“TO BE TRULY FREE ONE MUST OVERCOME HIS OWN INNER DEMON!” This was the intro to Captain Marvel’s two-page fight with a crumbling stone version of himself that was conveyed in dazzling freeze-frame digital panels intercut with wide borderless shots in which two decisive figures clashed against the white space of the page. A series of devastating strikes reduced the inner demon to builders’ chips, and Captain Marvel was, at last, ready to move on. I’d never seen anything like it. This comic felt like it had been custom created with my specific needs in mind as a reader. I was transported, hooked on a new drug.
As ever, it’s easy to look back and laugh, but to a fourteen-year-old who wished he’d never seen Uncle Jimmy’s porn, or squashed dogs called Shep at the side of the road, knowledge was torture. Which meant that maybe there did have to be awareness before there could be change. To an introspective, imaginative, and repressed teenage boy who had timidly rejected the Bible, this cosmic creed was as good as any. The Justice League seemed childish compared to Starlin’s beefy Pop Art psycho sci-fi—an increasingly guilty pleasure as the DC universe became stale and conservative, congealing to a set of repeated gestures played out with exhausted emblems, empty signs.
The age-old lessons of psychedelic drug trips, the booming, inevitable voice of the bloody obvious suddenly given godlike status, were passed on to me via these stories as surely as they were through the music of the Beatles or the Doors.
Mar-Vell was now “cosmically aware,” which meant that his features would often cloud over with a beautiful graphic representation of starry, unbounded consciousness. His face would plunge into shadows lit with moving star fields and nebulae, with only his two blue eyes gazing out of infinite space at us.
This was how it felt to live inside my head too. These battles were ones I was fighting in my own adolescent soul. This was the shamanic trip as Marvel hero book. Marvel Comics’ original conception of Mar-Vell had been too boring to contain the voltage of Captain Marvel, the original super shaman, but here he was finally living up to the promise of his stolen name and the responsibility of his heritage.
Even better was Starlin’s masterpiece Warlock. An acid-drenched existential journey that began with some of his best work, Warlock was another reinvention of a preexisting character, a throwaway Kirby concept given flesh and meaning by more urgent times. Warlock was an artificial Adam stepping from a cocoon created by genetic engineers, a notion Kirby left undeveloped in a half-cooked Fantastic Four story.
Starlin conveyed all the backstory in one of his quirky opening monologues, then set the character free, wrapped now in a billowing, red-and-yellow high-collared cape—the traditional garb of the mystic superhero, you may recall. Adam Warlock was a psychedelic champion who did nothing by halves and who had chosen as his enemy not crime, injustice, or even other superheroes but the Universal Church of Truth, a monolithic star-conquering faith led by a godlike sadist known as the Magus, who just happened to be Adam Warlock’s own corrupted future self!
In “1000 Clowns!” the ever-suffering Adam Warlock was cast adrift on a planet of clowns, all toiling on a gigantic garbage heap scattered with diamonds. The head lunatic was Len Teans, a near-anagram of Stan Lee, while the clown who painted the same smiling face on everyone he met was Jan Hatroomi, an almost anagram for John Romita, Marvel’s art director and the man who enforced the Marvel house style.
The word cosmic came to typify these wild forays into the often drug-illuminated imagination, and there were more to come. These strange new superhero stories were created by younger writers and artists, longhairs and weirdos who were pouring into the comics industry, drawn to Marvel’s iconoclastic universe of possibilities.
Urbane, and openly self-aware, writer Steve Englehart plunged Doctor Strange into a series of voyages to the beginning of the universe, beyond the veil of death, and the hinterlands of his own psyche. Englehart’s rush of pop philosophy came wrapped in the kind of arresting imagery that looked best when redrawn on the covers of school textbooks: floating, laughing skulls, bone horses, hooded lepers clanging handbells in dismal, postmortem cities. Unlike Starlin, who wrote and drew his own stories, Englehart worked with a series of talented artistic collaborators to bring a new twist to the superhero landscape. He took Roy Thomas’s fascination with continuity to new levels of jaw-dropping ingenuity, and he had a voice that brought new life to old characters, along with a worldly nonjudgmental counterculture perspective that spoke to an older audience.
