Strange Days’ superhero character Paradax was a pompadoured poser who could walk through walls as long as he was wearing a banana-yellow skintight one-piece that married the Kid Flash design to glam rock and Ziggy Stardust. Paradax was a slacker superhero, interested only in fame and sex, manipulated by his manager into aimless struggles with living abstractions like Jack Empty, the Hollow Man, or “Shudder … the madness of a warm toilet seat … and twitch … the heinous scab on the crotch of your dreams.” This was a comic created by art students to be a sexy, funny, and clever deconstruction of superhero and adventure tropes. McCarthy’s melting superpsychedelic visuals could sprawl across pages in a trancelike pageant of phosphorescent dream imagery, conjuring epic post-Kirby aboriginal visions of city-sized, floating, three-eyed Kennedy heads and a runway parade of fabulous, ludicrous supervillains as easily and lovingly as he captured the bustle and life of the East Village arts scene. Imagine Yellow Submarine grown up androgynous on mushrooms in the Dreamtime, and you may get some distant flavor of the flashing colors and textures of Brendan McCarthy’s inner territory. Milligan’s arch, knowing voice suggested an author at home on the chaise with a hookah in one hand and a hooker in the other, and together they made a formidable team—as well as making all the other adult superhero comics look decidedly adolescent.
Strange Days was a bracing dose of sunshine-yellow and petrol-blue exuberance in a landscape of postpunk industrial-gray tones. It had a relaxed and amused sexuality where Watchmen was stiff and uptight. McCarthy mined his living dreams, and I was reenergized by my encounter with his work, and rededicated to pursuing my own obsessions and consolidating my own style.
I’d already separated out the strands in my head: There were my own, unpublished drifting dream logic stories in the Near Myths style, and there were the commercial jobs for which I wrote about warring toys or absurd alien races in order to pay the bills, hone my commercial storytelling skills, and build a reputation as a freelance writer. There I tried to toe the line, follow trends, and do a passable copy of the latest fads and fashions with just enough of my own sauce to make it individual. But I always considered this work inferior to the expressive avant-garde material. Strange Days encouraged me to put more of myself into the commercial work and to enliven even those jobs with the things that really mattered to me.
Having seen what was possible, I decided to write about the kind of superhero that I would be and the kind of world it would take to have made me. Zenith consciously attempted to occupy my own imagined middle ground between the extremes of Gibbons and Moore’s serious formality and Milligan-McCarthy’s visionary remixes of modern culture high and low.
The superhumans of Zenith were designed by a mostly disinterested Brendan; the hero’s lightning-bolt Z motif—I never forgot to honor my divine inspiration—was borrowed wholesale from the well-known TV company logo.
Zenith had no secret identity; he was too famous for that. Nineteen-year-old Robert McDowell was the world’s first thoroughbred superhuman being, and only son of sixties iconoclasts White Light and Dr. Beat, the Julie Christie and Terence Stamp of Cloud 9, a psychedelic British superteam. The surviving members of Cloud 9 were Ruby Fox, the former Voltage, now a fashion magazine editor; and Peter St. John, a one-time hippie idealist with a new job as a Conservative MP in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. (He turned out to be the strip’s most popular character.)
Like Captain Clyde, Zenith lived in a recognizable fictional facsimile of late-eighties Britain, with familiar programs on TV, and well-known politicians and celebrities taking incidental roles, but Zenith took the world-building detail to new heights. I wanted to include all the tropes of Brit superheroes, too, so no costumes, and although Zenith’s history clearly wasn’t our own, everything else was interwoven with real current events as they happened. I composed pastiche George Formby Jr. songs about World War II superhumans, and the strip was peppered with British youth and pop culture references: Jonathan Ross. Network 7. Comic Relief. Bros and Betty Blue. Unlike Captain Clyde, Zenith was incredibly famous and used his special powers not to fight crime or injustice but to bolster his reputation as a shallow, party-loving pop star who could fly and bite off the tops of beer bottles without breaking his perfect teeth. Instead of costumes, the Goth, punk, skinhead, soul boy, and fetish supermen, superwomen, and supertrannies wore fashions influenced by designers Jean Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, and Vivienne Westwood.
