There was a science to some of this: The Image artists had made their names on high-profile Marvel comics, and readers expected to find those comics at certain predictable places on the shelves of specialist stores, so it’s no coincidence that Todd McFarlane chose the name Spawn for his first venture after Spider-Man. He knew where in the alphabet readers looked for his book’s name. Unable to infringe on the X trademark, Jim Lee was still able to occupy a nearby space on the shelves with his new WildC.A.T.S title. Rob Liefeld went from X-Force to Youngblood. The art school crew had sought validation in the literary columns, only to be dismissed by media tastemakers as a lurid, passing fad. Image couldn’t care less what authors Iris Murdoch and Martin Amis, or the readers of the Sunday newspaper supplements, thought about them. They were here to have fun and make money—enough money to play endless Mega Drive, hang out at the beach, buy a car, fuck cuties, whatever. Then retire. If the whole process could be accomplished within a span of months, so much the better.
Variant covers appealed to the speculator market. Driven by collectors convinced that these trashy foil alternatives, printed in their thousands, were in some way going to be scarce or valuable in the future, prices were briefly inflated, and comics stores enjoyed a boom time that left the Image crew very wealthy indeed. By appealing to the lowest common denominator, they had identified and then supplied a huge, new market: bored teenage boys growing up with The Terminator, PlayStation, and Mega Drive who wanted no-nonsense action heroes in the Arnold Schwarzenegger–Bruce Willis style.
Jim Lee had absorbed Adams and Byrne, then added his own steely refinements to the Romantic style. His men were impossibly handsome, with high angular cheekbones, piercing eyes, and permanent Clint Eastwood stubble. His women were all outlandishly long-legged supermodels, untouchably perfect in their glossy makeup and barely there costumes. Lee was a Princeton University physics graduate, and his WildC.A.T.S can be seen as an equation: Conflicted leader plus big guy plus man with claws plus ice maiden plus fiery sex kitten plus physically challenged mentor equals megasuccess. It was as if someone somewhere had handed out a superhero team assembly kit to several different men and asked them to create their own Frankenstein. Lee cleaned up. They all cleaned up, of course, but of all the Image artists, his drawing skills improved the most dramatically from an already strong base. And he was a natural businessman. In 1998 he sold his Image offshoot, WildStorm Productions, to DC before being promoted to copublisher in 2010 alongside Dan DiDio. He got back to work developing the next-generation version of the DC universe online and drawing Frank Miller’s flip and divisive All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder comic, which brought back a bracing dose of farce to the strip and drove the purists wild with its depiction of a cackling Batman yelling lines like “WHAT, ARE YOU DENSE? ARE YOU RETARDED OR SOMETHING? WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK I AM? I’M THE GODDAMN BATMAN!”
Rob Liefeld was the poster boy for Image. Certainly no physics magna cum laude but as shrewd an operator in his own way as Lee, he had the cornflakes-fed grin of a twelve-year-old California surfer. He looked like his name should be Skip or Spanky, but it was Rob, which was good enough. With his baseball cap and his wide-eyed love of trash culture, Liefeld spoke for a new generation of American kids. Not outsiders, not punks, not hippies or geeks; they were the Gen X-ers, the forgotten demographic, the kids too ordinary to merit their own movement, too de-politicized for manifestos. Their power fantasies were not of social justice or utopian reform but of nihilistic, aimless hedonism or revenge. Like so many of my favorite punk bands, however, Liefeld’s enthusiastic, arrogant amateurism enflamed a generation of young artists. If Rob could get away with his barely original characters, his blizzard of crosshatched lines, the heroic legs that tapered to tiny screwdriver feet, and the multitudinous array of new muscles he’d invented for the human forearm alone, anyone could do it. He was mocked, but his style was his own.
Image made Liefeld rich, and an appearance in a Spike Lee–directed Levi’s jeans commercial even made him briefly famous. His drawings never missed any opportunity to inflict some elaborate new deformity upon the human physique. His ideas were secondhand, his research nonexistent, his vision eccentric and quite unique in every detail. He was a superstar. When the script called for the appearance of a group of Nazi scientists, he drew them as modern men in modern clothes with background detail only where he could be bothered to sketch in a vague wall, screen, or rock. Period detail would only get in the way of another shot of a clenched-teeth hero crashing through a window in a shower of unconvincing glass shards, to disembowel foes with names like Stryfe, Carnyge, and Murdy’r.
