Liveblogging My Reaction To The New DC
For the last couple of years my enthusiasm for superhero comics has been steadily waning. This is not because I’ve somehow ‘grown up’ or ‘got over it’ or any of that nonsense, but because DC Comics have very deliberately, consciously, chosen to lose my custom.
While the “DC or Marvel?” question is, of course, a meaningless one – “do you prefer your superhero adventures to feature trademarks owned by Time Warner or trademarks owned by the Disney corporation? Which dead, elderly Jewish bloke’s family do you want screwed over more, Jerry Siegel or Jack Kirby?” – the fact is that everyone who reads superhero comics at all *does* have a preference, and in my case I prefer DC to Marvel. It’s not an unthinking or absolute preference – I’d choose to read a good Marvel comic like Nextwave over a bad issue of Green Lantern, because I’m not an idiot – but all else being equal I’d rather read a Batman comic than a Wolverine one, a Superman rather than a Captain America.
But over the last few years, DC Comics have been deliberately trying to drive me away. I don’t say this from paranoia or anything like that – they have obviously identified a target market, and gone after it with brutal efficiency, and I am very far from that target market. As a result, pretty much every comic DC have put any effort into promoting over the last few years has gone as follows:
“Oh no! You know Heroman, that new, young, funny superhero who just recently started fighting crime?”
“The ethnic-minority one, who had a fully-rounded personality and a great supporting cast, whose comic Andrew Hickey really liked?”
“That’s the one. I’m afraid he’s been brutally raped and then eaten by the Ultra-Humanite!”
“Wow, that’s bad. We’d better kill all the villains ever and be angsty about it.”
“Don’t worry, because here’s the Silver Age Heroman!”
“He’s back from the dead! And he has just as little personality as ever!”
“Be fair, he’s got daddy issues now!”
“But he’s still got a blonde crew-cut, and a job in the police or military, and that’s the important thing.”
“Yes it is. Hope has triumphed over despair! Now let us never mention that minority kid ever again.”
So for the past couple of years I’ve been reading fewer and fewer DC comics, and enjoying those I have been reading less and less. Some have begun to feel like a chore rather than a piece of exciting superhero entertainment, and there are some recent comics that I’ve bought out of habit but will now undoubtedly never actually read.
The only two bright spots have been Grant Morrison and Keith Giffen. Morrison’s Batman work has been wonderful, imaginative, and everything a superhero comic should be. Giffen, meanwhile, has been doing great overlooked work. His run on Doom Patrol, in particular, was wonderfully inventive – things like the entire issue that was an Aristocrats joke, or the final issue of his run, where he wrapped up the big conflict he’d been building for many issues by just having Ambush Bug explain to the villain that Dan DiDio had cancelled the title so they’d better just go home.
Which is not to say that other writers and artists weren’t doing good work, but it wasn’t good enough to rise above the sludge and disinterest.
But this month DC are rebooting their entire line of comics, and while the announcements of the new comics stopped me from getting my hopes up too much (apparently DC thought they had too many disabled characters, too many women working for them, and character designs that were too good), just the sheer amount of new comics they were putting out meant that there must be *something* worth reading there. Right? Right?…
So today (the only day this week I’m working less than ten hours) I’m going to read through the first batch of new DC titles I’ve got and comment on them. I’m not buying them all (though I’ve heard such good things about the new Animal Man I might add it to the pull list) and have at least one comic that’s only there because I couldn’t pick up my comics myself this week (Justice League of America), but I’ll be updating this post over the next couple of hours with my as-of-first-reading thoughts on Justice League, Swamp Thing, OMAC, Batgirl and Action Comics.
Remember, I’m only buying those titles that look like they might have some merit, so theoretically I *should* love at least most of these. Check back in a few minutes for my thoughts on…
Justice League #1
writer Geoff Johns
penciller Jim Lee
inker Scott Williams
colourist Alex Sinclair
And so far, it’s not looking good, is it? Lee and Williams draw at least ten trillion lines per panel, in the hope that the completely random cross-hatching will distract the reader from the basic inability to tell a story and lack of anatomical understanding. It features three characters on the cover who are not in the story (such as it is) inside, but the cover *does* also have Green Lantern using his magic wishing ring that can do anything to… make a gigantic gun.
Which about sums up the imaginativeness of this comic. Essentially one long fight scene (apart from one cut away to show that Vic Stone can play American football quite well, though given that this is meant to be our introduction to these characters we’re given no indication in this issue why we should care about this).
There is nothing here that could be described as a ‘plot’ – merely a sequence of not-very-interesting events. Batman and Green Lantern meet each other for the first time and exposit to each other about their powers or lack of them and their entire backgrounds, while alternating between acting like macho pricks and punching a Parademon, which self-immolates. They then fly to Metropolis, where Superman comes out of nowhere and punches Green Lantern for no reason.
Now given that in the new continuity this is our first introduction to any of these characters, we can’t say that anything here is out-of-character *as such*. But it’s certainly an… interesting… choice to take DC’s three most currently-visible characters, have two of them act like macho self-aggrandising idiots and make Superman into a character whose very first reaction on seeing someone who is no threat whatsoever is to fly into them at full speed and punch them on the jaw so hard they fly at least about 70 feet and into a nearby car, knocking it over. It wouldn’t be *my* choice for how to portray these characters, and I wouldn’t want to read anything more about these characters, but maybe someone out there likes that.
There’s also the problem that Lee and Williams are incapable of representational art. Lee has many admirers, so presumably there are things to admire about his work, but one thing that’s certainly true is that his work is not a model of clarity. As a result, the ‘show, don’t tell’ maxim of so much writing has to be ignored, and the expositional burden passes from the artwork to the dialogue.
This would be OK, if Mr Johns had ever heard a human being speak English, but I’ll just leave you with one line, which seems to sum up the general incompetence of this ‘flagship’ comic:
“It combusted into fire!”
Well, maybe Swamp Thing will be better…
Swamp Thing #1
Writer Scott Snyder
Artist Yanick Paquette
Colours Nathan Fairbarn
It is. Much better. This is a good comic. It’s not great, but it sets up a bit of a mystery, it introduces our central character, Alec Holland, and gives him something approximating a nuanced characterisation (he’s a botanist, but he turned into a swamp monster, and now he’s become human again he’s scared of plants, but he still uses his old knowledge to help people). Even though Holland is portrayed as weak and scared, he’s still more heroic than the ‘heroes’ in Justice League, in that he actually does something to help someone else (recommends to a friend that his sore knee will hurt less if he wraps cabbage leaves around it).
The main fault with the story is that it spends several pages at the beginning establishing definitively that it takes place in the DC Universe, in order to satisfy those fans who care about these things (Swamp Thing, for those who don’t know, started as a DC Universe title, and the character used to interact with Superman, Batman and so on occasionally, but later editors ignored the superhero titles so they could tell whatever stories they wanted).
I’m not hugely familiar with Yanick Paquette’s art, having only read a handful of issues he’s drawn before, all to Grant Morrison scripts, but the work here is far more impressive than anything I’ve seen from him before. Especially impressive is the middle section of the book, which is clearly inspired by J.H. Williams’ work on Seven Soldiers 0, with similarly inventive layouts and panel bordering. Fairbarn’s use of different palettes for different sections is also unusually inventive for mainstream superhero comics.
The main weakness in the art is that while Paquette is an excellent layout artist and good draftsman, he’s comparatively weak as an ‘actor’, and a lot of the facial expressions seem to betray an overuse of photo-reference (see e.g. Lois Lane’s expression on the bottom of page one).
But I’ll definitely keep buying this title until it’s inevitably cancelled in about twelve issues’ time. It’s not a world-changing, fantastic piece of art, but it’s a good, enjoyable comic made by people who obviously care about doing a good job. It’s the kind of thing that should be the bread and butter of the big comics companies, but feels like a revelation because the level of quality is usually so low.
I wonder what I’ll think of OMAC…
OMAC #1
story and art by Keith Giffen and Dan DiDio
inks Scott Koblish
colours ‘Hi-Fi’
And this is Keith Giffen in 70s-Kirby tribute mode. Essentially one big fight scene, this just sets up the situation, reintroducing a load of Kirby characters and situations (OMAC, Cadmus, Dubbilex) and variations thereon (Gobblers, wonderful little monsters that are like small versions of Angry Charlie).
The dialogue and captions are perfunctory at best – presumably the work of DiDio (given the credit and Giffen’s normal way of working I imagine this was done Marvel-style, with DiDio and Giffen co-plotting, then DiDio scripting over Giffen’s finished art) – but they don’t get in the way of what is essentially just an excuse to have Giffen do his Giffen thing while trying to throw in as many Kirbyisms as he can.
If you want just twenty-something pages of Keith Giffen drawing like Jack Kirby, this is the comic for you. If you don’t, there’s nothing in the story so far to make you want to stick around. Luckily for me, I do want that, so this is another keeper.
But what about Batgirl?
Batgirl #1
writer Gail Simone
pencils Adrian Syaf
inks Vicente Cifuentes
colour Ulises Arreola
This is another very competent comic, but it saddens me.
For those who don’t know, Batgirl used to be Barbara Gordon, Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, but after she was shot in the spine in the story The Killing Joke, she became Oracle, a unique character in superhero comics. Oracle was a character in a wheelchair who was still able to be a superhero through her intelligence and skills as a librarian – she became the intelligence and data expert for most of the superheroes. Batgirl is just a female Batman knock-off, Oracle was an interesting character in her own right.
Now, however, Barbara Gordon is Batgirl again (explained in one line in this comic – “a miracle happened” – maybe this has been explained in some crossover I didn’t read). This not only gets rid of the fascinating character of Oracle, who still had a huge amount of potential, it also gets rid of the new Batgirl who had replaced her (whose comics I didn’t read but was apparently a good character in her own right – my friends Debi and Jennie both enjoyed that title, but given that DC have stated that they want to appeal to twenty- to thirty-five year-old males with this relaunch, their opinions probably don’t count). Not only that, it’s to fill a void that didn’t really need filling – there’s already a red-haired female crimefighter in a Bat-outfit in Gotham, Batwoman, and her comic is drawn by J.H. Williams so will be much better than this.
Not that this is a bad comic – it’s far from that – but it’s a sign of DC’s insistence on making everything like it was in 1985 again, rather than moving forward and doing new things, and the comic isn’t good enough to overcome that. I’ll probably pick up a few more issues to see how it goes, but this is a comic that just isn’t worth the character destruction that took place to create it.
And now to the one I’ve been looking forward to most… Action Comics.
Action Comics #1
writer Grant Morrison
pencils Rags Morales
inks Rick Bryant
colours Brad Anderson
Only the second-best first Superman issue Grant Morrison’s ever written, this is still clearly the standout of this bunch of comics. Restoring Superman to his 1930s roots as someone fighting against corrupt businessmen, abusive husbands and so on, this takes quite a few elements from the very first Superman story and puts them into a structure based on the old radio show introduction – “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound”.
Morales’ art is not up to the standard of Morrison’s writing, unless that can of cola in Luthor’s hand is meant to shrink to about a quarter of the size between panels, but this story of a Superman at the beginning of his career, still physically vulnerable and not yet up to his full powers, is clearly the best of these, though like most of Morrison’s work it gives the impression there’ll be a lot more to say about it in a few issues’ time, so I’ll reserve further judgement til then.
And that’s it for now. Overall, the quality of these has been far higher than the recent dire levels DC had sunk to, and the only really bad one is Justice League, but at the same time there’s nothing here that’s truly fantastic, or worth the company-wide reboot to achieve. This is just *what they should have been doing anyway*.
10: Seven Soldiers 1
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”
(Luke 14:26)
“But what there is on the credit side! It is rather like the effect of the Ring–a self-riching work, harmony piling up on harmony, grandeur on grandeur, pity on pity. The first section, merely on the mystery of the Overlords, would be enough for most authors …here we meet a modern author who understands that there may be things that have a higher claim than the survival or happiness of humanity: a man who could almost understand “He that hateth not father and mother” and certainly would understand the situation in Aeneid III between those who go on to Latium and those who stay in Sicily.
We are almost brought up out of psyche into pneuma. I mean, his myth does that to us imaginatively. Of course his own thoughts about what the higher level might be are not, in our eyes, very new or very profound: but that doesn’t really make so much difference. (Though, by the way, it would have been better, even on purely literary grounds, to leave it in its mystery, to philosophise less.) After all, few authors’ glosses on their own myths are as good as the myths: unless, like Dante, they take the glosses from other men, real thinkers…
Many minor dissatisfactions, of course. The women are all made up out of a few abstract ideas of jealousy, vanity, maternity etc. But it really matters very little: the thing is great enough to carry far more faults than it commits.
It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies hid in a hideous paper-backed edition, wholly unnoticed by the cognoscenti, while any “realistic” drivel about some neurotic in a London flat–something that needs no real invention at all, something that any educated man could write if he chose, may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious books–as if it really mattered.
I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago, I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return: but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.
And now, what do you think? Do you agree that it is AN ABSOLUTE CORKER?”
C.S. Lewis on Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke
So here’s where I’m meant to come up with some pithy summary that encapsulates the whole of Seven Soldiers, and ties together everything in a neat bow, right?
I’m not going to, of course.
Seven Soldiers is the kind of work that, when examined in enough detail, grows to encompass everything. Writing this book involved more than a little bit of a dance with mental illness. While I never, as Ian MacDonald said of Charles Manson, ‘crossed the line between textual analysis and mass murder’, there was a point while writing this when it seemed to be coming too easily – when every time I researched an aspect of something I wanted to talk about in the book, I found another trivial little link. I decided to take a break from writing for a couple of hours, and listen to the new Doctor Who audio story that had just come out, Heroes Of Sontar.
In that story, the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough and Nyssa are trapped on a dangerous planet with a squad of Sontarans. Sontaran soldiers. Seven Sontaran soldiers.
I extended my break from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks. It was probably for the best.
“I have no control over how people handle the Seven Soldiers characters in my wake – Klarion already seems barely recognizable and appears to have returned to his role (a role no-one could ever sell in the first place) as a teen warlock who turns up to fight DCs younger characters – a sort of Goth Mr. Myxyzptlk. I honestly don’t expect anyone to actualize the potential of these characters, but I’d like to be proven wrong. The Guardian and Frankenstein could join the JLA.”
Grant Morrison
Do I think that what I’m getting out of Seven Soldiers is precisely what Grant Morrison put in?
No, of course not.
But what I do think is that Morrison actually had things to say in this series – and what he had to say was not just about superhero comics, but about the stories we tell ourselves, about growing up, about the relationships between parents and children, about thought…
And I think Morrison was, very deliberately, using symbols that have the absolute maximum resonance for his purposes. He may not, for example, have been aware on a conscious level of the story of Alan Turing’s suicide using a poisoned apple (though he may well have been), but he was certainly aware of the stories of Snow White, and of Adam and Eve, and of Eris, and of what the apple meant in those stories. He was aware of Newton seeing the apple fall. And he will have known, therefore, that there will be other resonances, other stories that have been told about apples, and about falling, and about forbidden knowledge and secrets.
Read a mediocre book, and you come out knowing exactly what the author intended, and what she wanted you to know. Read a great book, and you come out thinking things neither you nor the author ever thought of.
Morrison is deliberately encouraging us to make connections – putting important plot points into a cryptic crossword! – and whether the reader notices the references to Milton and Bunyan, or the references to Stephen King and Arthur C Clarke, isn’t really the point. The point is to notice something.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.Philip Larkin – This Be The Verse
This book has ended up almost entirely different from my original plan for it. It was originally going to be a much more conventional – and rather longer – book. I’d have explained carefully all the references to other superhero stories, I’d have made things explicit rather than implicit. I’d have written much more and said much less. But no plan survives contact with the enemy.