Another unique flavor of the Zenith strip was the lead’s complete lack of interest in committing his inherited abilities to the endless fight against crime or evil. I wondered why we automatically assumed that having superpowers would encourage a person to fight (or commit) crime. Zenith was a talent-free chart singer with a callous wit who hid his superhuman intelligence and perception under the sneering veneer he figured would get him by in a superficial world. He acted like a brainless oaf in order to get through life without the persecution that had led to the deaths of his gifted parents. He shagged Page 3 Girls and pursued a vapid, style-conscious, utterly vacuous existence of the kind that I was still convinced I coveted, all under the watchful gaze of his manager, Eddie McPhail. Artist Steve Yeowell and I based the gay Scot on Richard Wilson’s portrayal of Eddie Clockerty in the 1987 TV series Tutti Frutti by John Byrne—not the superhero comics artist, but the playwright, artist, and husband of actress Tilda Swinton.
The elaborate alternate history of Zenith was constructed around the idea that the Americans had dropped the first atom bomb on Berlin, not Hiroshima, in order to kill a fascist superhuman engineered and empowered by the Nazis as a living weapon to win the war against the Allies. This backstory, with its grubby roots in popular Nazi occult lore, eugenics, and the CIA’s clandestine LSD research program, had Lovecraftian monsters teaching the Nazis how to turn humans into superhuman vessels—ostensibly supersoldiers but in reality to be used as bodies for higher-dimensional entities whose mere presence caused fatal hypertension and hemorrhaging in ordinary flesh-and-blood men and women. It had the flavor of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, too—everything including the kitchen sink.
High-contrast Western manga art by my Zoids partner Steve Yeowell made Zenith’s world a frantic modernist blur of speed lines and contemporary fashions and haircuts. We announced to the world that Zenith was intended to be as dumb, sexy, and disposable as an eighties pop single: Alan Moore remixed by Stock Aitken Waterman. Keeping all the self-awareness outside the story, we used interviews and forewords to admit to our sources. In them we praised creative theft and plagiarism, quoted the French playwright Antonin Artaud and sneeringly suggested that the likes of Watchmen were pompous, stuffy, and buttock-clenchingly dour. The shock tactics I’d brought with me from the music world, delivered with the snotty whippet-thin snideness of the hipster, had helped me carve out a niche for myself as comics’ enfant terrible, and Steve was happy to play along as the handsome nice one with nothing controversial to say.
My public persona was punk to the rotten core. Outspoken and mean spirited, I freely expressed contempt for the behind-the-scenes world of comics professionals, which seemed unglamorous and overwhelmingly masculine by comparison to the club and music scenes. My life was rich, and my circle of friends and family was secure enough that I could afford to play a demonic role at work. Reading interviews from the time makes my blood run cold these days, but the trash talk seemed to be working, and I was rapidly making a name for myself. Being young, good-looking, and cocky forgave many sins, a huge hit British superhero strip did the rest and proved I could back up the big talk.
Over four volumes, Steve and I chronicled our hero’s reluctant entry into a massive parallel-worlds story that led inexorably to the origin of everything and one of those apocalyptic final battles so beloved of comic-book creators. In our version, instead of banding together to save the multiverse, the superheroes of the various parallel worlds spent twenty-six installments arguing and losing the plot. In one macabre twist, Zenith e
ven predicted Labour Party leader John Smith’s unexpected death of a heart attack. In Zenith the fatal coronary was brought about by the telekinetic meddling of Peter St. John, but it was no less terminal when the real-life leader was struck down by myocardial infarction on May 12, 1994, at age fifty-five.
DC’s rising fortunes were due in great measure to a new publisher who had replaced Carmine Infantino in 1978. Jenette Kahn was a go-getting, well-connected socialite with a progressive editorial team that included the dapper, elegant, and erudite Dick Giordano, the artist on Rose and the Thorn. Giordano, a much-respected editor at Charlton in the sixties, had set up in business with Neal Adams as Continuity Associates. In addition, he’d made a name for himself as an inker and artist in his own right, and now here he was green-lighting DC groundbreaking projects one after another.