His most accomplished collaborator on Doctor Strange was artist Frank Brunner, whose style ran Neal Adams–style naturalism through a European filter of Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley. Brunner combined the Adams aesthetic with the decorative Art Nouveau–inspired touch that Brit artist Barry Smith was bringing to Conan the Barbarian. (Like so many of his generation, Brunner was able to profit from the growth of specialist comics and fan culture. He went into the lucrative portfolio market with one set of limited-edition, beautifully drawn illustrations depicting Lewis Carroll’s Alice wandering around Wonderland with her tits and muff out, which was indicative of where things were at that time, as childhood toys and storybook characters were suddenly sexualized.) Orthodox fans of the Ditko original, like my uncle Billy, had no time for Englehart and Brunner’s research-heavy, decadent take on Doctor Strange. Their otherworldy dimensions were easily rooted in books they’d read, or aped Gustave Doré’s nineteenth-century illustrations of the underworld, and lacked the genuine menace and eerie schizoid originality of Ditko’s visionary landscape.
The same sense of liberation that had fueled the hedonism of the sixties and early seventies was turning kids’ comics into revolutionary tracts. Freedom. Magic. Rebellion. Even the superheroes were getting in on the act. The patriot days were behind them, and camp was over. Superheroes were Beat hipsters in search of meaning on the Great Road, wherever it led. Their enemies were blind Gnostic Archons, ossified, personified forces of restriction.
The semiunderground hippie superheroes of Englehart, Starlin, and writer Steve Gerber had one thing in common. They could and would fight to defend what had become the Marvel house philosophy: a kind of college-liberal morality that even with a new cynical edge never lost sight of the essential ideals of heroic self-sacrifice that powered the Marvel universe. “We won’t get fooled again!” the Who had sung, playing out the end of the sixties hippie dream with a typically bitter working-class pragmatism. The gleaming silver spaceships were rusting in their hangars. For America, there was more torment, more soul-searching, and the heroes were right there suffering with the nation, on the cross, perishing beneath merciless stars.
In cinema, the auteur era had arrived. UCLA film school graduates were bringing to Hollywood rule-breaking influences from the European cinema of the nouvelle vague. Even leading men changed, as a vogue for mournful or manic, rumpled Everyman antiheroes allowed fine but quirky actors like Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and Dustin Hoffman to strut their stuff upon the stage as unlikely heartthrobs. In the era of the disillusioned antihero, even the “I told you so …” voice of Woody Allen could be sexy. The sixties had feminized men and made gay or dandy styles and haircuts acceptable. As women considered new social possibilities, men chameleoned wildly in response. Some tried to appear unthreatening, others tried to define a new sexuality based around wit or intelligence. The square-jawed cowboy superhero retreated beneath the mocking stings of gay men and women, and intellectuals. It was as if nature was giving everyone a chance to get laid. Even populist Hollywood was wide open to new talent, new voices with a more authentic cadence. For a few years, maybe even less, anything could happen as we watched a young art form grow up and stretch its wings.
At Marvel, the books were going out unedited in an atmosphere of anarchy. The name on the door of Marvel’s editor in chief changed five times in 1976 as a succession of writers accepted the job and then just as swiftly pulled out. It was impossible for one mortal to supervise all of Marvel’s output, with the result that no
ne of it was supervised. This collapse of the command structure allowed for some of the most subversive superhero stories ever to slip through the net and influence the next generation of creators. Only three years previously, Spider-Man had defied the Comics Code by responsibly tackling the menace of teenage drug taking. Now Rick Jones was tripping in the Negative Zone.
A new current was flowing. A new polarity. Fashion was about to turn on its heels again. The flame of the interior was burning low, like the weakly sparking fused neurons of the burnouts, the acid casualties who hadn’t been able to handle the Nightside, the Negative World when it came knocking, as it always must. The new drugs were cocaine and heroin, offering escape from the visceral soul-wrenching effects of psychedelic drugs into the hard sheen of gleaming self-regard or numb self-obliteration. The impulse was to turn outward again. Like so many young seekers in the chilly, sweaty, shivering comedown mornings, superhero comics were crying out for some input from the real world before they lost touch with the concrete and the clay altogether.
