Our Gods Wear Spandex (21 page)

Frank Miller cut his teeth on Marvel's
Daredevil
before tackling Batman. Miller physically immersed himself in the landscape of Manhattan in order to inform his artwork, which depicted a mysterious wonderland of deep shadows, neon lights, and architectural majesty. Miller's early plots had a compassionate, humanist sheen, but his work slowly began to darken, reflecting a growing fascination with far-right politics.
Dark Knight
was the culmination of this trend. “In
Dark Knight
,” Miller said in a 1985 interview, “there's a much more direct use of my real life experiences in New York, my experiences with crime, my awareness of the horrible pressure that crime exerted on my life.” When asked of the fascistic implications of his new Batman, Miller explained that Batman “has to be a force that in certain ways is beyond good and evil,” a moral force this is “plainly bigger and greater than normal men and perfectly willing to pass judgment and administer punishment.”
¹²⁷
Nietszche himself couldn't have said it better.

Dark Knight
takes place in a near-future Gotham City, to which Batman has retired. The city is run by weak, cowardly liberals and terrorized by an incongruously all-white gang called the Mutants, led by a giant, shirtless thug known simply as “Leader.” Now a “limousine liberal,” Bruce Wayne uses his fortune to rehabilitate criminals through psychotherapy. Then a massive heat wave sparks a horrific crime wave and culminates in a powerful rainstorm, during which a giant bat crashes through Wayne's skylight. He takes this as a sign that it is time to don his cape and cowl and return to fighting evil. The lifeless clay of Bruce Wayne is “born again” as a marauding, bloodthirsty Golem.

Here again, we see the unadulterated power of myth in action. Miller unambiguously depicts Batman as a spiritual force that possesses Bruce Wayne for its own
purposes. And Wayne needs this demonic spiritual power to regain his manhood. Miller explicitly refers to his Batman as a “god of vengeance” and intentionally re-mythologizes him. He had clearly come to the same conclusion that Alex Ross came to ten years later with
Kingdom Come
: “Comics had been drained of the content that would give the heroes any reason to exist.”
¹²⁸
Miller found a new reason for his hero to exist in the runaway street crime that bedeviled New York City. Eventually the avenging spirit of the Bat totally consumes Wayne, who becomes a full-fledged avenging angel.

Miller's Batman is both a puritan and a fascist. As the series progresses, Batman slugs it out with supervillains until Gotham City is crippled by the explosion of a nuclear bomb, which causes a massive electromagnetic pulse. The story climaxes when the corrupt powers-that-be send their enforcer, Superman (who is usually busy fighting covert wars in Central America for the government), to destroy Batman. In the end, Wayne stages his own death and assembles a spelunking paramilitary band that he will train as his own army of Golems—an anticlimactic ending for a deeply problematic, yet extremely powerful, work of art.

Dark Knight
set the stage for late 80s revival. By then, a crack epidemic was fueling a dramatic rise in crime—particularly gun crime. Homicide rates skyrocketed as well-armed drug gangs fought over territory. Makeshift outdoor crack dens sprang up all over Manhattan, even in Midtown. The resultant fear and anxiety summoned the spirit of the Golem back into the public consciousness. Batmania hit America hard with the release of Tim Burton's 1989 feature film.

