Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
The Passionate Spring
Superman and the Authority and Crowley and Cameron
by Travis Hedge Coke
Here space becomes time.
In 1946, Jack Parsons calls on the Scarlet Woman and transcribes, “Behold, my Brother cracks the world like a nut for your eating.”
In 1923, a roman a clef novel by Aleister Crowley is published, Moonchild. Concerning the creation of a guiding life, a moonchild, it is satirical and prophetic, and was written six years prior to its publication.
In August 2000, Marvel Comics publishes an invocation of the new Age of Horus, Marvel Boy, the first part of a trilogy. It is written by Grant Morrison. The other two parts will never see completion or release.
In July of 1995, Cameron dies from cancer in her brain and lungs. The ashes of her body are scattered in the Mojave Desert.
May 2004, DC Comics publishes an invocation of the new Age of Horus, Seaguy, with a second series released in 2009. The third, closing series is never completed nor released. This, too, is written by Grant Morrison.
June, 1939, the Ultra-Humanite and Superman come into conflict for the first time, in Action Comics #13
Superman and the Authority begins publication in July, 2021, four years since it was written, by Grant Morrison, with art from a team led by Mikel Janin.
This is not a religious tract.
Inauguration
“You and I established the template for a new kind of conflict that has endured for decades.”
– The Ultra-Humanite to Superman in Superman and the Authority
Grant Morrison has spent a lot of comics trying to celebrate, which is also celebrating, the dawning new age of magick represented by a child at play; destructive, creative, experiential. It is a concept very European in sensibilities, more heteronormative male in its construct than, perhaps, the constructors would have liked, and on perpetually shaky ground because like the comics universes these stories have been set in, the rules and the humors have been hard to tack down.
In Thelema, the three Aeons, or Ages, are: the Aeon of Isis, characterized by matriarchy, mothering, life-giving; the Aeon of Osiris, paternalistic, perpetually dying, waning, characterized by self-sacrifice and submission; the Aeon of Horus – which we are entering – is conflated with/related to the new age Age of Aquarius, the end of novelty curves, the era of awakening, an age of the “crowned and conquering child,” with love, freedom, self-realization and True Will.
Does that make logical or causal sense? Is it definite in its chronological breaks and markings? Is it universal, cosmic, constant or synchronous? Is it like the stages of grief, which can be experienced in any order or any subset? Is it set on a firm clock? An individual experience? Cultural? Cross-cultural? Is it just so loose as to be agreeable and easily absorbing any other ideas or schedules?
“Here time becomes space.”
– Parsifal, Richard Wagner
The Hell that incubates and changes the state of the Enchantress is “space-time damage,” and anomalous, because flux is frightening.
The important thing is that these are stories and stories need not even agree internally only in the singular and plural moment of experiencing of the story. Superman spends SatA speaking of “the world,” and our assumption is that he speaks of ours, or its DC Comics reflection, and he does, but not Earth.
The Invisibles, set in its own continuity and drawn, lettered, colored by divers hands, ends on an invocation of this new age, trying it to the year 2000 and/or 2012 deadlines and last-minute flip-flopping it from the celebration of a boy become a man, called Jack, and either the Shae Fox/Renard dual characters or the fanfic author of reality, called Ragged Robin, or the fairy godmother former assassin, King Mob.
A child at play. Shae Fox, Jack Frost, Noh-Varr, Seaguy, Renard.
At Marvel Comics, Marvel Boy would have been eighteen issues total, an angry boy alien in hot pants whose gun has a scrotum and a smile climbing from the wreckage that killed all he loved to teach the Earth a better way by force and insult. It played so wildly with the established Marvel Universe, while disrupting none of its continuity, that many readers and critics continue to insist it was set in its own reality, its own continuity.
Seaguy, published at DC Comics, as was, The Invisibles, was set to be half the length of Marvel Boy, drawn by Cameron Stewart. It made it nine issues, and presented its young man as a lovelorn nice guy who maybe cheated a little with Death and wore scuba gear. It was simultaneously more pedantic than either Marvel Boy or The Invisibles, yet was so nakedly allegorical many insisted it was pure and meaning free dadaism.
If anything, the age appeared to be confused, unable to complete a project, probably straight and very male.
All stories are incomplete stories. Completion is not what achieves in a story.
Stories need cracks. Stories and mysteries and life need enough clarity to allow us to feel clarified, and enough fiddling room to feel there was room for us to do our part.
Meanwhile, in the seriocomic manner of the Batman tv series’ narration or Spongebob, another boy turned man called Jack, Jack Parsons, set about a Babalon Working in the mid-1940s, an invocation of the new age and an exchange of ideas and other stuff with Babalon, the incestuous sister goddess, horny for time, the flood of blood, the ghoul with the fuel, because Jack Parsons was that kind of guy. And, he met Cameron, aka Marjorie Cameron, and Cameron was the Scarlet Woman. Cameron was Babalon.
