Full disclosure: I am a rather large comic book fan. I am that dork in glasses who will sit in a superhero movie and tell my friends that “this is totally wrong”. They all love me. Really. Anyway, I love them, especially superhero comics. Oh I like my fair share of those quirky indie comics, noir comics, and whatever the hell Dave Sims is doing with “Glamourpuss”. But superheroes are my bread and butter, simply because it as a genre can completely disregard reality and run wild with whatever comes out of the creator’s head. Giant flying squid that shoots lazers from its tentacles and craps candy? Bam! You got it as a villain in a five issue Green Lantern miniseries. Ultradimensional Sphinx? No problem. The only limitation to the insanity is the amount of high end hallucinogenics that the writer can afford. And when it comes to the stash size, I am almost positive that no one has as big a pillowcase of the stuff as Grant Morrison. To wit: the man created a character in an early series which was a sentient, transvestite street named Danny that could teleport from place to place. Yeah, this is not your run of the mill comic book weirdness, this is comic book weirdness kicking back several tabs of acid and a hit of PCP and then engaging in a multi-state freeway chase from the authorities. All of which is great, but weirdness only can go so far, without anything to ground it. By and large, while the craziness and fierce rejection of banality is a large part of why I love comics, but without any emotional grounding is just like a Bruckheimer movie: sound and fury with little else. Morrison has an uncanny ability to be able to smoothly shift from the crazy to the real in a moments. All of which leads to the panel above. Recently Morrison wrote All-Star Superman, for DC comics. For this 12 issue series, Morrison could wrote an out of continuity Superman story, wherein the Man of Steel is actually poisoned by the sunlight that powers him, and he is dying. Towards the end of the series, Superman is engaging in a series of labors to try and make sure the world is alright when he is gone. He manages to perform incredible things by the sheer fact that he is Superman. He uses his advanced scientific knowledge to even create a miniature universe. Even while he is doing all of this, he manages to catch a girl frantically to her therapist, who was delayed, of course, by the onslaught of a giant mecha which Superman had to stop. The girl is standing on top of a building, looking down, crying. She drops her phone off first, watching it fall. Then closes her eyes as she prepares to step off the ledge. And then a hand grabs her shoulder. Your doctor really did get held up, Regan, a voice tells her. Its never as bad as it seems. She turns around to see Superman, as he says one of my favorite all time lines: You’re much stronger than you think you are. With that one line, Morrison manages to boil the character down to his very core. For that moment, 70 years of history, continuity, writers and gimmicks are all wiped off the board and Superman stands as what he has always been: Hope. The hope of what we can accomplish, and what we can become. A gentle, calming embrace telling us that everything will be alright.
One could argue that this is not real, it’s nothing more than a platitude by someone unwilling to face reality. One could argue that by waiting on a Superman, we are just deluding ourselves that things can get better, cause no help is coming. One would also be a heartless Grinch. But them’s the breaks. Very rarely will a big, blue, boy scout going to fly down and help us. A superhero can’t get you a job, keep you from feeling lonely, or help you escape a situation that you can’t stand to be in. And that is perfectly true. Sometimes there is no one to help us out, but hope is still there. Its the refusal to give up, because we are capable of so much more than we think. Hope is that hand keeping us from stepping off the ledge into despair, telling us we are so much stronger than we think we are. And I defy anyone to tell me otherwise.