Much to the consternation of fans, Burton cast comedic actor Michael Keaton rather than a buff and virile actor in the role of the hero, showing that he understood the Golem archetype better than the fans. In the comics, Golem Bruce Wayne is only distinguishable from messiah Clark Kent by the latter's signature eyeglasses. But Keaton is short, slight, balding, and bespectacled—almost a
rabbinic
stereotype. The strength of Keaton's Batman lies in his armored uniform and his mastery of esoteric martial arts and gadgetry strongly reminiscent of a rabbinical mastery of Kabbalah. The new Batman was especially popular with the kids of the new urban America, many of whom were racial minorities. To them, the need
for deliverance from criminal violence was not an abstraction; it was a day-to-day reality. Batman and Batsignal shirts were
the
urban fashion statement of 1989. The next Batman film,
Batman Returns
, was three years in the making. This navel-gazing Goth yarn had little resonance, even in the year of the LA riots. After its release, Burton quit the series and was replaced by Joel Schumacher, who turned the franchise into a homoerotic burlesque, first with the 1995
Batman Forever
and then the excoriated
Batman and Robin
two years later. The latter was such a catastrophic failure that it put the movie property on ice for eight years. The comics, however, continued to be popular and DC has published several successful Batman series and graphic novels since then. Two popular cartoon series emerged in the 1990s:
Batman: The Animated Series
and
Batman Beyond
. In 2005, the movie franchise was revived by British director Christopher Nolan (
Batman Begins
), which, although it was a hit, didn't enjoy the success or the resonance that the first Burton film had.

After creating Superman, Jerry Siegel returned to his occult roots. Perhaps inspired by the success of Batman, Jerry Siegel created The Spectre in 1940 (
More Fun Comics
#52). The Spectre is the shade of Jim Corrigan, a murdered cop who returns from the dead with godlike powers. Daniels notes that “with the Spectre, Siegel went all out to create a protagonist who was not merely super but absolutely omnipotent.”
¹²⁹
The Spectre is, as Maurice Horn wrote, “as close to God as the comic books got.”
¹³⁰

The Spectre's powers are given to him by “The Voice,” an omnipotent, discorporeal being many interpret to be God. The Spectre can change form and size at will, practices astral projection, and fights against inter-dimensional entities. Even as Corrigan, he appears invulnerable and has to make excuses when various attempts on his life are unsuccessful. The Spectre is ultimately hampered by his limitless powers, however, since omnipotence makes it hard to maintain any feeling of suspense. The Spectre quietly vanished in the mid 1940s, enjoying sporadic revivals in the Silver Age. He was resurrected in 1974 by editor Joe Orlando (
Adventure Comics
#431) as a gruesomely imaginative crime fighter whose macabre adventures skirted the limits of the Comics Code.

Marvel's Daredevil is very much a hybrid of Batman and Spider-Man. The story, told by Stan Lee and artist Bill Everett, begins when an accident involving nuclear waste leaves young Matt Murdock blinded, but heightens his other senses. Murdock, who is golemized when his father is killed by gangsters, works as an attorney by day and a crime-fighter by night. The title hit its stride when illustrator Gene Colan took over in 1966. Colan's dark, moody artwork played well to the book's blind-superhero conceit, and
Daredevil
chugged along as a solid B-list title.

Marvel's early Seventies' affirmative-action program forced Daredevil to share billing with the Black Widow (a Russian spy in this incarnation), and his base of operations moved to San Francisco. When Colan left
Daredevil
to tackle
Doctor Strange
and
Tomb of Dracula
, the series became a typically anemic 1970s Marvel potboiler. The book had no hook and no look, its only distinguishing feature being the moody and dramatic rendering of artist Klaus Janson.
Daredevil's
stock was so low by 1978 that it was handed over to young Frank Miller (
Daredevil
#158). Writer Roger McKenzie had signed on a few issues earlier and was moving the title away from tired heroics and placing Daredevil in the shadowy milieu of urban crime.

Between them, McKenzie, Miller, and Janson redefined the character, creating a gritty urban drama that had a powerful influence on comics and on Hollywood. When Miller took over the writing duties in 1981, the title became one of Marvel's top sellers. Miller left the title in 1983 and the book drifted for a couple of years. In 1985, Miller returned to
Daredevil
as a writer for the pivotal “Born Again” storyline. This remarkable saga began with the hero's arch nemesis, Kingpin, learning his secret identity from Murdock's former secretary, Karen Page, who sells the secret for a fix. The storyline is one of Miller's very best and helped legitimize superhero comics at a crucial time in the medium's history.

