The Sun God and the Dark Knight
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c hapter 1 thE SUn GOD anD thE DaRk kniGht CALLING ALL RED-BLooDED YoUNG AMERICANS! this certifies that: (your name and address here) has been duly elected a MEMBER of this organization upon the pledge to do everything possible to increase his or her StRENGtH and CoUR- AGE, to aid the cause of JUStICE, to keep absolutely SECREt the SUPERMAN CoDE, and to adhere to all the principles of good citizenship. I AYt M N o t be the ten Commandments, but as a set of moral guidelines for the secular children of an age of reason, the Supermen of America creed was a start. This is the story of the founding of a new belief and its conquest of the world: With a stroke of lightning, the spark of divine inspiration ignited cheap newsprint and the superhero was born in an explosion of color and action. From the beginning, the ur-god and his dark twin presented the world with a frame through which our own best and worst impulses could be personified in an epic struggle across a larger-than-life, two-dimensional canvas upon which Excerpted from "Supergods" by Grant Morrison. Copyright © 2011 by Grant Morrison. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Morr_9781400069125_4P_all_r1.indd 3 6/3/11 1:38 PM 4 supergods our outer and inner worlds, our present and future, could be laid out and explored. They came to save us from the existential abyss, but first they had to find a way into our collective imagination. Superman was the first of the new creatures to arrive, summoned into print in 1938—nine years after the Wall Street crash triggered a catastrophic worldwide depression. In America, banks were toppled, people lost jobs and homes, and, in extreme cases, relocated to hastily convened shanty- towns. There were rumblings too from Europe, where the ambitious Chan- cellor Adolf Hitler had declared himself dictator of Germany following a triumphant election to power five years earlier. With the arrival of the first real-life global supervillain, the stage was set for the Free World’s imagina- tive response. When the retort came, it was from the ranks of the under- dogs; two shy, bespectacled, and imaginative young science fiction fans from Cleveland, who were revving up typewriter and bristol board to un- leash a power greater than bombs, giving form to an ideal that would ef- fortlessly outlast Hitler and his dreams of a Thousand Year Reich. Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster spent seven years tinkering with their Superman idea before it was ready to take on the world. Their first at- tempt at a comic strip resulted in a dystopian sci-fi story based around the idea of an evil psychic despot. The second pass featured a big, tough, but very much human good guy righting wrongs on the mean streets. Neither showed the spark of originality that publishers were seeking. Four years later, after many fruitless attempts to sellSuperman as a news- paper strip, Siegel and Shuster finally figured out how to adapt the pac- ing and construction of their stories to take full advantage of the possibilities of the new comic-book format, and suddenly this fledgling form had found its defining content. The Superman who made his debut on the cover ofAction Comics no. 1 was just a demigod, not yet the pop deity he would become. The 1938 model had the power to “LEAP ⅛th oF A MILE; HURDLE A tWENtY StoRY BUILDING . RAISE tREMENDoUS WEIGHtS . RUN FAStER tHAN AN EXPRESS tRAIN . NotHING LESS tHAN A BURStING SHELL CoULD PENEtRAtE HIS SkIN!” Although “A GE- NIUS IN INtELLECt. A HERCULES IN StRENGtH. A NEMESIS to WRoNG-DoERS,” this Superman was unable to fly, resorting instead to tremendous single bounds. He could neither orbit the world at the speed of Excerpted from "Supergods" by Grant Morrison. Copyright © 2011 by Grant Morrison. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Morr_9781400069125_4P_all_r1.indd 4 6/3/11 1:38 PM the sun god and the dark knight 5 light nor stop the flow of time. That would come later. In his youth, he was almost believable. Siegel and Shuster were careful to ground his adventures in a contemporary city, much like New York, in a fictional world haunted by the all-too-familiar injustices of the real one. The cover image that introduced the world to this remarkable charac- ter had a particular unrepeatable virtue: It showed something no one had ever seen before. It looked like a cave painting waiting to be discovered on a subway wall ten thousand years from now—a powerful, at once futuristic and primitive image of a hunter killing a rogue car. The vivid yellow background with a jagged corona of red—Superman’s colors—suggested some explosive detonation of raw power illuminating the sky. Aside from the bold Deco whoosh of the Action Comics logo, the date (June 1938), the issue (no. 1), and the price (10 cents), there is no copy and not a single mention of the name Superman. Additional words would have been superfluous. The message was succinct: Action was what DC Comics © Excerpted from "Supergods" by Grant Morrison. Copyright © 2011 by Grant Morrison. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Morr_9781400069125_4P_all_r1.indd 5 6/3/11 1:38 PM 6 supergods mattered. What a hero did counted far more than the things he said, and from the beginning, Superman was in constant motion. Back to the cover: Look at the black-haired man dressed in a tight-fitting blue and red outfit with a cape trailing behind him as he moves left to right across the drawing’s equator line. The bright shield design on his chest con- tained an S (gules on a field or, as they say down at the heraldry society). The man is captured in motion, poised on the toes of his left foot, almost taking flight as he weightlessly hefts an olive green car above his head. Using both hands, he hammers the vehicle to fragments against a conve- niently placed rocky outcrop in what appears to be a desert landscape. In the bottom left corner, a man with a blue business suit runs off the frame, clutching his head like Edvard Munch’s Screamer, his face a cartoon of gib- bering existential terror, like a man driven to the city limits of sanity by what he has just witnessed. Above his head, another man, wearing a con- servative brown two-piece, can be seen racing north to the first man’s west. A third, equally terrified, character crouches on his hands and knees, jack- etless, gaping at the feet of the superhuman vandal. His abject posture dis- plays his whimpering submission to the ultimate alpha male. There is no fourth man: His place in the lower right corner is taken by a bouncing whitewall tire torn loose from its axle. Like the bug-eyed bad guys, it too is trying its best to get away from the destructive muscleman. In any other hands but Superman’s, the green roadster on that inaugu- ral cover would boast proudly of America’s technological superiority and the wonders of mass manufacturing. Imagine the oozing ad copy: “luxu- rious whitewall tire trim makes it seem like you’re driving on whipped cream,” and black-and-white newsreel cars in mind-boggling procession, rolling off the automated belts at Ford. But this was August 1938. Produc- tion lines were making laborers redundant across the entire developed world while Charlie Chaplin’s poignant film masterpiece Modern Times articulated in pantomime the silent cry of the little fellow, the authentic man, not to be forgotten above the relentless din of the factory floor. Superman made his position plain: He was a hero of the people. The original Superman was a bold humanist response to Depression-era fears of runaway scientific advance and soulless industrialism. We would see Excerpted from "Supergods" by Grant Morrison. Copyright © 2011 by Grant Morrison. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Morr_9781400069125_4P_all_r1.indd 6 6/3/11 1:38 PM the sun god and the dark knight 7 this early incarnation wrestling giant trains to a standstill, overturning tanks, or bench-pressing construction cranes. Superman rewrote folk hero John Henry’s brave, futile battle with the steam hammer to have a happy ending. He made explicit the fantasies of power and agency that kept the little fellow trudging along toward another sunset fade-out. He was Charlie’s tramp character, with the same burning hatred of injus- tice and bullies, but instead of guile and charm, Superman had the strength of fifty men, and nothing could hurt him. If the dystopian night- mare visions of the age foresaw a dehumanized, mechanized world, Superman offered another possibility: an image of a fiercely human to- morrow that delivered the spectacle of triumphant individualism exercis- ing its sovereignty over the implacable forces of industrial oppression. It’s no surprise that he was a big hit with the oppressed.