21/6 SUPERGODS Redux Pt1

Part One

LIBRARY artefact #018

SUPERGODS Redux

Part 1

My history of superhero stories Supergods was published in 2011 but the original manuscript was double the requested length. Stringent cuts were requested by my editor and made for final publication.

As a result, there are entire chapters and sections of the book that have never been seen.

Here, from the original draft when the ‘Tree of Life’ structure of Supergods was more in evidence, we plant our feet in the physical sphere of Malkuth and dig into the nuts and bolts of constructing a superhero universe.

BUILDING A UNIVERSE

       Superhero stories are no longer confined to comic books, but comic books provided fertile soil in which the concept could take root and flourish in a thousand different directions. When the new and improved strain of superheroes appeared, they spread like kudzu choking out all other genres. Comic books since 1938 have tested the superhero idea to destruction and back through reconstruction to a triumphant renaissance of popularity in the early 21st century when superheroes began to migrate en masse from their pages to the new mass media environments like cinema and computer gaming. With respect to the best of the superhero movies, comic books are still where to go if you you’re looking for challenging and sophisticated superhero stories, that still come out on a regular basis. Comic books are where I’ve always had most fun and freedom as a writer, so it seems only fair to give something back. Let’s take a closer look at the strange environment that nurtured the superhero to maturity.

       Before we look at the universe of the comic book superhero, let’s step up a scale from the page to the physical universe where we live and remind ourselves how it got its start.

       Like the first touch of pencil point to blank page, our own universe popped into being out of nowhere and no-when some 13.7 billion years ago, according to current scientific consensus based on our most reliable data. It began when a random quantum fluctuation into an unknowable prior ‘emptiness’ - or, as it may turn out, a hyper-dimensional fluid medium - resulted in the rapid expansion of a superdense, superhot pinprick of absolute energy. Everything that ever was and still is was packed into a barely existing point, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

       A hundred billionth of a yoctosecond after the initial Fiat Lux! of being from nothingness, our super dense, superhot white bubble of universe, our only home, started to expand and continues to expand to this day, creating as it does so the space and time it’s expanding into.

       Judging by the red shift of stars and galaxies away from one another in all directions, like dots on a balloon that’s inflating balloon, the Big Bang is far from over. We are all of us riding the shrapnel of a primordial elementary explosion, somehow clinging, breeding and killing one another on a speck of grit, an agglomeration of condensed minerals, liquids, gases, that’s spinning out towards a self-created infinite blast horizon from the heart of a pressurised hyper-detonation. It’s as if art and religion and morality had somehow come into being on a piece of spinning shrapnel. All our hopes, our history our individual precious lives and loves have all taken place in a brief, immense instant, on a cooling grain of hurtling debris, on the edge of an aboriginal detonation whose echoes still recur. We have built our cathedrals, our politics, our relationships and fought our futile wars on a wet glob of debris hurtling on a cosmic bow wave towards some unknowable terminus. Think about that next time your life seems boring.

       As expansion continued, the four fundamental forces of the universe separated out of a primal singularity in which matter and energy were completely unified. Think of four tributaries branching from the same source. At 10-43 after the so-called Big Bang or ‘Creation’, gravity split from the Grand Unified Field, followed at 10-36 by the branching of the Unified Field into the Strong Nuclear Force and the combined electroweak force which finally split itself into the Weak Nuclear and Electromagnetic Forces. These four great archangels of physics hold the universe in their hands. Their vast, secret transactions and interactions at the most fundamental levels of existence allow us to live and love, watch telly and read books like this one. 

       These four forces appear again and again throughout the human story as I‘m sure you may have noticed. The Greeks saw a universe made of Earth, Air, Fire and Water in various measures. The cardinals were sometimes represented as a Bull, a Lion, an Eagle and a Man. They haunt the four quadrants of transactional theory, the points of the compass, the career of the Beatles, and the story of the Four Musketeers. The Apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are representatives of the same energetic patterns, as are the fluid Mr. Fantastic, the airy Invisible Girl, the fiery Human Torch and the rock-like Thing, otherwise known as the Fantastic Four.

       The missing fifth force, or Fifth Element is of course, the elusive quality we sometimes call ‘spirit’, which seems to me another word for reflective awareness. The universe of aimless energy transactions comes to life and is given structure and meaning when it interacts with consciousness. Spirit sees spirit everywhere. Cosmologists in search of a Unified Field Theory can start inside their own heads, where the Forces are demonstrably bound together in hierarchies, diagrams and lattices of theory. In consciousness, the Forces meet and are given meaning.

       The comic book Universes of Marvel and DC began not with a Big Bang but at the moment when a thought condensed down into a single, almost silent, scratch of pencil point on white paper or struck a typewriter key. The first comic book universes grew by a process of accumulating stories, time, and meaningful connections between characters but like our own universe they too relied for their very existence on four fundamental forces, in this case four colours.

       The comics page is equivalent to the vacuum, the pregnant void, the unimaginably vast or empty prime medium into which our universe is said to have begun its inflation. In order to summon a world onto the flat white screen of the empty page, we must turn to the four cardinal forces of paper time, paper space, paper life. You may know them better as Black, Red, Yellow and Blue.

       These four colours combined to render characters in complex simulated environments. Time in a comic book universe is formed by the interaction of the static pictures with the dynamic empty gutter space between them - the gutter as mentioned before is where all the implied movement in a comic is stored - the gutter is the frame line of a movie reel - the gap between visual intervals. Unlike a movie where the gap between still pictures is 24 frames per second - the gap between one picture in a sequential comic may contain years, miles, parsecs of distance or aeons of time. The blank gutter is where much of the real magic lies. The gutter is where the reader’s consciousness plays a game with emptiness and fills in all the meaning, distance and passage of time that isn‘t shown in the pictures.

       The page then becomes something remarkable; a screen onto which inner worlds can be projected down the lighting rod of a carbon graphite pencil point.

More to follow…