On Saturday, October 6, the annual New Yorker Festival held a panel discussion titled “Superheroes” at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan. Panelists included Tim Kring, the creator and head writer/producer of the hit television series Heroes; author Jonathan Lethem, who titled one of his novels The Fortress of Solitude after Superman’s headquarters, and who is now writing Omega the Unknown for Marvel; writer/artist Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy; and Grant Morrison, whose work writing superhero comics ranges from Animal Man to JLA and X-Men.
Moderator Ben Greenman, an editor at the New Yorker, began by pointing out that comics were now only part of a wide range of “superhero media” that included movies, videogames, novels and television shows.
Greenman asked each panelist to disclose his “first superhero experience.” Lethem said it was the 1960s Batman TV show, which motivated him to buy a Batman comic: “It was like I’d been offered crack and this was my second dose.”
Next Greenman asked the panelists to explain the appeal of superheroes. Lethem pointed to “this paradox” that superheroes were “always famous and wonderful,” but had a “sulky side” in their secret identities. With his dual identity, a superhero “offers both ends at once.” Kring replied that what gave him “the most amount of drama to work with” was treating superpowers as an “affliction”: “How do you have a job, pay the rent or have a relationship when you have these powers?” Morrison asserted that superheroes represented “the way human beings live” on a “huge” and “cosmic” scale. Mignola first explained that he “didn’t set out” to make Hellboy a superhero and that “he looks like a superhero because he’s red.” A superhero, he continued, is “the outsider who’s got something that separates him from everybody else.”
Not a comics reader, Kring said he did not initially intend to use superpowered characters when he began creating Heroes. Instead, he first “got this idea of saving the world” in a series that would “tackle large questions,” and then asked what kind of characters could make changes on such a grand scale. Kring said he conceived of “ordinary people” receiving an “evolutionary” kind of “calling,” that was like that of “biblical prophets.”
Lethem acclaimed the “brilliance” of the original 1970s Omega the Unknown series, crediting writers Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes with “projecting the antiheroic future of the superhero”; they “had a glimmer of what Watchmen could be.” Lethem compared the original Omega, which was canceled after 10 issues, to such masterworks as Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons and Sappho’s poetry that survive in incomplete states: you “let your imagination flood” into those “gaps in the creation.”
Asked by Greenman if Heroes was a “post-9/11 show,” Kring agreed, saying that it represented the “wish fulfillment of the ordinary individual” to do something about the situation that “the world is going to hell.” Kring said that Heroes addressed the question of “free will” in handling these powers. The show’s archvillain Sylar demonstrates “what can go wrong with this evolutionary jump.”
Pursuing the subject of supervillains, Greenman was abruptly struck by Grant Morrison’s physical resemblance to Lex Luthor, which Morrison laughingly acknowledged. Morrison said his “take” on Luthor was that he is “not as smart as he thinks he is” and uses Superman’s existence as his excuse for not doing great things himself.
Returning to the subject of heroes, Mignola revealed that Hellboy “was very much conceived to be my father,” who “seemed indestructible.”
Asked by Greenman how he could write a character as all-powerful as Superman, Morrison responded that he wrote about the Man of Steel’s human side: “Lois Lane can say one word and bring him to his knees,” and Superman “can be misunderstood” and even hated.
Lethem stated that he “grew up to hate Captain America,” except during the Watergate-inspired story line, in which he gave up being Captain America and took the name Nomad. Explaining that he “grew up in a commie/hippie commune,” Lethem said that what he “loved about Marvel” was that the stories were “set in New York”: “Doctor Strange was obviously one of my parents’ friends.”
During audience questions, one member asked about Morrison’s own “evolutionary” theme in New X-Men. Noting that the X-Men can represent “any minority group,” Morrison said that his X-Men stories were specifically about a “war on children”: “These are our successors, they’ll take over, we’re going to die, and we hate them.” Echoing Kring’s remarks, Morrison suggested that superheroes act as a kind of “immune system in times of danger,” as if the “human species” were producing the counterparts of white blood cells.
Another audience member was concerned about the future of the comic book and wondered if superhero movies and TV shows funneled audiences to comics. Mignola replied that he now regards the “pamphlet”-style comic book as a “teaser” for the “ultimate form” his comics story will take in graphic novel format. Mignola also worried that the Hellboy movies, “especially the second film, don’t really reflect what the comic is” and that people who come from the movies to the Hellboy comics “won’t recognize” his version.
Morrison asserted that “a movie doesn’t affect the sales of comics” and claimed that a moviegoer was “more likely to buy a Spider-Man towel” than a Spider-Man comic. He contended that comic books will “probably continue to be despised,” but declared, “Comics are wellsprings of imagination in this country.”
Reminding the audience that he first discovered superheroes through the Batman TV show, Lethem asserted that with superheroes in so many media, it is “almost impossible today” that “a young kid will first see superheroes in a comic.” Rather less persuasively, Lethem argued that nowadays a child might be “looking at Chris Ware or Dan Clowes” in the New York Times Sunday Magazine “before he sees a superhero comic book.”
