The Berlin Wall and everything it represented now crumbled with a surprising lack of resistance, like stale meringue. It was as if we’d woken up in the plot of a utopian sci-fi story. The future was back in vogue, and perhaps because the last time the future had really been popular was somewhere in the Silver Age sixties, there was a revival of styles and attitudes from that era.
The gender confusions and reorganizations of masculine-feminine boundaries that marked the eighties had outgrown their welcome, so men became lads and women were babes. There was a new infantilization of culture as the idea of what was “adult” gave in to the desire of baby boomers to never outgrow their childhood pleasures. Geek culture and collector culture began slowly to infiltrate the mainstream with videos and later DVDs. The popular recreational drug of the day gave rise to a sunlit, cheerful Zen togetherness that recalled hippie afternoons in a playful recapitulation of a generation’s childhood. Even Margaret Thatcher was gone, betrayed by her party. Frail and shell shocked, the Iron Lady shuffled offstage as she had in Miracleman no. 18. In an age of glasnost and perestroika, the nuclear fears of Watchmen and Marvelman seemed quaint. It was time for superheroes to wipe the tears from their eyes and rediscover fun.
Endless vistas seemed to stretch into chromed and kinky-booted futurity: The world of the Legion of Super-Heroes was on its way, almost visible on the electric blue horizon. Girls who looked like the citizens of my daydreaming future meta-republics had arrived on the dance floors of the local nightclubs, as if from Time Bubbles launched in the thirty-first century—the hair bunches, bell bottoms, and crop tops, the fetish vinyl, high heels, Goth eyeliner, metallic wigs, and MDMA turned ordinary discos into meetings at the Legion Club House as tailored by Dave Cockrum.
The world of “Cyberia,” as Douglas Rushkoff dubbed it in his book of the same name, had arrived.
The superheroes responded by mutating into more colorful and baroque forms than before. Watchmen wasn’t a headstone after all, just the end of one particular line of inquiry.
Back in Britain, Milligan and McCarthy brought their collaboration to a pinnacle with the sensuous Rogan Gosh, a perfectly timed piece of multicultural psychedelic surrealism. Published in six parts in the anthology title Revolver, the dance-era successor to the punk Crisis, Rogan Gosh was a true supergod, a blue-skinned “karmanaut” enmeshed in the tacky snares of samsara in the company of a brutish South London boy named Dean.
Rogan Gosh addressed the nature of life, death, consciousness, and meaning with the characteristic wit of Milligan’s voice at a fresh peak and the boundless supercompressed natural originality of McCarthy. It was of its time and ahead of its time and timeless. It flowed between several narrative voices, including Rudyard Kipling and an unnamed dying youth representing the voice of bleak rational existentialism in the face of the uninflected void. Blending their stories like spices, Milligan and McCarthy summoned all the flavors of human experience from the gutter to godhood in forty-eight dazzling pages.
McCarthy reprocessed the lush, painted look of the Amar Chitra Kathra comic books from India. Using then new color-distortion effects made possible by more sophisticated laser printers and scanners, the artwork exploded in a dozen directions, each carrying a strain of the fugue weaving it tighter to its conclusion.
Like the cosmic comics boom of the early seventies, this new psychedelic period came about as a direct response to a preceding period of realism. The focus turned again from outer concerns to inner ones, along with the presence in many of our lives of the new psychedelic drugs. There was John Broome on weed in the sixties, Starlin on acid in the seventies, Milligan and me on mushrooms, ecstasy, and champagne in the nineties.
Enigma told the remarkable story of boring Michael Smith and his life-changing encounter with the world’s most powerful living being. This was Moore’s Doctor Manhattan born as a hillbilly and thrown into darkness, dropped into a well at birth, where he created his own world based on nothing but the objects and animals in his immediate environment. It opened in typical Milligan fashion with a single image of a well and three captions.
“YOU COULD SAY IT ALL STARTED IN ARIZONA. TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO ON A FARM. IT WAS AN ORDINARY SORT OF FARM IN ARIZONA. THE KIND OF PLACE WHERE YOU’D HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH YOUR PARENTS AND END UP SHOOTING SOMEONE.”