The Image heroes killed: readily and without mercy. They understood that Gen X didn’t want super Boy Scouts. They were post-Miller superheroes, off the leash, finally able to hit the bad guys where it hurt. When the talented Jim Valentino unveiled the pallid, Batman-inspired Shadowhawk title, it was distinguished only by its hero’s rampaging AIDS infection and a crime-fighting specialty that amounted to snapping the spines of any thuggish ne’er-do-wells who made the mistake of crossing his path. While UK youth celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall by dancing to anything that ticked or pulsed, American indie kids were snotty and uncomfortable in the midst of plenty, willing the whole world toward some kind of vague suicide pact, some love affair with a shotgun. Young middle-class Americans became ever more captivated by the violent lives of lower-income gangsters or contract killers, policemen, and soldiers.
Like those young readers, Image heroes suffered like no others had ever suffered, and none more so than Spawn. Disfigured, diseased, outcast, he personified the scarred America of River’s Edge, Marilyn Manson, and The Crow. Grunge music emerged as a prowling, whining, snarling soundtrack to the lives of kids who had to pretend really hard to be scared anymore.
Every band has its own defining couple of notes: The Beatles’ orgasmic “Whoooh!” said everything you need to know about their androgynous upbeat appeal. Johnny Rotten’s “Nyaaaa” was a sneer of disgust and disillusion. The defining sound of grunge came as a nasal whine of pain, a suicide psychedelia. The Crying Boy was back in a new guise, hiding his fear behind a moist and inwardly directed rage. Skinny boys with cigarette voices and mournful beauty called us to witness their immaculately scored dramas of self-extinction. With no more Red Menace, the American psyche seemed to turn on itself again with a renewed determination and fury, as if it had been gnawing on its own foot for so long that it couldn’t deal with the disappearance of the trap and just kept on going all the way down to the marrow.
Todd McFarlane’s art was the sound of heavy metal rendered into jagged lines and claustrophobic verticals. Spawn’s immense crackling cape echoed the crazed storm of webs surrounding McFarlane’s stylized depiction of Spider-Man for Marvel. McFarlane pages offered full-size images, two-panel spreads. His writing strained like a team of rabid huskies against the leash of the English language.
McFarlane drenched his superhero stories in a suffocating miasma of violence and bad religion, where cold-eyed angels and demons played out their amoral struggles with doomed human beings trapped in the middle. Unlike the gods and demigods of Kirby and Starlin’s stories, these sci-fi angels and demons had no interest in people as anything other than cannon fodder in their vicious struggles. The angels were every bit as devious, violent, and murderous as their infernal counterparts. The dial was never tuned to anything less than “total bugfuck hysteria” in a given Spawn story, and the agony was palpable in the slashing lines and black ink shadows. Spawn’s was a world of gaping graves, steeples backlit against flaring lightning, leering obese demons, trash cans, and overflowing gutters. It was the world behind the strip mall, the world of the homeless, where Spawn lived as king of his own garbage heap: a mountainous, fuming haunt of child molesters, rats, and emissaries from hell.
I managed to write three issues of Spawn in 1993, as a result of a misunderstanding. It happened after the trade magazine Comics International ran a cover story cla
iming that I was one of several names asked to contribute the first non-McFarlane-penned stories to Spawn—the others being Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Frank Miller. It was true for the others, but not for me. When I called McFarlane to check on the rumor, he asked me to write Spawn anyway. It was some of the easiest work I’ve ever done and the most lucrative. I found a tone that seemed faithful to McFarlane’s voice and followed it through to the end. McFarlane paid ten times more than anyone else at the time and reinflated a bank account that was beginning to diminish, as I blew the Arkham Asylum royalties on champagne, drugs, and spur-of-the-moment expeditions around the world.
