Our Gods Wear Spandex (25 page)

Until 1975, that is. Marvel was in the midst of a costly expansion at the time, in an effort to corner a shrinking market. Marvel brass recruited Len Wein (
Swamp Thing
and
Justice League of America)
and Dave Cockrum (
Legion of Super-Heroes)
from DC, who cooked up a new X-Men that made their debut in
Giant-Size X-Men
#1 in 1975. Cyclops hung in from the original lineup and was joined by Night-crawler (from Germany), Colossus (from Russia), Wolverine (from Canada), Storm (from Africa), Banshee (from Ireland), Sunfire (from Japan), and the Native American Thunderbird. The book was a hit and the new X-Men took over the reprint title with issue #94.

Wein handed the reins to writer Chris Claremont as the title began attracting readers. Cockrum left and was replaced in 1977 by new artist John Byrne
(X-Men
#108), and the title hit its stride.
The X-Men
became
the
hot title of the late Seventies, establishing many of the themes that would dominate superhero comics until
Kingdom Come
. With a style synthesized from earlier stars like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Neal Adams, and Jim Starlin, Byrne was a natural. Marvel paired him with Terry Austin, who finished the pencils with technical pens, giving the art a sharp, futuristic gloss.
The Uncanny X-Men
became a cosmic title and climaxed with “The Dark Phoenix Saga” (
X-Men
#129–138), in which Phoenix (formerly Marvel Girl) is possessed by a cosmo-demonic spirit and destroys an entire solar system. Later, she is put on trial by aliens and commits suicide before she can be executed. Fans were left stunned and breathless.

The title lost its white-hot intensity following “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and Byrne left soon after. Cockrum returned and the title remained a top-seller, but the locus of fan interest had moved to Frank Miller's
Daredevil
. Later in the 80s,
The Uncanny X-Men
became nothing more than a revolving showcase for the hot artist
du jour
. This process reached its apotheosis with the arrival of Jim Lee. Lee's tendency to disregard Claremont's plots rendered the book completely unreadable, but no one seemed to care because the art was so gorgeous. Marvel ordered a new
X-Men
series for Lee, who soon left to form Image Comics. Marvel has since launched dozens of X-Men-related titles, most of which turn profits.

Marvel tried its hand at an
X-Men
animated series in the 1980s, but never moved beyond the pilot (
Pryde of the X-Men
). In 1992, another animated series (that recycled many of the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne storylines) premiered on Fox and became one of the highest-rated Saturday morning programs in TV history. A massive licensing blitz firmly cemented the X-Men in the hearts of millions of
kids. In 2000, a more teen-centric version called
X-Men: Evolution
appeared; it ran for four seasons on the WB network.

The success of the Fox cartoon laid the groundwork for the massive success of an
X-Men
feature film in 2000. Director Bryan Singer took the characters out of Spandex and put them into paramilitary leather, and his bluntly emotional approach gave the concept a visceral kick. Soon after, the comics capitalized on concepts from the film in two sequels—X
Men: United
and
X-Men: The Last Stand
. As of this writing, a Wolverine solo film is in preproduction.

A more recent Marvel Brotherhood is the Illuminati. Comprised of the most prominent members of the Marvel Universe—Professor X, Mister Fantastic, Black Bolt (leader of the Inhumans), the Atlantean Prince Namor, Iron Man, and Doctor Strange—this powerful group was created to deal with particularly world-shaking threats. Of course, the name of the team is taken from the legendary 18th century secret society, the Bavarian Illuminati, formed by renegade Jesuit Adam Weishaupt. The official story has it that the Illuminati were forcibly dissolved once their revolutionary agenda was exposed, but any modern conspiracy theorist will tell you that the group simply went underground and now control the entire world through financial and, more importantly,
sorcerous
means. The lack of evidence pointing to the group's survival is simply taken as proof of their arcane means of persuasion.

In Egyptian art, Thoth is depicted as a man with the head of an ibis. Not coincidentally, one of the earliest wizard-heroes in comics is Fawcett's Ibis the Invincible. Although on a superficial level, Ibis is influenced by Mandrake, this crime-fighting magus is actually a reincarnation of the fictional Pharaoh Amentep—in other words, a reincarnation of Horus.

In Ibis' origin story, Thoth gives Amentep the omnipotent Ibis stick, a magical talisman containing the power of Osiris. Twenty or so centuries later, Amentep's mummy is brought to an American museum, where he comes back to life and renames himself Ibis. The reincarnate Amentep then fights demons and other malignant spiritual entities with the magical Ibis stick, dressed exactly like one of Blavatsky's Ascended Masters—a natty suit and cape complete with Sikh turban.
Ibis first appeared in
Whiz Comics
#2 and remained with the title until its very last issue (#155) in 1953, proof that someone at Fawcett (perhaps his creator, Bill Parker) had a more than passing familiarity with the occult. Ibis spent most of his time battling supernatural horrors alongside his scantily clad love interest, Taia.

Doctor Fate made his debut in
More Fun Comics
#55 in 1940, created by Gardner Fox and Howard Sherman. Doctor Fate, who lived in a doorless and windowless tower in Salem, Massachusetts, is similar in concept to Ibis and that other Egyptian-themed DC hero, Hawkman, and bears a thematic resemblance to Doctor Occult. Doctor Fate is sent to Earth in ancient times by the “elder gods” (Lovecraft, again) and is recast in
More Fun
#67 as the alter ego of Kent Nelson, son of an American archaeologist. While on an expedition to Egypt, Nelson's father opens the tomb of a wizard named Nabu the Wise and is killed by a mysterious poison gas (obviously drawing on “Curse of Tut” rumors). Nabu then resurrects himself, takes young Kent under his wing, and initiates him into the occult sciences. Since no one can acquire superpowers in a comic-book story without also acquiring a garish costume, Fate dons an outfit accessorized by an amulet and a golden helmet that covers his whole face.

