A Dream of Flying

Fuck superheroes, frankly. The notion that these things dominate an entire medium is absurd. It's like every bookstore in the planet having ninety percent of its shelves filled by nurse novels. Imagine that. You want a new novel, but you have to wade through three hundred new books about romances in the wards before you can get at any other genre. A medium where the relationship of fiction about nurses outweighs mainstream literary fiction by a ratio of one hundred to one. Superhero comics are like bloody creeping fungus, and they smother everything else.

It's been the hip and trendy thing to do, recently, to say that superheroes are, you know, all right. And, if they're well done, I agree with you. There's room for any kind of good work, no matter what genre it's in.

But that doesn't excuse you from going out and burning out all the bad work at the fucking root with torches. It doesn't excuse all the nameless toss that DC and Marvel and Image and all the others slop out every month. If you want to read three hundred superhero comics a month then you are sick and you need medical help.

Rip from their steaming corpses the things that led superhero comics to dominate the medium - the mad energy, the astonishing visuals, the fetishism, whatever - and apply them to the telling of other stories in other genres.

-Warren Ellis, The Old Bastard’s Manifesto

I dreamt that I was Superman last night.

What, you’ve never had that dream? Liar. Everyone’s had that dream.

I was Superman and I was angry. Through no fault of my own, apart from simply being human (or looking and feeling like one, anyway), I had fallen out of favor with the public. Call it a bit of editorializing on the part of my subconscious-- to my mind, the most unrealistic thing about superhero books is the seeming adoration of the common citizens. In real life, we tear down our heroes. But anyway, I was Superman, and I was in the public doghouse and I was upset about it. So, like you’d expect Superman to do, I went flying to clear my head. And it was great.

I jumped into the air-- it must have been ten stories or more-- and I hovered there for just a second. The real me is afraid of heights, but the dream me, the Superman me, had flown a thousand times, and I remember being puzzled at my own hesitation. But the moment passed and I began to fly forward, over the trees and cities and rivers, faster and faster with each passing second. It was night and the sky was beautiful and clear up where I was.

I saw the moon, and realized that, since I was Superman, I could fly there. I could fly there and back in a matter of minutes. It seemed silly not to. So I went to the moon and I walked where the astronauts walked. And when I had had my fill, I came back to Earth and flew lazy circles around some distant ocean.

When I woke up from my dream, I was very confused. For one thing, I was more than a little dismayed to discover that gravity had regained its power over me. But mostly, I was confused because I had been dreaming about superheroes, and I never dream about superheroes.

I’ve been an avid comic book fan for 12 years, more than half my life. By the time I was 17, my patience with superheroes was wearing thin. By the time I came to college, I was pretty much sick of them. I was always a pretty well-read kid, and it doesn’t take a genius to spot the deficiencies in an issue of Wolverine when you’re holding a copy of Franny and Zooey. I loved the richness and potential of graphic storytelling, but I longed for more substantial subject matter. Slowly, in my late teens, I began to find it.

Whether it’s comic books, or graphic novels, or anything else you want to call it, the medium is a fantastically rich and woefully unexplored one. Because of the stereotypes surrounding it-- the caped figureheads, the nerdy fan base-- it gets relegated to second-class status, but it is no different than any other literary medium. A story told in sequential art is no more or less inherently valid than prose or film. Good comic books have for years been talking about ideas like love and loss and creativity and faith and family and history and death-- the same kind of ideas that you’ll find in any good movie or hardback. They’ve been tackling real issues and doing it intelligently and without a stitch of spandex or a superpowered dog in sight. It’s just hard to notice with guys like Spider-Man taking up all the shelf space.

So, finally fed up, I took a cue from the enormously talented Warren Ellis (who’s written some of the best comics of the past decade, with tights and without), said “Fuck superheroes,” and gradually stopped reading most of my old superhero books in favor of more mature, adult work. I still pick up one or two titles, if they’re well-written, and I enjoy them, but it’s a guilty pleasure. I don’t wave them around, don’t share them with people. When I talk about comics, I talk about superheroes with disdain, and I do what I can to distance myself from them. I don’t want people to think that I read those kind of comics. I, after all, am an adult. I’ve moved on to better things.

But last night, I dreamt I was Superman.

In my efforts to expand into new formats and more adult genres of comic books, I made the very childish mistake of looking down on the genre I started in. I forgot what it was that made superheroes so very appealing in the first place, to me and countless others: the sense of wonder. Superhero stories are larger than life, they’re stories of gods and monsters, good and evil. They’re legends and myths; the same stories that we told around fires in the night, thousands of years ago, all dressed up now in shiny new packages. Of course we love them-- they make us believe that a man could fly. And what’s more, maybe so could we. Sure, most of them are just bad, and should be forgotten. But you cannot hold an entire genre responsible, just because it’s hardly ever used properly. If I did that with movies, I’d never buy a ticket again. The bulk of the work may be bad, but the idea behind it is still a good one. Like a fool, I forgot that. It took a dream of flying to remind me.

It’s not a life-changing revelation. No Saul on the road to Damascus. I’m not going to dig out my old X-Men books; my selection at the comic book store will probably not change. But the next time I buy a superhero comic, I won’t try to hide the cover when I leave, and the next time I talk about comics, I won’t say “Fuck superheroes” or anything like it.

Because for a few short hours one summer night, I was a superhero myself. And remember how that felt.