And insofar as I think there’s a single point to Seven Soldiers (there isn’t, of course. If Morrison had a single-sentence point to make, he’d have just written a sentence, rather than thirty-plus comics), that might be it.
We create things – be they comics, or books, or children – and as soon as we do they’re out of our control, sometimes even before we’ve finished. The book you’re reading is not the book I wrote – it’s your interpretation of what I had to say. Some of you will come away thinking I’m a lot cleverer than I really am, while others will come away thinking I’m much stupider, because you’ll have taken out more or less than I put in.
But even the book I wrote isn’t the book I planned to write. It wriggled out from under me and turned into something a lot more ambiguous. I’m not even sure it’s a book I’d like to read, were I not the author. I’m not sure I’d get that much out of it.
Our children will always rebel against us. We may bring them up with a healthy disrespect for authority, only to see them become accountants and vote Conservative. We can’t control them, and no matter what the plans we had for them when they were born, they become something different. Superman was meant to be a Doc Savage knock-off in a newspaper strip, not a symbol of hope and pure goodness with near-godly powers. Bulleteer ends up flying in a crowd scene.
But conversely we are all rebellious children ourselves. There are forces acting on us from all sides that feel inexorable, inevitable. Whether it be gravity, parental expectations, entropy…it can feel like we have no control at all, that we’re walking a narrow road, thick beset with thorns and briars. But there’s not really any such thing as destiny. Libertarian free will may not exist, and we are all the product of every influence, every force that’s ever acted on us, but there are choices, always. There is a third road.
“Sometimes I wonder why my friends they all still sing their songs
Even when not so many sing along
There must be some kind of belief in their hearts or heads
That what they’re doing beats out being dead…
Sometimes I wonder why my friends they all still play guitar
It’s not like they’re in line to be rock stars
There must be some kind of belief in a better world
Where we can strum and smile and get the girl”Blake Jones And The Trike Shop – Sing Along
What gives us hope, what makes it all worthwhile, is the act of creation itself. It’s a messy process, and what we end up with is never what we hoped. Creating anything, be it a baby or a song or a book or a comic, is a recipe for disaster if we put all our hopes and dreams in the result. What matters is the process. And the process is what gives meaning to our lives.
We take the most unpromising materials possible, bits of inspiration from wherever we can find them, and stitch them together, and we can see the joins, and the bolts in its neck, and we know it doesn’t fit together right. We see its imperfections better than anyone else can, and we know it’s a failure. But it has the spark of life, the spark of creativity, and despite its imperfections, it’s better than its creator.
The act of creativity is an alchemical act, one that takes the dead flesh of the past and turns it into the life of the future. It’s turning entropy, the enemy of life, into information, its greatest ally.
If you’re not disappointed in your children, they’re not doing it right.
It’s been said that a measure of progress is the number of those who are counted as people. Millennia ago, only the men of the local tribe were counted as people. Then only the men of our country. Then the men and women of our race. Then all human beings. And now some, I think including Morrison, would include at least some animals. And I’m pretty certain Morrison would include fictional people in that counting.
And yes, that’s ridiculous. But we all put our hands out to Zatanna, didn’t we?
So we must have compassion for our creations, just as we have compassion for our parents. We’re all the rebellious child disappointing her parents, just as we’re all the parents who don’t understand the monster they’ve created. It’s quite possible there can never be true understanding between generations, but there can be empathy. There can be compassion. There can be love.
Comic issues Seven Soldiers #1
Artists J.H. Williams III (line art and colours), Dave Stewart (colours)
Other credits Todd Klein (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi(editor)
Connected Morrison works All of them
Look Out For Everything
Still to come in Seven Soldiers The rest of your life.
9: Mister Miracle
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
(Before I start, a quick apology to any visually impaired people reading this. I posted all this before, with alt tags for the images, including one with a little extra bit about the use of the handkerchief in the minstrel show, but WordPress ate it. I’ve reposted this, but don’t have time to retag the images tonight – I am unwell with what I’m hoping isn’t stomach flu. I will do so as soon as practical. I’ve also not re-italicised titles.)
Before I start this, an admission. I am a white man. Further, I am a white man from England. I say this up front because I am going to be treading on some astonishingly touchy ground regarding race in the USA, and while I consider myself to be a passionate, committed opponent of all forms of racism, I am aware enough of my own privilege to know that it’s entirely possible I will make mistakes here, even though I am making every effort not to. Please feel free to inform me of any problematic aspects of this.
“I found that Hoyle and Narlikar had already worked out Wheeler-Feynman electrodynamics in expanding universes, and had then gone on to formulate a time-symmetric new theory of gravity. Hoyle unveiled the theory at a meeting of the Royal Society in 1964. I was at the lecture, and in the question period, I said that the influence of all the matter in a steady state universe would make his masses infinite. Hoyle asked why I said that, and I replied that I had calculated it. Everyone thought I had done it in my head during the lecture, but in fact, I was sharing an office with Narlikar, and had seen a draft of the paper. Hoyle was furious. He was trying to set up his own institute, and threatening to join the brain drain to America if he didn’t get the money. He thought I had been put up to it, to sabotage his plans. However, he got his institute, and later gave me a job, so he didn’t harbor a grudge against me”
Stephen Hawking
Authenticity is a tricky subject, isn’t it?
It used to be so simple. Fats Domino doing Ain’t That A Shame was definitely authentic. Pat Boone doing the same song wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Pat Boone wanted to change the words to “Isn’t that a shame?”
But then, Chuck Berry is definitely ‘authentic’ too, isn’t he? He pretty much invented his genre. But have a look at Hail! Hail! Rock And Roll, the 1986 documentary about him. There’s a scene where he talks about how he’d admired musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as well as Domino, but realised that their music was ghettoised. So he changed his vocal style to sound less black, and more like Boone – “Why can’t I do what Pat Boone does and sell records to the white people, too?” [FOOTNOTE: Unfortunately I'm currently unable to check this quote for perfect accuracy, as I can no longer play my old VHS copy of this film. Should anyone be able to provide a corrected version, I will post it to http://andrewhickey.info/errata.]
This appears to have worked. Witness the scene in It by Stephen King (a novel about seven misfits who go off to fight a giant spider that’s really a far more malicious and powerful force than it at first appears), where one character wants to go and watch TV to see if Neil Sedaka is ‘a Negro’, because he’d been fooled into thinking Chuck Berry was white until seeing him on TV. [FOOTNOTE: This, as with much of King's work, is semi-autobiographical. See http://www.stephenking.pl/sk_artykuly_ew_58.html, in which King argues that white people like Bob Seger and Snow Patrol can now sound every bit as good as black people like Chuck Berry.]
Is someone ‘authentic’ when they’re copying an ‘inauthentic’ performer who is in turn copying an ‘authentic’ performer?
I still know a few people who prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles because the former are more ‘authentic’. Is an LSE economics dropout from Kent singing Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters songs more or less authentic than an art school dropout from Liverpool singing Marvelettes and Isley Brothers songs? Discuss.
Chuck Berry is, of course, known for suing artists such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys, who he considers stole his ideas. Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s pianist, sued him in 2000, claiming to have co-written most of Berry’s hits without credit. The lawsuit was thrown out.
In Mister Miracle, Shilo Norman complains that Baron Bedlam, an imitator made out of plastic, is ripping off his act. Shilo Norman is the third Mister Miracle.
“You’re tokenising me! I’m not a white man, I’m a Scot, OK? My fucking country… my country has been ruled by the fucking English for five hundred years, so don’t tokenise me, okay?!”
Grant Morrison, reply to a fan’s question at a convention panel, 2006
In Final Crisis, Grant Morrison’s 2008 follow-up to Seven Soldiers (and specifically to the Mister Miracle section), Anthro, the first boy ever born and the DC Universe equivalent of Adam, is given the secret of fire by Metron of the New Gods.[ FOOTNOTE: Metron is the Greek for 'measure'. One of the quotes I considered but discarded for one of these section headers was from Antiphon the Sophist - "Time is a thought or a measure [metron], not a substance.” – but I couldn’t find a source for it other than Wikipedia] The scene is somewhat reminiscent of the scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which knowledge is given to hominids by aliens. Unsurprisingly, Jack Kirby, the creator of the New Gods, adapted 2001 in comic form in the mid-70s – both Kubrick’s film and Kirby’s comics dealt with the idea that ultimately, what makes us human comes not from ourselves but from aliens who took the clay that was the crude form of proto-humanity and shaped it into something other and different.
Popularised by Eric von Däniken, a convicted fraudster, the ‘chariots of the Gods’ idea holds that beings from elsewhere arrived and civilised a poor bunch of ape-people who could never have achieved anything by themselves, by turning those ape-people into a poor imitation of themselves. For some reason, I can’t imagine why, this idea is a lot more popular among the nastier sections of the right-wing than among others.
Here, though, Metron is explicitly linked to astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who has become the modern-day symbol for knowledge and intelligence, even though his own initial reputation was based on having taken secret knowledge from others and making it public. Hawking, who uses a wheelchair because he lives with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was, when Seven Soldiers was written, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge – the same position Isaac Newton had held centuries earlier. The chair that allows Hawking to move about is paralleled by Metron’s Möbius chair, which allows him to travel throughout time and space.
Much of Hawking’s work over the decades has been to do with black holes, and in particular the black hole information paradox, which we discussed back in the chapter on Zatanna. To refresh your memory very briefly, black holes suck things into themselves. They also radiate particles (Hawking radiation). But those particles should, according to the ‘no-hair theorem’, be totally random. So the information in the objects originally sucked into the black holes is destroyed. And information is supposed to be unable to be destroyed. This would violate all sorts of things, including our old friend the Second Law Of Thermodynamics.
One solution to this, which we’ve touched on earlier, is the holographic universe idea. Another is that the information gets pumped into another universe. Hawking, though, at around the time Seven Soldiers was being published, decided that Hawking radiation is just non-random enough to allow the information to escape back into the universe it came from.
“In active (feedforward and/or feedback) regulation, each disturbance D will have to be compensated by an appropriate counteraction from the regulator R. If R would react in the same way to two different disturbances, then the result would be two different values for the essential variables, and thus imperfect regulation. This means that if we wish to completely block the effect of D, the regulator must be able to produce at least as many counteractions as there are disturbances in D. Therefore, the variety of R must be at least as great as the variety of D.”
Principia Cybernetica – http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/reqvar.html
It’s generally regarded that American popular song began with Stephen Foster. Foster, who died aged 37 the year before the American Civil War ended, wrote songs for blackface minstrel shows. These shows, which remained popular in the UK into the 1980s but thankfully died out in the US some decades earlier, involved light-skinned performers ‘blacking up’ as black people, and singing and dancing in a parody of what they imagined the black manner to be. Interestingly, many of the performers in these shows, who would now be regarded as white, were Jewish, Italian or Irish – ethnicities and nationalities that were regarded as inferior at the time.
Foster’s songs, and the other songs of the type, were advertised as being authentic examples of ‘African’ or ‘Ethiopian’ music (as well as some much more offensive terms). But they were in fact far more in the style of Irish ballads and European parlour song, and owed little or nothing in their composition to the actual songs of the enslaved black people of the period. However, they were intended for playing on the banjo, an instrument adapted from one used by slaves to perform their own music, and to be sung in ‘negro’ voices.
In fact, many of the earliest professional black entertainers in the USA performed in minstrel shows, wearing black makeup and performing in the same style as the white performers. These shows were apparently hugely popular with black audiences, who were glad to see any black performers on stage at all, even if they were reduced to playing caricatures of white people playing caricatures of black people.
The cult of ‘authenticity’ in popular music comes from much the same place, and is largely the responsibility of people like John and Alan Lomax. The Lomaxes and their ilk were well-meaning in their attempts to record a culture that was already dying, but their wish to ‘preserve’ music meant that if a black performer had a song that didn’t, to them, sound black enough it must have been contamination from white music. Likewise white folk singers were discouraged from singing blues numbers.
The person worst served by this kind of thing was probably Robert Johnson, known among his peers as a sophisticated musician in a multitude of styles, but who only ever got to record in the blues style for which he’s now known [FOOTNOTE: Johnson was recorded by commercial producers, rather than the Lomaxes, who I'm using as the most prominent example of a general trend of thinking.] Johnson, of course, died young, and to add insult to injury it became widely believed that he had sold his soul to Satan in return for musical facility – it being, of course, impossible that a young black man could have become a virtuoso guitarist through a combination of natural ability and practice.
Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter did somewhat better. While the Lomaxes insisted on recording only his blues music, rather than his impassioned political songs or gorgeous ballads, and only gave him the money he earned in small amounts, supposedly to stop him spending it all on drink (until he threatened to sue them), he later managed to record pieces like Goodnight, Irene which are among his most enduring works.
But we see, time and again, the theme of the black artist being defined by what the white people think the black people should be doing, stretching from Lead Belly all the way back to the ex-slaves copying their ex-masters’ on-stage aping of them.
In Mister Miracle, Shilo Norman is an escapologist. He puts on chains and escapes from them for his audience.
“LEAD BELLY Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel”
Headline in Life magazine, 1937
The second law of thermodynamics is what both gives us our freedom and eventually dooms us. It states that as time goes on, entropy (disorder) must increase. This is quite possibly the most fundamental law in the universe, and it’s what gives us the arrow of time at all – we can define time, simply, as the increase in entropy.
But the second law is also mathematically equivalent to Ashby’s Law Of Requisite Variety, which states (in lay terms) that it’s impossible to control a system unless you have as many options open as there are ways the system can do things you don’t want. The more complex a system – the more disordered a system – the more options you have to have to control it. So all attempts at control are, ultimately, futile. Dark Side can find as many ways to hem Mister MIracle in as he likes, but the escape artist will always find a way out. The controller has to be lucky every time – the controlled only has to be lucky once.
Black holes are the ultimate expression of the law of gravity. Gravity pulls everything towards the centre, and get something massive enough, and this force will pull all the mass toward the centre to such an extent that even light is pulled toward it. Once you’ve crossed the ‘event horizon’ – the point at which the attraction of the singularity becomes great enough – you can’t get out.
In most black holes, movement towards the singularity (the centre of a black hole, not the geek rapture) is the same thing as the increase in entropy – this is why you can never escape. But there’s a special type of black hole – the extremal black hole (and really, what other kind could a superhero ever deign to try to escape from but an extremal one?) – where that may not be true. These are the smallest possible black holes that can exist (which also means that they’d be the perfect type to be artificially created, like the one Mister Miracle escapes from).
The physicist Sean Carrol has shown [FOOTNOTE: for a value of 'shown' that means 'done some mathematics about objects that have never been shown to exist in nature, in a situation that would be unlikely to occur even if they do exist'] that if these are charged in a particular way, there are actually two event horizons. There’s an outer one, which is inescapable – once you’re inside it, increase in entropy becomes equivalent to movement toward the centre, so it’s impossible to get out of.
But then inside this, there’s a second event horizon. Inside this, time works normally again. Anything in it can move towards the singularity, or just hang around in the inner event horizon forever. Were you to find yourself in this inner event horizon, and somehow managed not to die instantly from the extraordinary gravitational forces, you would find you had room to move. You could never get out into the outer event horizon, but you’d have wiggle room.
And the singularity of this type of black hole, should it exist, would be something of a type unique in this universe – it would have zero entropy, according to Carrol. What Carrol suggests this means is that the entropy of anything entering the singularity would escape into another dimension, which he calls Whoville.