By the time I met both of them in the back of a London taxi in 1987, Giordano was deaf, and my Scottish accent, churned to the consistency of a guttural porridge by my years in the tenement glens, left him smiling but clearly none the wiser.
Under the strict guidance of Jim Shooter, former teen prodigy, Marvel Comics had shed its counterculture trappings to corner the mass market for well-produced but mostly formulaic superhero books. Although that war was over, DC could take advantage of the growing older audience—the Alan Moore and Frank Miller fans—the people who remembered the relevance and cosmic movements and wanted something a bit more underground and edgy.
While Marvel gathered the abundant dollars of the lowest common denominator geek market, DC occupied the high ground with a series of projects that would redefine what superhero comics could look like, be about, and command, price-wise. Jenette identified the bookstores as an emergent market for DC collected and original hardcover or paperback books.
In the stuffy, aging microuniverses, change was afoot. Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985) had begun in the DC universe as an elegiac continuity audit made to purge all story meat that was seen as too strong for the tender palates of an imagined new generation who would need believable and grounded hero books. There were complaints that the parallel-worlds system was too unwieldy and hard to understand, when in fact it was systematic, logical, and incredibly easy to navigate, particularly for young minds that were made for this kind of careful categorization of facts and figures. There was Earth-1, where the regular DC superheroes lived; Earth-2, where their revived Golden Age counterparts, now twenty years older, existed; Earth-3, where all the heroes had evil counterparts; Earth-X, where the Nazis had won the war and where the characters that DC had acquired from Quality Comics—Uncle Sam, the Ray, Phantom Lady, Doll Man, and the Black Condor—were stationed in a never-ending battle against robot Hitler and his nightmare brand of techno–National Socialism. Is that really so hard to follow?
The new status quo mashed these infinite Earths of the Multiverse together in a yearlong maxiseries written by Marv Wolfman and drawn with meticulous perfectionism by George Perez, who managed to include every single DC Comics character ever created.
The Superman of the Silver Age had been given a teary farewell in a typically thorough, intelligent, and ruthlessly logical Alan Moore script entitled “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?,” which lost points for its weeping Superman, but otherwise it brought the necessary gravitas and a satisfying twist to the conclusion of an era.
The next month, Superman was reborn as a clean-limbed, square-jawed twentysomething quarterback. Even as Clark Kent, he stood tall, dressed well, and was, for all intents and purposes, a yuppie—all thanks to the notoriously cantankerous, restlessly reinventive Canadian superstar writer-artist John Byrne, collaborator on X-Men with Chris Claremont. Byrne’s The Man of Steel binned the bottle cities and superdogs in the first serious housecleaning for almost fifty years. The entire Superman franchise was rebooted back to its roots; the story told as if new, erasing all prior continuity. Everything felt fresh, and the skies were wide again in Metropolis. Byrne’s spacious layouts and horizontal compositions gave the hero space to breathe and rediscover his youthful sexuality. Freed of the baggage of the past, eighties Superman was no longer your dad but your big sister’s horny beefcake boyfriend. He snarled and got torn up a little. He faced terrible moral dilemmas in a way that gave them a contemporary dimension—even going so far as to execute three deadly rogue Kryptonians whose homicidal rampage destroyed an alternate universe.
Backing Byrne was the accomplished Marv Wolfman, who brought a new evil-eighties-businessman incarnation of Lex Luthor. The Superman revamp had the whiff of prefab plastic smugness that characterized a hit primetime TV show in the eighties, but in its day it felt like another bold and fresh move away from the expectations of superhero fiction, and that was what mattered. Superman was no longer a forty-five-year-old alien or a troubled counterculture outsider seeking meaning in post-Watergate America; he was confident and assimilated, like Byrne himself. In the revolutionary eighties, it seemed as though everything DC touched turned to gold and glittery awards.