Spawn appealed to kids who were desensitized to horror and violence but couldn’t get enough of it. Spawn was a black hero, but his face was completely covered by his mask to ensure that his ethnicity would never become an issue. When we did see him unmasked, he was so badly burned as to be unrecognizable as anything but a noble monster, allowing McFarlane to make his point and obscure it at the same time.
Alan Moore returned to the mainstream of superheroes with a curious and telling piece entitled “In Heaven” from Spawn no. 8. After the collapse of his own Mad Love self-publishing venture and the abandonment of the ambitious, nonsuperhero series Big Numbers, there was nothing left for Moore, then in his early forties, but to go back to the place where everybody knew his name. He had branched out into performance and declared himself a magician—describing it as an alternative to going mad at forty—but when he returned to the superheroes he’d made such a show of leaving behind it was clear that he needed money to back up his small press experiments. “In Heaven,” written by Moore and drawn by McFarlane, told the heartwarming story of Billy Kincaid, a sweating, unshaven child molester who’d made his first appearance in Spawn no. 5, as the lead in “Justice,” a typically shrill and insensitive story of child murder. Billy had indulged himself with a series of brutal kiddie killings before Spawn arrived to exact unholy vengeance and send the unrepentant bastard on his way to a well-deserved eternity in hell.
Alan Moore picked up the story where McFarlane left off with Billy waking up in hell to begin a Dante-inspired journey down through the trenches and rings of the inferno toward the domain of the grand devil, the Malebolge, here called Malebolgia. Moore posited other hells, other devils—enough for everyone to have a special customized one of his own, with a personal Satan.
In the end, the murderer’s soul was consumed by a sentient, demonic Spawn costume. The cape wrapped around him, while the mask sealed over his head and mouth to finish the job. Together with a horde of other damned souls, all swaddled head to toe in their own versions of the parasitic outfit, Billy trudged hopelessly toward his towering, chuckling satanic master in a chilling full-page image of final damnation. The end.
It was hard to read this and not imagine Alan Moore in that throng, sealed inside a superhero suit he couldn’t seem to peel off, manacled and bound as he was frog-marched back into the tenth circle of the abyss, the factory, the cold engines of the Industry. In the end, superheroes were bigger than he was. Bigger than all of us. What had seemed a gravy train was now pulling into a dreary Eastern European station with conformity cops waiting on the platform. The only money left in comics was in superhero stories.
Some factions credit Moore for signaling the beginning of the end of Image with his follow-up 1963 project. In a mildly satirical sequence of pitch-perfect pastiches of the early Marvel style, Moore reinvented the Fantastic Four as Tomorrow Syndicate, while Spider-Man became the Fury. With the help of the chameleonic artist Rick Veitch, he devised meticulous reconstructions of the early Lee-Ditko-Kirby Marvel comics that went so far as to reproduce the acidic yellowing of the pages on old comics, so that each 1963 issue came pre-aged, precollected, nostalgic on the day of release.
These imitations were intended to contrast the fallen superhero comics of the Image era with their allegedly more inventive forebears, but the curmudgeonly attack on changing tastes backfired to make Image look old-fashioned—no longer young, dumb, and full of cum, but backward-looking, bitter, and, worst of all, arty. The comic 1963 was a water-treading joke aimed squarely at jaded adult comics readers. It was easy to tell that he’d rather be somewhere else, stretching his wings, but even the stentorian Moore had capitulated to the Image juggernaut.
All in all, Image was comics’ greatest success story since Stan Lee stuck the Marvel logo on Fantastic Four. What Image Comics lacked was stories, relatable characters, and any real sense of emotional involvement with the events being depicted on the pages. It was cocaine comics, emotionally dead, creatively limited, and perfectly timely—but only for a short time. In the first rush of energy, glossy paper, and glowing color, the deficiencies barely showed, but they soon became apparent as the wait between issues that could barely be recognized apart from one another grew longer. Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog video games consumed the artists’ time, and they were all rich enough to step back from the wage-slave production line ethic, paving the way for new talent and clearing the field for yet another new take on superheroes in this turbulent time of restless change.