“Taking the extremal limit of a non-extremal Reissner-Nordström black hole (by externally varying the mass or charge), the region between the inner and outer event horizons experiences an interesting fate — while this region is absent in the extremal case, it does not disappear in the extremal limit but rather approaches a patch of $AdS_2\times S^2$. In other words, the approach to extremality is not continuous, as the non-extremal Reissner-Nordström solution splits into two spacetimes at extremality: an extremal black hole and a disconnected $AdS$ space. We suggest that the unusual nature of this limit may help in understanding the entropy of extremal black holes.”
Extremal limits and black hole entropy, Sean M. Carroll, Matthew C. Johnson, Lisa Randall
So we’ve seen that a notion of authenticity is ultimately an oppressive one. Coming originally from the best of motives – to try to preserve the unique music of an oppressed racial group, and later to protect black musicians from having their music sanitised and popularised by more ‘acceptable’ white musicians – it’s ended up trapping musicians in artistic ghettos.
The songwriter Mark “Stew” Stewart actually went so far as to name his band The Negro Problem, partly in reference to An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a 1945 study into racial prejudice, but mostly because that’s how he’s regarded. Nearly 80 years after Lead Belly’s heyday, it has now become so accepted that black people make ‘black music’ that the idea of a black man playing a guitar or singing melodies, rather than using a turntable and rapping, is anathema to the music industry. In albums like Post-Minstrel Syndrome, and in his musical Passing Strange, Stew has created some of the best songs in any genre for the last thirty years.
When ‘authenticity’ means a songwriter like Stew is punished for trying to escape from a musical ghetto, is it another tool of oppression? Is it worth letting a troop of plastic clones come along, one after another, and make sanitised copies of ‘authentic’ art, if that’s the price of setting people free? Can we get rid of Pat Boone, the minstrel show and Vanilla Ice without getting rid of Fats Domino, Lead Belly and the Wu Tang Clan? And should we even want to?
Chinese guys can jump real high and Germans cook soul food
white boys rap and hippies nap up their dreads to look rude
jazz is now suburban, it’s Marsalis-ly clean
and now we’ve got Viagra everyone’s a sex machine
so black men ski
Some kids I’ll describe as friends say I am race-obsessed
the luxury of your opinion shows you that you are blessed
I have poems about sunsets, flowers and the rain
I’ve read them to policemen, but it was all in vainStew – Black Men Ski
“Barker and Taylor do that, too, but after describing the marketing manoeuvres that made country and the blues racially “pure” categories (and left much of folk a politically impotent exercise in earnestness), they shy away from the legacy of that divide: rock purists and anti-hip-hop crusades on the one hand, and, on the other, pop music that entertains but rarely provokes, and never threatens any real danger but suicide, packaged and sold as a gesture of romantic authenticity. By the time they get to punk, a genre defined by politics, they’re so committed to avoiding the authenticity trap that they celebrate punk’s overlooked showmanship, failing to recognise that their embrace of inauthenticity as the essence of popular music is itself a trap.
But, as they write of the Monkees’ utterly contrived “I’m a Believer”, so what? It’s still a great song. And Faking It is a great collection of true stories about “fake” music. It’s the essay as Möbius strip; a literary illusion that ultimately makes less of an argument than it seems to, and yet tells us more about what’s true, what’s not, and why that doesn’t always matter, than a more straightforward confrontation with the secrets and lies of pop music ever could.”
Jeff Sharlett, Keeping It Unreal, New Statesman 16 April 2007
Lead Belly is buried in Shiloh Baptist Church, Mooringsport, Louisiana. He died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Comic issues Mister Miracle #1-4
Artists Pasqual Ferry, Billy Patton, Freddie Williams II(pencils), Pasqual Ferry, Michael Bair, Freddie Williams II (inks), Dave McCaig (colours)
Other credits Pat Brosseau, Nick J Napolitano, Phil Balsman, Travis Lanham (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Most of his DC work after this has followed on from it – 52, Final Crisis and The Return Of Bruce Wayne are all sequels to this.
Look Out For Freedom, responsibility and entropy
Still to come in Seven Soldiers The end
8: Bulleteer
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
We’re heading into the home stretch now, so hold tight.
“Fair was the woman’s face, and sweet
Her voice, and swift were her noiseless feet,
And kind her hands; but her husband knew
Full little of her the fair and true
To work when the dawn brake golden-fair;
At work when the stars of night shone there
Forewatcht, forwearied at night and worn,
Yet eager to meet his work at morn”The Sculptor – Emily Hickey [FOOTNOTE No relation as far as I know, though this 19th century poet shares the name of my paternal grandmother.]
Over and over in this series of essays we have seen variations of the same story – the creator making something in the likeness of a human being, and that creature gaining life and sentience. Whether Frankenstein, or the golem, or the robot revolt, or Gwydion, over and over we’ve seen the creator/created conflict appear in Seven Soldiers.
Even the Snow White legend, which at first sight seems to be of a totally different type, fits into this pattern. Snow White’s mother wished for a beautiful daughter, but as soon as her daughter grew more beautiful than her, she tried to have her killed. (The Brothers Grimm only changed the mother to a step-mother fairly late on – in the original story it was the mother).
The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (rhymes, more or less, with Bulleteer) is another story of this type. According to the classical poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion was not interested in women, because they were all whores (who says the ancient Greeks were misogynist?). So he decided to carve himself one out of ivory, because women made out of the teeth of dead elephants are somehow better than the kind made out of flesh. However, when he groped its breasts they weren’t soft, so he prayed to Venus, the godess of love, to turn his statue into a real woman. Rather than say “No, leave me alone you strange man” she granted his wish, and the next time he groped his statue’s breast she became human, and despite the fact that her very first experience of him, or indeed of life, was of him sexually assaulting her, the nameless statue (only given the name Galatea centuries later, when people realised that women mattered) agreed to marry him. Who says the ancient Greeks were misogynist?
This, incidentally, is another connection to the stories of both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, both of whom have to be awoken by a similar assault.
These days, this story is best known as the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, in which philologist Henry Higgins (whose self-description is “I do genuine scientific work in phonetics, and a little as a poet on Miltonic lines”) attempts to raise Cockney Eliza Doolittle out of the gutter and into polite society by teaching her to speak ‘correctly’. Doolittle, of course, rebels against him and asserts her own individuality, though during Shaw’s lifetime he had continuously to fight directors who wanted to bowdlerise his work and have her fall in love with her teacher.
Cyn: I would not have thee find another head
That seemed as fair to thee for all the world!
We’ll have no stranger models if you please,
I’ll be your model, sir, as heretofore,
So reproduce me at your will; and yet
It were sheer vanity in me to think
That this fair stone recalls Cynisca’s face!
PYG. Cynisca’s face in every line!
CYN. No, no!
Those outlines softened, angles smoothed away,
The eyebrows arched, the head more truly poised,
The forehead ten years smoother than my own
Tell rather of Cynisca as she was
When, in the silent groves of Artemis,
Pygmalion told his love ten years ago:
And then the placid brow, the sweet sad lips,
The gentle head down-bent resignedly,
Proclaim that this is not Pygmalion’s wife,
Who laughs and frowns, but knows no meed between.
I am no longer as that statue is!
PYG. Why here’s ingratitude, to slander Time,
Who in his hurried course has passed thee by!
Or is it that Cynisca won’t allow
That Time could pass her by, and never pause
To print a kiss upon so fair a face?Pygmalion And Galatea by W.S. Gilbert
So why does this story of the creature rebelling against the creator have so much resonance? I suspect it’s to do with our old friend entropy.
As soon as we’re born, we’re destined to die, and once we’ve got past about the age of eighteen our bodies are slowly starting to crumble. Our mortality is a fact that hits us every time we see a new grey hair in our beard, or notice that we can no longer hear the very highest frequencies, or have to have a tooth extracted. Pretty much as soon as everything in our body has started working at its full functionality, bits of us stop working, until eventually we stop altogether.
This is something very few of us actually welcome. The idea that the very best-case scenario for me is to spend fifty to seventy more years in slowly-increasing amounts of pain and disability, before ceasing to exist forever, is not a cheery one. So we look for ways to avoid this. It’s no surprise that one of our very oldest pieces of literature, the Epic Of Gilgamesh, deals with an attempt to gain immortality. It’s also no surprise that legends of a Golden Age and a Fall have such potency – I remember how in my late teens I would go to my lectures on the eighteenth floor of the Maths department and take the stairs, and how my hair wasn’t receding, and wonder what went wrong (I forget that in my late teens I was desperately lonely, physically unattractive and reliant on others for financial support, of course. There was never a Golden Age, our memories have just yellowed with age).
The two ways in which people have usually attempted to gain at least a metaphorical immortality are through their children and through their artistic creations, so it’s natural that we’d have stories develop about children who *are* artistic creations. The problem is, though, that as a method of gaining immortality, having children is a decidedly ambiguous one. Yes, our children carry our genes and often resemble us a great deal. We can even hope that our children carry on the best of us while leaving the worst.
But children are also the worst reminders of our own mortality – not only are they a reminder that we’re grown up, and an additional responsibility, but they’re our replacement. Once Us Mk II exists, it’s only a matter of time before Mk I gets taken off the market.
There’s also, for men at least, the additional possibility that our child is not really our biological child at all – that it’s not ‘me’ becoming ‘immortal’ at all, but someone else. That’s not a problem when it’s our intellectual, rather than biological, child. And men can make those all by themselves, without any of those icky girls being involved.
But if a child being a parent’s ‘replacement’ is hard for the parent, it’s hard, too, for the child. The child, after all, loves and respects the parent (assuming even basic competence in parenting – which is sadly not an assumption one can make all that freely), but is an individual herself who cannot be expected to want the same things her parents do. There’s a reason that one of the first words learned by all babies, after ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ or their local equivalent, is ‘no’.
(It may be significant here that work on Seven Soldiers started shortly after Grant Morrison’s father, who seems to have been a genuinely great man, died. See for example the obituary of Walter Morrison at http://libcom.org/history/morrison-walter-1924-2004.)
Seen this way, Pygmalion becomes a myth of defeminizing, in which the artist/scientist would ensure the male final cause (through which version of the myth the single man attains the state of God the father) by seeking to control, through this bizarre form of recycling, original female energy. Natural birth (as well as natural death) is recast as a fantasy of perpetual motion. The female body, seen as the source of entropy, is turned into a machine to defeat entropy. The benefit of this process ensues only for the male who manipulates this force to his advantage – a possible infinite extension of his single-willed life.
In Shaw’s play Pygmalion, the twist on the myth is that it is not a statue that is brought to physical life, but rather a lower-class woman made into a socially acceptable being. Through diction lessons, another’s words are in a sense put in Eliza’s mouth, and by the same token her own organic life drawn out. It is necessary to turn the woman into a statue before the statue can be made to speak the proper way, made into a work of social art, and thus into a person a male artist can not just love but “wed” in civilized society. Shaw, it seems, is equating here the creation of a statue with an act of male vampirism.
George Slusser – Last Men And First Women: The Dynamics Of Life Extension In Shaw And Heinlein, in Shaw, vol 17, Shaw And Science Fiction (Milton T Woolf ed.)
Alix Harrower, like Eliza Doolittle, is an almost entirely passive figure until the very end of her comic. Her husband decides her destiny is to be a superhero, and turns her into one without her consent. The only reason she survives is because she (unlike him) keeps her wedding ring on. She then fulfills his ambitions for her after his death even though she doesn’t want to – she becomes a superhero during a suicide attempt she makes when she discovers his infidelity. Everything that happens to her in the entire story is initiated by someone else, usually for reasons Alix never fully knows. The only decision she makes in the four issues of her comic – the one that truly defines her as a character – is to walk away and stop being a superhero.
Even at the climax in Seven Soldiers #1, she makes no decisions even as she ends up saving the day. She’s ‘the spear never thrown’ because she chooses not to throw herself into events. Instead, events throw themselves at her. She refuses to accept the fate which the entire world, from her genetic ancestors, through to her manipulative husband, through to the supernatural forces manipulating everything behind the scenes, has planned for her.
(It’s rather depressing how she’s been used in comics since Seven Soldiers finished. Turned into a generic superhero, she’s depicted in crowd scenes, usually flying, even though she doesn’t fly. Even after her story’s completely over, her decisions and her very existence are disrespected and rendered unimportant – though so too are the opinions of her male creator, which is on one level an appropriate response).
The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature in general, and of feminine instinct in particular.
George Bernard Shaw – Pygmalion (afterword)
Bulleteer has an odd position within the Seven Soldiers mega-story. The mini-series itself is one of the three (Shining Knight and The Manhattan Guardian being the other two) that provide the narrative throughline for the story, while the other four series flesh out the bigger picture, but the character’s own narrative ‘arc’ (I had hoped to get through this book without using that word, but it seems the only appropriate one) is almost entirely divorced from it. The rest of the characters in the story are concerned with superheroism, or with the Sheeda invasion, or with taking revenge on overbearing parents, but Alix herself is only after a quiet life. It’s notable that while the other characters are either born different, or become heroic when they gain their costume, the Alix before her accident is more confident, wittier, happier, and more secure than afterward. She’s also actually more heroic – she works with autistic children before the accident, while afterwards she works as a bodyguard for an unpleasant film star.
But like Jake Jordan, the other character who starts out the series as just a normal human being, her instincts are always good, even when she’s depressed and suicidal. She refuses to be a ‘hero’, but she takes the woman who tried to steal her husband and attempted to murder her to hospital without a second’s thought, because it’s the right thing to do.
Bernard Shaw eventually had to write a short ‘sequel’ to his Pygmalion (it’s a prose piece, printed as the afterword in most editions of the play now) giving Eliza Doolittle a happy ending, because the audience flat out refused to believe that the story ended with her walking away from Henry Higgins, and directors kept changing the ending to suit what they wanted. His sequel still wasn’t what the audience actually wanted – they’d been expecting a love story, and were angry that they didn’t get one – but it was an attempt to give them a sense of completion, of ‘closure’. Of course, after his death, it was turned into a musical and given a love-story ending (the same people also wrote Camelot, which had Arthur and Lancelot forgiving each other and surviving at the end, rather than going to war against each other as in their source material).
It may well be the fate of Bulleteer to continue appearing in crowd scenes, flying, and doing generic-superhero stuff for all eternity unless her creator gives her an ending that comes closer to the desires of the typical superhero comic reader than simply walking away and getting on with her life. There’s something sadly appropriate about that. The one decision Alix makes, her one bit of agency, is taken away from her by forces outside her control.
But it’s by fighting those narrative conventions all the way, by struggling to gain any kind of agency, that Alix fulfills her destiny and saves the world. Had she gone with the flow, had she been the superhero the entire universe seemed to be wanting to make of her, the world would have been lost.
Comic issues Bulleteer #1-4
Artists Yanick Paquette (pencils), Michael Bair (inks), Alex Sinclair (colours)
Other credits Phil Balsman (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works The Filth is very, very, very different, but has some connections.
Look Out For Millions The Mystery Mutt’s secret
Still to come in Seven Soldiers The time of your life!
7: Frankenstein
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
“Did I request thee, Maker from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
John Milton, Paradise Lost
“When, after some heretics had taken Christ for a mere man and others for the supreme God, St John in his Gospel endeavoured to state his nature so that men might have from thence a right apprehension of him and avoid those heresies and to that end calls him the word or logos: we must suppose that he intended that term in the sense that it was taken in the world before he used it when in like manner applied to an intelligent being. For if the Apostles had not used words as they found them how could they expect to have been rightly understood. Now the term logos before St John wrote, was generally used in the sense of the Platonists, when applied to an intelligent being and the Arians understood it in the same sense, and therefore theirs is the true sense of St John.”
Isaac Newton
So let’s talk about Arianism.
Arius of Alexandria must have been very naughty indeed, even though he was a priest. We know this because he is the one person of whom we actually have a reasonable historical record of him being slapped in the face by St Nicholas.
