Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes - Softcover

Knowles, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1578634067 ISBN 13: 9781578634064

Publisher: Weiser Books, 2007

Synopsis

From occult underground to superhero! Was Superman's arch nemesis Lex Luthor based on Aleister Crowley? Can Captain Marvel be linked to the Sun gods on antiquity? In Our Gods Wear Spandex, Christopher Knowles answers these questions and brings to light many other intriguing links between superheroes and the enchanted world of estoerica.

Occult students and comic book fans alike will discover countless fascinating connections, from little known facts such as that DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz started his career as H.P. Lovecraft's agent, to the tantalizingly extensive influence of Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy on the birth of comics, to the mystic roots of Superman. The book also traces the rise of the comic superheroes and how they relate to several cultural trends in the late 19th century, specifically the occult explosion in Western Europe and America.

Knowles reveals the four basic superhero archetypes the Messiah, the Golem, the Amazon, and the Brotherhood and shows how the occult Bohemian underground of the early 20th century provided the inspiration for the modern comic book hero. With the popularity of occult comics writers like Invisibles creator Grant Morrison and V for Vendetta creator Alan Moore, the vast ComiCon audience is poised for someone to seriously introduce them to the esoteric mysteries. Chris Knowles is doing just that in this epic book.

Chapters include: Ancient of Days, Ascended Masters, God and Gangsters, Mad Scientists and Modern Sorcerers, and many more. From the ghettos of Prague to the halls of Valhalla to the Fortress of Solitude and the aisles of BEA and ComiCon, this is the first book to show the inextricable link between superheroes and the enchanted world of esoterica.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Knowles has worked in the comics industry for over 20 years, as both an artist and writer. He worked with Robert Smigel on The X Presidents graphic novel, based on the popular Saturday Night Live cartoon, and has created designs and artwork for many of the world's top superheroes and fantasy characters. Presently associate editor and contributing writer for the award-winning magazine Comic Book Artist and a contributing writer to Classic Rock Magazine.


Joseph Michael Linsner is creator of popular comic book goddess Dawn, has painted covers for many of the major comic book companies, and more recently a collaborator with comics maestro Stan Lee. He resides in Atlanta.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

OUR GODS WEAR SPANDEX

THE SECRET HISTORY OF COMIC BOOK HEROES

By CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JOSEPH MICHAEL LINSNER

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Copyright © 2007 Christopher Knowles
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57863-406-4

Contents

I Want to Believe
Part I: Superheroes, Reborn
CHAPTER 1. LOOK, UP IN THE SKY
CHAPTER 2. KINGDOM COME
CHAPTER 3. THE CULT OF THE SUPERHERO
Part II: Ancient Mysteries
CHAPTER 4. DAWN OF THE GODS
CHAPTER 5. AN EMPIRE OF THE MIND
CHAPTER 6. SECRET SECTS
CHAPTER 7. THE VICTORIAN OCCULT EXPLOSION
CHAPTER 8. OCCULT SUPERSTARS
Part III: Pulp Fiction
CHAPTER 9. LITERARY LUMINARIES
CHAPTER 10. THE PULPS
CHAPTER 11. RACONTEURS
Part IV: The New Gods
CHAPTER 12. FAMOUS FUNNIES
CHAPTER 13. WHO WILL SAVE US?
CHAPTER 14. THE MESSIAHS
CHAPTER 15: THE SILVER AGE SCIENCE HEROES
CHAPTER 16. THE GOLEMS
CHAPTER 17. THE AMAZONS
CHAPTER 18. THE BROTHERHOODS
CHAPTER 19. WIZARDS REDUX
Part V: Gods and Men
CHAPTER 20. THE VISIONARIES
CHAPTER 21. THE DREAM LAB: COMICS AND THE FUTURE
CHAPTER 22. CONCLUSION: THE GODS WITHIN US
Bibliography
Index

CHAPTER 1

LOOK, UP IN THE SKY

INVOCATION

Suddenly, superheroes are everywhere. Superman, Batman, and the X-Men rule thebox office, with the Spider Man movies alone earning almost $2.5 billion dollarsworldwide. Superhero-themed shows like Heroes, The 4400, Smallville, and Kyle XYare major cult hits on TV. All across the world, superheroes can be seen on t-shirts,lunch boxes, backpacks, and bedclothes. The superhero industry is verybig business indeed, in many ways bigger than ever.

The modern superhero came to life in the midst of the Great Depression and atthe dawn of the Second World War. Americans were afraid, and superheroesprovided a means of comfort and escape. Superman, the first of the greatsuperheroes, didn't fight robots or space aliens in his early adventures; hefought the villains that people were really worried about at the time:gangsters, corrupt politicians, fascists, and war profiteers. After PearlHarbor, superheroes became the mascots of the war effort. Comic books enjoyedcirculations in the millions during the war, and were essential reading materialfor G.I.s overseas.