Back in the Marvel and DC universes, the Dark Age heroes got darker and more unhinged, and the villains became increasingly and laughably more grotesque to keep pace. Villains became serial killers with bizarre MOs: One mummy’s boy murderer might employ china dolls in his crimes, another could be equally obsessed with martyred saints or letters of the Greek alphabet—and they all had troubled childhoods. The tittering prankster of the TV series had become the eighties Joker, a psychopath who’d already demonstrated his commitment to the new sadism by using a crowbar to comically smash out the brains of Jason Todd, the second Robin, before shooting Batgirl in the spine (she’s still paralyzed in a wheelchair) and taking naked pictures of her agony—which he then showed to her father, Commissioner Gordon (courtesy of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland in The Killing Joke).
Kyle Rayner, the new, young Green Lantern of 1994, came home one day to find his girlfriend chopped into pieces and neatly stacked on the shelves of his refrigerator by an atom-powered supervillain named Major Force. Green Lantern was angry for as long as it took to defeat the villain and somehow managed to avoid being scarred for life. He took the gorgeous Alex’s gruesome death in his stride before proceeding without guilt or too many backward glances into a series of relationships with hot alien babes. The subtle psychological insights of the Moore advance were replaced with feverish inner monologues detailing the inner agony of being a superhero crime fighter in one more crumbling sewer of a city. Or worse, the hero’s psychotic opponent, who more often than not thought in scratchy, oddly angled, misspelled letters. No story could pass without at least one sequence during which an unlikely innocent would find herself alone and vulnerable in some completely inappropriate inner-city back alley setting. If the victim could be a scantily dressed prostitute, the jackpot was in sight, with bonus points for a transvestite hooker. Within a few panels of any such skimpily attired naïf penetrating the seedy underbelly of the urban nightmare, a pack of human wolves would slink inevitably from the shadows with grins and glinting knives. Part A Clockwork Orange, part Kings Road punk, the leering thugs would encircle their busty prey, and gibber in some private rapists’ pidgin. Only at the very last moment would Batman/Wolverine/Daredevil swoop down from the shadows to deliver a righteous display of satisfyingly brutal bone-breaking vengeance. The modern vigilante liked to leave his criminal enemies hospitalized or even permanently disabled.
“YOU DON’T GET IT, BOY … THIS ISN’T A MUDHOLE … IT’S AN OPERATING TABLE. AND I’M THE SURGEON,” boasted Batman, clearly superior to his opponents in every department, from class, privilege, and style to athletic ability, even as he menaced them with paraplegia. The idea of a terrorist threat to America was ludicrous in those halcyon days, so superheroes tended not to stretch themselves too far, content with beating up more than their fair share of unfit, unhealthy junkies and muggers.
This was no
ir condensed to a jet-black absurdity. Alone in its bedroom with overblown fantasies of grand agency, the adolescent comic book, the result of cloistering in direct-market retail outlets, had attenuated into a refined and specialized product, but the geek superhero was about to glimpse itself in the mirror, standing there in stained underpants and playing air guitar. The deep earnestness, the crass sensationalism, the aching desire to be taken seriously had become a ridiculous posture, and things would have to change. Hormones were beginning to subside. Calmer voices were breaking through.
The Dark Age period of adolescent introversion had yielded spectacular transfigurative insights that could now be put to more positive use. After facing his darkest dark night of the soul, the superhero was back, stronger than ever. Now it was time to get out there and meet some girls. In their coming Renaissance period, the superheroes would not only recover their dignity but also begin the journey off the page and into our lives.
CHAPTER 17
IN THE YEARS after 1996, the impatient energies of transformation that had dismantled the Berlin Wall, brick by painted brick, and dethroned eternal Thatcher, began to pry apart my own personal status quo with the same restless diligence and attention to detail.
Having missed out on the tilt-a-whirl of teenage life, I was tormented by regrets. I felt my own life had grown stale and repetitive. My own personality seemed crudely fashioned, and often ill-fitting. I was thoroughly sick of chronic vague depression, and chose to treat myself as another poorly conceived and barely developed character in need of a revamp. After much agonizing, I split from Judy after nine years together.
I’d already made my mind up to accept complete surrender to a process of transformation, an ego-dissolving ordeal that I felt sure would give me new things to write about, new things to say, and a new way to see the world.