Of Maus and Supermen

HOW A BAND OF MARGINALIZED LITERARY LUNATICS STARTED A REVOLUTION IN POPULAR CULTURE

When the film V for Vendetta debuts this spring, viewers will discover a story of a charismatic terrorist whose motto is "People should not be afraid of their government; governments should be afraid of their people." The movie is set in London, the site of recent bombings, and arrives at a time when newspapers are full of stories about political corruption, illegal government espionage and official dissembling by the White House and Downing Street. It's not surprising when a popular film like V for Vendetta, with its questions about loyalty, freedom, control and dissent, holds up a mirror to the issues of the day. Thirty years ago, for example, Francis Ford Coppola's first two Godfather films and Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men reflected in different ways the issues of power and corruption during the Nixon years. What's surprising is that V for Vendetta's complex, ambiguous, challenging story was adapted not from best-selling fiction or nonfiction but from a comic book.

Did we say surprising? Sorry, that should have been common-place. A glance around the media landscape suggests that comics have come to rule pop culture. In Hollywood, super-heroes like Spider-Man, Batman, the X-Men and the Incredibles have routinely performed feats of box-office strength, bravely propping up studios and saving the jobs of imperiled executives. The graphic-novel-based indies A History of Violence, American Splendor and Ghost World have earned critical acclaim, and directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have delighted us with plainly comic-book-influenced films such as Kill Bill and Spy Kids. On television--besides the obvious comics-inspired hits like Smallville, The Simpsons, The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer--24 and Lost have become hugely successful by emulating the winning comic-book formula of action and serial cliff-hangers. Meanwhile a look at publishers' catalogs reveals such writers as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, whose novels are about people who love comic books; Neil Gaiman and Bruce Wagner, who cut their teeth writing comics; and Brad Meltzer and Greg Rucka, who split their time between writing thrilling novels and thrilling comics. Then there's the alternative hip-hop supergroup Gorillaz, who we're meant to believe is a crew of animated two-dimensional oddballs drawn by Jamie Hewlett, most famous for the cult comic Tank Girl. And don't get us started on video games or, for that matter, professional wrestling. (Muscular guys? Silly names? Spandex? All they need are secret identities.) Indeed, even The New York Times, still the country's weightiest cultural arbiter, began publishing long-form graphic work each week in its Sunday magazine this past fall.

Today, says Alan Moore, "no one is surprised if a comic is intelligent or turns out to have social relevance." As well as having written V for Vendetta, Moore is the widely worshipped author of such imaginative comics and graphic novels as Watchmen, Miracleman, From Hell (which inspired an unfortunately flawed Johnny Depp movie) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which inspired an execrable Sean Connery movie). He points to Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's 2000 cartoon memoir about coming of age in revolutionary Iran. "You can read the reviews without realizing it's a comic," he says. "That shows a measure of acceptance on a deep level. There's a casual acceptance of comics as an art form."

Why are we as a culture so infatuated with something seen for so long as a kids-only medium? Maybe we're hardwired to enjoy stories about adventure, evil and extraordinarily empowered individuals--maybe the Hulk is just an update of Hercules. Or maybe the skills of computer-graphics wizards have progressed to the point that we can finally see on-screen the superheroics that used to live somewhere between the page and our imagination. Or perhaps it's because the comic book, as a medium not expected to be taken seriously, enables writers to take chances. One might recoil from yet another politician referring to "the horrible events of 9/11," but when the subject is examined in Brian K. Vaughan's Ex Machina, in which a superhero saves one of the towers and is elected New York City's mayor, it somehow feels fresh and even poignant.