The story is as old as time; we only call on our gods when we need them. Whenlife is easy, we ignore them. The prophetic books of the Bible are full of wild-eyedvisionaries wandering in from the desert and shouting down the people forneglecting Jehovah when the granaries were full. Likewise, we can chart thefortunes of comic-book heroes in American culture by the rise and fall of publicconfidence and sense of well-being.

The comics boom brought on by Batmania in the late 1980s, for instance,reflected a feeling of genuine terror in urban America fueled by the crackepidemic and the explosion of gang violence that accompanied it. Comic-bookcreators responded to headlines in the New York Post and other crime-driventabloids and set their four-color vigilantes to work against drug gangs,smugglers, and assorted other street thugs. In the happy-go-lucky Clinton years,however, the popularity of superheroes dropped to its lowest ebb. That would allchange on September 11, 2001.

There was a brief moment in time after the World Trade Center towers camecrashing down when the world seemed as clear and unambiguous as a superherocomic. Once again, there were good guys and bad guys, villains and victims. Theevents of 9/11 tapped into a deep-seated need for something or someone to savethe civilized world from a faceless, nameless evil that had the power to wreakinstant havoc—a kind of destruction previously seen only in comic books orcomic-book inspired movies. To fight these invisible demons, we needed gods. Andindeed, once again, the comic-book industry rebounded—supplying a confused andterror-driven nation with superheroes who would put things to right.

DECLINE AND FALL

But just two years before 9/11, the superhero industry was on its knees.Thousands of comic-book specialty stores evaporated in a slow but inexorabledecline that began in 1994, caused by rampant profiteering and a glut of themost poorly written and drawn comics in the history of the medium. Shell-shockedfans now refer to those dark times as the "Chromium Age"—a time when tackygimmicks like covers printed on chromium plastic enticed hobbyists to buymultiple copies of unreadable comics in hopes that their resale value wouldtriple or quadruple. Some fans actually believed that they would get rich on"hot" books, even though tens of thousands of other speculators had also boughtdozens of copies. It was a shameless pyramid scheme, one in which onlypublishers and retailers profited. In the end, it only discredited the mediumand hastened the industry's decline. The rise of hi-res video games, home video,and the Internet also threatened the future of the poor, humble comic book.

Comics had been to the brink before, when plummeting sales had threatened thefuture of the industry in the 1970s. They were saved by the introduction of the"direct market" system, a distribution model in which publishers were guaranteedsales from specialty retailers who bought the books outright, rather than onconsignment. In return, the retailers kept the books they didn't sell as backissues and were offered a greater discount for their trouble.

Freed from the crushing financial weight of unsold product and the restrictionsof the censorious Comics Code Authority (see chapter 15), creators began toexperiment with more mature and challenging storylines. In fact, many of thethemes that attract millions of moviegoers today have their roots in the groundbreakingstories of the 1980s. Sales began to climb as the content became moresophisticated. These mature works drew in new fans while retaining the interestof older readers who, in the past, usually abandoned comics as they left theirteens. Publishers retained the services of talented artists and writers, whomight otherwise have left the field for more lucrative work. And royalty andprofit-sharing programs allowed top creators to actually get rich. As a result,the 1980s saw a renaissance in American comics.

All this money, however, became the root cause of comics' near-death experiencein the 1990s. Titles like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen not onlyearned big sales, but they also attracted the interest of the mainstream media.A new breed of creator arose, motivated almost entirely by the money. Many ofthem were talented and sincere; many were not. But too many of the talentlessquickly learned the art of making a sale. At the same time, publishers abandonedlong-held standards intended to prevent comic characters from being overexposedor misrepresented. Combine these trends with the artificially inflated sale ofback issues, and the floodgates were open.

By the early 1990s, publishers like Image, Acclaim, and Malibu were pushing asort of crack-cocaine version of superheroes. The model was created by formerMarvel artist Rob Liefeld, who developed a garish vocabulary of visual gimmickscalculated to excite gullible fans. Instead of sleek, idealized athletes withcolorful-yet-tasteful outfits, superheroes became a riot of bulging veins andballooned muscles, absurd punk-influenced costumes, cybernetic limbs, andgrotesque automatic weapons. Their faces were invariably frozen in grimacingexpressions of hate, and they all seemed bent on death and mayhem for its ownsake. Stories became nothing but incomprehensible jumbles of action poses,poorly choreographed fight scenes, and explosions. The trend spread, until eventhe august heroes of Marvel and DC Comics were being done Liefeld style, and theentire market became saturated with promotional gimmicks—variant covers,chromium covers, diecut covers—whose only purpose was to move product.