This autistic superman discovered his humanity when he fell in love with Everyman Michael Smith and transformed himself into an image of Michael’s childhood comic-book hero the Enigma. The routines, deadlines, and expectations that had set limits on Michael’s life disintegrated under the influence of the Enigma, until even his sexuality was reconstructed when he and the Enigma became lovers.
Enigma’s narration was provided by a sardonic voice-over commentary:
“IT’S LIKE THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS BUT FUNNIER. IT’S LIKE THE LAST TRUMPET BUT HOPELESSLY OUT OF TUNE. IT’S LIKE THE PERENNIAL BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL BUT NO ONE CAN QUITE WORK OUT WHICH IS WHICH ANYMORE AND MOST PEOPLE DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT PERENNIAL MEANS.”
It was a voice that could never quite disentangle itself from the text or remain truly omniscient in spite of its mocking detachment. Enigma subverted genre by having its all-powerful central figure on a quest to find in himself the humanity and compassion that will allow him to confront the ultimate enemy in the form of his own deranged mother (building up to a climactic confrontation, a “fight scene” that occurs after the last page of the story). When Michael finally discovered that it was the power of the Enigma that made him gay and was given the opportunity to return to his previous life of routine straight sex and boredom, he elected to remain the person he’d become.
Duncan Fegredo’s art had a fluid grace and delicacy that brought the world of Enigma to life across panels swirling with the serpentine spirals of the lizards and wells and searing suns of Arizona. Enigma was a godlike superbeing born from the lowest depths, culturally, socially, and physically. Autistic, omnipotent, bereft of role models, the character known as Enigma spoke of the strangeness and isolation of being special in a way that Doctor Manhattan could not match. And when the identity of the series’ sardonic narrator was finally revealed on the second-to-last page of the story in a breathtaking masterstroke that changed everything, the effect was of a lightning strike of bright comprehension that compelled us to return to the beginning with a heartbreaking new knowledge that refreshed every line of the text.
I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t feel I had to do any more superhero comics. I felt I could be myself and open up new territory to explore. I preferred a bit of absurdist humor with my superheroes, too. I saw life as essentially ridiculous and inexplicable and found it hard to get into the minds of truly evil characters. My villains were all delusional, ultimately preposterous, as I imagined myself to be.
Meanwhile, in Barcelona, I learned to drink screwdrivers and munch on hashish in the company of DC editor Art Young and Peter Milligan and found that intoxication agreed with me and cured what had seemed a natural state of mild anxiety and depression. Milligan and I traveled to a comics convention in the gorgeous walled town of Lucca in northern Italy near Pisa to perfect the art of spending all day in the bar, making ourselves unavailable to the press.
“I’m afraid Peter Milligan can’t come to the phone right now. He’s dizzy,” I’d say gravely in response to every anxious inquiry from the media. “Very dizzy.”
Across the room, Milligan ordered a fourth round of drinks—on the convention organizers’ tab, of course.
“Tell the TV people perhaps tomorrow will be better. It’s just with the travel. The dizziness is getting worse. Even I’m starting to feel it …”
Together we stood on the rocks at Lerici, not far from where our mutual hero the poet drowned in 1822, with Milligan drunk, yelling defiantly at the surf, “You’ve had Shelley but you won’t have me!” as it broke over our feet, sending the two of us stumbling back to safety like a couple of big Romantic jessies.
Art Young replaced
Tom Peyer as my editor on Doom Patrol before accepting an offer to move to London to head Vertigo’s British office. Ensconced in a well-appointed Soho apartment, the tall, handsome twentysomething came out (as no surprise to any of us, it must be said) in the hedonistic fireworks party of MDMA and thumping trance. In its brief life, Vertigo London blossomed into a glittering mirror-ball where the future of comics was cooked and served by cackling pranksters on shiny chemicals.
