Our Gods Wear Spandex (30 page)

Why have comics survived? Why are they still so powerful and influential? Why do so many adult men spend up to 100 dollars a week keeping up with their favorite titles? Part of the answer is that comics are a profoundly intimate form of storytelling. They are something you can hold, something you can possess, something that speaks only to you. Comics have a special magic that affects the brain in ways prose does not. Comics fans develop intimate relationships with their favorite characters—a relationship they jealously guard. Fans of some obscure Indie band seek each other out, but comics fans are more wary, treating their obsession as part of their private space.

Clive Barker observes that comics happen in the reader's own time frame, noting that a comic story “unfolds in your personal time, just like a dream or
nightmare.”
¹⁵⁹
Readers control the visual timeline in a way that's hard to replicate in other media, even with video freeze-frame. Each visual moment is suspended forever in comic-book time and space. Comics fans control the flow of events, so every single moment belongs to them. No other artform can do this. It's as if, by reading the comics, you become a kind of deity. The impulse is brilliantly incorporated into the film
The Matrix
with the freeze-frame and “bullet time” sequences. It's also cleverly alluded to in the TV series
Heroes
, where comic-book fan Hiro has the ability to freeze moments in time.

Comic-book fans are a small, but highly dedicated and influential, group. They usually develop an intense, intimate relationship with the comics medium at an early age, often as a result of childhood trauma. Many have a general disposition toward shyness or social awkwardness that tends to cement their dedication to the form, turning them into, in Stan Lee's words, “true believers” indistinguishable from your average theology student or seminarian.

Hardcore comics fans are very reverent to their heroes and woe betide the artist or writer who doesn't share in their worship. If a creator appears insufficiently devoted to the characters or fails to imbue their work with the prerequisite religious awe, they will suffer at the hands of the fans, who, like ancient pagans, take special delight in killing their kings. Even Jack Kirby fell from grace when more realistic artists like Neal Adams came to prominence in the 1970s.

Because of their intense devotion, many fans want to become creators themselves, and the increased accessibility and affordability of tools for creating comics—particularly online—has created an explosion of independent and self-published work. Many fans expect that they will eventually “break in” to the major publishers, and the competition for the top books is murderous. Some give up when they realize that they will never reach the big leagues; others keep plugging, hoping for the impossible.

The World Wide Web has created a perpetual 24/7 comics convention, with its thousands of message boards, chat rooms, and Web comics. And creators continue to self-publish, whether in mini-comic form or in the cheap black and white formats. These conditions have created a pressure-cooker test market for a new popular culture that has inevitably branched out into other forms of storytelling. Today's comics fans are
all
connoisseurs, and the contemporary
superhero culture is exclusively of, by, and for hardcore, highly educated fans.

Of course, this means that comic books are no longer a mass medium. Instead, they have become a highly charged laboratory for pop culture, developing themes and ideas that are picked up in television, movies, and video games. Many of Hollywood's top creators—Steven Spielberg, Bryan Singer, James Cameron, George Lucas, Chris Carter, Sam Raimi—are hardcore comic-book fans who adapted themes and ideas from the comics in their work. Today, movie people write for comics, and vice versa. The same applies to fiction, with best-selling authors like Brad Meltzer and Jonathan Lethem working for the Big Two.

The symbiosis that has developed between comics and Hollywood extends to video games as well, to the point that the content and storylines of games are essentially indistinguishable from comics. This is a recent phenomenon, concurrent with the amazing advances in digital imaging technology. Computer rendering has allowed the visual punch of comics to be translated on screen in games and on film. The cost of special effects is no longer prohibitive, and the limitations of even the best pre-digital effects have been overcome. Digital imaging technology now brings the kinetic energy of comic-book action to the screen, especially in films like
Sin City
and
300
, based on Frank Miller's graphic novels.

Whether we realize it or not, we are programmed by pop culture. Television and film and video games are part of our collective consciousness, perhaps even more so than our dreams. The great comic creators sensed this and deliberately wove the threads of past, present, and future into their work. Jack Kirby recognized that he lived in a society “without the kind of gods that used to exist, or the legends that used to travel back and forth with tribes. The tribes each told the same stories in their own way,” Kirby observed. “I gave those stories the power of the old concepts with characters from our own day.”
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Alan Moore worked from the same vision and articulated what may be the core truth of the comics culture: “There is something very magical at the heart of writing, and language, and storytelling. The gods of magic in the ancient cultures … are also the gods of writing.”
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Superheroes were once vigilantes against organized crime or soldiers in the war against fascism. Now they have become something else. They address a greater anxiety—the universal feeling of powerlessness in a new technocratic world order. The proliferation of technology and the dramatic rise in world population makes people feel marginalized and insignificant—isolated and powerless against the invisible systems that control every aspect of their lives.