Of course, it was not always thus. We're 20 years into a renaissance in this medium, one that began with a creative moment in 1986 when the superhero traditions established by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s collided head-on with the edgy sensibilities of Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar and other practitioners from the underground "comix" scene. Prior to 1986 comics were by and large kids' stuff. The epic struggles between good and evil, between Spidey and Doc Ock or the X-Men and Magneto, reflect a view of a world populated by pathetically ordinary guys who secretly have amazing powers and really big muscles and by women with perfect breasts. The stories can largely be read as revenge fantasies of outsider adolescents. But take Kirby's bold, cinematic illustration, extend Lee's superheroes-should-have-a-human-weakness approach until your characters have all the insecurities and venality we expect in human nature, and then toss in Crumb's willingness to damn the censors and go wherever the subject matter leads, and you have more than a renaissance on your hands. You have new stories that gleefully leap over the heads of young readers to portray transsexual disco-queen shamans, to imagine the creator of the universe returning to earth as a vengeful overlord and to create superheroes who are fearful, disillusioned and neurotic in distinctly adult ways. Before 1986, says Neil Gaiman, author of the landmark Sandman series, comics "attempted to do two things: tell great stories and make 15-year-old boys happy. The joy of Alan Moore's Watchmen is that Alan doesn't care about making 15-year-old boys happy." Liberated from their adolescent audience, comics came into their own as a cultural force that would shape the next two decades of entertainment.

What made 1986 so significant? Simply this: Three unique, groundbreaking works were published in that single calendar year. First was Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a comic that took the heretical step of completely reimagining an icon of the genre, the venerable Batman. Though a much beloved character, Batman had fallen on hard times. First the censorious Comics Code Authority cleaned up his noir exploits in the 1950s; then television turned him into a punch line in the 1960s. Miller, a pulp-fiction lover, rechristened Batman in the blood of young Bruce Wayne's murdered parents. His new Batman is a brutal, obsessive vigilante with enough emotional baggage to fill the Queen Mary; he has no literal superpowers, just intelligence, training and an indomitable will. The city where he acted as self-appointed judge and executioner also changed, to a grittier Gotham littered with violent, nihilistic gangs. Miller's vision was a sharp stick in the eye to the neutered, campy Batman and to simplistic superheroes and limp plots generally.

In the second seminal work from 1986, Watchmen, Moore also looked at superheroes, but where Miller saw dark, Moore saw boring. Superheroes had been there and done that. They'd all met their evil nemeses, chased their elusive love interests and been forced to fight their best friends several dozen times over. There was nowhere to go but down--and Moore was more than happy to take them there. In Watchmen he turned a Justice League-like band of superheroes into a group of aging sad-sack has-beens who come out of retirement when someone starts assassinating their erstwhile colleagues. (Tracing the similarities with a certain recent Pixar film will be left as an exercise for the reader.) Normal citizens who dress funny and take the law into their own hands seem scary and unbalanced in Watchmen rather than heroic, and the one legitimate superhuman character (who gets his powers in an A-bomb experiment gone horrifically awry) is depressed, disappointed with the human race and unenthusiastic about his job as a one-man Cold War trump card. Not only did Watchmen upset the comic-book status quo, it also produced characters to whom an adult reader could actually relate, even if they wore their underwear on the outside. Dark, depressing and shot through with the pathos of lonely men past their prime, Watchmen made more than one Simpsons-esque comic-book guy take a long hard look in the mirror. Susanna Clarke, author of 2005's best-selling Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, cites Watchmen as a favorite work, alongside Jane Austen's Emma. "The first time I read Watchmen, I could not put it down. It is simply virtuoso."

The third book in this revolutionary trilogy was Maus, Art Spiegelman's wrenching depiction of his father's experiences in the Holocaust, which fully displayed the medium's humanistic capabilities. Had Maus been written as a traditional novel, its graphic, wretched scenarios would have been difficult to take in, but by using a visual-language conceit--Jews are rendered as mice, Nazis as cats and Poles as pigs--Spiegelman insulates us just enough from the horror so that we can keep reading. With that layer of protection we are allowed to come close enough to true evil to smell its corpse-stained breath. The New York Times Book Review called it "a remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness," and for its profound subject matter, vision and bravery, Maus was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize, signaling the beginning of the literary mainstream's acceptance of comics as a legitimate part of its world.