Cameron was a veteran cartographer of World War Two from Iowa, courtmartialed and later given an honorable discharge.
Parsons was a jet fuel specialist, occultist, “the father of rocketry,” who enjoyed sex, art, and linguistically-based jokes.
She would go on to be a singer, an actor, a painter, artist, prophet, poet.
He would die, maybe by assassination, maybe by accident.
Light(ning)
Manchester Black’s mental powers are by nature tied to electricity, but it is electricity that brings him low in the early pages of SatA. Electricity emboldens, empowers, regulates and threatens us. It brings him down again, at the end.
In the DC Universe, in DC comics, lightning takes a special place, indicative of power and speed and energy, but also speedsters – people who can move and think at superhuman, sometimes superluminal speed – and alternate realities. The plethora of realities.
In 1998’s Trials of the Flash, we are (re)introduced to Lightray, who appeared a year earlier, when men (including her father) attempt to trap her via the famous Hollywood sign. They fail. And, every time they fail, her father, in particular, is injured and humiliated by circumstance he could very easily learn to stop placing himself in.
Two versions of Lightray, both illusions.
Thirty years after Grant Morrison made The Coyote Gospel with Tatjana Wood, Chaz Truog, et al, about a Wile E Coyote proxy as Gnostic Jesus Christ, Morrison wrote a story demonstrating that in the modern DCU, Bugs Bunny is the New God.
Lia Nelson was the Flash of the Tangent universe, a universe somewhat adjacent to our more familiar DC universe, and with which there has been crossover. She is also, as seen in SatA (Superman and the Authority), Lightray, an avatar of a New God.
This Lightray was created, intentionally, as a Bugs Bunny riff in a Bugs vs Daffy cartoon or a Bugs vs Elmer Fudd cartoon. Bugs versus… well, all those stuck-in-their-way dad figures and their corporate bosses and unquestioning henchmen and their self-condemnation by adherence to old rules, nonsensical patterns, damaged pride, and ways.
Lia/Flash/Lightray’s father cannot, in seems, learn new behavior or unlearn bad habits. He is a societal, cultural, and as an individual a stalemate with himself. She does not even need to be nearby or directly engaging for him to fail and to be humiliated.
Lightning in DC comics are symbolizes and evokes change. DC comics bought Captain Marvel and related characters from Fawcett comics and for decades, Captain Marvel has been, like the Flash, the lightning. In Kingdom Come, Marvel is specifically referred to by “the lightning,” and the magic of Captain Marvel is that there is a bright, industrious, kind young boy who magic up some lightning with a special word and that lightning swaps him for an ideal adult, a good parent, a dad superhero, named Captain Marvel. Growing up by healthy transference, in an instant, without having to not be yourself, or a child.
Captain Marvel has strength and speed and such, but also great wisdom.
A recurrent theme of SatA, if not the dominant chord, is the villainy of browbeating, of gaslighting and obfuscating, of shaming, and how they are predicated on the assumption that that the browbeater is intellectually superior – must be intellectually superior – or the browbeaten could not be quieted or hurt. That silence is victory, even if that silence is the other people disengaging with you.
The empty villainy.
Body-shaming trolls. Agency-shaming cortical homunculus. Shoot-first police. Doubt.
The opposition to the lightning is vacuum, even intellectual vacuum.
Ultra-Humanite and Brainiac disregard Superman’s super-intellect as a facade or an assumption made by others based on his handsomeness and chiseled physique. Incel arguments abound as do edgelord, alt-right, dishonest devil’s advocate arguments we have all experienced routinely for years. Possibly for all our lives.
While the desperate, the financially crunched, the miseducated or misaligned can be talked around, educated, the young can be reared, the old can be cared for, there are strains of malice which cannot be reasoned with because they know the reason already. They have chosen their path.
The Neo-Nazi Iron Cross is aware that Nazis are bad. There is not an argument for badness or an illustrative principle you can rely on. The Authority can only kick off his head and the head still won’t #*@^&ing die.
Underworld versus Hell versus Threshold
Manchester Black is “too big,” and Black is an odd fit at first glance. Former leader of a satiric gang of Authority parodies too ugly, brutal, racist and petty to be real (and if you doubt that, ask why the cartoon adaptation trimmed so much of the visual cues and witty dialogue back). Black, in SatA, is the part of the vacuum of villainy we can make friends with. Black is the voice of doubts and frustrations, unsatisfied with half-measures, willing to look the gift in the mouth.
“Go to hell.” – Manchester Black
“Hell’s coming to me, Mr. Black.” – Superman
– Superman and the Authority
In 1991’s Kid Eternity, written by Morrison, the maps of Hell retrieved by the Kid, use societal expectations as landmarks.
In 2021’s SatA, Superman initiates a plan to map the Underworld, distinguishing the Underworld (and the DC-trademarked Phantom Zone) as separate from yet not separate from Hell. Both Underworld and Hell have their place on the Grant Morrison and Rain Hughes’ designed map of the DC Multiverse, from The Multiversity, as correlated spheres.
