In the summer of 1938, when Superman, the first and most enduring comic-book superhero, flew into our lives, the American economy was still in the depths of the Depression. In the cities, anxious faces waited for jobs and handouts; on the plains, migrants poured west in search of salvation. With the early promise of the New Deal having evaporated in the heat of the Dust Bowl, millions of Americans felt abandoned and angry. Little wonder, then, that they lapped up the story of a downtrodden journalist called Clark Kent, who, when transformed into a colourful crusader, vents his frustration on a rogue’s gallery of slum landlords, crooked businessmen and swarthy wife-beaters. On the cover of Action Comics #1, where he first appeared, Superman is smashing up a green roadster, the symbol of the automation that was throwing thousands out of work. “He was a hero of the people,” writes Grant Morrison, “as resolutely lowbrow, as pro-poor, as any saviour born in a pigsty.”
A comic-book author who has written for Superman, Batman, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, as well as producing a host of more countercultural titles, Morrison is well placed to analyse the extraordinary success of the superhero. Comic books date back to the Victorian era, but it was the superheroes who made them a huge success. By the 1940s, comics featuring Superman and his commercial arch-rival, Captain Marvel, were selling more than 1m copies a month, inspiring a host of imitators from the Mighty Atom to Wonder Woman. No 10-year-old boy, it seemed, was without a comic book.
As Morrison points out, much of the superhero’s history can be reduced to the tension between two archetypes. On one hand you have the populist, progressive, forward-looking Superman; on the other, the decadent, reactionary, vampiric Batman, who first appeared in 1939. As the child of far-flung Krypton, Superman is the modern equivalent of a god fallen to earth. Establishing a template for successors such as Captain America and Spider-Man, he symbolises our “loftiest aspirations”. Even his ridiculous get-up was inspired by the circus strongmen of the day, representing the height of masculinity. By contrast, broken, traumatised Bruce Wayne lurks in his mansion, consoling himself with his millions and regularly transforming himself into a bat. As numerous comic-book authors have pointed out, he really belongs in a padded cell, just down the corridor from Wolverine and the Hulk.
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Critics often compare superheroes to Greek heroes, but in an increasingly populist age, comics took care to root their characters in reality. As the recent Spider-Man films showed, the weedy alter ego is as important as the muscle-bound do-gooder. Like so many modern fantasies, superhero stories sprinkle stardust on the everyday: as Morrison puts it, the comic-book’s job is the “radical enchantment of the mundane”. But of course there is a fine line between the enchanted and the ridiculous. Not all the superheroes caught on: a particularly absurd example was the Red Bee, whose party trick was to release a swarm of trained crime-fighting bees from his belt buckle. Ironically, his favourite bee, Michael, would have been pretty useless in real life: male bees do not sting.
After its heyday during the Depression and the second world war, the superhero craze seemed likely in the 1950s to die out. Reflecting public anxiety about rising crime and juvenile delinquency, the Comics Code Authority cracked down on depictions of violence and disorder. Sales tumbled, and even Superman became dull and domesticated, absorbed in his love affairs with Lois Lane and Lana Lang.
But, like all good archetypes, the superhero moved with the times. In the 1960s, writers such as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created younger, more fashionable crime-fighters — Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor — for Marvel Comics. Appropriately for the space age, these were superheroes born of scientific experiments; appropriately in the age of Andy Warhol, too, they became celebrities in their own universes. Crucially, they appealed to a new teenage sensibility. When we first meet Peter Parker (Spider-Man), he is smarting from endless rejections by female classmates. “Some day I’ll show them!” he sobs. “Some day they’ll be sorry — sorry that they laughed at me!”
It is at about this point in the book (the mid-1960s) that Morrison himself enters the story, and from here it goes downhill fast. As a boy, growing up in Glasgow, he adored comic books, and dreamt of producing his own. A decade later he got his break with Captain Clyde, an unemployed Scotsman who fights monsters in the Govan subway. All this is mildly interesting, but there is too much of it; as the book turns into an extended CV, the analysis of the superhero is forgotten. Above all, Morrison’s idea of profundity is often unintentionally hilarious. Quotations to prove comics’ newfound maturity (“You haven’t heard an ant scream? Well I have — and it’s a sound to haunt a lifetime’s worth of dreams!”) are bad enough. But his attempts at analysis (“McCarthy’s melting super-psychedelic visuals could sprawl across pages in a trancelike pageant of phosphorescent dream imagery, conjuring epic post-Kirby aboriginal visions of city-sized, three-eyed Kennedy heads…”) leave you wondering what his editor was up to.
On the surface, the superhero genre seems alive and well. Without it, cinemas worldwide would be empty this summer, while Morrison’s drug-fuelled rock-star lifestyle, which he describes at great length, depends on people buying his work. Yet, as he admits, there are clouds on the horizon. Readership has been declining for decades, not least because, since the 1970s, comics have been written for nerdy grown-ups; dense with allusions, sex and sadism, these superhero tales often have a limited appeal. The stats tell the story: a successful comic once sold at least 500,000 copies, now it sells barely 75,000, usually to adults and older teenagers.
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The other problem is that, to put it bluntly, superheroes no longer look super. When Superman first flew, readers swooned in admiration, but most of us today have been on a plane. Plastic surgery is common; medicine and technology are turning us all into superheroes; reality TV means anyone can be a star. Will anybody care about Superman in 2038? I doubt it.