What followed in the wake of this wave of originality was an explosion of imagination. A world of comic-book freaks had just had their horizons obliterated, and the most original and ambitious of them sought to create the next phase of comics themselves. A swarm of talented young writers and artists descended on the industry and in short order produced books about travels in the earth's collective dreamworld (Gaiman's The Sandman), punk occult warriors with killer fashion sense (Grant Morrison's The Invisibles), a drug-addled Hunter S. Thompson manqué wreaking political havoc in the far future (Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan) and a Super-friends analogue in which the characters modeled after Batman and Superman are gay lovers (Ellis's The Authority).

Key in this flowering was editor Karen Berger, who had worked with Moore when he was radically reenvisioning the exhausted Swamp Thing series as a horror franchise. After working with him, Berger had a hunch that Moore and other upstarts from the British Isles could teach Americans how to fully exploit a U.S.-born medium, as had happened with rock music. She recalls, "I said to myself, There's this whole world of untapped talent over there. Let's have these guys reinvent what we do." Moore remembers Berger asking him "if there were any more at home like me. I said I'd pass on their names. The first person who presented himself to me, by a fluke of luck, was Neil Gaiman."

At that point Gaiman was a 26-year-old freelance journalist who had written an article about the burgeoning graphic-novel revolution for the Sunday Times of London. When the piece came in, the editor seemed puzzled. "He said, 'These comics--you seem to think they're a good thing?' " Gaiman remembers with a smile. "I said, 'I don't think I can change the piece to be the way you want it. You've got a renaissance going on right now.'" Impressed by that attitude, Berger set Gaiman to work on what would become the epic series The Sandman, which spans vast eras of human history to follow Morpheus, ruler of the dreamworld, as he intercedes in the lives of the mortals who visit his realm each night. Startlingly original and unapologetically literary, The Sandman became a huge success; by the end of its run it was outselling Superman and Batman.

Its massive impact allowed Berger to establish the Vertigo imprint within DC Comics in 1993. Soon she had assembled a stable of writers that included Morrison, Ellis and Garth Ennis (author of Preacher). Before Vertigo, says Gaiman, "there was nothing in comics that was fantasy, that was horror, that was funky science fiction." With Vertigo, grownups finally had a comics publisher on their side. "We're the HBO of comics," says Berger. "We do smart, original stuff of a certain quality. People who like indie films, good music or contemporary fiction tend to gravitate to our stuff."

As it turned out, being the most influential publisher of comics for adults is good business. The 10 collections of Gaiman's Sandman series continue to sell. With each volume costing approximately $20, it's not such a stretch to think of the series as one $200 book bought in sections. Vertigo now has several of these almost-pure-profit machines reliably pumping cash into the company and allowing it to take chances on the kind of titles a sophisticated readership responds to.

Film, of course, has been one of the chief beneficiaries of comics' rebirth. Before the 1990s, movie adaptations of comics were almost guaranteed to be awful. The Christopher Reeve Superman movies were played for nostalgia, and even though Tim Burton's Batman had visual panache and Michael Keaton playing the caped crusader with a grim irritability, little of the ingrained psychosis of Miller's vision came to the fore. "I think Burton never really wanted to do a movie about Batman," says TV, film and comics writer J. Michael Straczynski. "He wanted to do a movie about the Joker."

But starting with Bryan Singer's X-Men, in 2000, Hollywood began to get comics right. Hugh Jackman's Wolverine was really angry; Ian McKellen's Magneto wasn't so much pure evil as he was a follower of an opposing ideology, which he had ample motivation for advocating. Since then two Spider-Man movies have provided us with a hero we can relate to, along with visuals that for the first time really seem to capture the panel-exploding exuberance of their source material. Last year Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins foregrounded the tortured psychological drama that gives The Dark Knight its grit while showing the ties that link ordinary feelings and events to heroic behavior.

