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480 pages, Paperback
First published July 19, 2011
“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.This book was just a wonderfully pleasant surprise as I didn't have huge expectations going into it. I strongly recommend it to fans of the superhero genre as well as to those interested in a history and evolution of the comic book/graphic novel medium.
Where Alan Moore had peered beneath the masks to find frightened, confused, hopeful people very much like the rest of us, Mills found only deviants, perverts, liars and monsters. He saw superheroes as emblematic of regressive reactionary forces and disastrous foreign policy. They were America’s self-delusion, a fantasy of U.S. omnipotence that Mills despised and set about eviscerating with the glee of a revolutionary on a purge. If superheroes were the face of mythic America, Mills planned to rub their noses in the shit of real-life America—which he exposed with meticulously researched, coldly delivered info-dump captions detailing a world of CIA dirty tricks, torture camps, denial, vivisection, corrupt politics and ruined lives.That gives you an idea of both Morrison writing chops and how thoroughly he breaks down the comic form as reflected by some of its most iconic artists and writers.
"I'd found my way into a separate universe tucked inside our own, a place where dramas spanning decades and galaxies were played out across the second dimension of newsprint pages. Here men, women and noble monsters dressed in flags and struck from shadows to make the world a better place. My own world felt better already. I was beginning to understand something that gave me power over my fears"
"We live in the stories we tell ourselves. These stories are not afraid to be hopeful, not embarrassed to be optimistic, and utterly fearless in the dark. The best superhero stories deal directly with mythic elements of human experience we can all relate to, in ways that are imaginative, profound, funny and provocative. We should listen to what they have to tell us."
"I wanted more from my fictions. Naturally contrary, I'm tired of hearing about what superheroes would be like if they were real, only for it to be exactly the same as us at our worst: venal, corrupt, bemused and stupid. Realism had become confused with a particularly adolescent kind of pessimism and angry sexuality that I was beginning to find confining."
I started out thinking this was going to be a fantastic book. The well-reasoned critical discussion of comics history (for example, I had never thought to do an in-depth artistic analysis of the Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 covers) and its relation to the contemporary culture that influenced it is terrific for many chapters. Everything was going smoothly... until Grant Morrison was born.
Once Morrison reaches an era where he can access his own memories, he immediately inserts himself into the story (as he famously did during his run on Animal Man). The book becomes comics history as autobiography, relying too heavily on the books Morrison read and liked, the work he did, and the work his friends created. Once Morrison starts telling us about his experiences with psychedelic drugs, the book delves into the questions of philosophy alluded to in the subtitle (What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human). At this point, the book becomes a weird hodgepodge of sociology, history, and Eastern philosophy. Though not exactly what I expected, Supergods is still well worth reading.
I could almost forgive Morrison for the merely half-brilliant book if he hadn't been so loose with his description of the multimedia rundown of Superman's end-of-the-century escapades. He claims the mulleted version of Superman "hung on grimly until 2000," but Clark actually got a haircut in time for his wedding in 1996. (He also carelessly says Superman Returns came out in 2007, not 2006.) It might seem like I'm nitpicking, but it's a detail like that that makes me wonder if there are any other typos or misrememberings I'm not picking up on. I'm not claiming this to be true, but I'd believe that Morrison would rely on his vast knowledge of comics for facts and dates instead of rigorous fact checking. Though he is clearly grateful for the opportunity to be in the comics business, it's fairly evident that his healthy ego is the lens through which the entirety of comicdom is viewed. I wonder if Morrison felt this was really the only way to tell his life's story, by showing early comics to be his ancestors in a de facto family tree, and his ideas, comics, and predictions as his descendants. Morrison has woven himself into the fabric of comics, the medium that birthed him, as the ultimate product of the masters and the driving force of change and predictor of future trends from the '80s onward.