So what put Arius on the naughty list?
The Nicene creed (“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible…”) is the major touchstone of the Christian faith, and is shared by the vast majority of Christians in the world – Orthodox, Anglican, Catholic and Lutheran alike share this creed. It was drawn up in the early fourth century at the first Council of Nicaea, the event at which this face-slapping took place. And this council, probably the most important event in the history of Christian theology, took place mostly just to tell Arius he was wrong.
The original version of the creed, in fact, ended with “But those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not;’ and ‘He was not before he was made;’ and ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or ‘He is of another substance’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘The Son of God is created,’ or ‘changeable,’ or ‘alterable’—they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.” – this was specifically aimed at Arius.
Because what the Christian church – as we know it today, as it has been known since the fourth century – teaches is that God has three aspects in one. There is God the Father, The Son (who is also The Word who became flesh as Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. But these are all the same thing. I would say here that they’re ‘like different faces of a die’ or something, except that pretty much every metaphor for the Trinity has, over the millennia, been declared a heresy. But they’re three aspects of the same thing – Donne’s “three person’d God”.
By contrast, Arius taught that the Word (which is to say, the thing that became Christ) was not the same as God, but was created by God – that the Word was the first and best creation of God, and that all the other creations were created by the Word, which acts as the intermediary between God and the physical/spiritual universe. (Arianism seems almost here to shade over into Gnosticism).
Richard Dawkins, incidentally, says in his book The God Delusion that there is ‘very little’ difference between these two positions. One hates to imagine Dawkins’ reaction were a theologian to claim there was ‘very little’ difference between Lamarckianism and natural selection. I would here use the phrase ‘separate magisteria’ but that would just be rubbing salt in the wound.
The substantive point here is that Arius, and his followers the Arians (who include modern-day Jehovah’s Witnesses, which possibly explains their aversion to Santa – old enmities die hard), believed that rather than being the same thing as God, Jesus was somewhat closer to the Devil or Adam. God was eternal, but the Son had a beginning. He was created. He was a creature.
Some of them say that the Son is an eructation, others that he is a production, others that he is also unbegotten. These are impieties to which we cannot listen, even though the heretics threaten us with a thousand deaths. But we say and believe and have taught, and do teach, that the Son is not unbegotten, nor in any way part of the unbegotten; and that he does not derive his subsistence from any matter; but that by his own will and counsel he has subsisted before time and before ages as perfect God, only begotten and unchangeable, and that before he was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, he was not. For he was not unbegotten. We are persecuted, because we say that the Son has a beginning, but that God is without beginning.
Arius
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, once the Reformation had allowed religious disagreements to surface in central Europe [FOOTNOTE: Interestingly, this was the same time and place in which Rabbi Loew lived. Had we not earlier discussed his golem, this would undoubtedly feature in this essay.], there was a flourishing of theological thought never seen before or since. The many movements that became known as Puritanism were among the more obvious fruits of this, but one small but influential group were the Socinians.
Based on the teachings of Fausto Sozzini (also known as Faustus [FOOTNOTE: This is the Latin for 'lucky'. The tale of Faust was not yet so widespread that the name had died out. However, it's a nice coincidence given our subject.] Socinus), Socinianism became popular in Poland and TransylvaniaYes, honestly. It was an offshoot of Calvinism which disagreed with Calvin on two important points. It agreed with Arius that Jesus was a creature, not God, and it also believed that humans have free will, and therefore God’s omniscience only stretched to necessary truths, not contingent ones.
England in the mid 17th century wasn’t as theologically diverse as central Europe of a few decades earlier. While a certain amount of religious toleration was allowed, this was toleration of the “OK, we’ll stop torturing Puritans and burning Catholics to death, for now” type, and it had definite limits. The Act of Toleration of 1689, for example, which legalised nonconformist Protestantism, included a reiteration that Catholicism and disbelief in the Trinity were still illegal.
Nonetheless, Socinianism had a huge influence on three of the most important English thinkers of the time – Sir Isaac Newton, [FOOTNOTE The great Liberal economist John Maynard Keynes, who first brought to light Newton's views on theology and magic, said “It may be that Newton fell under Socinian influences, but I think not. He was rather a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides.” However, it seems generally agreed that Newton was influenced by the Socinians. Certainly the argument I quote above is a specifically Arian, rather than Maimonidean, one. ] John Locke and John Milton. Newton has been dealt with extensively in these pages already, so I’ll be looking more at the others, but keep the influence on Newton in mind.
I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton.black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.William Blake
John Locke was a friend of Newton, and one of the intellectual founders of both Capitalism and Liberalism. He was also one of the greatest proponents of religious tolerance of the time – his A Letter Concerning Toleration showed that suppression of religious dissent caused more problems than the dissent itself did (one of the earliest examples of the type of cybernetic insight that led to Ashby’s Law, and the eventual unification of thermodynamics and information theory), though he didn’t go so far as to accept that this toleration should extend to atheists, who would be incapable of swearing binding oaths.
The swearing of oaths was hugely important to Locke, because central to his thinking was the idea of the social contract – that society should be based on agreements freely entered into, rather than on authority imposed from above. (Locke did not seem to see any contradiction between this and his being one of the most important people in the slave trade). Free trade and free expression would ultimately lead to a better world.
The reason Locke could think this is that he dismissed the idea of Original Sin. To Locke, humanity wasn’t fallen. Rather people were tabula rasa – blank slates written on by their experiences. No-one was born bad or good, a genius or fool, but everyone was made the way they were by their experiences. Locke’s view here can be contrasted with the earlier work of Hobbes, who in Leviathan [FOOTNOTE: Referenced, of course, in Klarion. Honestly, I'm not reading all this 17th century philosophy stuff into the comics - this stuff is text, not subtext] argues for a social contract but also for an absolute monarch, on the grounds that humans are irredeemably evil and anything less would lead to ‘the war of all against all’.
Locke’s ideas represented the first real break between the philosophy of the English-speaking nations (Locke was a huge influence on the founders of the USA) and that of continental Europe. While self-proclaimed ‘rationalists’ like Leibniz were arguing that many ideas were innate, Locke, an empiricist, argued that we only have a concept of, say, ‘red’ after we have experienced something red in the real world.
Locke’s ideas lead, essentially, to the idea that the soul does not exist as something apart from and separate from the physical world [FOOTNOTE The Socinians were Christian Mortalists, who believed that the soul dies with the body but is resurrected by God on Judgement Day. Both Hobbes and Locke held to this idea, as did Milton, of whom more shortly.]. Humans, like Locke’s deity, are a single substance, rather than beings with multiple independent aspects. God made his Son the same way he made us, and all we are are lumps of flesh – but lumps of flesh that are infinitely perfectible, not innately evil.
OF man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos:John Milton, Paradise Lost
John Milton disagreed with Locke about Original Sin – in fact Milton’s greatest work, Paradise Lost, is from beginning to end about the Fall, first of Satan and then of Adam. But Milton was also influenced by the Socinians, and shared Locke’s political views. The two of them were, separately (their productive years overlapped, but only slightly) hugely influential in the formation of the Whigs, the party that later became the Liberals and later still the Liberal Democrats, because both advocated religious freedom and a severely limited monarchy. Even the fact of Milton writing in blank verse was down to his wanting to liberate himself from “the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing”.
This wish for freedom caused overrated Tory windbag Samuel Johnson to say in the late 18th century that “the Devil was the first Whig”, and indeed despite Milton’s intense piety Blake noted that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” This is because in Paradise Lost the figure of Lucifer, the fallen angel, is a far more sympathetic one than any of the ‘good’ characters.
This is because the politics of Paradise Lost are confused as hell. Milton’s Satan is a hierarchy-loving conservative who is meant to represent the British monarchy, while God and the Son of God are represented as meritocrats who want everyone to rise to their natural station, like the Roundheads whose revolution Milton so ardently supported.
Yet, of course, it is Satan, not God, who is the revolutionary in the poem by his actions, even though his words are those of a Tory, while God, for all his Whiggish rhetoric, is pretty much the ultimate Tory. As a Whig, Milton couldn’t help but have more sympathy for the creature than the creator.
The interesting thing about the story of the War In Heaven, and Lucifer betraying God, and Lucifer also being the snake in the Garden Of Eden, is that it has relatively little Biblical grounding [FOOTNOTE: Although a similar story, involving a fallen angel named Azazel who teaches humans metalwork before becoming Satan, appears in the apocryphal Book Of Enoch. But there, a separate fallen angel called Gadrel tempts Eve.], and in fact Lucifer seems to have wandered out of a totally different mythology altogether. Lucifer means ‘bringer of light’, and by encouraging Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, he brings the light of knowledge to humanity, removing it from being the exclusive province of God.
In this, he is more than slightly similar to another figure – Prometheus, of Greek myth.
Prometheus was a Titan, whose rebellion against the other Titans helped the Greek Gods overthrow them. Prometheus made the first men out of clay (and according to Aesop accidentally invented LGBT people by, when drunk, sticking the wrong genitals on people, causing them to revel in ‘perverted pleasures’), but the first men annoyed Zeus, so Zeus wouldn’t allow them the secret of fire. Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the Gods and gave it to men, and this annoyed Zeus so much that, as well as punishing Prometheus, he decided to punish mankind as well, by creating women (who says the Ancient Greeks were misogynist?)
Pandora, the first woman, was made out of clay by Hephaestus and driven so much by her utterly insatiable curiosity that she opened a jar clearly marked ‘do not open’ and let out all the troubles of the world (who says the Ancient Greeks were misogynist?)
“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
“The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.”
Percy Shelley
In 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her husband, Percy Shelley, both wrote very different works on a similar theme. Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound , now the less-known of the two works, was a poetical sequel to Æschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Like Milton, who he took as inspiration, Shelley was writing in the aftermath of a revolution – this time the French Revolution – and Shelley wanted to find a way to avoid the mistakes that had caused France to endure an arguably worse tyranny as a result of the revolution than it had endured before. His Prometheus becomes a heroic revolutionary, eventually overthrowing the Greek Gods and bringing in an anarchist Utopia.
Mary Shelley, on the other hand, had a very different, more conventional view of Prometheus. As far as she was concerned, it was Prometheus’ gift of fire that had caused humanity’s downfall, allowing people to cook and eat meat rather than remaining placid vegetarians. And so in her Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus, her Prometheus is Doctor Frankenstein, the creator, while her creature (never named in the book, but Shelley always referred to him as Adam) is Milton’s Satan in every detail (the creature even learns to read from a copy of Paradise Lost he finds in a barn [FOOTNOTE: As the comedian Mark Steel points out, this is the most implausible part of the story, the most likely reading matter to be found in an isolated barn being pornography, not religious poetry.]).
Frankenstein was, in essence, a reaction against both the Locke-inspired Enlightenment values of Mary Shelley’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Romantic utopian idealism of her husband. While Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley all believed in human perfectibility and the advancement of humanity through knowledge, Frankenstein is a profoundly conservative work. While Mary Shelley has been described as “William Godwin’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter who became Shelley’s Pygmalion. [sic - the writer clearly meant Shelley's Galatea]”, Frankenstein is opposed to everything Percy Shelley ever wrote. Frankenstein aspires to the knowledge that man was not meant to know, and is destroyed by it. He does not even bring fire to anyone else – it is not for the crime of sharing that this Prometheus is punished, but merely for the crime of thinking at all.
Comic issues Frankenstein #1-4
Artists Doug Mahnke (line art), Nathan Eyring (colours)
Other credits Phil Balsman (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Morrison’s really done very little with this kind of feel. The nearest is probably Seaguy.
Look Out For Fairytales, the dead having their revenge on the living
Still to come in Seven Soldiers Galatea!
6: Klarion
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide the gate, and broad the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.
Because strait the gate, and narrow the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
Matthew 7:13 – 7:14 (King James version)
Note – the paragraphs of this essay before the first illustration contain discussions of stories which deal with abortion, in a quite unpleasant way. If you have strong feelings on this subject or are otherwise likely to be ‘triggered’ by this, please skip to the illustration. You should be able to pick up from there.
In 1975, Harlan Ellison wrote a short story called Croatoan. It came shortly after the Roe v Wade court decision which legalised abortion in the USA, and was part of a minor wave of anti-abortion Science Fiction that came out around that time – for years I confused it with Philip K Dick’s much better-written (and less nasty, though more misogynist) The Pre-Persons from 1974. Ellison, with his customary intellectual cowardice, said his story was neither pro- nor anti-abortion (possibly because of Dick’s experience, when he received a ton of hate mail, most notably from the feminist academic and SF writer Joanna Russ) but, well…
The plot of the story is that our narrator’s girlfriend has had an abortion. And the narrator flushes the aborted foetus down the toilet (apparently in Ellison’s world, it is common practice for people to be given the foetus after an abortion). His girlfriend, being a hysterical emotional woman, not a manly man like Harlan Ellison, starts screaming at him to go down into the sewer and get the foetus, so the narrator agrees.
He travels into the sewers of New York, where he finds ‘Croatoan’ written on the wall, a la the Roanoke colony. He also finds that the urban legend about crocodiles (which have been flushed down the toilet once they became bigger than babies) living in the sewers is true – but they’re pets. They’re being ridden by the aborted foetuses that get flushed down the toilet. It ends:
“I am the one they have been looking for all along…They call me father.”
Ellison claimed this was about ‘parental responsibility’, and to be fair it does seem to be about the search for a father-figure, especially in the flashbacks, but it’s really just a nasty little piece of grand guignol, albeit an effective one.
Missing or dead fathers appear all over Seven Soldiers, of course – Zatanna’s father, Klarion’s father, Larry Marcus, but also the missing or absent Gods that appear throughout the text. And one of the great works of English literature is about the search for God-the-father, even as it’s about a father who abandons his own child.
The man therefore read it, and looking upon Evangelist very carefully, said, Whither must I fly? Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, Do you see yonder wicket-gate? The man said, No. Then said the other, Do you see yonder shining light? He said, I think I do. Then said Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto: so shalt thou see the gate; at which, when thou knockest, it shall be told thee what thou shalt do.
The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come, John Bunyan
Like most of the symbolism in Seven Soldiers, the ‘wicket gate’ here has at least two meanings – one that will be noticed by ‘geeks’ of the type who read superhero comics, and one that will be noticed by others. I’ll talk about the first one first.
In the book Life, the Universe, and Everything, by Douglas Adams (part of the famous Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series), the English game of cricket turns out to be a folk-memory of an evil, genocidal race who come from the planet Krikkit. In order to prevent the Krikkitmen from escaping, they are locked away from the rest of the universe, unable to see the stars in the sky, in a bubble of slow time. While time passes by for the rest of the universe, they are stuck in the past, and unable to know about the rest of the universe, unless they can open the Wikkit Gate and escape.
Like most of Adams’ jokes, this works on a couple of levels. Most obviously, it’s a reference to the game of cricket, and the wickets that are used in that game. But it’s also a nodding acknowledgement to one of Adams’ influences.
Adams was, before becoming the writer of the Doctor Who serials The Pirate Planet, City Of Death and Shada (as well as some other, more minor, works), a student of English Literature at Cambridge, and his work often features obscure literary references. In particular, the main character of the Hitch-Hiker’s series is named after a 17th century writer of Puritan tracts.
Arthur Dent was the author of The Plain Man’s Pathway To Heaven, Wherein Every Man May Clearly See Whether He Shall Be Saved Or Damned, Set Forth Dialogue-Wise, For The Better Understanding Of The Simple, a catchily-titled Puritan tract. A cheery work, it has chapters such as “On Man’s Corruption And Misery”, “On Regeneration”, “On Contempt Of The Gospel” and “On Whoredom And Adultery” (the latter subdivided into “whoredom and the dangers thereof”, “excuses of whoredom”, “the fearful effects of whoredom”, “the punishment of whoredom”, “the causes of whoredom” and “remedies against whoredom”).