And it's not just movies about Super-friends. After helping Batman return to his roots in hard-boiled detective fiction, Miller went there himself in the 1990s and created the Sin City series, in which he used bold black-and-white graphics to explore the comic-book industry's origins in pulp fiction and film noir. His panels were sufficiently cinematic to be used as storyboards for the 2005 film. Last year's A History of Violence, nominated for a best drama Golden Globe, was directed by the always inventive David Cronenberg but began life as a graphic novel by John (concluded on page 126)Of Maus(continued from page 76) Wagner. A testament to the strength of the material is that Cronenberg had no idea the screenplay was based on a graphic novel until after he began shooting. Another filmic contemplation of violence and its effects, 2002's Road to Perdition, directed by Oscar winner Sam Mendes and starring Oscar winner Tom Hanks, also came from a graphic novel. Both Daniel Clowes's Ghost World and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor became indie faves.

It helps that today, as Straczynski puts it, "you have executives who understand comics." It also helps that graphic novels, with their smaller budgets and ease in finding niche audiences, offer would-be filmmakers something of a safety net. The bidirectional crossover potential between comics and movies is illustrated by the saga of The Fountain, a tale about the fountain of youth written by Darren Aronofsky, the daring director of the critically acclaimed films Pi and Requiem for a Dream. When interviewed in April 2005, Aronofsky said of The Fountain, "If Hollywood gives me a problem with it, I'll make a comic book out of it." It did, and he did. Then suddenly the film was back on. The graphic novel is available now, with the movie scheduled for later this year. Both take place in the same world but feature different, complementary plotlines. "Screenwriting is a particularly frustrating trade sometimes," says Paul Levitz, president of DC Comics. "A lot of the writers say, 'Oh, there's this other field that's visual where my work actually comes out.'"

Something about comics seems to encourage versatility. Since The Sandman, Gaiman has come to personify comics' influence on the mainstream. He has become a best-selling novelist (Anansi Boys), children's-book author, (The Wolves in the Walls) and screenwriter (he wrote indie favorite MirrorMask and co-wrote Robert Zemeckis's adaptation of Beowulf), and he is slated to direct a film from his comic Death's Day. He also still writes comics. When he returned to the Sandman world with the Endless Nights collection in 2003, the book instantly hit the New York Times best-seller list.

A flood of celebrated writers from television, film and books are now happily plunging into what was once a mocked medium, including Joss Whedon, the man behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who has written two years of Astonishing X-Men; best-selling author Brad Meltzer, who wrote Identity Crisis for DC; and director Kevin Smith, who scripted issues of Daredevil and Green Arrow. Novelist and culture critic Douglas Rushkoff just started the Bible-themed Testament for Vertigo. Greg Rucka wrote two superb thrillers, A Gentlemen's Game and Private Wars, based on the Queen and Country comics, and is now writing Supergirl for DC. Michael Chabon oversees a title based on the Escapist, the hero he invented in his Pulitzer Prize--winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and Jonathan Lethem, whose novel The Fortress of Solitude delves into the instrumental role comics played in a childhood friendship, is set to revive Omega the Unknown for Marvel. Says DC's Levitz, "Thirty years ago novelists would write comics by another name. As comics have moved to be perceived as a more literary art form, people are comfortable saying, 'On Monday I worked on my comic book; on Tuesday I worked on my novel.'" Straczynski, who created Babylon 5 and now writes Squadron Supreme and several Marvel superhero titles, says, "I put comics on such a high pedestal. I had worked in TV for years, on The Twilight Zone and Murder, She Wrote, but when I sold my first comic I was jumping up and down."

So what does a world transformed by comics look like now that we're 20 years down the road from 1986's annus mirabilis and the holy trinity? Well, the beauty of a revolution that has only just turned 20 is that its instigators are still working. Moore's recent Promethea is a dazzlingly imaginative piece of metafiction. Miller received a co-directing credit on 2003's Sin City movie and recently revived his black-hearted muse for The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Spiegelman put out the slim, powerful In the Shadow of No Towers, a meditation on the 9/11 attacks. In other words, they've all still got it.

