“ Gerard Way, the lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance, was a very different kind of entertainer, a New Jersey art-punk rocker who’d been an intern at Vertigo back in the days of The Invisibles and a fan of my Doom Patrol run, although we’d never crossed paths.
In mid-2006, with Final Crisis on my mind, I caught the video for his band’s song “Welcome to the Black Parade,” a searing slice of punk psychedelia I was primed to like anyway. What really made me sit up were the outfits the band was wearing.
Dressed in black-and-white marching band uniforms as they led a procession of sexy walking dead through a bombed-out city, My Chemical Romance looked like a glamorous postmortem Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
They had fused the images of two opposites—the tough soldier and the frail emo kid—to create an image of what was to come.
Nor was the sound morbid or dark; it was triumphal, chiming, imperial rock. The new psychedelia would learn to Make Friends with Darkness. It would come from The Goth and alternative frontiers of the last twenty years into the mainstream, laughing at cancer as it put a beat to the Dance of the Dead and began to have fun again, however dark that fun might seem to grown-ups.
That fall, I listened to The Black Parade over and over and over again, to inspire cosmic mortuary scenes for Final Crisis and Batman’s mental breakdown. MCR had shown me a picture of the new superhero, posttraumatic, postwar, the hero with nothing left to believe in.
The supersoldier was home from the front, jumping every time a car backfired, staring at his hands.
Neil Gaiman put me in touch with Gerard, and we met in Glasgow before a gig, forming an instant connection. He led a new young generation of musicians who had grown up with superhero comics and had no qualms about saying so. He walked the walk too, with Umbrella Academy, his own award-winning re-creation of the superhero formula with artist Gabriel Ba. It was a kaleidoscopic tour de force. There was no shaky start, no cramming of balloons with words (a common tyro error), and none of the familiar missteps that dogged so many other celebrity-fan forays into the comics biz. Umbrella Academy was the end result of years of reading and thinking about superheroes and science fiction: Funny, scary, cerebral, arty, and violent all at the same time, it harvested all the fruits of Gerard’s own “iconography tree.” The Heroes of Umbrella Academy were a group of outsider kids who grew up to be the world’s greatest superheroes. It was the story of his band. It was my story too. It was a premonition of where we were all headed.
These days, it’s no longer enough to be a star or even a superstar. Today even the most slender and ephemeral talents are routinely described as “legends.” There’s no need to slay ten-story sea beasts, endure complex and life-threatening quests or epic military campaigns: Simply release a couple of dodgy records or do some stand-up, and you too will be elevated to the ranks of the mythical King Arthur, heroic Lemminkainen, or mighty Odysseus. You too will become legend.
With our superlatives and honorifics devalued so that star, legend, and genius will suffice as descriptors for any old cod with half a good idea he stole from someone else, what lies next on the upward trajectory of human self-regard from star to superstar to legend? Once upon a time, a star was an individual of exceptional sporting, musical, or acting talent. Then it became every child who could grip a crayon and scrawl a daisy for Mother’s Day. When we all became stars, stars became superstars to keep things straight, but they were swimming against the tide. In a time of Facebook and Twitter, where everyone has a fan page, when the concept of “genius” has been extended to include anyone who can produce a half-competent piece of art or writing, where is there left to go but all the way? We may as well crown ourselves kings of creation. Why not become superheroes? Supergods, in fact. Isn’t it what we’ve always known we’d have to do in the end? Nobody was ever going to come from the sky to save us. No Justice League; Just Us League.
Back in 1940, Ma Hunkel, the Red Tornado, was the first attempt to depict a “real-life” superhero in comics. Not a spaceman from Krypton, not a billionaire playboy with a grudge, Ma had no powers except for her formidable washerwoman build. She wore a homemade costume to dish out local justice in the stairwells and alleyways of the Lower East Side in some aboriginal memory of the early DC universe.
She was joined by characters like Wildcat, the Black Canary, the Mighty Atom, the Sandman, and other tough but good-hearted vigilante crime fighters who took to the mean streets in nothing but their underwear. They had no special powers, just fists, and an attitude—at best, a gun that shot darts or gas or bees.
Seventy years after Ma Hunkel, sixteen-year-old Dave Lizewski, the hero of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass, asked the question “WHY DOES EVERYONE WANT TO BE PARIS HILTON BUT NOBODY WANTS TO BE A SUPERHERO?”
Leaving aside the cynical response that nobody in their right minds wanted to be Paris Hilton, Dave’s question had already been answered by a handful of brave souls, real people in the real world who dress up in capes and masks to patrol the streets and keep people safe. You can read all about them online if you type “real world superheroes” into a search engine. They even have their own registry, like Civil War veterans who fought on Iron Man’s side.
The TV and film hopefuls, the half-baked actors, are easy to spot. But to the others, fierce behind homemade masks and hoods and helmets, the superhero’s calling is as important as religion, or at least as important as the youth cult demographic you conformed to at school. They are the future.
Who are these valiant harbingers, concealing their identities behind colorful masks and costumes to serve their communities as best they can? There’s Portland’s Zetaman, who patrols the city with gifts of food and clothing for the homeless. Atlanta’s Crimson Fist hits the sidewalk of his city twice a month “to help those in need.” There’s Geist, “the Real Kick-Ass.” Thanatos, Phantom Zero, the Death’s Head Moth, and the Black Monday Society, a team of activists including Insignia, Ghost, and Silver Dragon. Captain Prospect. The list echoes the mesmerizing lullaby of Golden Age character names except for a lightning-stroke realization that these are real people, with curtains and light switches. This is what it’s like to be a superhero with no plot, no Aristotelean thematically interconnected story arcs, no cliff-hangers, no tidy resolutions. Only raw motivation.
Many of them, like Entomo, the Insect Man, construct their own personal continuities on elaborate websites with animated graphics and voice-overs that hint of adventures we will never know or comprehend. These are florid private worlds glimpsed to best effect—like Phil Sheldon’s photographs of Marvel heroes—from a distance, and fleetingly, but they speak of the power of pretend to ennoble ordinary lives. These real-life superheroes are waiting for a world that’s not quite here, but one day soon they might be recognized as pioneering neonauts, part human, part story.
We allow people to tattoo themselves and even change sex: Can we deny these supervestites the opportunity to take it all the way and physically become the lunar-dwelling, light-speed-racing amphibians they’ve always wanted to be? Like a flock of wingless, fabulous missing links on a hostile shoreline, they seem to await the day when the skies will be filled with their kind, when they’ll be able to hurdle tall buildings (one-eighth of a mile will do for a start) or stick to sheer glass the way nature intended. Ask real-life superhero Angle Grinder Man from England if he awaits the holy day as he goes about his business breaking council wheel clamps on behalf of grateful motorists. Does he dream that one day he’ll be called upon to shatter the restraints on Batmobiles and Fantasticars?
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