The Underworld is a place for the dead. Hell is a genre.
The Underworld, which is also the Phantom Zone, the land of the dead, does come for Superman, in SatA, but he and Black do, indeed, go to Hell, after, a personal and yet universal Hell, to recover the glory of Babalon, herself, the Enchantress.
D’z’amor encouraging depressive quietness, hiding inside. Brainiac manipulating the Ultra-Humanite with pride. Eclipso trying to talk Lightray into suicide.
The span of SatA is a sequence of descendence through death, hauntings, reverberations, Hell and beyond, as the magician and guide make their way to light and future.
When Irons is introduced, she enters a strange world to guard it, entering conflict and repair work on emergent consciousnesses masquerading like children at play as internet bullies, scary-faced avatars, flesh-chewing trolls and glowing, evil-smiles edgelords. The magician lives outside and all that talk. But, outside is inside. Community is not something you can escape by touching your foot over a border line. Or, a borderline.
The Hell overseen by D’z’amor and holding June Moone, holding Enchantress, the prison in which they hold themselves because all three are one and more than one, is Christ’s self-surrender to the crucifixion, it is power and glory and the move to a new aeon.
Depression, anxiety, malaise, self-hatred.
The shadow-boxing uselessness of petty superhero/supervillain punch ups.
Condemnation comes in many forms.
Why is Lightray’s place of birth changed, her place of conception, from passing by Jupiter in a rocket to a base on Mars? Colonization of Mars?
Why are the Justice Society referred to, rather than as superheroes or just a superhero team, “Golden Age,” as “the wartime Justice Society”?
Why would Superman gather a patrol of magicians, a convocation of experts, to save Warworld? A colonial action?
The anxiety of British police action facing a War of the Worlds nightmare of alien Hell on stilt legs.
“They built their very own Frankenstein monster using spare child parts,” SatA tells us. A monster of many children and maybe pro wrestlers, screaming for help and pity as our heroes are forced to kill the forced-and-controlled-collective before it murders them.
A number of early readers seemed to have missed the firearm that Lightray cradles in issue #3, completely, its barrel directly under her chin as she asks why she has to feel so low.
Another version of Lightray, also another illusion?
SatA remixes the original Enchantress story from Strange Adventures #187, telling it again from a chopped and screwed angle. Superman’s physical condition reflects the Ultra-Humanite’s original disabilities. Superman’s Authority starts as a one for one mimicry of the original Authority, beginning with a Manchester Black from an Authority-proxy from a satirical comic about a bully Superman (What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?), and they are matched with a one to one mimicry of their team in essentially time-wasting fisticuffs.
A thousand ways to tell a witch hunt.
The repurposing of Apollo from sun god or, as Black calls him, “flying brick,” to a solar-powered solar-fanboy allows the character to embody both the sun and sun worship with the energizing of worship and appreciation. And, let us be clear, whether in a universalist sense or specific cultures, most of what is called “sun worship,” is sun appreciation.
Apollo is Zeus’ favored son. Just saying.
SatA is a comic about appreciation and a comic showing appreciation. Acknowledgment and worship can be aspects of a spiritual practice or awareness, but they do not define spiritualism or religiousness. Worship, at its most pared back, is dependent on royalist cultures. Worshipful religion is the backformation of the divine right of kings.
Magicians
Janin puts amazing effort, without drawing attention to it, in separating Black and Superman even if they are side by side or in tandem. Both are guide and both are guided, for and for each other. Manchester cannot help himself, vomiting on a large globe representing the Earth. Superman with his eyes darting here and there as he deflects, assuages, or coaxes Black and audience into a comfort and aspiration.
Superman’s attempts to communicate to Manchester Black through Pet Shop Boys lyrics date them both and reflect on the character and lived experience of each of them. “The samurai in autumn,” refrain and title of a Pet Shop Boys song, is indicative of how they approach the world and how they approach each other, song and quote positioning the mythic samurai into a magical role, a ritual role, reflective more of story than history. But, it is a historic story. The samurai role has been politicized and re-stories, re-politicized since its inception.
All friends and kingdom come.
The renaming, in captions, of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude as “Fort Superman,” plays on story of the forts on the border, last outposts, pyrrhic victories and the Alamo. That universalist, colonial-minded shamanic last place on the edge, the castle in the far distance, the hut in the woods. The renaming is a return to the original reference, that the Fortress of Solitude was called Fort Superman first and begs the question of how Superman sees the world and his position that he names it so.
A difficulty with discussing an abstract superman, is the specter of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the Übermensch, an already frequently unpleasant concept which was perverted, after Nietzsche, as a tool of Nazism and white supremacy. DC’s own Superman is often the victim of writers, editors, artists and fans who would have that superman nature be an outlet for the worst of human potential and not the kindest. It is, for the cynic or the misogynist, easier to imagine that super/over-nature to imply a rein of gaslighting, disdain, petty cruelty or quick bully results, which neither Nietzsche’s nor the original Superman stories support.