We live in extremely depressing and disheartening times, in which old certainties vanish before our eyes. The world we once knew is either collapsing or being systematically dismantled, and there is nothing we can do about it. The daily political and economic bad news and the constant drumbeat of war and terrorism are making superhero fantasies more relevant and visceral, as well as more comforting and reassuring, than at any time since World War II.

American religion seems unable to provide a viable salvation myth in this time of crisis. Most denominations have become nothing more than badly disguised political movements, interested only in money and power. On the other hand, our bloodless secular culture has no room in it for wonder. It should not surprise us, then, when
Harry Potter, Star Wars
, and
The X-Men
step in to fill the void.

Superheroes provide escape, but from what and to where? From the mind-numbing mediocrity of most modern life. To a space where greater potentials and possibilities exist. But it's no longer enough for us simply to root for these heroes. Deep down, we want to
become
them.
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This is the impulse behind the role-playing popular today at comic conventions, in which fans dress like their favorite characters and act out their adventures. Costume contests are also popular and some fans write reverent parodies of their gods or make home videos based on their favorite characters. The same impulse is driving the increasing popularity of Halloween with adults. People want to enter into the mythic realm and become someone else in an attempt to shed their mundane problems. This phenomenon is a survival of the mystery cults of ancient times, with their rituals and festivals in which pagans dressed like their favorite gods and acted out their dramas.

Entertainment Weekly
claims that the TV series
Heroes
is proof positive that what was once considered cult pop is now mainstream thanks to a decade defined by the Spiderman and Harry Potter film sagas.”
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The question now becomes this: Will a society so immersed in
Heroes, Harry Potter
, and
The X-Men
settle for the limitations of the human body? Or will fascination with these stories raise new expectations that we will try to meet through cloning and genetic engineering? Shows like
Heroes
and
The 4400
feature superpowers made manifest in the real world, not in the Spandex world, and the virtual environments of some video games suggest the possibility of entering other realities. Are these trends shaping our future? Are we beginning to wonder how to manifest these new possibilities?

The superhero culture has become much more than comic books. The superheroes of today are actually changing our expectations of the human machine, especially in the minds of the young. Hollywood wizards are making Harry
Potter's magic and the X-Men's mutant powers almost tangible. How much longer will young audiences be satisfied with the ordinary? How long before they demand increased or supernatural powers for themselves? And will that lead to an expectation of greater human abilities that can only take the form of a totally new human reality? Are we facing the inevitable incorporation of technology into humanity itself?

Seeking to unlock the evolutionary conundrum posed by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke in
2001: A Space Odyssey
, Jack Kirby came to the conclusion that man will send robots into space rather than risk it himself. He tried repeatedly to make sense of the Star Child, only to answer with
Machine Man
. Kirby's character was not a cybernetic man, but an artificial intelligence alienated from human life. Today, however, we increasingly see efforts made, not to turn machines into people, but to turn people into machines.

Some observers label this projected reality “transhumanism,” or “posthumanism.” Its goal is to use cybernetics and nanotechnology (microscopic computers and robots ) to “perfect” the human organism. Through neuroscience, we can now control the human brain and its processes. But this sort of dabbling alarms many scientists, theologians, and philosophers. What direction will this extraordinary technology take? Will human beings end up as automatons, serving a computer-controlled hive mind like the Borg in
Star Trek?
Will artificial intelligences become self-conscious, making human beings obsolete, as in the
Terminator
films? If the 20th century has done nothing else, it has proven to us how dangerous science can be when pressed into service for inhumane purposes. There are so many questions we need to ask. Who is creating this technology? Who's paying for it? Do these people have our best interests at heart? Are they guided by love and compassion, or by power and profit?

By the same token, technology empowers and liberates us. It acts in
defiance
of the limits set by natural law. Science describes the boundaries and the limits of gravity—or of distance, or of brainpower—and technology allows us to rebel against them. In the 19th-century, the myth of the
ubermensch
expressed our desire to transcend our human limitations. Yet, in Spider-Man's first adventure, Stan Lee warned that “with great power came great responsibility.” And in
Kingdom Come
, Alex Ross showed how dangerous transhuman power could be without a moral foundation. The new mythology of the comics gives us a model to follow, a moral
compass to guide us through incredible new possibilities by allowing us to play out the potentials of super or transhuman power in a fictional setting.

We must not, however, forget the “x-factor” in all of this—the supernatural component. Before it was co-opted by opportunists like Shirley MacLaine, the New Age movement was concerned with the synthesis of ancient mysticism and modern technology.
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Even as the movement splintered, some groups sought to continue this work, most notably the New Edge movement that emerged from the 1990s cyberpunk underground. The movement, centered around the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, has also continued in this vein.