Cosmic!

Beyond ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’.

“ Even better was Starlin’s masterpiece Warlock. An acid-drenched existential journey that began with some of his best work, Warlock was another reinvention of a preexisting character, a throwaway Kirby concept given flesh and meaning by more urgent times. Warlock was an artificial Adam stepping from a cocoon created by genetic engineers, a notion Kirby left undeveloped in a half-cooked Fantastic Four story.

  Starlin conveyed all the backstory in one of his quirky opening monologues, then set the character free, wrapped now in a billowing, red-and-yellow high-collared cape—the traditional garb of the mystic superhero, you may recall. Adam Warlock was a psychedelic champion who did nothing by halves and who had chosen as his enemy not crime, injustice, or even other superheroes but the Universal Church of Truth, a monolithic star-conquering faith led by a godlike sadist known as the Magus, who just happened to be Adam Warlock’s own corrupted future self!

  In “1000 Clowns!” the ever-suffering Adam Warlock was cast adrift on a planet of clowns, all toiling on a gigantic garbage heap scattered with diamonds. The head lunatic was Len Teans, a near-anagram of Stan Lee, while the clown who painted the same smiling face on everyone he met was Jan Hatroomi, an almost anagram for John Romita, Marvel’s art director and the man who enforced the Marvel house style.

  The word cosmic came to typify these wild forays into the often drug-illuminated imagination, and there were more to come. These strange new superhero stories were created by younger writers and artists, longhairs and weirdos who were pouring into the comics industry, drawn to Marvel’s iconoclastic universe of possibilities.

  Urbane, and openly self-aware, writer Steve Englehart plunged Doctor Strange into a series of voyages to the beginning of the universe, beyond the veil of death, and the hinterlands of his own psyche. Englehart’s rush of pop philosophy came wrapped in the kind of arresting imagery that looked best when redrawn on the covers of school textbooks: floating, laughing skulls, bone horses, hooded lepers clanging handbells in dismal, postmortem cities. Unlike Starlin, who wrote and drew his own stories, Englehart worked with a series of talented artistic collaborators to bring a new twist to the superhero landscape. He took Roy Thomas’s fascination with continuity to new levels of jaw-dropping ingenuity, and he had a voice that brought new life to old characters, along with a worldly nonjudgmental counterculture perspective that spoke to an older audience.

  His most accomplished collaborator on Doctor Strange was artist Frank Brunner, whose style ran Neal Adams–style naturalism through a European filter of Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley. Brunner combined the Adams aesthetic with the decorative Art Nouveau–inspired touch that Brit artist Barry Smith was bringing to Conan the Barbarian. (Like so many of his generation, Brunner was able to profit from the growth of specialist comics and fan culture. He went into the lucrative portfolio market with one set of limited-edition, beautifully drawn illustrations depicting Lewis Carroll’s Alice wandering around Wonderland with her tits and muff out, which was indicative of where things were at that time, as childhood toys and storybook characters were suddenly sexualized.) Orthodox fans of the Ditko original, like my uncle Billy, had no time for Englehart and Brunner’s research-heavy, decadent take on Doctor Strange. Their otherworldy dimensions were easily rooted in books they’d read, or aped Gustave Doré’s nineteenth-century illustrations of the underworld, and lacked the genuine menace and eerie schizoid originality of Ditko’s visionary landscape.

  The same sense of liberation that had fueled the hedonism of the sixties and early seventies was turning kids’ comics into revolutionary tracts. Freedom. Magic. Rebellion. Even the superheroes were getting in on the act. The patriot days were behind them, and camp was over. Superheroes were Beat hipsters in search of meaning on the Great Road, wherever it led. Their enemies were blind Gnostic Archons, ossified, personified forces of restriction.

  The semiunderground hippie superheroes of Englehart, Starlin, and writer Steve Gerber had one thing in common. They could and would fight to defend what had become the Marvel house philosophy: a kind of college-liberal morality that even with a new cynical edge never lost sight of the essential ideals of heroic self-sacrifice that powered the Marvel universe. “We won’t get fooled again!” the Who had sung, playing out the end of the sixties hippie dream with a typically bitter working-class pragmatism. The gleaming silver spaceships were rusting in their hangars. For America, there was more torment, more soul-searching, and the heroes were right there suffering with the nation, on the cross, perishing beneath merciless stars.

  In cinema, the auteur era had arrived. UCLA film school graduates were bringing to Hollywood rule-breaking influences from the European cinema of the nouvelle vague. Even leading men changed, as a vogue for mournful or manic, rumpled Everyman antiheroes allowed fine but quirky actors like Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and Dustin Hoffman to strut their stuff upon the stage as unlikely heartthrobs. In the era of the disillusioned antihero, even the “I told you so …” voice of Woody Allen could be sexy. The sixties had feminized men and made gay or dandy styles and haircuts acceptable. As women considered new social possibilities, men chameleoned wildly in response. Some tried to appear unthreatening, others tried to define a new sexuality based around wit or intelligence. The square-jawed cowboy superhero retreated beneath the mocking stings of gay men and women, and intellectuals. It was as if nature was giving everyone a chance to get laid. Even populist Hollywood was wide open to new talent, new voices with a more authentic cadence. For a few years, maybe even less, anything could happen as we watched a young art form grow up and stretch its wings.

  At Marvel, the books were going out unedited in an atmosphere of anarchy. The name on the door of Marvel’s editor in chief changed five times in 1976 as a succession of writers accepted the job and then just as swiftly pulled out. It was impossible for one mortal to supervise all of Marvel’s output, with the result that none of it was supervised. This collapse of the command structure allowed for some of the most subversive superhero stories ever to slip through the net and influence the next generation of creators. Only three years previously, Spider-Man had defied the Comics Code by responsibly tackling the menace of teenage drug taking. Now Rick Jones was tripping in the Negative Zone.

  A new current was flowing. A new polarity. Fashion was about to turn on its heels again. The flame of the interior was burning low, like the weakly sparking fused neurons of the burnouts, the acid casualties who hadn’t been able to handle the Nightside, the Negative World when it came knocking, as it always must. The new drugs were cocaine and heroin, offering escape from the visceral soul-wrenching effects of psychedelic drugs into the hard sheen of gleaming self-regard or numb self-obliteration. The impulse was to turn outward again. Like so many young seekers in the chilly, sweaty, shivering comedown mornings, superhero comics were crying out for some input from the real world before they lost touch with the concrete and the clay altogether.

  The psychedelic wave shaded into the self-indulgent, self-absorbed musical bywater known as progressive rock, or “prog.” It seems hardly surprising that music and comics were on this parallel course at the same time. These were reverberations from an original gong.

  And as if summoned by some collective invocation, a new Dark Age came on like a freight train from the shadows under a long tunnel.”