In his first adventure, Doctor Fate does battle with the Norse god Wotan, girded with Egyptian symbols like the Ankh and other occult signifiers. Fox drew on Lovecraft's concepts and pitched his wizard against several arcane horrors, including the fish-men called the Narl-Amen (
More Fun
#65). Despite a strong premise and some wonderfully moody art by Sherman, Doctor Fate was short-lived in his first incarnation, but was rereleased from Nabu's tomb in the 1960s. No one seemed to know what to do with him then either, and he remains a supporting player in the so-called DC Universe of heroes.

Although Fate never really caught on, he inspired a character that hit it big in the Sixties—Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, created in 1963 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (
Strange Tales
#110). Doctor Stephen Strange is a gifted neurosurgeon
whose career is ruined in a car accident. Left with a tremor that prevents his holding a scalpel, Strange hits the skids and roams the world searching for a cure. His search brings him to the Ancient One, a fabled magician who lives in the high Himalayas. Although the magician does not offer a cure, after a sequence of events he initiates Strange into the mystic arts. The reborn Doctor embarks on a series of memorable adventures dressed in a stylized pseudo-Asian pastiche of stock comic elements and wielding the All-Seeing Eye of Agamatto, a powerful amulet he wears around his neck. Appropriately, Strange makes his home at 177A Bleecker Street in New York's Greenwich Village.
¹⁴¹

Lee claimed that the character was inspired by an old radio show called
Chandu the Magician
, but he was probably hoping his readers were too young to remember Doctor Fate. After Steve Ditko left the feature in 1966, Strange appeared in a series of apocryphal yarns of wildly varying quality. With sales declining, he was even briefly recast as a superhero. His book was canceled in 1969, and he joined Hulk and Sub-Mariner as the third Defender in 1971 (
Marvel Feature
#1). Although his title was later relaunched and ran for several years, the early Lee/Ditko material remains the definitive incarnation of Doctor Strange.

A well-written but cheaply produced
Doctor Strange
TV movie aired in 1978, starring Peter Hooten as the Doctor. The film, written by Grateful Dead associate Philip DeGuere, took extreme liberties with the source material, turning from the vaguely oriental occultism of the comics to a more traditional British presentation. Strange is pitted against Arthurian villainess Morgaine Le Fey and the Ancient One is portrayed as a British occultist, not a Tibetan ascended master.

A new kind of wizard appeared in 1985, created by Alan Moore (
Saga of the Swamp Thing
#37). John Constantine is not a dandified occultist like Doctor Strange, but a former Punk Rock singer (artist Steve Bissette purportedly based him on Sting) who takes to trafficking with unclean spirits and somehow finds his way to the Louisiana swamps, where he offers advice to Swamp Thing, a muck encrusted “earth elemental” who once believed he was a man. Reflecting the seedy, distinctly
unheroic occultists Moore ran across in England, Constantine appears in a shabby suit and trenchcoat, and puffing on his ever-present cigarettes.

Constantine was given his own series,
John Constantine, Hellblazer
, in 1988. Through the 90s,
Hellblazer
helped to bridge the gap between comics fans, Goth devotees, and the neo-occult underground. After Moore's hand-picked successor, Jamie Delano, left the title (with #40), the book was handed over to several different writers and artists, most of them from the U. K. Garth Ennis brought Constantine to New York, both for occult adventures and a pitched battle against lung cancer. Paul Jenkins used the character to explore ancient British myths like King Arthur and the Green Man. Warren Ellis had Constantine punish the murderer of his ex-girlfriend by pumping him full of LSD and locking him in a mortuary drawer with the woman's rotting corpse.

Constantine tangled with demons, warlocks, gangsters, and ghosts for twenty years before facing his most dangerous foes—Hollywood hacks. An extremely unfaithful 2005 film adaptation starring a miscast Keanu Reeves portrays him as a black-haired American, not a blonde Englishman, who does his business in LA, not London. The script is a typically tedious Hollywood take on Catholic folk demonology that recasts Constantine as a freelance exorcist. Although the film uses every tired religious horror cliché imaginable, pummeling viewers' eyeballs with unconvincing CGI monsters and hellfire, it still failed at the box office, and a hoped-for franchise was nipped in the bud.

Wizard heroes have never been truly popular in comics, perhaps because wizards are more familiar to comics and pulp-fiction fans in the form of “mad scientists.” The bad guys in sword-and-sorcery stories are usually the sorcerers. And modern sorcerers like Lex Luthor, Doctor Sivana, Doctor Doom, and the Joker are the villains fans most love to hate. The unfathomable mysteries of science, however, make it the modern equivalent of trafficking with demons and evil spirits. In fact, there has been something of a revival of the scientist-as-sorcerer idea in the American Evangelical community, seen in large-scale and well-funded attacks on evolution and climate-change theory.

Superman villain Lex Luthor is the archetypal comic-book mad scientist. An early Luthor prototype called the Ultra-Humanite appeared in
Action Comics
#14 in 1939, and was, like
X-Men's
Professor X, bald, confined to a wheelchair, and endowed with telepathic powers. Luthor himself was introduced in 1940 (
Action
#23) as a mad scientist, but with a full head of red hair. Siegel introduced a bald Luthor in the following year, released in all his bald glory in
Superman
#10.