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The geek shall inherit the earth
By Grant Morrison Last updated at 00:00am on 10.08.00Out of the raging media storm, where 10 billion images per second vie for attention with sparklingly superior resolution, come the exaggerated snarls and airbrushed gazes of the X-Men. It's hard to miss them as a multi-million dollar marketing tsunami strikes the UK. The mutants are taking over and this time they have enough money to make you notice.
The superheroes arrive on cinema screens and in the public consciousness, however, at a time when the comic books that created them are struggling against extinction. While manga and coffee-table graphic novels enjoy widespread acceptance in Japan and the rest of Europe, the media-illiterate commentators of Britain and the USA, waxing lyrical over the latest Lara Croft adventure, or seeking depth in an East-Enders episode, persistently dismiss the work of comics creators as irrelevant and childish.
I've spent the past 15 years making up best-selling stories for DC and Marvel comics, the publishers of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and the X-Men. From corporate franchise properties like Judge Dredd and the Justice League of America to personal and creator-owned work like Kill Your Boyfriend and The Invisibles, I've been able to write any kind of story I ever wanted to and have it illustrated by masters of pop art.
I've watched with interest the stealthy but none the less grand theft of style and content from my beloved comic book medium, ideas magpied into the mainstream so fast that everything I see on crap TV or in the new action movies is something I previously read in a much better comic. But there's a last-ditch rescue at work here as a great American art form enters a strange and possibly life-saving relation-ship with Hollywood.
Forget the celebrated failures - Tank Girl, Howard the Duck, The Phantom. As more and more graphic fiction migrates onto the screen, the beleaguered comics deserve, at the very least, an acknowledgement of their place at the root of expanding pop culture and recognition for their over-whelming contributions to the common visual language of the media.
Bryan Singer's ripped-back film adaptation proves that the story behind almost 40 years of accumulated superhero soap opera remains simple and effective. The X-Men are representatives of a posthuman species, superior to our sapiens, on the next rung up the evolutionary ladder. They are beautiful, misunderstood super-monsters banding together in cool neo-Fascist uniforms to fight against our ignorance for a better tomorrow.
Where humankind is directionless, existential, post-ironic, the X-Men are focused, united in noble intent and here to make the world a better place. They are, in short, the perfect antidote to a 20th-century legacy of social disintegration, neurosis and fragmentation.
Consider also the success of Buffy, the Crow, Angel, Blade, Harry Potter and the terrorists of The Matrix. An obvious question springs to mind. Why are superheroes suddenly so popular again?
Like their mutant heroes, the scorned and rejected creators and fans of the comics are back in the spotlight for another 15 minutes. Peek below the waterline of the X-Men phenomenon and you'll find a vast, submerged culture, a colourful parallel world still thriving beyond the horizon of acceptability. This is the radiation of mad concepts which the entertainment and advertising giants are placing at the forefront of a corporate techno-utopian dream.
Several cloned sheep, a few embryo harvests and a sequenced human genome into the new century and the class geeks are beginning to look like the only reliable guides to this overlit, super-accelerated Matrix simulation we are all learning to live in.
Long pigeonholed as meaningless fantasy or adolescent wish-fulfilment, the comics and the ideas of their eccentric creators no longer seem quite so implausible.
The world didn't end at the stroke of midnight. There was no apocalypse, no nuclear war, no Y2K meltdown. No excuse to stop thinking about the future and our place in it. While literature and drama have wallowed out the past 50 years in existential angst, only the comics were stupid and optimistic enough to visualise a future beyond the death wish fantasies of postwar culture. Only the comics have dared to make increasingly sophisticated maps of a looming world where genetically engineered supermen and women, bizarre science and dreamlike technology are commonplace and subject to rigorous analysis.
Despite the disastrous plunge in sales of the 1990s, the mood of the remaining comics creators is eerily hopeful, futurist and militant. Space on the page has been cleared at last for new and more relevant characters.
From the taboo-busting political satire and ultra-violence of The Authority or Planetary, to the contemporary epic Western that is Preacher, to work like Acme Novelty Library (whose bleak narratives and formal innovations recall the best of Dennis Potter's television work) the comics are expanding their range to cover every available type of subject matter.
With scant editorial interference, rogue intellects are free to peddle philosophies, tall tales and wild speculations to a literate, vocal audience safe in the knowledge that even in the current slump "difficult" or "literary" comic titles can still shift 20,000 to 40,000 copies per month, 12 times a year. Compare those figures with sales of the latest piece of "serious" fiction and it's clear to see the attraction of comics for maverick, experimental authors working under the radar.
With the world outside our windows becoming more and more like the world of the XMen, the mutant artists are taking over and we're here to stay. If you want to make sense of where it's all going, make it your business to learn our language - fast.
? X-men opens on 18 August.
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It's a shame that the stereotype persists of comics and graphic novels being regarded as juvenile. They share an incredible influence on popular culture, and that influence has only grown since the time of the first X-Men film, and this article.
- Andrew, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
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