But a new generation of authors on the newsstands owes a great debt to them. In the brutal characters, lowlife situations and lyrical, streetwise dialogue of Brian Azzarello's 100 Bullets (for our money, the best currently ongoing series), you can sense echoes of Miller. The revisionism of Straczynski's Supreme Power, which retells Superman's origin story in an alternate world where the government--rather than Ma and Pa Kent--first discovers baby Kal-El, bears the unmistakable mark of Watchmen. And every couple of years we're treated to a new book from Joe Sacco, chronicling his firsthand experiences in war zones by employing a generous eye and ear that don't flinch from devastation, torture or the banality of evil. He'd be a Spiegelman for today's readers if we didn't already have one.

Though it seems everyone loves comics these days, not everyone is thrilled about their induction into the mainstream. "You miss the energy of the gutter," Gaiman says. "One of the things that allowed me to do The Sandman was that nobody was looking and nobody cared. We were making pop music for the long-haired people who turned up that evening." Of course, we hear this complaint any time an underground medium is discovered, but whether their creators like it or not, thousands of copies of The Sandman and Watchmen are sold to newly minted fans each year--they're now ultra-popular masterpieces, ubiquitous as Sgt. Pepper's and Dark Side of the Moon. Back when these books were written, though, the key players didn't think they were doing anything significant; they were just trying to do something interesting. "I knew Moore was raising the bar, that he was doing intelligent work, that he was treating comics like any other form of contemporary fiction," Berger says. "But we didn't know he was transforming this industry, which is what he did." Here's to that, and to the next 20 years of kickass comics.

Moving pictures

When traveling in the world of the graphic novel, it helps to have a few Landmarks to Steer by, consider this your road map

Black Hole

Charles Burns's meditation on sex, drugs and 1970s teens takes a horror-movie approach to the topic of becoming an adult. Ten years in the making and worth every minute.

Batman: The dark knight returns

In Frank Miller's grimy vision of Gotham, Batman gets his balls back--and no one's going to take them again.

Ex Machina

Brian K. Vaughan's ripped-from-the-tabloids tale tells how an engineer with the power to talk to machines saves one of the World Trade Center towers and gets elected mayor of New York. Also worth reading: Vaughan's Y: The Last Man.

From Hell

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell spin a complex literary detective story about Jack the Ripper.Aimed at those who don't believe in tidy solutions, the book goes so far beyond the movie you'll wonder why Johnny Depp bothered.

The Invisibles

Never has a book had so much fun being deadly serious. The frightening thing is, Grant Morrison says the magic, time travel and freaky sex are autobiographical.

Like a Velvet Glove cast in iron

A disturbing, paranold masterpiece involving an estranged wife, a bondage flick and a cult, by Ghost World author Daniel Clowes.

Love & Rockets'

Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez began by depicting outer space adventures and ended up writing about lesbian punk rockers. Come for the copious cheesecake, stay for the barrio realism. Start with the recent collection Locas.

Maus I and II

Two volumes that will slice you clean open. Art Spiegelman uses his father's horrific memories of living through the Holocaust to take us on a clear-eyed tour of the cruelest moments of the 20th century. Stunning.

100 Bullets

Brian Azzarello's breakout hit gives beaten-down people a gun, 100 untraceable bullets and evidence of who screwed them over. A meditation on money, power and morality.

The Quitter

Harvey Pekar fundamentally does not like himself. Fortunately a lot of other people do. An appropriately prickly place to get to know the antiheroof American Splendor.

Safe area Gorazde

In this pioneering work of comics-based reporting, Joe Sacco chronicles with pictures and words the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. Humanizing and heartbreaking, this is New Journalism with word balloons.

The Sandman

Neil Gaiman's long-running series made cool comics fantastical and fantastical comics cool. Collected in 10 volumes, The Sandman is a modern myth, as well as a precis on why the stories we tell matter so much. Start with Brief Lives.

Transmetropolitan

Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson take a Hunter S. Thompson analogue and put his through a 23rd century wringer. It's angry political sci-fi, and it's funny as hell.

Watchmen

If you need to know why we're fans of Alan Moore's magnum opus, we put all our superlatives in the piece at left. Just buy it, for heaven's sake.