The turning point came in 1993 with DC Comics' "Death of Superman" stunt inSuperman #75, which sold millions and brought thousands of new customers intocomic stores. The ill-fated marketing ploy left a sour aftertaste, however. Truefans knew DC would never leave their signature character dead, and finallyrealized they were being ripped off. By the middle of the decade, thousands ofretailers found themselves buried under piles of unsold product; many storessimply went under. Yet, publishers simply continued spewing out more of the samegarbage.

Things went from bad to worse. Batman and Robin, the nearly unwatchable 1997film directed by Joel Schumacher, brought the Batman franchise to its knees andnearly took the Warner Brothers empire down with it. This was followed by astring of superhero flops like Judge Dredd, Tank Girl, and The Phantom thatthreatened the future of the entire "comic-book movie" genre. There is an ironicsymmetry to this, for it was the success of the first Batman film in 1989 thatlaunched one of the most feverish booms in the comic-book industry's fifty-yearhistory, just as the success of the Batman TV series had done in 1966.

CHAPTER 2

KINGDOM COME

In 1996, two creators decided they had had enough. One was Alex Ross, anastonishingly talented painter and preacher's son from Texas. Ross grew upobsessing over the work of classic illustrators like Andrew Loomis and NormanRockwell, and the music of the classically trained rock band Queen. His greatpassion, however, was for the noble, self-sacrificing superheroes of the so-calledSilver Age of comic books (1957–1970). Ross burst onto the comic-bookscene in 1994 with a series entitled Marvels, in which he presented MarvelComics' most popular heroes in his graceful and impressionistic, yetphotorealistic, style. Ross' noble characters had an immediate effect, makingall the other superhero comics look ugly and cynical by comparison.

With the help of another ornery Southerner (dialogue writer Mark Waid), Rossdeclared war on the Chromium Age. His 1996 epic mini-series Kingdom Come isnothing less than an apocalyptic tract, awash in fiery Biblical wrath. The storypresents a world in which the old-school superheroes (Superman, Batman, Flash,Wonder Woman, and others) are either in forced retirement or operatingunderground. In their place, a new generation of heroes arises—violent maniacswho spend most of their time engaging in pointless battles with each other.Foremost among these is Magog, a none-too-subtle parody of Rob Liefeld's mostsuccessful creation, Cable. During one of their meleés, this new breed of heroescauses a nuclear accident that irradiates the Midwestern farm belt and reducesit to a wasteland. Savvy readers recognized this as a metaphor for what the newbreed of superhero comic was doing to the medium and the market.

Alarmed by this, Superman emerges from retirement and reassembles DC's JusticeLeague. In an eye-grabbing series of battles, Superman and the League descendfrom the heavens like archangels and smash the new breed of super-poweredlunatics, finally placing them in an enormous gulag in the radioactive wastelandof Kansas. Superman's arch-foe, Lex Luthor, has other plans, however. Luthorassembles his own band of heroes (led by a mind-controlled Captain Marvel) tofight the League. The climax comes when Superman and the more-powerful Captainengage in battle, while nuclear missiles meant to destroy all super-poweredbeings rain down from the heavens. At the very last moment, Captain Marvel tearshimself free from the influence of the mind control and summons lightning fromthe heavens to destroy the missiles in mid-flight. He dies in the act. The storyends with peace on Earth and Wonder Woman pregnant with Superman's child.Kingdom Come marked the end of the Chromium Age, even though it would be severalyears before the comics market recovered from the damage it had wrought. Thebook is remarkable, however, for another reason. Kingdom Come—perhaps more thanany other comic book in history—delineates what superheroes are to their mostdevoted fans. They are nothing less than gods.

THE HERO AS MESSIAH

Ross and Waid clearly depict the Captain—a discorporate entity incarnated byoccult magic—as the new Christ. Though Superman is the book's star, Marvel isthe linchpin of the series, and his death is the salvation of mankind. InKingdom Come, Captain Marvel is endowed with an invulnerable, almost totemic,power.

In many ways, Captain Marvel is the ultimate icon of wish-fulfillment. A youngorphan, Billy Batson, accidentally stumbles on a great wizard in an undergroundchamber. The wizard then teaches him a magical incantation that gives the boythe powers of a god. Captain Marvel isn't stained by the faults and foibles ofordinary heroes. His costume, with its royal, militaristic flourishes, is moredignified than Superman's longjohns. Nor is he saddled with the psychologicalbaggage that figures like Batman and Spider-Man carry. It's no surprise, then,that he was the favorite character of the most important creator in the historyof superhero comics, Jack Kirby. Two of Kirby's most iconic characters, theMighty Thor and OMAC, borrow heavily from Captain Marvel, as does Kirby'ssignature character, Captain America. And it is probably no coincidence that twoother pivotal creators, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, began their careers writingfor Captain Marvel's British counterpart, Marvelman.

