Daily Herald - New Spin on the Superhero

Originally published in the Daily Herald, 25th October 2001

NEW SPIN ON THE SUPERHERO

by David Belcher

TERROR. Fundamentalist. Hijack. Inhuman. Zealot. We thought we had words like these pegged, but, of course, they and many more have required fresh definitions following Osama bin Laden's mass-murdering attack on New York on September 11. Now another term has come to need a tragic new meaning since the destruction of the World Trade Centre: ''Superhero.'' In particular, notions of superhuman bravery have certainly proved to be problematic for Columbia, the Hollywood movie studio. It has recently been engaged in transferring an established fictional superhero, Spider-Man, from printed cartoon-strip form to live-action representation on the screen.

It won't be until May 3 next year that America begins its celluloid celebration of Spider-Man's fortieth birthday with the finished movie's release, its cast headed by Tobey Maguire, and including Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, and Cliff Robertson. Hollywood's hype process employs a different, more pre-emptive kind of calendar, however, and it was in the summer that advance trailers for Spider-Man began appearing in US cinemas and on official websites. Unfortunately, Columbia's PR execs didn't possess powers of prescience to match the fantastic arachnoid super-talents of New York-based freelance news photographer Peter Parker, to give Spider-Man his everyday alter ego. Because the trailers depicted a twitching helicopter caught in a vast steely web spun by Spidey - a web that criss-crossed a space which no longer exists: the one between the ruined World Trade Centre's twin towers.

One man who's conscious of the current troubling status of the comic-book superhero is Glasgow-based author Grant Morrison. Having created his own group of superheroes - The Invisibles, recently optioned by Hollywood - Morrison has been engaged this year scripting the exploits of another such super-combo, The X-Men, for Spider-Man's American publishers, Marvel Comics. Marvel last week published an agonised one-off comic book response to the awful events of September 11, called Heroes. Morrison views it as a sincere attempt to make sense of what happened, but he's painfully unsure nevertheless about how any fiction can handle the rawness of such a large-scale tragedy.

British comic-book fans have yet to see Heroes for themselves. However, more than one US commentator has remarked upon the inherent mawkishness of a cartoon frame in which Captain America salutes the real-life victims of the twin towers. Morrison has wider concerns in the wake of September 11, too.

''Questions of superheroes are irrelevant now. It's obvious who are the only heroes today - the people from New York's safety services who selflessly ran into collapsing buildings to try to save other folk's lives.'' Uncannily, Morrison's August edition of The X-Men comic featured a storyline in which a large silvery-grey flying-machine propelled itself into the side of a glassy New York skyscraper, thereafter cascading hellish clouds of rubble and flame on to Times Square beneath. Morrison views this as more than an accidental conjunction of fact and fiction; as an act of the collective consciousness rather than simply a coincidence.

''I wrote the story in February this year as a deliberate means of bidding a farewell to what has latterly been the big vogue in comics - widescreen physical damage and structural carnage. ''For a lot of writers, comics can no longer be bang-bang-shoot-'em-ups or hero-and-villain wrestling matches. The most meaningful conflict isn't going to be between good and bad. ''Rather, in comics, we're beginning to address the idea that soon, thanks to cloning technology and advances in medical science, we're going to have a race of superhumans walking among us. How will they view us lesser, older mortals? ''But before this thematic development, a lot of authors had seemed to be tapping simultaneously into the same current of violence. If there really is such an awkward phrase as 'intuiting the zeitgeist', it might sum up what we were all doing.''

A keen student of comic book sci-fi history since he was a boy growing up in one of Glasgow City Council's own largely ignored proletarian twilight zones, Moss Park, Morrison knows that fictional superheroes are born of their times and not simply conjured out of thin air. ''Sales success is a cyclical process for the whole industry,'' he says. ''Marvel took on a whole bunch of us more radical and anarchic artists and writers to combat a slump the company had suffered in 1995. It has bravely allowed people like me and my partner on The X-Men, Glasgow artist Frank Quitely, to get on with doing whatever we wanted to. ''Sales are up as a result because, by 1995, the comics scene had become stale, but sales are also up because comics boom when the world is in recession. When everything's going well for everyone, sales fall. It all maybe has something to do with a greater need for escapism during times of economic uncertainty. ''It's also a fact that Batman does better when we're living in what might be termed long-haired hippie periods. Conversely, Superman thrives in short-haired authoritarian eras when folk are worried about their futures.''