And, so we have the Eurocentric concept of the Magician and then the colonialist appropriation of shaman as a term for all nonwhite magicians and then onto white magicians, which brings us circling back in an ouroboros so tight it could break its back, to the Magician as universal, specific, and universally- and specifically- limiting concept. The universalist image is corrosive in the same fashion that “If Superman were real” rumination can corrode.
The strength of DC’s Superman is that Superman is made up. The potency of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, is that the Übermensch is something being told to us. Zarathustra speaks, not the Übermensch, and they are both only illustrations from Friedrich Nietzsche.
Industrial Age colonialism has too much a grasp on what many cultures now anticipate as formalized thinking.
What is most unusual in SatA, is that it is not the story of Superman-the-Magician, nor Black-the-Magician, but cohorts of practitioners, cohorts of enactors or actors. The Authority gathered by Superman and Black are magicians in this very rude and Joseph Campbell sense. The engineer, Natasha Irons, aka Steel. The solar-empowered solar-fan, Apollo. The bitter outsider filled with emotion on behalf of the world and self, Manchester Black. Black and Superman are our ins and outs, our primaries even in a ensemble team comic, but they are also part of a group-protagonist, their Authority team, and also, they do not face anything alone, but always together. Always together.
Putting the ADHD in ABILITY.
Appropriately thelemic.
No one faces things alone in SatA. The Enchantress, another magician, divides herself into many roles, many semblances or people, some even set against herself, but she is allied with Superman, with Black, with the Engineer. She is separated from the Hell of herself by group effort. Superman and Black return the possessed or imitative probes from the Underworld by group effort.
What is an enchantress, after all, if not a magician? And, an enchantress’ secret self?
True magick is getting back spilt coffee.
Babalon
“All love songs are of me.”
– Liber 49, Jack Parsons (transcribed an evoked spirit, the divine Babalon)
Majorie Cameron in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Enchantress in SatA.
In the first mission of The Authority together, their group effort to free and align The Enchantress, which is also an effort to free and align themselves, is a Babalon working and invocation, invitation to Babalon. In the Enchantress and her other forms and peoples, the dissociative identity disorder by maybe-magic of a superhero-suffused universe many-in-one-in-many, Babalon is given self-rein and form and asked to have a seat at the Round Table.
Babalon who ushers and implies the dissolution of ego, the dissolving of individualism, into a collectivist and colluding “menstruum of the lunar current,” (Kenneth Grant) or life-blood of glory, or mass horrific murder, is implicit multiplicity of gender and sexuality.
It is providence that Babalon and Babylon and Babel and the Tower of Babel come so sonorously soundalike, if for nothing else than they are, in this application, subject to the sex hangups and orientalist of Crowley, Grant, and others of note.
SatA is a very Aleister Crowley comic. A thelemic comic performing and demonstrating rituals and connections of a thelemic nature. (My digital amanuensis, spellcheck, wants to render all use of “thelemic” to “thalamic,” and what webs of inference we could have from such a limited yet infinitely derailing advising angel as spellcheck or the dictionaries available to Pages.) The Mauve Zone of Grant is in evidence in the color scheme of SatA, as well as the greens and reds which can mean start and stop or so many other things, including the crimson flagging of Babalon, herself.
Phil Hine would do something very elegant and researched here, but I have to remind you, reader, I am not producing a history or a religious tract. The affectations of Crowley or Grant, the limitations of their work or their organizations, are not as important in the context of SatA, as their influence and evocative nature. Like the landmarks in the maps of Hell in Kid Eternity, the effluvia of Thelema and the sexual anxieties of Grant are less than secondary to the felix culpa and resonance.
You’re making this up.
The cover to the third issue of SatA is the top of a June/Enchantress’ head exploded open to reveal her teammates on the yet-forming Authority lifting her away from fire and shadowy reaching hands. Blood drains over her ears, down her face, her eyes rolled up and glazed, as Superman, Apollo, Nat Irons and all appear heroically to rescue her angry and limp form. Is this story in or out of her head? Is space and time?
One of my frustrations with Nameless (Chris Burnham, Nathan Fairbairn, Grant Morrison) is that it is ostensibly the story of a Babalon-like influence altering the world into something new, a new understanding, new rules, and how the toxic masculine mind of our protagonist processes this as an endless anxiety chase and horror show, because… why bother? Why emphasize this unhealthy man’s mind, even if it reflects many thousands or millions of minds on Earth today? Why privilege him/that?
The green/red dichotomy that overtakes the color scheme of much of the first and second issues of SatA prepares us for Enchantress/June, but also eases us into the purplish realm where she is arrested, self-condemned, under threat of “purple people-eaters.” “The Purple Plateau welcomes your innocence,” says D’z’amor, a bloated demon with sleepy eyes and teeth like slats. “These are sugary treats we bleak ones exist to gorge upon.”