The psychedelic wave shaded into the self-indulgent, self-absorbed musical bywater known as progressive rock, or “prog.” It seems hardly surprising that music and comics were on this parallel course at the same time. These were reverberations from an original gong.
And as if summoned by some collective invocation, a new Dark Age came on like a freight train from the shadows under a long tunnel.
CHAPTER 11
THE STRANDS OF influence that came together in the Dark Age went back to the dawn of the superhero comics—Batman’s dark and violent pulp roots, Superman’s social activism, and Wonder Woman’s outsider sexuality—but it took a team of ambitious young artists and writers to define a voice and a look for the new direction.
The fathers of the Dark Age were writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams, who, in 1970, anticipated its themes and concerns in a revolutionary series entitled Green Lantern/Green Arrow. O’Neil was of Irish Catholic descent and, as the writer himself later confessed after a successful recovery from alcoholism, reveled in the hard-drinking stereotype that his heritage allowed him to indulge. Intense, opinionated, and unwilling to leave his politics at the door when he started writing superhero stories, O’Neil launched his career as a Missouri newspaper reporter, where he learned his virtues of brevity and clarity of expression. (It was O’Neil who came up with my favorite description of comic-book dialogue and captions: “headlines written by a poet.”) A local-boy-does-good piece he penned on Roy Thomas brought O’Neil to the attention of Marvel Comics editorial, which offered him a job.
There he was, uncomfortable among the costumed crusaders but eager to give this new form of self-expression a shot. He came to comics, like so many drifting young intellectuals of the time, as a way of paying the bills. After bailing from Marvel, he became a favorite of Julius Schwartz, who gave the unorthodox writer a chance to shine on some of his biggest titles. Under pressure to modernize in the face of Marvel’s unstoppable challenge to DC’s sales supremacy, Schwartz had no choice but to break up his old Silver Age stable and retire the men who’d given an audience of mad-eyed kids the kind of well-adjusted, fearless heroes they could look up to. In an emblematic gesture, he replaced DC veteran Gardner Fox after sixty-five issues of inventive work on Justice League of America and a clever run on Batman. The sixty-year-old Fox pulled out all the stops to impress, but his long run as DC’s premier writer was suddenly over. John Broome mailed the last of his Green Lantern stories from Paris or India and hit the Zen trail. This left the comics to younger, hipper writers who could duplicate the Marvel formula, such as Steve Skeates, Mike Friedrich, and Elliot Maggin, all fresh out of college and eager to enlist the heroes of their childhood as mouthpieces for their politics.
Chief among Schwartz’s new breed was O’Neil, who accepted the Justice League assignment on the understanding that he’d be required to “Marvelize” the formula by introducing personality clashes and awkward misunderstandings to the ordered lives of the venerable heroes. It was a mistake, of course: Instead of providing a real alternative to Marvel—a lesson DC would learn a decade later—the company made a fool of itself with a series of weak and ill-at-ease impressions of a narrative style that came naturally to Lee and suited his roster of troubled characters but failed to translate to DC’s world of smiling superfriends.
O’Neil’s love of the urban, the human, and the ordinary needed a more appropriate outlet than Justice League or Superman comics. Inspired by the writers of New Journalism, like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Jimmy Breslin, O’Neil had a restless desire to wrench the gaze of comics up from the psychic depths and turn it back on the world outside the window. After the cartoon pop of Batman and the Monkees and the blissful Summer of Woodstock, the adult world had returned with a vengeance to early seventies America. The fear stalked newly violent Manhattan streets, and O’Neil wondered if there was a way to combine the gonzo touch with comic-book superheroes.
In artist Neal Adams, he found the perfect collaborator to help him realize his vision of this holy, paradoxical union of opposites: fantasy fiction and journalism.