Kingdom Come summoned the spirit of Captain Marvel because its creators feltthat his absence—or rather, the absence of what he represented—was destroyingsomething they loved. The grim and gritty superheroes of Rob Liefeld and his mobof coconspirators—dark, violent vigilantes like Wolverine and The Punisher—wereno longer even likable, never mind admirable or worth emulating. The catalystfor this trend was Frank Miller's 1986 graphic novel, Batman: The Dark KnightReturns (or simply Dark Knight).

Dark Knight was a relentlessly brutal look at urban violence, seasoned withheavy doses of crypto-fascist propagandizing and sexually transgressive imagery.The book's apocalyptic fury (complete with nuclear warfare) had the emotionalimpact of a bludgeon, and soon all of comicdom was following suit. Superheroesbegan to shed their naive, kid-friendly aura, and soon became up-to-the-minuteurban warriors. This appealed to inner-city youths, many black and Hispanic, whowere living through similar mayhem in their own neighborhoods. Indeed, the bulkof new readers who came into the comic-book market in the late 1980s were urban.American cities were in the midst of an existential crisis, and it is in timeslike these that gods appear. Likewise, it is probably no accident that thecomics boom began to wane as the crack epidemic and the horrific gun violencethat accompanied it began to ease in the mid 90s.

The landscape changed, however, when the tragedy of 9/11 struck. Politicans andpundits alike responded to the event with a calculated series of statements andactions that seem lifted straight from the pages of Superman or The X-Men. Andthe comic-book industry wasted no time rising to the occasion. A series ofcommemorative magazines and comics quickly flooded the racks, featuring Marvel'stop characters reacting to the tragedy.

The following summer, a big-screen adaptation of Spider-Man hit the screen. Thedamage done to Manhattan by the Green Goblin in that film tapped into the primalfear unleashed on that beautiful September morning, and Spider-Man's eventualvictory guaranteed that the movie would become a box-office juggernaut. Thetrauma of 9/11 explains why the film packed the visceral punch it did. As wewatch Spider-Man triumph over the forces of chaos and evil, in some sense thepsychic damage done on that day is repaired. And those primal fears stilllinger. Witness the success of the 2005 Batman Begins, which also featuredsimilar acts of apocalyptic mayhem wreaked on Gotham City.

HOLLYWOOD HOMEGROWN HEROES

The box office success of superheroes has led many movie studios and animationfirms to attempt to build their own superhero properties from scratch. SpaceGhost, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, The Mighty Isis, The Greatest American Hero,Thundarr the Barbarian, The Thundercats, Darkman, Dark Angel, Meteor Man, andM.A.N.T.I.S. are all examples of this. Most of these attempts, however, havebeen short-lived. There have also been movie characters that are superheroes inall but name—Terminator and Rambo, for instance. But there is something aboutthe medium of the comic book that seems to be the best incubator for oursubstitute gods. People seem to sniff out the insincerity of these prefabHollywood properties. And insincerity is instant death for a superhero—or a god,for that matter.

The two films that have successfully created superheroes from the ground up havedrawn heavily on comic books to do so. In 1999, The Matrix was created by twocomic-book-fans-turned-movie-directors, Andy and Larry Wachowski. The brothersenlisted two flashy comic-book artists, Geoff Darrow and Steve Skroce, to helpthem develop their concepts. In fact, Darrow and Skroce essentially created acomic book out of the script. The directors then used the comic book to pitchthe film. The Matrix also drew heavily on religious mysticism and cyberpunkscience fiction, effectively creating the first Gnostic, computer-hacking, ZenBuddhist superhero in Neo, played by Keanu Reeves. After writing and producinganother big-budget movie based on a comic book (V for Vendetta) in 2006, theWachowskis took the plunge and started their own comic-book line, BurlymanEntertainment.

A more family-oriented band of heroes, The Incredibles, was created by animatorBrad Bird for the computer-animation studio Pixar. This heroic family was eithera tribute to or a blatant knockoff of Marvel's Fantastic Four, depending on youroutlook.

Efforts have also been made to present superheroes in film and on televisionwithout all of the iconic trappings (i.e., Spandex). M. Night Shamalayan's filmUnbreakable (2000) posited the existence of real-life superheroes who areunaware of their powers. More recently, the cable series The 4400 has presenteda new race of humans, who are given superpowers by scientists from the future inorder to prevent a projected disaster. The series, however, draws heavily on TheX-Men, in that the 4400 are endowed with individualized powers and are perceivedby the government and the society at large as an existential threat. Followingin this tradition, NBC's smash-hit series Heroes (co-produced by top comicswriter Jeph Loeb) has made these everyday superheroes sexy.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from OUR GODS WEAR SPANDEX by CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JOSEPH MICHAEL LINSNER. Copyright © 2007 Christopher Knowles. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Weiser Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1578634067
• ISBN 13: 9781578634064
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Linsner Joseph Michael
• Number of pages: 256