(NB Cameron’s magickal name as Candida, shortened often to, Candy. For those for whom synchronicity overtakes causality.)
There is an Enchantress and an Enchantress, and they are not the same. One is centered, unified, and one is deliberately liminal, deliberately ousting herself.
The Enchantress, trapped in the Purple Plateau, pregnant in a haunted mental hospital in Hell, while she accuses herself and her boyfriend who is probably her accuses herself, nesting dolls cut with mirrors and recordings. Pregnant Enchantress is Horus, Isis, Osiris. Black says, “The rebels always defeat the empire or there’s no story,” but the truth is, the rebels cannot yet defeat the empire of there is no story.” Story is in the delays and wanting.
The Enchantress feels trapped by June, June by the Enchantress, in this revolving door of red and green and in this purpled realm. Grant’s Mauve Zone is a conceptual range on the limn of reality where people can experience something close to nothingness, non-existence, in which is produced happy accidents, confluences, synchronicities, and in this kind of realm, the anxiety and guilt that are the heart and lungs and spleen of June and Enchantress form a self-damning Hell.
June Moone losing her baby, pulling her body inward from her uncomfortable wheelchair, facing herself. Someone asks, “It’s real and it’s not?”
Superman first fought the Ultra-Humanite in June. Everybody’s an angel. Everybody’s a star. “Everybody’s in movies, it doesn’t matter who you are,” to steal from the Kinks. It does not matter who is dreaming, who is motivating, who is moving. A prime mover is over.
Shifting the anxieties and (mis)interpretations to June and Enchantress, and anchoring the the Purple Plateau, which “flat[tens] back to oblivion” instead of the more deliberately esoteric and freeform allusive nature of Nameless helps simplify the horror down to superhero-friendly levels, but also de-emphasizes the question of man, the male gaze and male anxiety issues, of which both superhero stories and comics in general have said more than enough.
The Rainbow
Burst open the fetters that bind,
Change from us the garb of our prison
And lighten the mind.
– The Rainbow, Aleister Crowley
The bad boy of Marvel Boy, the confused lad of Seaguy find form in Manchester Black, and in SatA, an introduction to the new age, an easing in, but quickly we move on. He is a bit passé, a bit old hat, still got some bite, still feels his rock ’n’ roll in his boots.
Work friends.
The old married couple, Apollo and Midnighter, are the young married couple who got old beyond their years.
The real work is Babalon and the light, the lightning, Lightray, the rainbow pop star child born from Mars and first called, Lia Nelson.
The real work is Lois Lane, her writing and her kryptonite rifle.
The real work is realizing Manchester Black and John F Kennedy are both “drug-addled lechers” who are good at keeping other people on their toes.
That Lightray is.
Lightray, god of light, friendship, vibrancy, created by Jack Kirby.
Lightray, “the girl who makes the sunshine.” “‘The power of positivity! The potency of hope!’” Lia, Lightray, invokes herself.
So, why, if the Aeon of Horus is the Age of a Child, and that child is almost always represented as male, is the Scarlet Woman so important and a similar if not the same a moonchild, as Horus? Because a lot of people have had a lot of ideas. And, because, is it not better?
My own mind cannot help but link up Cameron and Enchantress by the dramatic red hair, by the gematrial value shared by “lord of light,” “Wormwood,” “the strong,” “numinous,” and “Enchantress.” The film, Wormwood Star, starring Cameron and her artwork, her miscarried child, also called, Wormwood Star. “Lord Christ,” “I sun rays,” “witch hunt,” “hell’s real dark.” I looked those ones up. They are good, though, are they not? They have resonance. Intensity. Drama.
As superhero and theater fans, do we not rely on drama to tell us what is important? Thunder, lightning, flashing light and lines of speed? The shield on your chest and the signature tics. Roles are people and people are roles.
Everything in a story is ritual. Every piece of art, of entertainment or record, is ritual. Revisiting them, reading them or watching them, whatever it is we really do when we enjoy a comic, that is ritual.
An important part of embracing frameworks in stories is remembering – if not specifically, the energy and awareness that accompanies – the existence of indigo in rainbows, in spectrums, because the number of bands was preferable if indigo was there. You cannot really say indigo is not in the rainbow. Roy G Biv would be a different, and odder name, even, without indigo. It has its place and its place is assisting in elegance and mnemonics.
We leap over the Great Beast and Therion and Aleister Crowley as the Great Beast called Therion, here, because it is inelegant to this and to SatA.
And, having said that here, someone will present rebuttal that Therion is represented in the ape, human, and undead plant-based bodies of the Ultra-Humanite with his special angel, Brainiac. This is how we go.
Two guys thinking: You know, some day, you gotta die.
