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Superheroes:

Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again

"It’s not a comic book world anymore. Don’t you see that? Our time has passed. Problems don’t come in neat little boxes anymore, with ‘The End’ scrawled in the corner. There is no end. Only new versions of reality. People don’t talk in balloons anymore. They curse. They shout obscenities. The world is no place for children: or heroes. Which may be the same thing."

These bitter words come from Billy Button, formerly the mighty, high-flying Captain Mantra, now an aging patient of the Edgeville Sanitarium, confined to a wheelchair. Button’s visitor is another retired superhero named Indigo, now just an empty suburban family man, David Brinkley, with his middle-aged spread, mid-life crisis and unusual blue hair. Brinkley has tracked Button down to ask him to team up with him in cape and tights one more time to save the world. But the broken-spirited Button refuses to say the Captain’s secret transforming word ever again.

Later, riding the train home, Brinkley mulls it over. "Button was wrong. Americans did cherish strength, probably to a fault… He, like Superman, had become a symbol, an archetype, precisely because of his total strength. The cavalry charge. The Yanks are comin’ The B-52. America the Powerful. And if history revealed that the cavalrey massacred women and children, and the B-52 bombed hospitals - if cynical men made a whore of morality - did that make it quaint to fight for what was truly good, truly just? Was morality dead, justice extinct, virtue an illusion: the province of infants and saints?"

These moral doubts and debates between substitutes for Superman and Captain Marvel come from Superfolks, a searing satirical prose novel by Robert Mayer, long out of print and at last reprinted in 2005 by St Martin’s Press. Set in a trashy alternative America of Cold War conspiracies and ‘no more heroes’, rooted in the post-Vietman, post-Watergate, pre-unsafe sex, pre-9/11 year of 1977, Mayer’s book uncannily foreshadows the way superheroes would be deconstructed and darkened in comic books by Miller, Moore and more from the 1980s onward.

Dated Seventies slang and celebrities aside, Superfolks stands up as perhaps the first, and easily one of the funniest, subversive superhero graphic novels (albeit without pictures). As a prime member of the Britpack behind this revisionist vogue, Grant Morrison, in his new introduction, praises Mayer’s prophetic twists on the genre: "Back in the day when comicbook heroes were mostly still innocent of the ravages of time and cynicism, these fallen, fallible men and women of clay must have seemed monstrous parodies. Now, they’d fit right in with the locals in any comic book universe."

Morrison is spot on. These days Mayer’s flawed superheroes seem topical and symptomatic of an underlying ideological faultline straining both DC and Marvel. Often it seems like shock for shock’s sake as writers indulge the adult collectors’ market with grim and sensational takes on long-established Marvel and DC icons "as you’ve never seen them before".

In a way, you can understand the writers’ difficulties. What can anyone do with such aged, unending characters month after month to avoid repetition, except to go to further extremes or to go back to basics, back to the beginning for the umpteenth time, like DC’s All-Star line?

No wonder that creators like Alex Ross and Darwyn Cooke consciously hark back to more heroic eras. Their art, and their hearts, don’t suit the revisionism and cynicism of much of today’s superhero tales. These have their attractions, as Geoff Klock outlines in his book How To Read Superhero Comics And Why (Continuum Books).

New Frontier

Canadian Cooke, though, sees the legacy "as a North American mythology" from which there is no need to deviate with "this revisionist shit". His New Frontier (DC) goes back to the supposedly simpler 1950s to glory in the courage of the men and women who would become the Justice League. Sometimes I wonder if really the best story of any superhero is their origin; it might explain why origins are embroidered over and over, or reimagined so that the infant Superman, for example, can land and grow up in Communist Russia in the political power-game Red Son or boring Britain in the Pythonesque farce True Brit.

As another origin re-telling, New Frontier is clearly a loving retro tribute, reworking but respecting the core ‘mythology’, staged in Cinerama panels and bravura brushstrokes, part Kirby, part Caniff, part Hanna-Barbera. But to some it might appear a bit quaint, and bafflingly issued in two volumes it seems to have been overshadowed in the media and fan tastes by the meaner streak and looser morals of books like Identity Crisis or The Ultimates.

Cooke has nothing against adult content, as he told Comic Book Artist magazine: "I can see why some people want more sex and violence in their comic books, but I don’t understand why Captain America or characters like that are the vehicle for that kind of expression."

New Frontier

Like New Frontier, two atypical Marvel graphic novels have returned to periods before their heroes began to add some backstory. In Unstable Molecules, James Sturm and Guy Davis movingly explore the relationship between four struggling, unsuperpowered individuals in the Fifties and treat them as if their ordinary lives were the real, mock-historical sources of the Fantastic Four. And if you thought you knew the origin of Captain America, Truth: Red, White & Black by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker presents the declassified files on the African-American men who were the U.S. War Department’s first expendable guinea pigs to test the Super-Soldier serum, before it beefed up scrawny whiteboy Steve Rogers. Baker’s loose cartooning will put some people off, but, as Morales’ appendix confirms, this disturbing scenario is highly plausible because it taps into the shameful history of racism in America, and has now become part of the offical Marvel legend.

Unstable Molecules

Coming up to date are two series, both about superheroines on the margins of the Marvelverse, and so a bit more free to play with expectations.

Proving that there is no such thing as a bad character, just a badly handled one, the latest She-Hulk is a delight, starting her new job with lawyers handling such surreal superhuman suits as Spider-Man suing Jameson or libel. Ignore the unrelated, glitzy pin-up covers; inside, Dan Slott’s clever, mostly single-issue plots, sparky repartee and spot-on timing and Juan Bobillo’s vivacious art make this an addictive legal sitcom. Winning touches include the Mad Thinker’s giant mule android, now their office-boy, and the fact that their old comicbooks are addmissible as evidence in court because they bear the stamp of the Comics Code, a federal agency!

Also within continuity but free from the Code’s seal (replaced by an ugly Parental Advisory Expicit Content alert on the cover) Alias offers Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos plenty of new wrinkles on superheroics and crime fiction. Foul-mouthed Jessica Jones couldn’t hack it as a second-rate Avenger, so she becomes a private investigator with a penchant for costumed cases. In volume 3, for instance, she tries to rescue a 16-year old runaway Spider-Woman - an orphan adopted by J. Jonah Jameson - from being doped and harmed by a dealer to provide the pricey drug MGN or Mutant Growth Hormone.

This can get pretty dark in places, but if mainstream superheroes are going to deal with sex and violence, Alias seems one of the best ways forward. No naughty-boy shock tactics here, but truly adult qualities of feeling and intelligence. The world can still be a place for heroes.

Posted: September 30, 2007

The original version of this article appeared in 2005 in Comics International, the UK’s leading magazine about comics, graphic novels and manga.

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My Books




Comics Unmasked by Paul Gravett and John Harris Dunning from The British Library


Comics Art by Paul Gravett from Tate Publishing


1001 Comics  You Must Read Before You Die edited by Paul Gravett




Featured Books

Superfolks
Superfolks
by Robert Mayer


New Frontier Vol 1
by Darwyn Cooke


New Frontier Vol 2
by Darwyn Cooke


Unstable Molecules
by James Sturm
& Guy Davies


Truth: Red, White & Black
by Robert Morales
& Kyle Baker


She-Hulk
by Dan Slott
& Juan Bobillo


Alias
by Brian Michael Bendis
& Michael Gaydos