Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Iron Man, and the X-Men—the list of names as familiar as our own. They are on our movie and television screens, in our videogames and in our dreams. But what are they trying to tell us? For Grant Morrison, one of the most acclaimed writers in the world of comics, these heroes are powerful archetypes who reflect and predict the course of human existence: Through them we tell the story of ourselves. In this exhilarating work of a lifetime, Morrison draws on art, archetypes, and their own astonishing journeys through this shadow universe to provide the first true history of our great modern myth: the superhero.   Now with a new Afterword “Seventy years of superhero history with erudite analysis and autobiography thrown in—an account of what it’s like to plunge your brain into these fictional universes for decades, refusing to come up for air.”— Rolling Stone   “Morrison writes with such flair, humor and insight that Supergods may be the season’s most winning exploration of pop culture and the creative process.”— San Francisco Chronicle   “A personal and erudite history of the medium by one of its most intelligent and articulate practitioners . . . Morrison lays out the history of comics with infectious passion and amusement.”— Financial Times   “A blast, a pure hit of hero worship and deep understanding of comics as mind expansion . . . It’s hard not to be swept up in [Morrison’s] vision.”— Austin American-Statesman   “The perfect textbook for fanboys and the mainstream alike.”— USA Today Grant Morrison is best known for their innovative work on comics from the graphic novel Batman: Arkham Asylum to acclaimed runs on Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the X-Men, as well as their subversive creator-owned titles such as The Invisibles, Seaguy, The Filth and WE3 . In television, they have developed adaptations of their comic series Happy! for Syfy and Netflix and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for Peacock. In addition, Grant is an award-winning playwright, a musician, occult practitioner and stray cat magnet. They are also the author of the New York Times bestseller Supergods . Morrison was awarded an MBE for services to film and literature.  Chapter 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 COURAGE, to aid the cause of JUSTICE, to keep absolutely SECRET the SUPERMAN CODE, and to adhere to all the principles of good citizenship.   It may not 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 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 shantytowns. There were rumblings too from Europe, where the ambitious Chancellor 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 imaginative response. When the retort came, it was from the ranks of the underdogs; two shy, bespectacled, and imaginative young science fiction fans from Cleveland, who were revving up typewriter and bristol board to unleash a power greater than bombs, giving form to an ideal that would effortlessly 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 attempt 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 seek