Superman with his nonhuman lineage and his solar soul, who better to be Nimrod the hunter, to echo with the intelligence of the sun, the Age of Old Man Superman as the Aeon of Osiris, seeing as Osiris and Therion have equity in Crowley’s English gematria? But, it is Lightray whose purview is holograms, so maybe Lightray is Therion and Horus and Isis? Can Superman make a rock so big he can’t curb evil with it?
We leap over nothing, because the leap and what is leapt have to be put there, too.
Angel to Angels
Between Aleister Crowley and Awaiss, Narcissus and Goldmund: Manchester Black and Superman. The doll-sized proxy Superman who comes from the palm of a de-powered Superman. The disabled brawn and comfort who comes from a brutalized Black’s mind.
Black and Superman take the role of guide, each, but in that they are guardian angels, even to the point that a tiny Manchester Black might sit on Superman’s shoulder and opine to him. Black is, to Superman, a whisper in the ear, and Superman is to him.
“I’m just a mental projection.”
So, too, the Dionysian and Apollonian Midnighter and Apollo. The Enchantress and her reflective June Moone (and the dynamic engine of Ring Lardner’s Some Like Them Cold, oft-adapted, most famously as the Lardner and George S Kaufman play, June Moon), with their self-damning trajectory to ennui and despair. The generational inspiration of John and Nat Irons, sometimes spoken of in terms that allow us to intuit either of them or both.
When Superman and Black walk through Fort Superman, they pass rooms of wishing machines, rooms of space-traversing vehicles, monitors, a room of time machines. Robots from a dead world, robot dinosaurs, Green Lantern charging lanterns. The Columbia, the Titanic, the Batmobile, the Nautilus. Superman, himself, uses a mobility aid, his powers on the wane and physically disabled. The supermobile is mocked by others, but Superman makes no apologies for it, does not malign himself for needing it, no guilt for using it.
Apollo laments the loss of “the different dynamics,” when he and Midnight reduced their immediate operations from a group to a duo, re-affixing the integrity of group efforts and group living. Recognizing community, appreciating community, but not attempting to worship or be worshipped within community. Angels can dance on the head of a pin, but if one of them is not an angel but something regal, something sovereign?
The leader of the baddies, the other Authority, as self-proclaimed as our heroes but evil, is the body of Solomon Grundy, confused, multiple-personality if not multiple-person dead man who walks, controlled by the brain of the Ultra-Humanite, first superhuman opponent of Superman, and that brain controlled by the programming of the alien Brainiac and his pet alien who looks like a monkey.
In stories we talk of King Arthur and those of the Round Table, but Arthur sat at the table. We lament the death of Kennedy as both a death and a death that foments an era, as if he was bigger than us. Superman and the Authority will be told and talked of as Superman and the Authority, but in-story, Superman is not necessarily elevating himself to this special position, even if other members of the collective cannot help but do so.
King Arthur was a king of Indigenous peoples facing colonization and colonizers done with them. If you look at it that way. Awkward but not untrue. Nothing with King Arthur is untrue. He is real. He is not fictive.
The demon D’z’amor who holds June prisoner with guilt and conviction and Enchantress in thrall with confirmation bias, is only also Enchantress/June, another part or player in their group mind. Superman is able to rationalize away D’z’amor’s potency with mind games and rhetoric, but Black’s response of exhaustion and selfishness is not wholly inappropriate, the physical combat others engage in is fair. The face of “the glory of Babalon” is not Enchantress, June, D’z’amor or others, but the incestuous, masturbatory, homosexual and queer unification and interplay that is also self-named Enchantress.
The Now Generations
“The altar cloth of one aeon is the doormat of the next.”
– Mark Twain
Our touchstones of history as given are the last days of John F Kennedy and the age of King Arthur, united in King Arthur’s court of Camelot and the application of Camelot, in retrospect, to the presidency and radiance of Kennedy and what he symbolizes.
The youngest president of the United States was Theodore Roosevelt, but old Ted does not seem particularly young. He is not remembered young. The second-youngest was John Kennedy and Kennedy never got to be old.
In SatA, Superman says, “Young people […] are more responsible and serious about social issues than we ever were,” but, this Superman is different, himself, a kinder, more patient, less toxic Superman, because this Superman is also of an era. The overlapping age groups we try to transfigure into political or social categories and call generations are always unworkable, but an era? That might come closer. And, as an imaginary person, Superman reflects not the age he is portrayed as, but the age of his portrayal.
“You represent progress, hope, the future,” President Kennedy says of a time-displaced Superman. It is not the same thing to represent something and to be that thing.
While these stories of an older Superman, an experienced Superman, often see him turn into a company man or fascist jailer, a vicious dictator, all of whom loathe and fear the current youth, Morrison and Janin’s Superman has not only aged gracefully, a full of silver fox Superman who is careful with pronoun use and patient in the face of mockery, but he intends his Authority to work “overt missions,” and to be heroes. This is not a demonstration of realpolitik wherein Superman must bend to reality and elect a counsel of black ops death merchants or perform quieting missions for Ronald Reagan. He is not going to fly to the nearest bar and tell everyone having a drink they need to join his army or go to prison immediately to not collect two hundred dollars do not pass go.