The Batman franchise, following Frank Miller’s groundbreaking turn, was locked into increasingly bizarre, shrill, and distorted parodies of his voice, relieved only by a charming, nonconformist take from Alan Davis and Mike Barr that effortlessly updated the Adam West aesthetic to suit the new DC but which was counter to the prevailing trends and went largely unlauded. Batman was waiting for Hollywood to bring him back into the global mainstream, and he wouldn’t have to wait for very much longer.
Far from delivering the rational death blow and beautiful eulogy that he and many others assumed he’d dealt, Moore had instead opened the door to a new kind of superhero. Take out Moore’s passion, his excellence as a wordsmith, and his formal obsessions, and save only his cynicism, his gleeful descriptions of cruelty, and his need to expose the potentially wounded sexuality of cartoon characters, and you had the germ of a strain of superhero-porn comics. Unlike Watchmen, which was written for a wide mainstream audience, the new superhero comics were pitched at fans in the direct market, who were tired of all the old tricks and craved shock-therapy versions of all their old favorites. In this atmosphere of self-flagellating manly guilt and doubt, even Batman’s inner monologues had come to read like the diary of the madman in the 1995 film Se7en.
Eliminate Miller’s talent as a cartoonist and satirist, his skill as an action storyteller, and leave only his reactionary “bastard” heroes—all those psychologically damaged sociopaths in trench coats, jackboots, and stubble—and you had the new model superhero in the late-eighties American style. Humorless cyborg assassins, crazed death machines, amoral and carnage-loving sadists became the heroes of the Dark Age’s decadent phase; for instance, the Punisher, a Death Wish-inspired Spider-Man antagonist who’d seen his wife and family gunned down by the Mob and responded by waging a one-man violent war against criminals. Created for Marvel in 1974 by Gerry Conway and John Romita, the right-wing antihero Frank Castle became the template for a new generation of cookie-cutter no-compromise superthugs. The superheroes were exposed as kin to the serial killer, deranged fascist loners, delusional narcissistic nut jobs who were barely above the level of the scum upon whom they preyed night and day. Was this what America’s role models had become?
Oddly enough, Britain had outgrown all that. Its new comics seemed keener on old-school Lewis Carroll–John Lennon surrealism, Smiths-style kitchen-sink kitsch, and druggy absurdity. As the no-longer-excluded Brits partied and surveyed the flag-planted beachhead, Americans were in retreat as if through the flaming hooches of Southeast Asia.
When I got the call to join the DC orchestra, I was living with Judy and four cats in a rented flat near Observatory Lane, doing well on my Zenith paychecks and her nurse’s wage but hungry for bigger opportunities and more creative control. Now at last the Americans were on the phone, and I’d never been more ready.
On the nail-biting train journey south to the London meeting, I worked up a four-issue miniseries pitch for Animal Man, an obscure superhero from the sixt
ies. I’d seen him in reprint comics and I figured no one else would remember him. I even saw a way to give the character a fashionably Moore-esque spin that would hopefully make him appeal to DC editorial. I’d been horrified by harrowing scenes from the animal rights documentary The Animals Film, and a single viewing was enough to bring about my conversion to vegetarianism. And I saw how to use Animal Man as a mouthpiece against cruelty to animals and the general degradation of the environment as well as for deeper explorations of the superhero as an idea.
Alan Moore’s magnificent costumed deities in Marvelman and Watchmen were flawed by the same familiar human doubts and failings we all shared. They were Olympians but not comic-book superheroes like Superman and Batman. So what were comic-book superheroes, really?
Even Moore’s view of planet Krypton showed a world riven by racial tensions, religious fanaticism, and brutal street violence, but I could see all that on TV and longed for mind-expanding tales of a world so far beyond my own in development and learning that it would have no need for conflicts of this ordinary kind, except perhaps as games. Eighties leftist politics, with its regular recourse to incoherent angry victimhood, was no longer blowing my mind the way that situationism, the occult, travel, and hallucinogens had begun to. I was tired of grids and imposed structures.