Morrison's own career in comics began to flourish most fully during Britain's last most authoritarian era, under the iron heel of the Thatcherite junta, having survived a false start under the iron-heeled tartan baffie of the DC Thomson organisation, reactionary Dundonian publishers of the Sunday Post. ''At 17, I was writing a sci-fi commando series for DC Thomson called Starblazer. I remember them going mad one week when I made my hero a pacifist. 'You can't have a pacifist hero!' they shouted. I was also doing stuff for a free-form underground hippie publisher, and running a punky Beatles band called the Mixers. ''Thereafter, though, until about 1986, I spent years on the dole, writing wherever I could. I've always written, starting off at five by making little Enid Blyton-style books for my mum, and in 1986 I went professional with the British comic 2000AD. DC Comics head-hunted me for America the next year.''

One initial failure proved to be a vague kind of spur, too. ''I didn't get into Glasgow School of Art because they didn't like my rotten portfolio - Arthurian characters, Celtic knot- work, comics superheroes. Bizarrely, I've been invited back to give a formal lecture in a fortnight.'' Ironically, the acquisitive yuppie eighties were especially kind to Morrison and his innately Glaswegian brand of two-fisted, punk-rock, underclass Gothic. A spot of controversy helped him establish himself, too. ''Like everyone else at the time, I hated Margaret Thatcher - even though I was prospering under her. So I devised a strip for a Scottish magazine, Cut, called The New Adventures of Hitler. ''This was inspired by the apocryphal story that Adolf Hitler had spent part of his teenage life in Liverpool, living with relatives. I thus had Hitler's brand of Nazism having been formed by his exposure as a 16-year-old to the Sun-style philosophies of John Bull. My underlying point was that Thatcher seemed to have got her inspiration from Mein Kampf.''

Later he came up with Zenith, an eighties pop star-cum-superhero. ''As a superhero, he was really annoying,'' says Morrison blithely. ''He had no interest in fighting, he just wanted to make records with people like Pete Waterman. ''He'd try to get out of situations via cowardice and guile. It was as if Nick Kamen had been given super-powers. That's really my approach to writing: get an idea and push it to its limits . . . 'What if Nick Kamen became invulnerable to harm, how far would he go?'.''

Zenith was followed by Animal Man and Doom Patrol, before Morrison hit pay-dirt in 1990 with a hardback Batman book, Arkham Asylum. Emerging at the same time as the Batman movies, this graphic novel sold 250,000 copies in its first week. The book had a typically skewed Morrison weft to its weave: he made The Joker a transvestite. Morrison recalls an anguished transatlantic call from his publisher: '' 'People in Hollywood will think you're saying Jack Nicholson is a transvestite'.''

Lately, Morrison has been spending more time away from his dark, cat-filled, mini-mansion in Glasgow's bohemian west end, hanging in weirded-out Hollywood, discussing movie deals, feeling strangely at home. ''Hollywood's become home to the global counter-culture again,'' he says. ''Aldous Huxley lived there, plus Manson, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, and now it's home to Genesis P Orridge. Hollywood movie-makers want voodoo-weird now,'' says the shaven-headed Morrison, looking splendidly cadaverous.

There's always been a weird diversity to Morrison's work. Scottish Opera recently had him explain the plot of Cosi fan tutte for its programme notes. ''It's all about boys dressing as other guys to woo their own girlfriends, testing their faithfulness, so I did a Jerry Springer cartoon strip - I Dress Up To Two-Time Myself.''

Wherever he is and whatever he does, Morrison is always true to his upbringing. His dad is a community councillor for Corkerhill; an inveterate protester against official lassitude and inequality; against mobile phone masts, destructive ring roads, and inadequate pedestrian crossings. Indeed, Morrison senior mounted a long one-man campaign outside the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow after having been knocked down outside it. Thanks to his direct action, there is now a crossing. ''My dad's always been a radical,'' says Morrison. ''He'd been a soldier, but in the sixties he became a ban the bomb campaigner. ''The bomb dominated conversation in our house when I was a child. I think that's why I started inventing superheroes. Here was something strong enough to defeat the thing my parents feared the most - the atom bomb.''

For ''atom bomb,'' read ''terrorist hijack''. Fear: its defining image changes from generation to generation, but no society is ever rid of it. Can art triumph over our fear of conflict? ''Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,'' Winston Churchill once said. Now perhaps Grant Morrison has given rise to a new pacifist aphorism: draw-draw can mitigate the effects of bang-bang.