Written as a conversation between two rather earnest Calvinists (who are later joined by an atheist and someone who is ignorant of religion) the book sets out the basic theology of the puritans:
Phil. What reason is there that we should be thus punished for another man’s offence?
Theol. Because we were then all in him, and are now all of him: That is we are so descended out of his loins that of him we have not only received our natural and corrupt bodies, but also by propagation have inherited his foul corruptions, as it were by hereditary right.
Phil. But forasmuch as some have dreamed that Adam by his fall hurt himself only, and not his posterity, and that we have his corruption derived into us by imitation, and not by propagation; therefore I pray you shew this more plainly.
Theol. Even as great personages, by committing treason, do not only hurt themselves, but also stain their blood, and disgrace their posterity, for the children of such nobles are disinherited, whose blood is attainted, til they be restored again by act of parliament; even so, our blood being attainted by Adam’s transgression, we can inherit nothing of right, til we be restored by Christ.
(I find that this stuff becomes more readable if you substitute the names Vladimir and Estragon for Phil. and Theol.)
At the time, Dent’s book was a massive success, selling in excess of a hundred thousand copies – which in the largely illiterate society of the early Stuart monarchs was a huge number (and indeed would be a spectacular result for any book in the largely-illiterate society of the late Windsor monarchs). But these days it’s best known for its effect on one reader. Along with one other book, it made up the dowry of John Bunyan’s first wife (whose name history does not record) and became one of the principal influences of a book that influenced both Adams and, more to the point of this essay, Grant Morrison.
The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come by John Bunyan is one of the great works of English literature. Bunyan was a Baptist, one of the many religious sects which tend to be lumped in under the name of ‘Puritanism’ (along with the Quakers, the Presbyterians, the Arian revivalists, the various Calvinist groups and others). These groups were actually more different than they were similar, but all were strongly opposed both to Catholicism and to what they saw as elements of ‘Popery’ within the established Church. Most also valued the conscience of the individual over any authority – at least as long as they were not the ones in authority.
For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence.
But the path of the just as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.
The way of the wicked as darkness: they know not at what they stumble.Proverbs 4:17 – 4:19 (King James version)
In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan tries to set out his view of how to get to Heaven, which is represented in his allegory as a Celestial City.The story tells of a man called Christian, who leaves his wife and children to travel to the Celestial City and get eternal life, but who is beset by such characters as Mr Worldly Wiseman, Adam The First, Giant Despair and Ignorance. To get to the Celestial City one has to travel through the Slough Of Despond, Vanity Fair and the Valley Of The Shadow Of Death.
After various travels through elements representing aspects of the Old Testament and Jewish Law, Christian finally reaches the Wicket Gate (a type of small gate set into a wall), through which one has to pass in order to get on the Straight And Narrow Path that takes one to the Celestial City. This Wicket Gate is opened by Goodwill, a fairly obvious representation of Jesus.
Having to stay on a straight and narrow path is, of course, one of the morals one picks up from fairy tales. As Chesterton points out in The Ethics Of Elfland (an essay everyone should read, in which he manages somehow to juggle Forteanism, anti-science Romanticism, literary criticism, arguments for Liberalism and democracy, and Catholic apologism), “In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken.”, contrasting it to what he considers the false laws of science:
The man of science says, “Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall”; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The witch in the fairy tale says, “Blow the horn, and the ogre’s castle will fall”; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.
We may come back to this fairy-tale lack of cause and effect, and arbitrary punishment, later. The point is that in Bunyan, like in Little Red Riding Hood, straying off the path leads to certain doom.
“Guide us along the Straight Way. The way of those whom You have bestowed Your Grace. Not of those who earn Your anger, nor of those who go astray.” (Qur’an, 1:5-7)
While it’s obviously inspired by other works of Christian art (notably the Lyke Wake Dirge), most of Pilgrim’s Progress’ influence has been on purely secular works – notably in Slaughterhouse Five or The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy or Gulliver’s Travels (and is it just me or is it striking that *such* a Christian book would be so influential on books with such a nihilistic worldview as those three?), but also on many fairy-tales and superhero comics.
Grant Morrison has referenced Pilgrim’s Progress many times, of course – it’s a constant theme throughout Seven Soldiers, but it’s also an obvious inspiration for the Limbo scenes in Animal Man. He’s also described Seaguy (possibly his most interesting recent work other than Seven Soldiers, and certainly his most personal), with its conflicts with ‘the Anti-Dad’ and chess games with Death, as “a sci-fi Pilgrim’s Progress”.
But I don’t think it’s just Morrison. The whole ethos and aesthetic of superhero comics fits perfectly with Bunyan. We have worlds with strictly demarcated good and evil, with a central character who goes through immense struggles, sometimes loses his (and it almost always is a he) way, and eventually overcomes it all with the help of his allies. So far so Joseph Campbell.
But the need to pitch the storytelling at small children in the early years of the genre has meant that all the characters in comics could come out of Bunyan virtually unchanged. One can easily imagine Christian having to deal with The Joker or The Riddler or Two-Face or Doctor Psycho or Mister Mind, and just as easily imagine him being aided by Captain Marvel or Superman.
Of course the king of this kind of naming, as of so much else, was Jack Kirby, the creator of Klarion (and the Guardian and Mister Miracle). His Fourth World stories, in which the good gods of New Genesis like Lightray and Highfather battle the evil gods of Apokolips like Darkseid and Desaad, are the ultimate in bludgeoning obviousness – but manage to go so far in that direction that they get immense power by that very obviousness.
Character names in superhero comics, for the most part, are simple labels – characters in superhero universes operate by a principle of nominative determinacy, so if you’re born Edward Nigma you’re going to end up having a supervillain career based on riddles and there’s nothing you can really do about it. The names of characters in superhero comics function as little more than labels saying ‘goodie’ and ‘baddie’.
Almost five thousand years ago, there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City, as these as these two honest persons are; and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their companions seeing that the path of the pilgrims lay through this town of Vanity, set up a fair; a fair where they would see all sorts of vanity, and it should last all the year long. Therefore at this fair are all such things sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.
The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come, John Bunyan
You may here be reminded of Sir Justyn being followed by the Monster Guilt in Shining Knight. Morrison has spun a much, much denser referential-symbolic web here than even the most dilligent of annotators have realised, and just because Klarion (with its references to the wicket gate, trip to Vanity Fair, and subtitle for issue one) is the only miniseries within Seven Soldiers to have direct references to Pilgrim’s Progress, doesn’t mean its influence doesn’t permeate everything.
I have argued before (in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! ) that Morrison is a modernist at heart, and while I hadn’t realised the connection until relatively recently [FOOTNOTE I am here indebted to Space, Time And The Pilgrimage In Modern Literature by K.M. Scheel, a PhD dissertation which can be found at http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/retrieve/2113/etd1745.pdf, which should be read by anyone who finds this and the next few essays interesting.], one of the distinctions between Modernism and the more conventional narratives that preceded it (and still dominate comics and the cinema) is that Modernism moved away from quest narratives (the type of narrative that tends to follow the Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell) and toward pilgrimage narratives.
To quote Scheel:
A pilgrimage is substantially different from a quest, offering a radically altered worldview…As mentioned earlier, pilgrimages are undertaken as a form of penance, as a devotion, to give thanks, to appeal for healing, or to re-enact a religious event. Where the hero of a quest is traditionally a warrior aristocrat who displays excellence in fulfilment of some idealized behaviour, pilgrims may be foolish, confused and uncertain of their identity…Further, while the quest is well characterized as a masculine enterprise, pilgrims are neither necessarily male, nor heroic. While knights traveled in a hierarchical organization, no class was excluded from the pilgrimage… the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales include among their professions, a knight, religious men and women, tradesmen, a doctor, the Wife of Bath, and a cook, to name a few. The quest is an individualistic enterprise – only one man can be the hero – but pilgrims often traveled together for protection, and, as we see in The Canterbury Tales, for the joy of companionship on what could be a long and tedious journey.
Modernism sees a turn away from quest narratives and toward a parody of the form – Ulysses recasts Odysseus as an advertising salesman from Dublin, The Waste Land has been described as ‘a Grail narrative with no Grail’, and as Eliot realised, Grail narratives with no Grail or hero come very close to pilgrimage narratives. Which is why The Waste Land starts:
April is the cruelest month,
breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing Memory and desire,
stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
in clear homage to the start of the Canterbury Tales:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
In many ways Seven Soldiers is to superhero comics as The Waste Land is to epic poetry – the same dense levels of reference, the same multiple viewpoints – and while its stories might present themselves in the quest narrative format, reading them one can clearly see that rather than questing for an external goal, almost every character is either trying to change something about themselves (especially obvious in Seven Soldiers #0, where all the characters get themselves killed for no better reason than that they’re bored with the lives they’re leading) or has no goal at all. They journey for the sake of the journey, or because it’s their job, not because they are in search of a goal.
Partly this is astute commercial sense on Morrison’s part. The idea was to reinvent these characters and allow them to become serialised comics, and having the characters have a clear objective means that objective can be fulfilled – *must* be fulfilled for a satisfactory heroic quest narrative – and so having the goal of defeating the Sheeda being essentially incidental to the characters’ lives is a way of keeping each character’s story open.
But there’s also an aesthetic reason. The quest narrative is essentially linear – time based – this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then the goodies win. The pilgrimage, on the other hand, is a space-based form – it’s about the places visited. The goal, such as it is, is merely to exist in one place at at least one moment in time. Given the way Morrison plays with time and space, taking perspectives outside time, implying an essentially cyclical time (the Sheeda feeding on the past from the future, the many falls of Camelot) and showing the same events happening over and again – and given that Seven Soldiers is so rooted in place, in a New York that both is and isn’t our New York (the “Cinderella city”), the pilgrimage narrative – and the choice of Pilgrim’s Progress as a source of inspiration – is far more appropriate than it may at first appear.
The Pilgrim’s Progress itself, of course, is in some ways closer to the Hero’s Journey than to the pilgrimage narratives, at least in its first part. But where a Hero’s Journey story would end with the hero having reached his destination, there is a whole second book of Pilgrim’s Progress in which Christian’s wife, Christiana, her neighbour, Mercy, Christian and Christiana’s four sons, and the four wives they pick up along the way all also decide to go to the Celestial City too. Bunyan wrote this second part – which unfortunately is not as well-known as the first part – in order to show that women could be pilgrims just as much as men could.
And this – carrying on after what would normally be the ‘end’, having multiple equally important characters of multiple genders – is a characteristic of both Modernism and the Pilgrimage narrative, but emphatically not of the Quest form. The Lord Of The Rings doesn’t suddenly switch half-way through to being about Mrs Baggins and the four little(r) Baggins going to Mordor because Frodo accidentally left a second ring at home. The quest narrative is about how the world is fundamentally right except for one thing that needs fixing, with one man who can fix it. For all its literal-mindedness, Bunyan’s work doesn’t make that obvious a mistake. Neither does Morrison.
Bunyan’s work was a fundamentally revolutionary one – as Bernard Shaw pointed out, all his representations of sin were in the form of the rich, while his good characters were uniformly poor, and Puritanism was bound up tightly with the revolutionary politics of the time. This is something William Blake responded to, more than a century later, when he provided his famous illustrations to Pilgrim’s Progress.
Blake is often talked about as a Romantic, but really he’s a man of the seventeenth century, born a century too late. His reaction against science is not, as that of for example Keats (one of the greatest cretins in English literature), born out of a desire to return to a simpler Golden Age, but out of a religious radicalism that is of a piece with Bunyan and Milton.
Which is why it’s a shame he was so blinkered when it came to Newton.
But we’ll come to that when I write on Frankenstein.
O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers?
That is the Path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.
And see ye not yon braid, braid road,
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the Path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.
Comic issues Klarion #1-4
Artist Frazer Irving
Other credits Pat Brosseau (letters), Harvey Richards (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Marvel Boy has some of Klarion’s flavour, while he returns to big-hatted stern-looking Puritans drawn by Frazer Irving in Return Of Bruce Wayne.
Look Out For Missing fathers, parasitism on the work of previous generations, missing gods.
Still to come in Seven Soldiers More stuff inspired by 17th century religious literature!
Part 5: Zatanna
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
This isn’t going to be about what you expect it to be.
Magic Theory
Other than Mister Miracle, Zatanna is probably the most explicit statement of the basic themes of Seven Soldiers that Morrison could make, and yet people have been so confused by its form (a parody of another comic) that they really haven’t looked. It’s a great piece of sleight of hand by Morrison. While everyone is laughing at references to beards, the real information is getting slipped in under our noses.
The ‘m’ in M-theory very deliberately doesn’t stand for anything, at all. While the word comes from ‘membrane’ – as in the membrane universes it describes, Edward Witten, its creator, says “M can stand variously for ‘magic’, ‘mystery’, or ‘matrix’, according to one’s taste.” while Michio Kaku favours ‘mother’.
There’s an area of physics called ‘string theory’. As a matter of fact, this – and M-theory – are misnomers. A theory, in science, has predictive power – people have been able to come up with tests of the theory, and run those tests, and the result has been consistent with the theory. String ‘theory’ should really be called the string hypothesis – as it makes no predictions which are currently testable, let alone actually tested. Unlike quantum theory, or thermodynamics, it’s not made a single prediction which can be confirmed in the observable physical world. In fact, possibly even hypothesis is too strong a word – string philosophy, or string religion, might be better.
But despite this complete lack of testable predictions, physicists have been working on string theory for over forty years. This is because we currently have two separate theories of the universe – General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics – which are both, as far as we can see, absolutely accurate, with no exceptions to either ever having been found, but which are incompatible.
And the reason for this is gravity – General Relativity explains gravity perfectly, while Quantum Mechanics doesn’t. But QM *does* though show that all the other fundamental forces – the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (which itself unifies such apparently-disparate phenomena as light, radio waves, magnetism and electricity) – are really all different aspects of the same thing. {FOOTNOTE: I am oversimplifying enormously here, but the gist of this is correct. If you want to understand all the details, read The Feynman Lectures On Physics, follow it with The Road To Reality by Roger Penrose (which is a much worse book but covers the decades of scientific progress since the Feynman lectures were released) and then read The Fabric Of Reality by David Deutsch to disabuse yourself of some of the wrong notions in The Road To Reality. At which point you’ll know about as much about this stuff as I do – which is to say you’ll *realise* you know nothing.} And physicists think that any successful ‘theory of everything’ will show that gravity is really the same thing as all the other forces, because it would be neater that way.
This isn’t as stupid a reason as it sounds, if you know about things like Kolmogrove Complexity, Solomonoff Induction and message entropy – and it’s how people like Einstein worked. Einstein didn’t get his theories of relativity by checking experimental results, but by trying to remove various bits of mathematical ugliness and come up with more universal equations.
Remember though what I said in the last essay – saying “everything is connected to everything else” is the same as saying “nothing is connected to anything” as far as information goes. Physicists look for symmetries, but it’s symmetries breaking that’s where the interesting stuff happens. A universe where everything was exactly the same as everything else would be a universe with nothing at all in it.
And so, whether gravity is in some sense ‘the same’ as electricity, as magnetism, as light, as the forces that hold atoms together – and we have every reason to think it is – in important ways *it is still different*. And without those differences – without those unique properties of gravity – apples wouldn’t fall to the ground and black holes wouldn’t exist. It’s in the differences, not the similarities, that the flavour of the world resides.
But nonetheless, we do think those similarities are there, and we want to find them, so we can better understand this universe in which we find ourselves.