The Action Comics Superman written by Grant Morrison and Sholly Fisch was a course correction from the ground up for the toxic masculinity and malignant nationalism and jaded conservative the character had accumulated over decades while being mostly controlled by editors who were real life monsters, and the SatA Superman is a distillation of the best of that. Superman is nice, patient, confident, easygoing, un-self-conscious, self aware, and fair.
“Opponents can’t learn lessons when they’re dead,” says a Superman who wants us all to be able to learn our way out of our hassles. To grow free from our hangups.
“This dad-like figure looking out for us can be made authoritarian,” Grant Morrison said in an interview, “but I think that’s a mistake.”
SatA Superman has the black and red S-shield to remind us of Alex Ross and Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come.
&^#* your bottles and your trying to have a job!
Kingdom Come is famous for a lot of reasons – many positive and amazing – but one that gets excused often by fans while intended as a grave warning, a tragedy, a wrongness, is that Superman explicitly makes mistake upon mistake for most of the comic, becoming a fascist despot who the United Nations believe they have to bomb. It is a Superman who, rather than deal with his own failings, blames youth for everything and imprisons youths and those he considers childish, dangerous, or dangerously childish in his gulag.
Mark Waid followed Kingdom Come with The Kingdom, which freed continuity from repression with the Morrison-created Hypertime, and SatA features a similarly-garbed-to-KC’s-Superman Superman who, rather than lock everyone up, is freeing people from police custody, police brutality, and presenting them with “get out of jail free” cards. Not on work detail. Not as prison labor or prison chattel, but on their own recognizance and Superman’s good faith.
The Kingdom is in part a course correction of Kingdom Come, showing an older Superman who regrets what he had done in KC, trying to make things better while also being murdered every day, going backwards in time, yesterday, the next yesterday, the next yesterday.
And, The Kingdom, is where Lia Nelson, called Lightray, makes her DC Universe appearance, having been introduced in a separate, smaller continuity, an imprint called, Tangent.
Superman and the Authority? Introduced by Warren Ellis, Laura Martin, and Bryan Hitch, the Authority were owned by DC Comics, but set in the WildStorm Universe, an imprint which had been purchased by DC not too long beforehand. Modeled on the Justice League, the team members slotted into particular power sets or dynamic roles of classic superhero types, in a bit of a mix. The Batman and the Superman were also the couple. The lightning, as demonstrated in Thor at Marvel and Flash at DC or sometimes in Captain Marvel at both and at Fawcett, as in The Authority merged with the elder statesmen, like the Martian Manhunter, and the authoritative woman, that is, Wonder Woman.
The Authority were presented as a bright, fiery, impatient hope. Heroes who were unafraid to kick ass hard to make a finer world. The team was largely queer, deliberately international, most of them had recently been homeless or squatted for many years. They were victims of abuses, child abuse, experiments, government mistreatment. The comic made a splash and revolutionized superhero comics on several fronts.
The comic was also a joke. A writer now revealed as a serial abuser and con artist wrote the initial arc as the big tough heroes beating up racist stereotypes, the Fu Manchu proxy and his legions of identical mindless Asians. The second arc presented mass murder as the ultimate answer to a culture of colonizers who had set up rape camps and puppet governments on an alternate Earth, inspired by racist caricature Ming the Merciless. These were gags to see what could be gotten away with. The final arc from the original creative team featured the Authority versus “God.”
The Authority were heroes so long as they had bigger (and culturally inappropriate) monsters to fight, otherwise they would simply be a fascistic ruling power.
SatA echoes these early Authority stories with its own human-missiles, ending on the promise of a conflict with a yellow peril supervillain dressed up as if it is not offensive (this time routine Superman foe, Mongul, and his Warworld), and of course the framing set of an armored woman, a bitter British leader, Midnighter and Apollo.
As delightful as this healthy, cool, experienced but not so judgmental SatA Superman, Morrison reminds us he is, “slightly scarier than Superman as an authoritarian dad with heat vision eyes.” He is without and within, “an alien perspective.” It is still what you can get away with, only in a different skin. A new voice. But, what the comic is tying to get away with appears, at least, to be considerably healthier all around. No need for self-flagellation.
What This Means About Superheroes
The discovery that the world Superman means to save is not ours should shake us to action, it should stir our core.
SatA is predicated on the superhuman vs superhuman fight. Ultimately, the alien vs the alien. Not-us vs not-us. “An,” as Morrison said, “alien perspective.”
The two things that exhaust superhero fans easiest are also two elements we seem to never get enough of:
* Fights that exist so a fight exists.
- Superhero drama detached from people with recognizable human lives.
