In learning what makes superheroes matter to one man, the question is begged: what makes them matter to the rest of us? Are these paper titans emissaries from a world beneath our own, or are they simply a way to mark the time in between life’s more tangible dissatisfactions?
Page 233 of Grant Morrison’s Supergods provides the magic phrase that unlocks the entire puzzle: “I wanted more from my fictions.” ‘More’ is a subjective thing — each reader will want something else in specific abundance.
“If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.” That’s Kurt Vonnegut, writing thousands of years ago, in his novel Deadeye Dick. If Action Comics #1 is the genesis point, as Supergods posits, then the superhero hyper-saga is now seventy-two. This may be why superheroes are so endlessly picked apart, re-invented, and re-re-invented these days. Hell, look at the way superhero comics are sold, like movie opening weekends or pop singles: they exist in a state of perpetual decay, where the most steadfastly reliable series doesn’t gain readers, just fails to lose them. In the flabby, osteoporetic nursing-home years of the concept, life breaks down to a series of secret origins, followed by ever-after epilogues and waxy, pale imitations until the next cataclysmic re-invention of the universe. They thrash at their nurses, fighting cascading entropy by whispering every word they can think of in a parched, tiny voice, hoping that next one will be the magic one that calls down the lightning.
We’re continuity-minded creatures. We find meaning in sequences and coincidences. The person who reads X-Men: Legacy to find out just how Hazard or Siena Blaze relates to the picture of X-continuity as a whole is no different from the person who reads up on the titanic first meeting of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, or thrills at finding the improbable connection between Alexander “Skip” Spence and Genesis P-Orridge, or went hunting for that elusive sample source that provided the bass line for Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Part II” (spoiler: it was a heavily processed piano). We bemoan the cancellation of NASA’s manned space-flight series, and wait for the new #1 with hotter creators down the line. The idea is to make sense of it all — to quote another famous Vonnegut riff, “They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books.”
(Ex.: A week or two ago, I bought a first-edition copy of one of the few issues of Simon Dwyer’s culture journal Rapid Eye. Seeing Grant Morrison mention it in Supergods bridged that moment of my life to the previous one, and might as well have carried a footnote: “As seen in the now-classic last week! -Smilin’ Stan.“)
Without a meticulous and well-trained worldview and some degree of inflexibility, it’s impossible for us to make sense of the world around us. It’s a small world, but we always want it smaller, so it can be viewed in total, like the spread of a map. In being able to see the whole of that cartography, the connections are easier to make, the continuity easier to establish, the cause-and-effect streamlined and efficient. Not only that, but in compressing the universe down one dimension, we can make it sleeker and more attractive, and for moments at a time, live in a world designed by Brian Bolland, or Dave Stevens, or Arthur Adams, or Adam Hughes — and who wouldn’t want to? Not just a whole world, but a whole multiverse, capable of fitting into two hands, footnotes from Smilin’ Stan and all.
This 2D-vs.-3D comparison helps us understand Supergods. Grant Morrison is a man who’s trained himself for decades to break three-dimensional existence down into two-dimensional terms, to bring life and soul to paper architectures where, if he hits the keyboard just so, Montevideo disappears from the map. Supergods is about the two-dimensional, easily digested and understood paperverse ripping free of its moorings, like a demon invoked by generations of bug-eyed, feverish fans, and colliding with the labyrinthian modern pop culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. A book that starts off speedy and shiny ends up a jumble of autobiography, critical review, behind-the-cape history, and op-ed musings on what’s next. Just as Supergods transitions without cue from objective history to subjective travelogue, it shifts from being about superheroes to being about us, the summoners — going from the powered muscle-men to the mortal boys and girls with the magic words.
Continued belowOf the various personae ascribed to Grant Morrison by popular myth, it’s easiest for me to compare them in terms of electronic music. To some, he’s the cyber-shamanic e-male of San Francisco’s early raves, a whirl of color and appropriated symbols acting as the winking eye of transcendence as his stories wash in on the currents of future love. To others, he’s a glass-eyed and screw-faced gabber-house hooligan, twitching inconsolably to unsubtle brutalist breakbeats, bashing on the same “Uzi weighs a ton” KRS-One samples and Joey Beltram “Mentasm” stabs until they bleed meaning from their meta-jugulars. He’s either the Speed Force or just speed and force.
Whatever you, gentle reader, think of Grant Morrison, Supergods will do nothing to dissuade you. Much has already been made of the casual swipes at obsessed manchildren that dot the book’s landscape like gaudy monuments on a long highway trip, or Morrison’s criticism of Watchmen, the most sacred of sacred cows. It’s as much about Grant himself as anything, relating anecdotes from his career in equal measure to the amount of outside history — and merging the two as the new millennium exploded and then collapsed. This book is personal down to its core: look at the choices of works given deeper examination as superhero milestones. Because this is Grant Morrison’s history of superheroes, the Peter Milligan / Brendan McCarthy collaborations in Strange Days and Rogan Gosh (not to mention Enigma, maybe the best superhero story to ever be criminally overlooked) receive a thousand times more attention than, say, Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s Teen Titans, like you’d expect to see lots about in Rob Liefeld’s history of superheroes, or Secret Wars, like you’d expect to see in Jim Shooter’s, or Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo’s Fantastic Four, like you’d expect to see in mine.
The core of Supergods is an attempt to remind us all of the power that comes from the best superhero stories — an ineffable quality that transcends whether or not a story holds true to Bronze Age continuity, or pointedly ignores it. In his appreciation of what makes landmark stories like Dark Knight Returns, Miracleman, and Jim Starlin’s Captain Marvel speak to us — not to mention films like Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles — the meaning of these stories stands naked (or at least, the meaning that Grant Morrison finds). What it lacks in objectivity or detailed historical continuity, or even continuity within itself (Morrison freely skips back and forth between topics like a pub ramble taking the long way back to its original point), it makes up for with an intelligent exuberance and thorough rejection of cynicism and bitterness. He sees the 2-D paper universe that can be held in two hands as something capable of injecting itself into the 3-D pop culture around us and enhancing it like a bionic graft.
If nothing else, by reading what these heroes and stories mean to Morrison, it’s almost impossible to avoid thinking about what they mean to you. The day I finished the book, I put nearly my entire comic book collection up on eBay. And I couldn’t feel more optimistic about superheroes as a result.
