassed to be optimistic, and utterly fearless in the dark. They’re about as far from social realism as you can get, but the best superhero stories deal directly with mythic elements of human experience that we can all relate to, in ways that are imaginative, profound, funny, and provocative. They exist to solve problems of all kinds and can always be counted on to find a way to save the day. At their best, they help us to confront and resolve even the deepest existential crises. We should listen to what they have to tell us.

  Supergods is your definitive guide to the world of the superheroes—what they are, where they came from, and how they can help us change the way we think about ourselves, our environment, and the multiverse of possibilities that surrounds us. Get ready to take off your disguise, prepare to whisper your magic word of transformation, and summon the lightning. It’s time to save the world.

  CHAPTER 1

  CALLING ALL RED-BLOODED YOUNG AMERICANS!

  This certifies that: (your name and address here) has been duly elected a MEMBER of this organization upon the pledge to do everything possible to increase his or her STRENGTH and COURAGE, to aid the cause of JUSTICE, to keep absolutely SECRET the SUPERMAN CODE, and to adhere to all the principles of good citizenship.

  IT MAY NOT be the Ten Commandments, but as a set of moral guidelines for the secular children of an age of reason, the Supermen of America creed was a start. This is the story of the founding of a new belief and its conquest of the world: With a stroke of lightning, the spark of divine inspiration ignited cheap newsprint and the superhero was born in an explosion of color and action. From the beginning, the ur-god and his dark twin presented the world with a frame through which our own best and worst impulses could be personified in an epic struggle across a larger-than-life, two-dimensional canvas upon which our outer and inner worlds, our present and future, could be laid out and explored. They came to save us from the existential abyss, but first they had to find a way into our collective imagination.

  Superman was the first of the new creatures to arrive, summoned into print in 1938—nine years after the Wall Street crash triggered a catastrophic worldwide depression. In America, banks were toppled, people lost jobs and homes, and, in extreme cases, relocated to hastily convened shanty-towns. There were rumblings too from Europe, where the ambitious Chancellor Adolf Hitler had declared himself dictator of Germany following a triumphant election to power five years earlier. With the arrival of the first real-life global supervillain, the stage was set for the Free World’s imaginative response. When the retort came, it was from the ranks of the underdogs; two shy, bespectacled, and imaginative young science fiction fans from Cleveland, who were revving up typewriter and bristol board to unleash a power greater than bombs, giving form to an ideal that would effortlessly outlast Hitler and his dreams of a Thousand Year Reich.

  Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster spent seven years tinkering with their Superman idea before it was ready to take on the world. Their first attempt at a comic strip resulted in a dystopian sci-fi story based around the idea of an evil psychic despot. The second pass featured a big, tough, but very much human good guy righting wrongs on the mean streets. Neither showed the spark of originality that publishers were seeking. Four years later, after many fruitless attempts to sell Superman as
a newspaper strip, Siegel and Shuster finally figured out how to adapt the pacing and construction of their stories to take full advantage of the possibilities of the new comic-book format, and suddenly this fledgling form had found its defining content.

  The Superman who made his debut on the cover of Action Comics no. 1 was just a demigod, not yet the pop deity he would become. The 1938 model had the power to “LEAP ⅛th OF A MILE; HURDLE A TWENTY STORY BUILDING … RAISE TREMENDOUS WEIGHTS … RUN FASTER THAN AN EXPRESS TRAIN … NOTHING LESS THAN A BURSTING SHELL COULD PENETRATE HIS SKIN!” Although “A GENIUS IN INTELLECT. A HERCULES IN STRENGTH. A NEMESIS TO WRONG-DOERS,” this Superman was unable to fly, resorting instead to tremendous single bounds. He could neither orbit the world at the speed of light nor stop the flow of time. That would come later. In his youth, he was almost believable. Siegel and Shuster were careful to ground his adventures in a contemporary city, much like New York, in a fictional world haunted by the all-too-familiar injustices of the real one.

  The cover image that introduced the world to this remarkable character had a particular unrepeatable virtue: It showed something no one had ever seen before. It looked like a cave painting waiting to be discovered on a subway wall ten thousand years from now—a powerful, at once futuristic and primitive image of a hunter killing a rogue car.

  The vivid yellow background with a jagged corona of red—Superman’s colors—suggested some explosive detonation of raw power illuminating the sky. Aside from the bold Deco whoosh of the Action Comics logo, the date (June 1938), the issue (no. 1), and the price (10 cents), there is no copy and not a single mention of the name Superman. Additional words would have been superfluous. The message was succinct: Action was what mattered. What a hero did counted far more than the things he said, and from the beginning, Superman was in constant motion.