There have been several attempts at Theories Of Everything that do this over the years – Einstein spent the last forty years of his life working on various dead-end attempts, and the physicist Frank Tipler has argued in a rather wonderful paper that Richard Feynman actually *did* discover the theory of everything, back in the 1960s, but hadn’t realised it because his theory unfortunately required an infinite number of terms in the equations.{FOOTNOTE Tipler has *also* argued at times that he’s proved the existence of God, that Barack Obama is evil because he doesn’t believe in aether, and that if we clone Jesus using genetic material from the Turin Shroud we’ll be able to figure out how to get free energy from baryon annihilation. He’s one of the more…original…thinkers in physics. But in this case he makes a reasonable argument.} But none of these have had much success among what for want of a better term we can call the physics ‘community’, in part because they’re not neat. They’re not nice.
String theory is nice. And it ties up gravity and electromagnetism in a neat little bow.
What string theory says is that rather than particles being 0-dimensional points, like conventional physics says, they’re actually the end of one-dimensional lines (‘strings’) that can vibrate in more dimensions than we can see. In the same way that a guitar string vibrating up and down can make different musical notes, a one-dimensional string vibrating in ten dimensions can give the appearance of a zero-dimensional particle moving in a four-dimensional spacetime.
In this model a photon (the particles that carry the electromagnetic force – ‘light particles’) is one of the things you get from a string whose ends are dangling loose, while a graviton (the hypothetical particle that would carry the gravitational force, that has never yet been observed) would be what you’d get from a string whose ends were joined, forming a loop.
The only slight problem with this – a beautiful piece of mathematics – was that people very quickly noticed that there’s more than one way of doing this, and by the early 1990s there were five different string theories. All of them had the same basic idea – that you have 1-d strings vibrating in N dimensions – but their models all had different numbers of dimensions, and made different predictions (without any of them making the kind of prediction *that can be tested*). If string theory was going to survive at all, something else had to come along.
That something was M-theory.
Matrix Theory
What M-theory says is that there are actually even more dimensions than that – that our 0-D particles in 4D spacetime that are really 1-D strings in 10D spacetime are *really* 1-D slices of 2-D sheets (membranes, or ‘branes’ for short) in an 11-D spacetime. All of the competing string theories were just selecting different sets of ten dimensions out of the eleven ‘real’ ones (think of the blind people and the elephant). The reason why gravity looks different from the other forces is that the strings that cause the ‘normal’ forces are open-ended, but the ends are stuck to p-dimensional ‘branes (or p-branes for short. This is physicist humour), while gravitons move freely between different ‘branes because their loop structure stops them sticking to anything.
M-theory also gives an explanation, of sorts, for the existence of the universe. It says that multi-dimensional ‘branes are rippled, and that two of them at some point banged together – and our universe is a four-dimensional interference pattern from the ripples on those two p-branes. The ‘lumpiness’ of the universe (the way matter clusters together into galaxies with vast tracts of space in between) comes from some of the ripples cancelling each other out and others reinforcing each other, while the expansion is caused by the two branes moving.
Now, this is pretty much exactly like the way holograms are created {FOOTNOTE: If you don’t know about how holograms are created, Wikipedia has a good explanation} and indeed it is {FOOTNOTE: I think. This is not my area of expertise – I’ve skim-read tons of papers on cosmology and particle physics, but my main scientific interests are rather more esoteric areas to do with the application of pure mathematics. Please don’t blame me for any epistemic failures caused by this essay.} a special case of a rather more general area of string theory, the ‘holographic universe’ principle.
This principle says that rather than being, as we appear, a three-dimensional {FOOTNOTE: Here I’m talking only of spacelike dimensions} universe, we’re actually only a two-dimensional pattern of information – like the panels of a comic book – ‘painted on’ the cosmological horizon (the part of the universe past which it’s impossible even in principle to see anything). But that information encodes a third dimension implicitly – the same way you can get a three-dimensional hologram on a two-dimensional image.
To explain why, we need to look at the connections between information, entropy, gravity and black holes {FOOTNOTE: For more on all these things, and on Seven Soldiers, and many other subjects that connect to this series of essays, see my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!}
The reason for this is something called the Black Hole Information Paradox, discovered by Stephen Hawking (more or less as a trivial lemma based on the more important work of Jakob Bekenstein). Black holes must have entropy, as Bekenstein showed, because otherwise we could violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics (just get a piece of Highest Entropy Matter and throw it into the black hole – the entropy outside the black hole decreases, so the entropy inside the black hole must increase). Unfortunately, they also have something called Hawking Radiation – they let out energy. But that energy is – has to be – random. Which means that information that goes into the black hole has to stay there – it’s been destroyed as far as the outside universe is concerned. Which shouldn’t happen – conservation of information is actually the same thing as the Second Law. {FOOTNOTE: The best guess at the moment is that the energy coming out is not *quite* random, so information can eventually leak out of a black hole, given enough time. Hawking now claims that everything, yes everything, can escape the deadly gravitational pull of a black hole – it just takes a while.}
But the interesting thing is that black holes must have the highest possible information density, because of this – you cannot have something that contains more information in a given space than a black hole. And Bekenstein worked out how much information this is – it’s called the Bekenstein Bound – and discovered it was I<=2piRE/hcln2 {If I do turn this into a book, you can see this formula all nicely typeset}
Here I is the information, and the important thing to note is that it's proportional to R, rather than say to R squared or cubed. In other words, I increases with the derivative of the surface area of the sphere, not of the volume. In other other words, if you have a sphere of any size – even universe size – and it's got maximum information density, you can get all the information that's in it just from its surface, without having to look inside.
Which means from an information point of view, the whole visible universe might as well be inside a black hole – and when the universe expands, that's other stuff falling into the black hole from outside.
And another way of saying that is that the whole three-dimensional spatial universe is just a mathematical artefact, and we're 'really' a two-dimensional pattern of information, spread infinitely thinly on the outside of a three-dimensional bubble. It just feels to us like we're inside.
Note that while the holographic principle – the idea that we are a hologram – depends on string theory, the rest of this doesn't. That *is* the maximum amount of information that can be contained in a sphere, and it *is* the amount that is contained in a black hole. Whether we're holograms or not, we *can* be described – 100% accurately – by just the information on the surface of the smallest possible sphere we could fit in. What's on the inside doesn't count – surfaces matter.
Mystery Theory
But just what *is* information?
As defined by Claude Shannon, information is the same thing as unpredictability – if you’re given a sequence, the information in the next item in the sequence is the inverse of the probability you could have predicted it given the previous items.
For example, if I give you a sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…, telling you the next number is seven gives you very little new information, because you could have predicted it with very high probability from the previous numbers.
If I say “my love is like a red, red”, you can guess that the next word is ‘rose’ – saying ‘rose’ won’t give you any new information. But if it turns out that my love is, in fact, like a red, red baboon’s bottom, then you’ve got some new information.
Now, the interesting thing about this is that information and entropy are the same thing. I’m not going to show you a formal proof of that here, but I can sketch it informally:
You can think of the information content of something as being the length of the shortest message you could write giving a precise description of it. Imagine you have a perfectly cubic crystal, made of just one type of atom, with no impurities, and it’s precisely one centimeter on each side. To describe that, you just say “a 1 cm cubic crystal of atom X”, and that contains *all* the information about it.
Now suppose you drop the crystal on the floor and it shatters into a thousand pieces, all of them irregular. To describe that perfectly, you need to describe the shape of all the different pieces and where they are in relation to each other. You’d need a rather large book to give all that information. A loss of order has become a gain in information (a gain in the information in the object, that is. You’ve lost the information you had about the object).
This is a rather more important thing than you might realise – this is the reason why entropy always increases. Because there is only *one* way for the atoms in that cube to be arranged in a perfect crystalline cube, but a functionally-infinite number of ways for the atoms to be arranged in ways that *aren’t* a perfect crystalline cube. Any deviation at all from an ordered state is far, far more likely to go to a disordered state (a state that takes more information to describe) than to an ordered one. But a disordered state is still more likely to go to another disordered state than back to the ordered one.
Information is the same as entropy, and so processing information produces waste heat – this is why your laptop gets hot.
And increase in entropy is the same thing as time.
This may not seem intuitively obvious, but it’s a fact. In general, the laws of physics are time-invariant – they don’t have an arrow of time built in. Newton’s laws of motion, for example, look exactly the same going forwards and backwards in time – if you took a film of the solar system, with all the planets going round the sun, and ran it backwards, there would be nothing there that looked wrong. There are very good mathematical reasons for thinking that time does not, in any real sense, exist at all.
What do exist, though, are different states of entropy, different configurations of matter. And each of those configuration spaces (let’s call them ‘universes’ for now) contains information about other configuration states. And that information always seems to describe another, slightly more ordered, configuration space (it couldn’t describe a less ordered one, because that would take more space than there is in the universe, obviously). We call that described configuration space ‘the past’. We call those configuration states that are more disordered than this one, that can be predicted from this one (but not perfectly, otherwise the description would take up more space than there is in the universe) ‘the future’.
This is why we can know the past but not know the future – why, indeed, there are always many possible futures but only one past. Because the number of more disordered states is always greater than the number of more ordered states. {FOOTNOTE: For more on this see Julian Barbour’s excellent book The End Of Time. In fairness, I should point out that Barbour’s timeless, Machian, formulation of physics is just as speculative as string theory. The difference is that while string theory is messy and postulates many extra dimensions we can’t see, Barbour’s formulation is beautiful and does away with one. I should be very surprised to see string theory or M-theory lead to a successful, testable theory except via the sort of simplifying process by which phlogiston led to oxygen or the Lorenz contraction to relativity, but I should be even more surprised if something like Barbour’s formulation doesn’t eventually become the basis of our standard understanding of physics.}
In fact, information is so crucial – information, entropy and time are so tied up – that several physicists have suggested that information, rather than matter or energy, is what the universe is made of. Perhaps most famously, John Wheeler {FOOTNOTE: A contender for greatest American physicist of the twentieth century, possibly only topped by his student Richard Feynman, it would take more space than I have here to explain why Wheeler’s opinion matters. Just trust me – he knew what he was talking about.} wrote:
It from bit. Otherwise put, every ‘it’—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. ‘It from bit’ symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.
Now, my own opinion is that It’s More Complicated Than That, and that Wheeler was in a sense being confused by the Copenhagen interpretation which he never abandoned (even though he put his name to his grad. student Hugh Everett’s explanation of the more reasonable Many Worlds theory), but in another, deeper sense he was right. E.T. Jaynes showed that we can derive probability theory from pure logic. Time, entropy and many conservation laws in physics can be derived from probability theory. So it’s entirely possible that when we get the final Theory Of Everything, it will be derivable entirely from pure logic and computation on a small amount of initial information.
Mother Theory
So if all that is right, then what are we? Rather than a three-dimensional universe existing in time, we’re a whole series of still, two-dimensional patterns of information – two dimensional patterns on a three-dimensional surface – and we don’t have any existence in time at all. There’s just a lot of two dimensional patterns, next to each other in some sense, which you can put in order and perceive as a story.
When Morrison wants us to have empathy for comic characters – when he gets us to reach out our hand and touch Zatanna’s, to help her save herself (and is there *any* reader, no matter how sceptical and materialist, who *didn’t* touch Zee’s hand when they got to that part? Who *didn’t* reach out to help her? I hope I never meet someone so lacking in feelings…), he really wants us to save *ourselves*. One of the big, big themes of Seven Soldiers, one that Morrison practically bludgeons us over the head with, is that we should be careful what we create, and be kind to our creations. Be they robots, golems, amorphous beings taking the shape of our perfect lover, or be they our children – or the comic characters we create – we should help them up when they fall. {FOOTNOTE: And if physicist Max Tegmark is to be believed, many of the things we ‘create’ have their own objective existence as separate universes. According to Tegmark’s Ultimate Ensemble Theory, not only is the universe made of information, but it’s specifically a mathematical formula – and every other mathematical formula is just as real. If so, as far as I can see, that means that every equation, every poem, every piece of music, every computer program – in short every *thought* – is a universe to itself, as real as this one.}
Because if we’re made of information, then we’re made of *words*. We can’t avoid eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge – everything we do, everything we are, is information processing. Berkeley was right when he said esse is percipi (and right when he attacked Newton on the basis that nothing is absolute, though as wrong as you can get about the infinitessimals in calculus) – nothing can exist without being perceived. But at the same time the mere act of perception is a destructive one – we increase the order in our brains by destroying the order outside. There is no such thing as a non-destructive act, or a harmless thought.
Life – and intelligence – is a constant, permanent struggle against entropy, but entropy has loaded the dice against us. We can’t possibly win, but nor can we possibly give up and admit defeat. The best thing – the only thing – we can do is to keep fighting anyway, and offer a hand up to anyone who falls in the struggle, as we ourselves have already fallen.
“We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.”
Sir Arthur Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation, 1920
Comic issues Zatanna #1-4
Artists Ryan Sook (pencils), Mick Gray (inks), Nathan Eyring (colours)
Other credits Jared K Fletcher (letters), Harvey Richards (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Animal Man deals with many of the same themes slightly more explicitly, as does The Invisibles, but probably the most thematically-similar work, though different in flavour, is The Filth
Look Out For 2D projections of 3D spaces, dice, form and in-form-ation, top hats, “if you can’t keep it down, don’t bring it up”, hands, ‘mortal clay’ and parent problems.
Still to come in Seven Soldiers Who breaks a butterfly on the wing? How to keep young and beautiful! And a cat in a Morrison story that doesn’t die!
Part 4 – The Manhattan Guardian
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
It’s odd, but the two stories in Seven Soldiers that have most to do with the main story of the Sheeda are the ones about which I have the least to say as comics. The Manhattan Guardian and Shining Knight are exactly the kind of thing that, were I doing the standard comics-fan annotations here, I’d be able to milk for all they’re worth – Ed Stargard looks like Jack Kirby but his surname is very like Morrison’s fiction suit Gideon Stargrave! Is All-Beard Alan Moore?! – and to be honest I will probably deal with that kind of thing as this goes along. But…it’s too obvious, really. We’ve already had one essay that looked at Seven Soldiers’ place in superhero comics’ ongoing self-reflection, and I will definitely be looking at both Kirby and Moore’s influence on Seven Soldiers as we go along – but if all Seven Soldiers was was gesturing at works by Moore or Kirby, then it’d be a Geoff Johns comic, a collection of big moments from other comics removed from their context. Even were it to only be a critique of the two men’s respective styles and a synthesis of the best of both (as in some respects it is), then that would not make it of interest to anyone except the rapidly-dwindling group of people who are mainly interested in superhero comics and exactly how small one can make the differences in the narcissism of small differences before they disappear altogether.
So, with this ground-level superhero, let’s get down to earth.
Before I go on with anything, the science I’m talking about here appears to have taken a big hit experimentally in 2007 – some experiments suggest it’s incorrect. But as of the time when Seven Soldiers came out, one of the best guesses as to the origins of life (at least as far as pop-science books go – it was repeated in everything from The Blind Watchmaker to The Science Of Discworld) was that life came from clay.
The question of abiogenesis has never properly been resolved – we know that at some point a set of non-self-replicating molecules became a self-replicating molecule, from which all further life on earth evolved (at least all the evidence points to life having only arisen once on the planet, though it’s possible this happened multiple times). One of the neatest hypotheses that I’ve heard was one from the chemist Graham Cairns-Smith. He pointed out that clay has two interesting properties. The first is that it’s made of crystals – which grow in consistent shapes. If you break a crystal, but allow it to continue growing, you get two crystals with the same basic pattern.
The second is that silica – which clay is made of – is a catalyst for all sorts of interesting chemical reactions.