The Sandman—Neil Gaiman’s Goth revisioning of the superhero team as contemporary mythology—was the last and biggest success of the Britlit comics wave. Sandman was a Gardner Fox concept from 1939, which had already passed through several iterations: originally clad in a suit, tie, cape, and gas mask, he slipped into gold-and-purple tights for a few adventures with kid partner Sandy the Golden Boy and the new creative team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. In 1974, Kirby retrieved the name and stuck it on a fresh creation. This cosmic Sandman was the protector of the Dream Dimension in stories that aimed at an audience of younger children and failed to attract the teens and college kids who were now buying comics.
Gaiman stayed with the dream theme for his own update, but everything else was fresh. His Sandman borrowed the traditional trappings of superhero comics: the skinny, pale hero had a cape and a helmet that he sometimes wore; he had a magical ruby of destiny; he had a castle in the Dreaming; and he even had a kind of team of his own in the form of the Endless, a group of anthropomorphized eternal principles with names all beginning in D—like Delirium, Destiny, Despair, Destruction, and the series breakout star, Death, re-created by Gaiman and his artists as a funny and wise teenage Goth girl with spiky hair, an ankh necklace, and spray-on black jeans. From familiar foundations he built something brand-new. The Sandman ran for seven years, during which the idea and Gaiman’s ambition grew so far from their roots in superhero comics that the book basically invented a new genre at the intersection of fantasy fiction, horror, and literature.
The Len Wein–Don McGregor school of poetic narration rose to a new prominence in the hands of delicate stylists such as Moore and Gaiman, whose lapidary prose captions attracted a new, hip audience from outside the traditional comics fan base. Gaiman’s friendship with singer/songwriter Tori Amos inspired the lyric “Me and Neil’ll be hanging out with the dream king” from the song “Tear in Your Heart” on her 1992 album Little Earthquakes, and soon the writer was to be found working and playing golf with Alice Cooper and Sammy Hagar. A confident and clever young man with a plan, Gaiman carefully polished and promoted his brand while so many of us were spending our money on drink and drugs and acting as if it would always be this way, always this easy.
But these live dissections, these autopsies of the American Dream conducted on the operating tables of chic Brits, would soon come to an end. Nobody wanted to read about miserable, wimpy emo superheroes anymore anyway.
The Americans had figured out how to fight back.
CHAPTER 16
THE ART SCHOOL invasion defined one strand of superhero development, which mostly refined itself in the Vertigo imprint established at DC. Vertigo books were owned by their creators, and there was no bar on content. In celebration of the new latitude, my comic The Invisibles opened with a character screaming “Fuuuuuck!” Karen Berger had established herself as the go-to girl for securing British talent. She seemed to genuinely like us, and the respect was mutual. She’d been rewarded with her own imprint where new content and more contemporary ideas could be generated away from the DC universe, with its monolithic continuity and its caped characters dating back to times and attitudes that barely anyone left alive could recall or comprehend. Fantasy, sci-fi, Gothic, and political were in, superheroes were out—in a moment equivalent to the “weird” comics boom of the early seventies or the blossoming of EC in the fifties.
We Brits rode in on a wave of self-belief and arrogance and now we were off to do our own thing. We were quitting the superheroes, leaving them to the Americans, who would not suffer our changes for long or gladly. US comics’ response was devastating when it came and effectively ended the art school phase of mainstream superhero comics.
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Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane had both apprenticed to little fanfare at DC. There they perfected their styles before being snapped up by Marvel, which could always offer more lucrative deals and was always happy to watch DC do the work of developing talent.
McFarlane’s Spider-Man run sold nine million copies. Not since the heyday of comics in the sixties had sales peaked like this, bumped up by the multiple variant covers, the collector’s item limited-edition foil, or holographic enhancements. The decision to target the collectors’ market seemed to have paid off handsomely.
By anyone’s reckoning, this was crazy money.
Chris Claremont had shown the way. He’d stuck with X-Men to deliver a steady, ongoing, bizarre soap opera in which the characters could become children or animals or travel across time, space, and alternate dimensions with ease. His stories had taken on the anything-goes quality of Weisinger-era Supermen but with an added twist of S/M role play that gave it a gloss of adult wickedness.
