Our Gods Wear Spandex (29 page)

Hellboy
creator Mike Mignola occupies a space different from that of the other wizards of comicdom. His work is about history—o
ccult
history, to be precise—and he uses a Golem-type hero to immerse himself and his readers in the dark corners of our past.
Mignola began his career submitting illustrations to fan magazines like
The Comic Reader
. He eventually turned pro at Marvel, and made his bones with the 1988 mini-series
Cosmic Odyssey
, written by the death-obsessed Jim Starlin.
Odyssey
delved deeply into Kirby's
Fourth World
material and also featured the Justice League. Mignola's eyes were set on the past, however, and his 1989 graphic novel
Gotham by Gaslight
, which featured a Victorian-era version of Batman battling Jack the Ripper, caught the eye of Francis Ford Coppola, who hired the artist as production designer for his 1992 film
Bram Stoker's Dracula
. Mignola also illustrated a comic-book adaptation of the film. Wading even deeper into occult waters, Mignola was production designer for Disney's 2001 animated opus
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
, a production that clearly spoke to Mignola's obsessions.

In 1993, Mignola brought forth his signature creation, Hellboy
(San Diego ComicCon Comics
#2), a young demon summoned by a reincarnated Rasputin to work for the Nazis in the closing days of World War II. The demon is taken by the Allies, who train him to be a classic occult detective. In concept, Hell-boy is little more than a hijacking of Jack Kirby's Demon, with a personality on loan from Ben Grimm, but Mignola's elegant and moody artwork, as well as his encyclopedic knowledge of the occult, made Hellboy by far the most remarkable superhero of the 1990s. Mignola leavens his stories with heavy doses of humor that, paradoxically, only make them more arcane. He also adds heavy doses of Lovecraftian horror and a morbid ambiance that displays a strong Poe influence.

Mignola's stories are impeccably researched, and his explorations of Nazi occultism are at once remarkable and chilling. Mignola also incorporates horrors like leprechauns and werewolves from old European folktales, and more esoteric beasties like the Homonculus. He makes his comics tantamount to magic spells by decorating his pages with various sigils and icons borrowed from ritual magic. Unfortunately, Mignola's involvement in the
Hellboy
comics has recently diminished and the art work has been handed off to others.

The 2004
Hellboy
movie, directed by Guillermo Del Toro (
Pan's Labyrinth
) and starring Ron Perlman (
Beauty and the Beast
), was a serviceable action picture completely devoid of the magical ambiance and creeping dread of Mignola's comics. Mignola's work is about the beauty of decay and the purity of terror—themes that don't always translate well on screen. His best work taps directly into the deepest
recesses of the collective imagination; the deep shadows and dark stares that give his drawing such intensity in print are hard to translate to film.

If Jack Kirby is the prophet of the new gods and Alan Moore the comics' sorcerer supreme, then Alex Ross is the foremost apostle of the new superhero religion. His father was Protestant minister and his mother worked as a successful illustrator. Being a preacher's son put special pressures on Ross, who poured all his youthful energies into his art. After moving with his family from Portland, Oregon to a new home deep in the heart of Texas, Ross sought inspiration in the graceful, idealized heroes of artists like Neal Adams and George Perez, as well as the classic magazine illustrations of Andrew Loomis and Norman Rockwell. By age 12, he was already more talented than most of the Nineties hacks whose work wounded him so deeply.

Ross seems to have latched onto DC's heroes for the same reasons other fans abandoned them in the Sixties and Seventies. The heroes of
The Justice League
were aloof and Olympian; they were better than normal Joes. In other words, they were
gods
. In his monograph,
Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross
, he explained this appeal: “As an adolescent you need order in your world, and superheroes have that, a sense of ethics that would never change—they would never be less than perfect, fighting for their ideals,” adding “they deal succinctly with moral issues, in a way that religion doesn't. Or rather, religion does, but in a much more complicated and often confusing manner.”
¹⁵⁵

After a stint in advertising, Ross landed an opportunity to draw a
Terminator
miniseries for Now Comics. In 1993, he got his first job for DC—appropriately enough, a book cover for a novelization of the dying-rising Superman saga entitled
Superman: Doomsday and Beyond
. His work caught the attention of editors at Marvel and, in 1994, he illustrated his graphic love letter to the superheroes of old,
Marvels
. Ross' art electrified fandom and snapped comics out of their cynical 90s decline. All of a sudden, superheroes actually looked
heroic
again. Indeed, looking at Ross'
Marvels
is almost like seeing those characters for the first time. As Chip Kidd said of Ross' later depictions of Superman, “the effect was like finally meeting someone you'd only ever heard about.”