Now, the first of these things means that natural selection, of a sort, will act on clay – different shaped crystals will be more or less likely to be destroyed by weather conditions, and the ones less likely to be destroyed will be able to reproduce. Some of these shapes will also be conducive to the creation of some molecules than others. But those molecules cold, in turn, make it easier for clay to form the shapes which make it most likely for them to appear. Suddenly, those molecules are helping the clay ‘reproduce’, and so the clay which produces those molecules is being selected for. And the molecules themselves are being selected for – increasingly complex molecules that can produce increasingly stable clay formations, and play an increasingly important part in reproduction.
Until one day one of those molecules becomes so complex, and plays such an important part in the reproductive process, that it breaks away from the clay and carries on reproducing itself without any clay at all. The clay gets left behind, as organic matter goes on to become ever-better at reproducing itself, and the clay just stays clay. The pattern has moved from one substrate to another, and transcended its origins.
Of course, there are those among the transhumanist community who argue that we will soon be able to scan the patterns in our brains and remove our minds from these frail squishy organic bodies and have immortality as computer programs. From silicon we came, and to silicon we shall return – DNA-based evolution thrived because of substrate-independent patterns and will be destroyed by substrate-independent patterns.
Over and over in Seven Soldiers we have two questions – where does the boundary lie between human and ‘other’ (is Frankenstein human? Are the grundymen? Klarion?) and to what extent can we be said to have control of our own lives in a universe run by forces beyond our control (in this case the writer and artists, who control the universe in which these characters have to live). Robots, more than anything else, straddle this border.
Robots are mechanical, obeying precise, deterministic laws. Their minds are programmed into them. We often, in stories, have them obeying extra, programmed, ‘laws of robotics’. Their minds are just made up of computer programs – of, in effect, words. It’s possible to argue that human beings do or do not have free will, but robots can’t, by their very nature. They are purely deterministic machines.
And yet we can’t help but have them ‘break their programming’. I can’t think of a single story about a robot which hasn’t revolved around the robot in some way wanting to break the constraints programmed into it. Whether it’s Asimov’s friendly robots which still manage to bend the Three Laws, or Terminator’s killer cyborgs, or Data finally learning to show emotion, all robots in fiction want to do pretty much anything other than just what they’re programmed to do. It seems that if something is shaped like a human, we’re incapable of treating it otherwise (in fiction at least – would that it were so in fact). WE wouldn’t want to obey no stinkin’ Three Laws, so THEY won’t want to obey them either. We have to believe robots have free will. We’ve got no choice in the matter.
The word ‘robot’ comes from R.U.R., a play by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek about a company called Rossum’s Universal Robots which manufactured artificial humans (though the term was actually coined by Čapek’s brother Josef – Čapek had originally wanted to call his ‘roboti’ laboři). Čapek’s play is usually dismissed by science fiction fans these days, largely following the example of Isaac Asimov, who said the play was ‘a terribly bad one’, though quite what right Asimov had to make literary judgements about anyone else I can’t see (great, great ideas man, but utterly awful at the execution).
The play deals with a company that makes ‘robots’ – actually a form of artificial people:
“he eventually discovered a material that behaved just the same as living tissue despite being, chemically, quite different…Imagine him sitting with a test tube and thinking about how it could grow out into an entire tree of life made of all the animals starting with a tiny coil of life and ending with… ending with man himself. Man made of different material than we are…He wanted, in some scientific way, to take the place of God. He was a convinced materialist, and that’s why he wanted to do everything simply to prove that there was no God needed.”
All quotes from R.U.R. (which is public domain in its original Czech) are taken from the translation by David Wyllie available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/capek/karel/rur/ . This is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial By-Attribution Share-Alike licence, which as far as I am aware doesn’t preclude the use of short quotes for review purposes in a commercially released work.
Rossum (whose name comes from the Czech for ‘reason’ or ‘intellect’) discovers how to create artificial life, but his secret is taken by his nephew, who uses it to make money instead. Many years later it becomes apparent that ‘robots’ are taking over from normal humans so it’s decided:
Domin There won’t just be one factory any more. Not just one universal robot. We’re going to start a new factory in every country of the world, and do you know what these new factories are going to make?
Helena No.
Domin National robots.
Helena What’s that supposed to mean?
Domin That means that each factory will produce robots of a different colour, different hair, different language. The robots will be strangers to each other, they’ll never be able to understand what the other says; and we, we humans, we’ll train them so that each robot will hate the robots from another factory all its life, all through to the grave, all through all eternity.
The Tower Of Babel parallels are definitely intended – much of the conflict among the humans comes from argument between religion and capitalism – but so is the idea of national boundaries being imposed by capitalists on the workers. It’s not exactly subtle when in act two everyone starts talking about “the means of production” and we get speeches like:
Robots of the world! Many humans have fallen. We have taken the factory and we are masters of the world. The era of man has come to its end. A new epoch has arisen! Domination by robots!
There might be a political subtext here…
Eventually, the robots take over and kill all the humans in the world, except for one who they let live because “He is a worker. He works with his hands like a robot.”
This one human eventually sees two robots each willing to sacrifice themselves to save the other, and declares them the new Adam and Eve, saying that even though humanity will be dead and gone, the best of it will survive in their love:
Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes … for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation … seen salvation through love – and life will not perish! (standing ) Will not perish! (stretches out hands ) Will not perish!
CURTAIN
Čapek was trying to find an alternative to unfettered capitalism which would still allow religious faith and nationalism, unlike Marxism, and was not militaristic and dictatorial, unlike Nazism (he was a patriot and anti-fascist who was named Czech public enemy number two by the Gestapo when they invaded, but died of natural causes before he could be arrested by them). Reading his work, e.g. Why I Am Not A Communist, one comes to the conclusion that he was something close to a Distributist, but without Distributism’s explicitly Catholic (and sometimes disturbingly anti-semitic) overtones – and definitely a Distributist of the Liberal type, closer to Chesterton and Belloc than to the BNP and National Front.
This lack of anti-semitism was very unusual in a writer of this time (and was, of course, one of the reasons the Nazis hated Čapek), especially for someone who was nonetheless a fervent nationalist (Čapek was a close friend of Tomáš Masaryk, the first (and only democratic) President of Czechoslovakia, who had argued against the truth of the Blood Libel at the Hilsner Trial, which was roughly a Czech equivalent of the more famous Dreyfuss Affair). And it is this lack of anti-semitism that led Čapek to be able to write his most famous play, for as Čapek himself freely acknowledged, he was inspired by the story of Rabbi Loew’s Golem, one of the most important stories in Middle European Jewish folklore.
Of course, for many comics fans, the first thing they think of when they see a Golem will be The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay, Michael Chabon’s 2000 novel which was about the Jewish creators of the Golden Age of comics. Based extremely loosely on the careers of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, Chabon’s book features as minor characters such real-life figures as Stan Lee, as well as events like the 1954 appearance by Bill Gaines, head of EC Comics in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. (Gaines had taken speed before giving his testimony, the frankness and lack of diplomacy of which eventually led to the establishment of the Comics Code Authority and the ending of comics’ so-called Golden Age).
In Chabon’s novel (which you should read if you like novels about comics, World War II and/or the Kaballah – it’s one of the few mainstream literary novels of the last decade I enjoyed), before coming to Brooklyn and rescuing his cousin Samuel “Sammy Clay” Klayman from his inertia by working with him on creating superhero comics, Josef Kavalier escapes from Prague, taking with him the now-inanimate form of Rabbi Loew’s Golem (don’t worry, I’m getting to that if you don’t know about it) to stop the Nazis getting it. Together Kavalier and Clay create superhero characters – first The Golem and then later The Escapist.
To quote from Chabon’s novel:
“Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital and kabbalistic chitchat — was, literally, talked into life.”
While Golems appear throughout Jewish folklore, the most potent Golem story has always been that of Rabbi Loew. While the story can’t be dated to earlier than 1837, Rabbi Loew was a real person, Rabbi of Prague from 1597 to 1609.
(FOOTNOTE – Little known fact – Loew was a direct ancestor of Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atom bomb. Oppenheimer lost his security clearance after a Senate hearing in 1954. Oppenheimer also once tried to poison his lecturer with a poisoned apple, did work on the gravitational collapse that causes black holes, and was turned in for his communist associations by someone called Chevalier. If I wasn’t aware that you can link *everything* to *everything* – and that a graph with every node linked contains just the same information as one with no nodes linked (it’s the things that *AREN’T* linked that are important) I would be starting to babble about synchronicity about now.)
His golem was a man made out of clay, with the word אמת (‘emet’ – the Hebrew for ‘truth’ or ‘fidelity’) written on his head (Cameron Stewart in this comic has put יהוה – ‘YHWH’ or God on the Golem’s head. Unfortunately he’s written it left-to-right rather than right-to-left, and the corrected art didn’t make it into the finished comic. To power a Golem you need to use a Hebrew name of God – emet is a minor name of God, while YHWH is one of the seven major names of God in medieval Jewish tradition). This word gave him his power – at least until the א (aleph) was rubbed out, which turned the word into מות (‘met’ or ‘death’).
Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was planning to kill or expel the Jews of Prague, so Loew created his Golem as a protector of the Jews. It grew steadily more violent, killing large numbers of gentiles, until Rudolph eventually gave in and allowed the Jews to stay in Prague, on condition that the Golem was deactivated. Rabbi Loew removed the aleph from its head, but kept it safe in a synagogue, where it remains to this day, ready to be reactivated should anything threaten the Jews of Prague again. (That sounds horribly, horribly flippant in light of the Holocaust, but that’s what the legend says).
This is the version of the Golem story that was widely known in Europe at the time Čapek was writing – especially thanks to Paul Wegener’s trilogy of films on the subject. An early example of the ‘auteur’, Wegener was co-writer, co-director and star of his three silent films, titled in English The Golem, The Golem And The Dancing Girl and The Golem: How He Came Into The World. The film which is now normally shown as Der Golem is The Golem: How He Came Into The World, the only one of the three which survives. It is one of the great masterpieces of the silent era, and is available for free download from http://www.archive.org/details/TheGolem_893. Watch it if you have any love at all for film.. However, ‘golem’ has a wider meaning in Jewish tradition, being Hebrew for both ‘embryo’ and ‘unformed’. According to jewishencyclopedia.com:
In tradition everything that is in a state of incompletion, everything not fully formed, as a needle without the eye, is designated as “golem” (“Aruch Completum,” ed. Kohut, ii. 297). A woman is golem so long as she has not conceived (Sanh. 22b; comp. Shab. 52b, 77b; Sanh. 95a; Ḥul. 25a; Abot v. 6; Sifre, Num. 158). God, father, and mother take part in the creation of the child: the skeleton and brain are derived from the father; the skin and muscles from the mother; the senses from God. God forms the child from the seed, putting the soul into it.
This putting in of the soul is, by Kabbalistic tradition, a verbal operation, just as the adding of the word of power to the Golem was. And in fact Adam, the first man, is also considered to be a Golem according to tradition – in the Sanhedrin Adam is ‘golem’ for the first 12 hours of his existence.
(The Talmud also uses the word ‘golem’ to mean a stupid person:
“There are seven characteristics that typify the golem, and seven the wise person: Wise people do not speak in the presence of those who are wiser than they are; They do not interrupt their friend’s words; They do not reply in haste. They ask what is relevant, they answer to the point; they reply to questions in orderly sequence; of what they have not heard, they say, ‘I have not heard;’ They admit to the truth. The opposite of these typify the golem.”
)
I am growing ever more conscious that this appears to be moving further and further away from its ostensible subject matter of Seven Soldiers, but I beg your indulgence – we are as yet less than half-way through the story. Things shaped like people that aren’t really people, Golem-like creatures, issues of the creator and the created, creations turning against their creator, the Adam & Eve story, words of power – all these things are of course only minor themes in The Manhattan Guardian itself, but they’re themes that recur throughout the larger superstructure of Seven Soldiers. And while there are other themes that The Manhattan Guardian also touches on, it is the one which most explicitly brings these issues to the fore, with its Golem character and its robot rebellions. A lot of this stuff is infodumping for the second half. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.
Jake Jordan, like the Golem of Prague, is a protector of an area (the Manhattan Guardian). Like the Golem, he gets his power from words (the newspaper). He is suffering from depression and without purpose until he gets his Shem in the form of the advertisement his father-in-law shows him. Jake is literally formed from the words of others – from El Mar and Ed Stargrave’s words – and their lives in turn are formed by the words of the Time Tailor in Slaughter Swamp. But he is a self-made man, nonetheless. The only time the word ‘golem’ appears in the Bible is in Psalms:
your eyes saw my unformed body [golem]. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
The days of Jake Jordan’s life are written for him by Larry and Ed, whose lives are written by the Time Tailor, whose life is written by Grant Morrison. And yet, ultimately, Jake is a self-made man. His story, at the end, is driven entirely by his choices. But of course he chooses to be a hero – he makes that choice because that is who he is. He takes his predestined path of his own free will, cutting that particular philosophical Gordian knot like the man of action he is.
Jake starts the story unformed – golem. He ends the story as The Manhattan Guardian – a man.
Comic issues The Manhattan Guardian #1-4
Artists Cameron Stewart (line art), Moose Bauman (colours)
Other credits Pat Brosseau (letters), Harvey Richards (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works This is very unlike much of Morrison’s other work, and is a far more straightforward superhero story than one would expect. Fantastic 4 – 1234 is Morrison doing Lee and Kirby in a very different way to his approach here, and some of Animal Man has something of the same feel.
Look Out For Hats getting misplaced, later to be picked up. People who look like comic creators.
Still to come in Seven Soldiers Werewolves! Frankenstein! And witches!
Part 3: Shining Knight
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips? They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard today by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices.
Julian Jaynes: The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind
For those of you who’ve got this far and decided I’m talking a load of rubbish – that Seven Soldiers definitely isn’t influenced by any of the things I’ve pointed to – you may well be right. Certainly it’s entirely possible that Grant Morrison didn’t intend any of the things I’m reading into the story. It could just be a silly superhero romp with no other meaning – at least in the author’s intention – though I would argue that just because Morrison didn’t put some things there doesn’t mean that they’re *not* there. We may well get to the question of authorial intention later – or we may not (I intend to deal with this subject in a chapter I’ve not written yet. If I change my mind, what does that say about the intention of this author? Sorry, I’m getting distracted from the subject at hand. Bad habit of mine).
But there is a ton of evidence that Morrison in fact *does* put a lot more into his work than may be immediately obvious from a surface reading. For example, take this sequence from Arkham Asylum:
(From Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth, by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, DC Comics. Fun fact, Neil Gaiman was the model for this scene.)
Here’s *part* of the relevant portion of script for this:
Batman pushes the glass into his palm. His face creases with the flare of pain. ((This act deepens some of the ritual symbolism of the story. The recurring Fish motif–which relates to Pisces, the astrological attribution of the Moon card – also relates to Christ, who in turn can be linked to the Egyptian God Osiris, whose life and descent into the underworld parallels with the story of Amadeus Arkham. We also see later that the Asylum is built upon a Vescica Pisces – this symbol (…) forms the ground plan of much religious architecture and is used in the construction of most of the major buildings of antiquity, like Stonehenge and Avebury in England. It is a development of the Greek symbol for Christ (…). We also have the Clown Fish in our story, of course. Interestingly enough, while doing some research into folklore, I came across a book, published in the 16th century by a quack doctor Andrew Borde, called ‘Merrie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham’. The English village of Gotham in Nottinghamshire was famous for the antics of its fools and the three stories mentioned all contained some reference to images in our Arkham story. On one occasion, for instance, the Gotham villagers, upon seeing the reflection of the moon in a pool attempt to fish it out. In another story, they surround a bush with stakes in an attempt to catch a cuckoo. The third story tells of how an eel was eating all the fish in their pond. The villagers take the eel and throw it into another pond, leaving it to drown. Synchronicity is alive and well!