The sales were consistently high, and Claremont’s royalties were piling up. Soon he was able to buy his mother a Learjet, or so the story went. This was no longer a business for out-of-work pulp writers or I’d-do-it-free fans turned pro; this was a medium where outsider artists could work out their kinks on a regular basis, in public, and make big money in the process.
So the star system developed. Once it had been Batman who mattered; henceforth it would be the combination of character and creator that really made the difference. It would be Frank Miller’s Batman or Brian Bolland’s Batman that brought in the audience dollars. And after a decade in the hands of the writers, it was time for comic-book artists to remind the world who really made the rules in this “visual medium,” as it was so often described whenever we writers got too big for our brogues. The backlash, when it came, took the form of severing of the cord linking American superheroes and the UK alternative arts scene. The previous few years had been dominated by superstar writers, and mainstream press attention had tended to focus on the improvement of story content and narrative technique—at the expense of the drawing. Now the visual constituent was wrenching its domination back with an unabashed return to old-school punching, kicking, and exploding superhero comics.
While the Brits remained foolishly intent on creating comic stories worthy of review alongside the latest novels in the Guardian literary section, a group of young American artists were preparing undeniable proof that comics would do much better business if they just looked cool and stopped trying to be so goddamned clever. At the time, it was a dreadful setback for the idea of “grown-up” superhero comics. In hindsight, it was America’s inevitable reaction to Watchmen, and the only response that could possibly be effective: Fuck realism, we just want our superheroes to look cool and kick ten thousand kinds of ass.
Image Comics was a different kind of punk. Founded in 1991 by a group of successful and popular artists—including Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, and Rob Liefeld—who’d made their names on Marvel properties before tiring of their treatment at the hands of the company’s accountants, this was no po-mo ironic art school sneer. The Image gang were the Ramones, all gabba-gabba glorious incoherence. Image comics seemed tailored toward bored, cynical kids in the Valley or heartland suburbia, post-ironic Bill and Ted Gen X airheads who’d grown up privileged on a diet of Star Wars, MTV, McDs, mosh pits, and metal. Image had a lot in common with European house music, too. Like hard-core dance, Image stripped away all the frills—all the boring bits—and left only a straight-ahead, hard-punching beat.
Artists had learned that they could make ten times their page rate by selling the original pages to collectors, and the more iconic the page, the more money it would fetch. A full-page or double-page shot of the title character or team was best. A similar shot of a new character or team was almost as good—better if
the new team graduated to its own spinoff book. Soon Image comics came to resemble pinup catalogues. Rob Liefeld in particular developed a hyperkinetic narrative style where a new superteam would be introduced on almost every other double-page spread. Creating characters was easy for Liefeld and the Image boys. The fragrantly poetic hero and villain names of the past—the Doctors and Professors, Lads and Lasses—were replaced by punchier names ripped raw and unprocessed from the pages of nearby dictionaries; there were “tough” names like Barricade, Brigade, Thrust, Magnum, Grifter, and Pulse for the men, while the women were called things like Vogue, Zealot, and Catwalk.
Villains now had to compete with the heroes for tags like Deathshead or Blood Pack. Image superheroes led the howling horde with permanent enameled snarls and pinpoint eyes. Consumed by rage or grief or rage or sometimes grief, they romped across outlandishly nonnaturalistic artistic landscapes, rippling with muscle meat and steroidal attitude. The kind of direct copying that would have been impossible in 1945 was now a profitable business model. Anyone could, and many did, create “analogues” of DC and Marvel superheroes in ersatz “universes” photocopied from the structural gestures of the old originals. Superman could become Supreme in Liefeld’s hands, or Mr. Majestic in Jim Lee’s. Lee’s Wonder Woman was a warrior nun named Zealot; Liefeld’s was a princess named Glory. McFarlane, to his credit, forged a style of his own by uniting horror and superhero comics in a way that was designed for transmedia exploitation, but many of the others were happy to use tried-and-tested concepts with new names and costumes that were crisscrossed with a bewildering, nonfunctional tangle of straps, pouches, buckles, harnesses, and leather garter belts (on men). It was how Batman’s utility belt might look if it was left to grow wild and free in every direction.