Ultra-Humanite and Superman establish the pattern as initiating with their conflict in Action Comics #13, but it is a pattern which crystalizes and becomes septic only with time and repetition.
Morrison’s superhero work had been notably avoiding climactic fight scenes, with The Green Lantern seeing victory in the expression of love and will, and Wonder Woman Earth One succeeding via love and structure, with physical conflicts secondary or quickly cut off. Similarly, when Marvel Boy was seemingly repurposed as Seaguy, the ultraviolence and punch-first ethos was reconfigured as puzzles and feelings without requisite city-block-sized explosions. Characters who persisted in perpetuating fights for the sake of fights were presented as stodgy, regressive, self-destroying. And, in a sense, the same is true in SatA. The Ultra-Humanite and his Authority are only looking for a fight. The probes from the Phantom Zone are only looking for a fight. But, in SatA, Superman and his Authority perpetuate a grand final issue battle royale almost exclusively as a bluff.
The grand Authority vs Authority fight is to draw out the supervillains. Superman says that he is the bait, but the whole team and their staged fight as as well. Violent conflict is the bait both for the villains and for the audience. We come in for the fight. We want the fight so that we can know serious things are being discussed and considered. Like true theater and wrestling fans, we need the fight or how can we be sure the positions held hold meaning?
What This Means About Us
How many of our fights are purely for the formalist sake of having a fight? How much do we craft and curate our social and work engagements to something which only reaffirms out biases? How many months do we live simply to get to the next month, planning our summer events that might be delayed three years if they happen, our little three month arcs we hope don’t need a guest penciler?
We’re not penciled. We are real. Naturally.
Time goes by us, too, and our judgment as skewed no matter how we shift it. The way Superman became displaced in time, saw the best in Jack Kennedy, accidentally or on purpose let him die all reflect how we might behave, how we might intuit. Guilt and awareness we might feel. The snippiness and impatience of Manchester Black. The concern of OMAC. The self-damnation of June Moone and the craving attention of Eclipso, for better or worse, reflect drives we have all experienced, even if we are not arrested by our shame or playing mind games with the young and impressionable to feel cool.
Some of us are assholes. That’s just in the cards. That is in the deck from which we deal.
So, we deal. Being tired or self-sacrifice and looking forward to self-realization is not unfamiliar to anyone.
Stare too long at any abyss it starts to read like self-help.
What This Means For Superheroes
The passionate spring released in the autumn of the samurai.
Superman and the Authority gives an ad for another creative team’s story in another comic before hitting us with the swelling denouement disguised as an epilogue. SatA is almost all tease, narratively, set up for future stories, for story and character potential, but so elegantly presented, so enthusiastically played it is a gorgeous piece itself. Mikel Janin could retire top of his game with these designs, his co-artists complimenting his work and opening it like a blooming lotus flower.
The healthy Enchantress seen once June and Enchantress are past their self-arresting shame resembled closely the June who leaves the original version of that same story, from 1966. The silliness and verve of that original telling are sadness, grief, self-loathing in the second, but they are beat for beat nearly the same tale. Stories are not locked. Every time you play a story again, you play a new game. Every time you read an old comic, it cannot be the comic you read before.
The likelihood of most of us reading 0r rereading any of the stories from 1930s Action Comics which is not the first Superman story is scant, but if the Ultra-Humanite attempts to perform a craniotomy on Superman in 2021? We want to read the story where they first met and the Ultra-Humanity ran a circular saw against Superman’s head. We definitely want that.
Even the comics that were made by assholes can be remade by new reads, by new tellings, new drawings, new valuations. Bad comics can be made good by new readings.
This is us.
Warren Ellis did not make The Authority by himself, nor did he make all of it.
Superhero comics are not perfect. Not from any publisher. But, so many of them are serial stories, so many of them have retellings and tie-ins, follow-ups and shared worlds, that they can get better.
What This Means For Us
“If you don’t read this, you’ll probably die!”
– Grant Morrison
This is Grant Morrison’s last work monthly serial set in the DC Universe for the foreseeable future. Having worked, off and on, in that universe, and frequently guided that universe, for more than thirty years, this leaves many fans lamenting, but it is also a celebration of new and other work. A miniseries which could have been released as two albums or a single original graphic novel, SatA.
The followup story, about Warworld, is almost certain to be implicitly racist, because Warworld’s most famed resident is Mongul and Mongul is unavoidably racist, a yellow peril thuggish warlord named “Mongul” with bright yellow skin.
With the release of Shang-Chi lately, and many other stories, we continue our process of reclaiming slurs, reworking abuses, fixing racist stories and repurposing bigoted art, and that too, is a fitting, if ill, metaphor for our life.
The good is, we can actually do it. We can approach things better. We can appreciate what should be appreciated and we can talk around some badness and we can disengage from some badness. We can transfigure pain and anxiety, confusion and shame into play. Into novelty and fuel go our waste and the locks and doors we no longer need nor want.
Our stories continue next month, too.