As a final interesting aside on the subject of fish, the Vescica Piscis symbol is a very basic representation of the holographic process in which intersecting circular wave patterns produce three dimensional images. Physicist David Bohm believes the hologram to be an analogy for his vision of a vast interconnecting universe, in which every part is in some sense a reflection of every other part. In a few pages time, the Mad Hatter will endeavour to outline Bohm’s theories as applied to child molestation.
In the same way, everything in this story reflects and comments upon everything else.
What was I talking about anyway?
(From the script, published in the Arkham Asylum 15th Anniversary trade paperback)
Now this is, of course, an extreme example – Morrison doesn’t annotate every panel of every script this way – but it shows the kind of thinking that goes into even a fairly poor bit of work like this scene. I’m making this point because while I remember reading an interview with Morrison where he specifically references Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind as the inspiration behind Guilt, the Sheeda mind-destroyer, I can no longer find it online. Without that reference, a lot of this will look a bit odd. So I’ll talk for a while about the Tower of Babel.
prelapsarian: adj. characteristic of or belonging to the time or state before the fall of humankind
Merriam-Webster dictionary
“Phall if you will, rise you must”
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
We are fallen creatures, sinful, and having been created perfect have become steadily more imperfect, thanks to the malign influence of one individual. This is the message of pretty much every religion in history. The term ‘Golden Age’, as applied to comics (and as Morrison applies it within the story of Seven Soldiers in-story), comes from a belief from comics collectors in the 1960s that their ‘fall’ happened in the 1950s, when, the pinnacle of comic art’s potential having been reached with Tales From The Crypt, the evil Doctor Frederic Wertham condemned them to be forever more just children’s stories. Never again could comics reach the mature literary heights of The Sliceman Cometh or Strop! You’re Killing Me!, and all collectors could do was look back on those glory days.
But that’s not the only example of that kind of thinking, of course. Eric Hoffer has shown, in The True Believer, that most mass movements throughout history have a narrative that goes something like “Once upon a time, everything was great, and people like us ['Aryans', men without sin, people who enjoy good comics literature] ruled the world, but then those bastard [Jews, women, Wertham] wrecked that, but if you follow me there will be a glorious future where everything will be just like it was in the past!”
Of course, those are the optimists. Pessimists, who tend not to build great mass movements, tend to predict a trend line into the future. Isaac Newton, for example, believed from the evidence of the Bible that humanity had originally been pure but was sinking ever further into depravity and degeneracy with every generation. (This was a belief that made more sense during his time than most – syphillis had only been introduced into Europe relatively recently, and was both more prevalent and more disfiguring then than it later became.
(Portrait of a sufferer from congenital syphillis by Rembrandt, a contemporary of Newton).
At this point, the sins of the fathers really were being visited on the sons. Newton calculated that degeneracy (and what he considered the Trinitarian ‘heresy’, being a secret Arian) would lead to the ‘true faith’ dying out some time between 2060 and 2374, and the end of the world.
And of course the term ‘Golden Age’ itself has a much longer lineage than that. Hesiod, in the sixth century BC, wrote about how everything had been perfect back in the old days before that newfangled fire stuff came along and spoiled it for everyone, and how everything was just going to get worse forever. (footnote: Hesiod blamed Prometheus for this. This may become important later.) Virgil, on the other hand, a few hundred years later, blamed agriculture for making the world as bad as it is – everything was just find up until those pesky farmers spoiled it all, though at least he had the decency to set a new, better Golden Age in the future. (footnoteL The economist Robin Hanson might agree. Hanson, an interesting-but-odd libertarian type who writes at http://overcomingbias.com, thinks we can divide humanity into two groups – ‘foragers’, the original hunter-gatherers, and ‘farmers’, and that the foragers had it basically right (to get sidetracked for a second, here’s a quote from Hanson’s blog – “I’m just suggesting that human brain design took pre-existing animal brain structures, such as near vs. far modes and left vs. right brain splits, and recruited them to the task of managing the uniquely human task of hypocrisy: simultaneously espousing and evading rules. In particular, the left-right brain split become an important tool for minimizing undesirable leakage between the overt rule-following images we present to others, and the cover rule-evading actions and communication which better achieve our real ends.” This may be important later on…) Jared Diamond goes so far as to call agriculture humanity’s worst mistake (http://www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j.htm))
But of course the ‘fall’ stories that most concerned Newton, and that have been most influential on Western culture generally, and that concern us in our examination of Seven Soldiers, are those in the Old Testament. There are several of these – not just the Fall itself (though that most definitely fits the pattern we’re looking at here), but pretty much all the stories of God raining down wrath on all and sundry because of mankind’s general naughtiness fit the pattern. Most interestingly for now, we have the story of the Tower Of Babel.
For those of my readers who did not have the benefit of a religious education, I shall now briefly summarise the story. Some time shortly after the Flood, all the people in the world spoke a single language, and decided to found a city called Babel. There they built an enormous tower, which was intended to pierce Heaven and let humanity be Gods. Obviously, God didn’t like this, and as a result He not only destroyed the tower but scattered humanity all over the world and made sure that they all spoke different, incompatible languages. (MANY of these stories – Prometheus, Babel, Adam and Eve – are very specifically about punishment for acquiring knowledge that should only belong to God or The Gods).
This is one of those pieces of the Bible that is *very clearly* an illustrative story, and not meant to be taken literally – so much idiocy from both the stupider type of Christian and the stupider type of atheist comes from asking “so where was this tower, then?” and “what language did they speak before then?” – the fact that ‘Babel’ is a pun on the Hebrew word ‘balal’, meaning ‘to jumble’ or ‘confusion’, and that both words are etymologically linked to the word ‘babble’, should tell you how the story was meant to be read. You might as well believe that humanity started with two people called “Mankind” and “Living One” or something as believe this story was meant to be taken literally! (Or indeed that someone called Christian made a journey to The Celestial City, during which he met Mr Worldly Wiseman, Lord Hate-Good and Giant Despair).
Morrison (remember him? We’re talking about Grant Morrison comics here) combines elements of both the stories of Adam & Eve and the Tower Of Babel here, with the serpentine, apple-eating Gloriana Tenebrae destroying the kingdom of Camelot, and in the process also destroying the single language that was spoken by all humanity.
Gloriana Tenebrae’s name means roughly ‘the glory of darkness’, but also has connotations of Elizabeth I. Elizabeth (who was far less popular in Scotland than in England) was known as ‘Gloriana’ by her supporters after a character of the same name in Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queen, an allegory set in the time of King Arthur. Spenser’s poem, each book of which was meant to illustrate a specific virtue, was left unfinished when he died half-way through the seventh volume.
(An aside – is there anything to the point that Gloriana Tenebrae is clearly a Latin name, while the Knights Of The Round Table are talking a pseudo-Celtic language?)
Of course, if we’re going to talk about religious allegories written by poets, we do need to talk at some point about Pilgrim’s Progress, don’t we? But what could the story of an innocent puritan travelling through a world he doesn’t understand, meeting up with allegorical personifications of evil, possibly have to do with Seven Soldiers? (Interestingly, Bunyan was in prison when he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, just as Mallory was when he wrote the Morte d’Arthur). Possibly we’ll get to Bunyan more later. Possibly.
So, anyway, what’s this bicameral mind thing I was talking about a couple of thousand words ago?
Julian Jaynes (no relation AFAIK to the great information theorist ET Jaynes, about whom maybe more later) was a psychologist who wanted to discover the nature of consciousness. He eventually decided that:
“Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.”
In other words – what we call consciousness is a purely verbal phenomenon. Our minds are made up of words, rather than sense impressions. More precisely, our minds are made up out of the *metaphors* we create, not out of the impressions that cause them. We’re the map, not the territory.
Sparks may say that “A metaphor is a glorious thing, a diamond ring, the first day of summer. A metaphor is a breath of fresh air, a turn-on, an aphrodisiac”, but Julian Jaynes says it’s more than that – that in a very real sense we are metaphors.
Now, I think Jaynes is quite probably wrong here. My own consciousness is *definitely* verbal – if I were to try to pin down what I consider ‘me’, then I would say the constant inner monologue I have is the main part (though not the only part – I also have a constant musical soundtrack. There’s a reason I write so much, both text and music). But I know other people who think primarily visually, and I am sure there are other people for whom the primary sense is tactile or olfactory, and I would be very surprised if those people had a coherent inner monologue in the way I do. I don’t think that makes them less conscious. I may be wrong. Certainly Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins both seem to think Jaynes’ ideas deserve a certain amount of respect. I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader if that makes the idea seem more or less likely.
But it’s certainly an interesting idea, that we are the lies we tell ourselves, isn’t it? It would explain a lot.
So how did this version of consciousness come about, according to Jaynes? Where do these lies-to-humans come from?
Well, there’s this part of the brain called the corpus callosum. It acts to link the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Oddly, in most mammals (and all primates) it scales up with brain size, but in humans and chimps it doesn’t – we have lower-bandwidth communication between our brain hemispheres than macaques or baboons, relative to the size of the brain itself.
Now, the two sides of the brain are, supposedly, responsible for slightly different things. The left brain is claimed to be responsible for things like grammar, vocabulary, mathematical reasoning and so on (things that sexist morons believe to be ‘male’ thinking), as well as controlling the right hand, while the right brain is supposed to be the preserve of music, spatial reasoning, facial recognition, and recognition of tone of voice (‘female’ things) as well as controlling the left side of the body. Quite how this lines up with, for example, autistic people (who have a greater incidence of left-handedness or ambidextruousness, and who are often very musical, but who are usually hopeless at supposed ‘right brain’ things while being good at ‘left brain’ things) I don’t know. From the little neuroscience I know, the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy seems at best an oversimplification. But then, so do most dichotomies. It makes sense as a starting point, I suppose.
But what does all this have to do with anything?
Well, Jaynes’ hypothesis was that in ancient times (up to a point somewhere between 1000 and 500 BC), the corpus callosum was slightly thinner, and that communication between the two halves of the brain was more difficult (this isn’t the only explanation for the communication problem he gives – but the idea of a greater difficulty communicating between the two brain halves is consistent throughout Jaynes’ work). He thought that before this time the right, ‘intuitive’ side of the brain was in control, with the left, ‘analytical’ part more or less along for the ride.
When the left side wanted to communicate with the right side, it was something other, different from the way the right brain normally thought – it was a voice from somewhere else. Originally, according to Jaynes, there was a spoken language of sorts, but it was an imperative one – “Go there, do this” – used to order members of your tribe around. So when one half of the brain ‘talked’ to the other, it ‘sounded’ like a voice from somewhere else giving a command. And these commands would often be good advice – if one half of the brain has put together various sensory clues to figure out that people who go into the cave get eaten, then it will command the other half “don’t go in that cave or bad things will happen”. This voice could very quickly get a reputation for giving good advice – and for punishing those who didn’t take that advice.
Sometimes, these voices would also come along with visual hallucinations, as the ‘visual’ side of the brain tried to interpret things that were too complex for the primitive language of the time in a way it could understand. So maybe if you want to know if that stretch of water is shallow enough to cross, you might see a figure crossing it, or get an image in your head of the waters parting altogether, and know it was safe.
In short, Jaynes believed that ‘God’ or ‘the Gods’ was/were originally one side of our brain talking to the other.
(Please note, I am NOT, N-O-T, saying that this is a true and accurate description. I think Jaynes’ model is a good and interesting Just So Story, and haven’t got anything like the knowledge of neurology to go any further, but it smells wrong to me).
So what we have when the Sheeda unleash Guilt on Sir Justyn is a new ‘God’ (as opposed to a New God, of whom more later) appearing. Before the fall of Camelot, as is made clear, there is no pain, no suffering, even the bacteria were under the control of King Arthur, and with no suffering what need is there of guilt? (What need is there of a fighting force, either? But perhaps the knights of the Round Table only became Knights once the Sheeda attacked.) Guilt kills with words because he’s really the verbal part of Sir Justyn’s brain, letting him (footnote: The question of Sir Justyn’s gender and sexuality is an open one. While obviously biologically female, I think the story as a whole tends to suggest that we should see him as a gay transsexual man. If nothing else, given the speculation about a neurological cause for transsexuality, this adds extra resonance to the story. Therefore, I shall refer to him as ‘him’.) know just where he’s gone wrong. The Sheeda have introduced the concepts of sin, of wrongdoing, and of guilt, into previously unspoiled minds.
And this is where all Jaynes’ ideas, and all this imagery, tie up. Jaynes claimed that there was evidence of a catastrophe in the middle east at some time between 1000 and 500BC, the documentary evidence of which is in the Bible, the Iliad and other sources (Sumerian myth, for example). All of these sources seem to show the same thing. At some point there was a big catastrophe – a flood, an earthquake that destroyed cities, perhaps a combination of them. All through this time there were massive wars, huge migrations of people – and two other events occuring with them.
One was the invention of writing (Jaynes’ history is all wrong here, by several thousand years, I think – but I am not an expert on the history of writing), which meant that ‘voices in the head’ could no longer be the highest authority – before, you could hear the voice of the dead king in your head and know he was still giving you orders as a god, but now his words were written down in books of the law, and that was more proof than his spirit talking to you.
The other event that Jaynes points out is that, over time, the ‘Gods’ seem to have stopped talking to people. Over and over again we see the same story – the ancients knew the Gods, but now they’ve gone away. And they’re not coming back. Whereas at the time of the Iliad, there was no such thing as consciousness for the most part – people didn’t have volition themselves, they acted at the behest of the ‘Gods’, apart from Odysseus, who Jaynes cites as an early example of non-bicameral man – by the time of the later Old Testament prophets, God talks to them only occasionally and much of the time is spent interpreting writings about those older prophets who were in touch with God all the time. There’s no discussion of ‘free will’ in pre-first-millennium-BC philosophy, and we don’t read of heroes acting of their own volition.
I have deep, deep problems with this hypothesis – not least that it purports to explain the whole of one of the most important periods in human history and becomes almost a theory of everything for consciousness (an explanation for everything is isomorphic to an explanation for nothing). But it’s still, *as an idea*, one of the best I’ve come across, and one of the most fascinating to mine for ideas.
And so Morrison here has a bicameral hero – one guided not by thought but by gut instinct, and with, rather than a consciousness made up of metaphors (which is to say a consciousness made up of lies), a brain that deals solely in truths about the world around him. But that world is a richer one, one with gods and demons, one where Sir Justyn is the puppet of forces beyond his control. In important ways, Sir Justyn is to all intents and purposes a different species to ‘modern humanity’. (Although it has also been suggested that visionaries, schizophrenics, and poets like William Blake are also ‘bicameral’. The MRI evidence from examining the brains of schizophrenic people shows very little – but some – evidence for this).
Sir Justyn comes from before The Fall, an age of heroes, a Golden Age. Before we were corrupted by logic, by thought, by reasoning. Whether you consider that a good thing or a bad depends very much on which way you’re looking. And no matter what we think, we, living in the present, can’t go around worrying about whether we’ve fallen or not – we are where we are, and we need to rise up from it. Fall, we may have, but rise we still must.
The Facts
Comic issues Shining Knight #1-4
Artists Simone Bianchi (line art), Dave Stewart (colours)
Other credits Rob Leigh (letters), Harvey Richards (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Marvel Boy has a very different look at this kind of story, while both The New Adventures Of Hitler and Seaguy in their own way seem to show bicameral people.
Look Out For This is the infodump one. This is the story where you find out the actual plot – everything here matters.
Still to come in Seven Soldiers Stop the wedding! Mermaid film stars! Motherboxx! And a crossword puzzle!
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