A whirling tornado in the classical halls of DC Comics, Adams was an outstanding draftsman with a flair for foreshortened hyperdramatic poses and faces contorted by intense emotion. Fingers clawed outward from the panel surface, faces were stressed, agonized, running with tears, or simply chiseled, beautiful, idealized. Trained in advertising illustration and newspaper strip cartooning, Adams combined slick Madison Avenue photo-realism with the power of Jack Kirby in a way that made comic-book characters more convincingly naturalistic than ever before. His innovative layouts broke with convention and enabled his heroes to reach through the panels into a virtual 3-D space, or formed hidden composite images when viewed from a distance. His camera angles, intense character acting, and scene setting borrowed from cinema while marrying those techniques to compositions and poses that were possible only on the comics page.
Adams’s work was grown-up and contemporary—a defiantly Romantic and electrifying answer to the traditionalism that was beginning to make DC Comics look stuffy and out of touch. He could even bring new conviction and depth to characters devoid of all charm or originality, such as Green Arrow, so when he tackled a character with real potential like O’Neil’s version of Batman, the results were extraordinary. Readers instantly took notice, and the word went out: The Grim Avenger of the Night was back.
When scenes in a script called for Batman to be seen in action around Gotham City during the daytime, Adams simply made it night. He elongated the cape and ears of the “Dark Night Detective,” making them more like the devil horns of the Golden Age original. He brought a shadowy, mood-heavy Gothic sensibility back from the 1930s that went well with O’Neil’s wild pulp tales of immoral aristocrats, carnival freaks, and ex-Nazis, and he returned the Joker to his homicidal, psychopathic roots. His Batman was believably big but lean and athletic, and he displayed a new mastery of martial arts in extended, choreographed kung fu sequences that were framed and edited like Bruce Lee movies. Together Adams and O’Neil created two classic and abiding Batman antagonists, in the forms of international crime lord Ra’s al Ghul and his sexy daughter Talia, who updated the Fu Manchu exotic villain archetype into the fashionably seventies world of ecoterror. Adams’s drawings of the impossibly glamorous Talia locked in passionate clinches with a shirtless, hairy-chested Batman brought an electric surge of pure testosterone back to Bruce Wayne that seemed a direct and full-throated riposte to Dr. Wertham’s indictment.
The success of the Batman TV show had left the mainstream audience with an enduring comedic vision of Batman, but Adams’s simple, effective adjustments brought the original Weird Figure of the Night back, establishing a look and a mood that would reconstruct Batman for a generation and finally make it onto the screen thirty years later in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. That film featured Ra’s as its main villain but neglected to feature Talia, alas.
It was Adams
who went to war with DC over the ill treatment of the elderly Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. It was a time of national audit, another changing of the guard. In 1967 John Broome, Gardner Fox, and several other writers—including the maverick Bob Haney, Batman maestro Bill Finger, and Doom Patrol creator Arnold Drake—had threatened to form a comics freelancers union, which would allow them some kind of financial stake in their creations for DC and provide long-term security in the form of health coverage. Facing implacable resistance from management and no solidarity from the artists, who earned much more than the writers anyway, that dream miscarried. But in Neal Adams, the revolutionary spirit was reborn. He’d already made intimidating noises about refloating the union idea. The big companies’ shoddy treatment of their creative talent was deplorable, and the case of Siegel and Shuster made for a perfect rallying point for Adams’s reform demands. Thanks to his efforts, both men received at least some extra compensation for their work, and the first steps were taken down a road that would lead to many fundamental changes in DC’s relationship with its freelance contributors.
In 1970 Adams depicted himself in self-portraits as an almost archetypal go-getting Mad man, in tie and rolled-up shirt sleeves, and as handsome as any of his heroes. He could have been Ray Palmer or Barry Allen. O’Neil was generally shown chewing on his specs, eyes on the wild blue yonder, hair like Dylan.
Together, as “Denny O’Neal Adams,” they forced superheroes into the national discourse and brought the conflicts and complexities of the real world back into the DC universe. The goofy and fantastic stories of the previous decade were seen as glib and uncommitted. It was time for comic-book superheroes to tap into the same self-critical, antiauthoritarian cultural energy source that would drive The Godfather, Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and Midnight Cowboy.