Ross leveraged his success with
Marvels
to get his hands on the Justice League. DC was floundering at the time, its editors playing a perpetual game of catch-up with Marvel and Image. Ross set out to revitalize the entire line with his epic
Kingdom Come
, in which he sought “to bring a sense of morality back to the comics.”
¹⁵⁶
Comics had never seen anything like
Kingdom Come
, which captivated fans and fellow creators alike. Ross was acknowledged as a prophet, shouting down the fatuous corruption of the Chromium Age. No one yet realized it, but when the
Kingdom
came, the New Age had begun.

Kingdom Come
was almost a decade in the making. In his original notes for the series, Ross perceptively equated the 40s Superman with Samson and the 60s version with Jesus Christ. “Superman as a fictional character is just as important as if he existed in flesh and blood,” he claimed. “Either way he is inspirational, and that's what's relevant” Indeed, Ross wanted to put “Superman in the same role” as Jesus Christ.
¹⁵⁷

Ross made his father a star of the show in
Kingdom Come
, renaming him Pastor Norman McCay as a tribute to Winsor McCay. His father proved an excellent model, bearing a strong resemblance to Alec Guinness in
Star Wars
. In the story, Jerry Siegel's occult hero, the Spectre, appears before McCay and anoints him as a witness to the coming Apocalypse. McCay protests against the Apocalypse using the tepid language of liberal Protestanism, but regains his religious fervor (and his congregation) after helping the gods of the League save humanity.

Ross' superheroes are the very embodiment of Nietszche's
ubermenschen
. Indeed, members of the League are referred to as “gods” throughout the book. Ross depicts Green Lantern in the armor of a Wagnerian knight, and returns the Flash and Hawkman to their original forms. No longer stand-ins for Hermes/Mercury and Horus, they are the exact look-alikes of those gods, their carriage and behavior leaving little doubt that they are their actual incarnations. Ross claimed “Hawkman would become Hawkgod … he's become a real birdman now, a new entity, a reincarnated Egyptian prince.”
¹⁵⁸

Ross' Wonder Woman, modeled on Lynda Carter, is a lioness, fierce in battle but tender to her man (
Super
man, in this case). In the book's final apocalyptic battle, Ross accentuates her divine nature by dressing her in golden eagle armor reminiscent of ancient figurines of the winged Isis and bathing her in sunlight (which he does throughout the entire story). When we first see the reconstituted Justice League descend from heaven, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Hawkgod are most prominent among them, drawing an irresistible parallel to Osiris, Isis, and Horus. The three seem to fly from the heart of the Sun itself.

The mythological tone and sense of majesty of Ross'
Kingdom Come
hark back to the Neoclassical, Romantic, and Pre-Raphaelite movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ross' worshipful sensibility has much more in common with Leyendecker, Waterhouse, or Alma-Tadema than that of even the most elegant cartoonists like Hal Foster or Alex Raymond.

Even the moronic Chromium Age-style heroes that Ross is seeking to exorcise are designed and rendered in a manner infinitely more creative and dignified than the wretched 90s characters that inspired them—although he still has most of them annhilated by a nuclear explosion.

Sprinkled throughout the series are passages from Revelations that underscore the apocalyptic events in the story and the sense of reverence and awe Ross seeks to reintroduce to comics readers, whose sensibilities were ruined by the deluge of Chromium Age garbage. Ross mounts a crusade against superheresy, and responds to the 90s decline with his vision of the one true faith. The cumulative effect of all this nobility, righteousness, and wrath is indistinguishable from that of any of the great ancient religious epics.

Make no mistake,
Kingdom Come
is a fundamentally religious piece of work, and the gods that Ross celebrates in it would easily be recognized by any ancient pagan or polytheist. The symbols and accessories of the ancient gods—whether Egyptian, Greek, Roman, or Norse—and motifs taken from Templarism, Freemasonry, and Neoclassicism are everywhere in
Kingdom Come
. If Ross did not set out intentionally to reintroduce the ancient gods and goddesses to a modern audience, then we must seriously contemplate whether some other supernatural force was working through him to do so.

The impact of
Kingdom Come
and Ross' tabloid-size graphic novellas featuring Superman (
Peace on Earth
), Batman (
War on Crime
), Captain Marvel (
Power of Hope
), Wonder Woman (
Spirit of Truth
), and the Justice League (
Liberty and Justice
) cannot possibly be overstated. It took some time to digest, but soon the better draftsmen in the field began to inject their art with Ross' realism and reverence. Now, most of the top artists at Marvel and DC make heavy use of photo reference and tell stories in a cinematic storytelling style that has come to be known as “widescreen.” Artists who draw in the cartoon style of the Eighties or the hyperthyroid style of the Nineties are out of fashion—perhaps forever.
Kingdom Come
heralded the age of the superhero as god, and gods must be awe-inspiring or not exist at all.