An explicitly Catholic superhero, Miller's Daredevil is motivated, not by revenge, but by compassion, struggling against his own rage and need for vengeance. Miller ended his first run on the book in 1983 with a brooding morality play in which Daredevil plays Russian roulette with his nemesis Bullseye in a hospital room (
Daredevil
#191). Movie director Kevin Smith also drew heavily on the same Catholic imagery and morality on his run on
Daredevil
, and these themes are prevalent in the 2003
Daredevil
film, starring Ben Affleck.

Marvel produced two Golems that drew heavily from the classic horror tales of the 19th century: the Thing and the Hulk. Both represented a sort of inversion of the science hero—men who become monsters through the power of the dark side of progress. The Thing becomes a Golem when exposed to cosmic rays during an aborted spaceflight. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the Hulk is a scientist named Bruce Banner who is golemized when exposed to the deadly radiation of an experimental atomic weapon (the “Gamma Bomb”). The parallels between the arcane arts of Kabbalah and the arcane arts of nuclear science are unmistakable here.

In many ways, the Hulk is a carbon copy of the Thing (a.k.a. Ben Grimm). A member of the Fantastic Four, Ben Grimm is a test pilot who is persuaded by his old college friend, Reed Richards, to take an experimental rocket into orbit. Grimm's reservations are confirmed when he and the rest of the crew (rounded out by Richards' fiancé, Sue Storm, and her brother, Johnny) are genetically mutated by cosmic rays. Grimm takes the brunt of the radiation and is transformed into a misshapen freak of enormous strength with orange skin that looks like rocks or bricks. Grimm's rocky orange skin makes him one of the more explicit incarnations of the clay Golem of Jewish legend.
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Initially, Grimm's is as unpredictable and dangerous as the Golem, but he slowly evolves into a lovable curmudgeon. The Thing became a popular icon for Marvel, eventually spinning off into his own series and cartoon show. Michael Chiklis' portrayal of him—and his makeup job—in the 2005
Fantastic Four
movie both harken back to the lumpy, cantankerous Thing of the early issues of the
Fantastic Four
comic.

The Hulk, who first appeared in 1962 (
The Incredible Hulk
#1), draws on Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
and Robert Louis Stevenson's
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, two famous stories inspired by the Golem. Like the
Frankenstein
novel,
The Incredible Hulk
takes a dim view of science run amok. In Hulk's case, however, the scientist and the monster are one and the same. In a sense, the rabbi and the Golem become one. Like the Golem, Hulk loses his power and returns to the
prima materia
—the mud—that is Bruce Banner.

Not surprisingly, the essential Hulk is the version drawn by creator Jack Kirby. Whereas later artists portrayed him as either a dull-looking muscleman or a steroid addict, Kirby portrayed him as
id
run amok. The Hulk embodies an inner rage that the artist nursed over the years, and themes of abuse and anger dominated later storylines and movie adaptations. A popular CBS TV series appeared in the late 1970s starring Bill Bixby and featuring bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno. Bixby's portrayal of Banner as a nauseatingly sensitive “70s guy” made the all-too-brief episodes with Ferrigno all the more satisfying.

The social unrest of the Sixties terrified Middle America. As the civil rights movement went sour and industrial decay and urban blight created a new generation of increasingly vicious criminals, a new urban crime wave became the inspiration for a 1971 film that featured a revised Golem strongly reminiscent of The Shadow.
Dirty Harry
told the story of San Francisco homicide cop Harry Callahan's pursuit of an elementally evil serial killer. With his dark blond hair, lanky frame, and almost delicate good looks, Clint Eastwood may seem an unlikely choice to play a tough Irish cop like Callahan. But Eastwood brought the quiet fortitude of a Golem to the role, as well as its relentlessness. The Scorpio Killer of the film was inspired by the real-life Zodiac Killer, who terrorized the Bay Area with a series of random shootings and arcane coded messages. Dirty Harry's grim brand of street justice immediately struck a chord with a young comic writer named Gerry Conway.