Superheroes Panel at The New Yorker Fest
Okay, as promised, here's the transcript for the Superheroes Panel at the New Yorker Fest. Also, as mentioned, there's only so fast I can type, so though I did get about 90% of what was said at the panel, there were some things edited out for time/being kind of boring. It's a long one, too, so hang in there, kitty.
Every year, the literati gather for packed weekend celebrating the very specific types of entertainment that are of interest to readers of The New Yorker. The panels are always sold out, and are usually of excellent quality. This year, for the first time, the focus turned towards the graphic arts, featuring a panel called "Superheroes: Up, Up, And Away."
The guests were Jonathan Lethem (Omega The Unknown), Mike Mignola (Hellboy), Grant Morrison (All-Star Superman), and Tim Kring (Heroes), with the panel being moderated by New Yorker writer Ben Greenman.
The setting was the Highline Ballroom in the Meat-Packing District, which, for those of you not in NYC, is where all the skinny hot people go to party.
The Ballroom was predictably packed with several hundred people sitting at cabaret style tables, a stage in front with five chairs, and slides showing everything from New X-Men to Amazing Fantasy #15.
As the lights dimmed and the panel took the stage, the group I was sitting next too ceased their very intense discussion of who would win in a fight, Peter Petrelli or...
And then we were into the panel. Greenman introduced the panel, and himself by talking about the creation of comic books in 1938 with the debut of Superman, but also explaining that comic books aren't the only medium for superheroes; they also stretch to movies, video games, novels, Halloween costumes, and more.
He also explained that he only got into comic books because his children love them.
Greenman then introduced the panelists to a smattering of applause, and got right into it.
BG: What was your first superhero experience?
JL: It has to have been the Batman TV show, then the Batman comic. I got the comic immediately... It was like I was offered crack, and this was the second dose.
MM: I think my cousin bought Marvel comics... He took me to the store to get Richie Rich, but he got Fantastic Four. And then I stole it from him.
GM: A British comic called Marvel Man; a black and white comic, featuring Marvel Man fighting bird ninjas.
TK: Watching the old Batman series with Adam West, and also the Superman series with George Reeves.
BG: I have two sons, six and three, and the six year old has gotten that crack feeling in the past few years. Anything with a cape, anything with underwear on the outside, he’s there. Let's talk a little about what the appeal of the Superhero is...
JL: The thing that makes a Superhero the kind that turned me on when I was a kid, so absolutely satisfying for a boy to identify with, is that a Superhero is both famous and wonderful and known to everybody, but also has a secret identity, this sulky side. It resolves the paradox of your school days: you don’t want to be the asshole jock, but you want his strength; and you don’t want to be the loser in the trenchcoat, but you want to have some of his mystery. And the Superhero has both.
TK: You know, [using superheroes] was purely out of the idea of giving me the most amount of drama to work with, and the afflication of having these powers. How to have a job, how do you pay the rent, when you have these powers. It’s the juxtaposition between: how do you live with this happening to you; and how does it affect your life.
BG: You think powers, you think Superhero identity, you think secret identity... But is there anything a superhero has to have?
GM: My favorite as a kid was the Flash, and I loved him because of his big yellow boots. They emobody different qualities of people though; there’s nothing that a superhero has to have. I think that what they are are huge, out of proporation, cosmic identities of ourselves.
MM: I didn’t set out to make Hellboy to be a Superhero, but to anybody on the outside, he looks like a Superhero because he’s red. It’s the outsider, the guy who got something that separates him from everybody else. Hellboy is the Beast of the Apocalypse, which kind of makes him the ultimate outsider.
BG: When you [create a new Superhero], how do you deal with the fact that there might be similar things out there?
TK: I did not come from a background in comic books, I came at this from the idea… I came with this idea of saving the world. I wanted to create a show that tackled large questions, and started thinking about what characters could effect large changes. I started to think about this idea of a calling, almost in the way biblical prophets were called. Ordinary people called upon led me to this... evolutionary calling. I started to think about what kind of characters I wanted, and I backed into the powers based on the characters. I was trying to work in large archetypes: a cop; and a politician; and a teenaged cheerleader. A single mother who was stretched in different directions, so wouldn’t it be great if she could be in two be places at one time?
BG: Did you worry that someone would say, “That’s a lot like..."
TK: I knew really instinctively that I was slamming into archetypes that have been done over, and over again. Various people would give me a comic book, and I would close it, because I felt like I was on to something, and I didn't want to feel like I was reinventing someone else's wheel.
BG: Grant, you’ve been given the job to reinvent Superman…
GM: The first thing I looked at was how superman has been portrayed since 1930. Superman is a character that we continually reinvent. He is initially a Socialist Superhero, closing down mines, etc. Post-Depression, Superman doesn’t work. So he’s a patriotic character. In the 1960's he has a family of super pets, and aliens. 1970's, Lois Lane becomes super-bitchy, and Superman faces problems like super-obesity, or my favorite one, which is that he can shoot a tiny Superman out of his hand. And everybody loves the tiny Superman. That stuff to me, that’s 50's, man, that’s psychadelic. 60's, he’s dealing with women’s issues and civil rights. In the 70's he’s feeling lost, in the 80's he’s a yuppie, and the 90's he has a mullet. Then they killed him, thank God.
He’s about loss, and hate, and fear, and all these big feelings we feel. That’s how you can revive him for today.
JL: Grant, what always struck me… I used the Fortress of Solitude for a novel. He’s the character with the least need for a secret hiding place ever, but there’s something really neutrotic about spending time in a place, and addressing statues of his friends, when his real friends are back in Metropolis. When I went to Marvel, they gave me the keys to the castle, so to speak. I could choose anything I wanted. So when I chose Omega the Unknown, it was like I pointed to an ashtray an 11 year old had made, and said “I want that.” No-one was waiting to see what would happen to Omega next.
MM: You know, I mostly came in as an artist, and if Omega had come in to me, I would have been, like, the third artist on it. I limped around for a while, but I really wanted to draw monsters. After about 10 years of bouncing around, I plotted a Batman story I drew, which worked, and people liked it. But then I thought, do I work at Marvel and DC, or do I make up my own guy?
So I said, let me make up my own guy, let me do it for a publisher who will let me do what I want.
I actually would have made Hellboy a human being, made him a Victorian detective. But I made him a superhero monster, because he’d be more fun to draw. And if I drew him bad, he’s red so everyone would know exactly who he is.
BG: Villains are just as big a part of all of this… Evil’s more fun, right?
MM: Until I discovered Hellboy was the Beast of the Apocalypse... Which came entirely, by the way, because I had a fight scene where two characters had nothing to say, and so one of them said, “You’re the Beast of the Apolcalypse.” This is what happens when you don’t plan out your scripts.
The bad guys who want to end the world… In Hellboy, when the world ends, the bad guys believe it starts again, so the idea I deal with over and over is that they think the world has run its course, but the next one will be better.
TK: I think Heroes is a post 9/11 show, because of the idea of wish fulfillment; that the individual can do something about the world going to hell. As far as evil, there's a character called Sylar in Heroes designed to be the cautionary tale about what can go wrong with this kind of evolutionary rung. Free will starts to come into it, and the ideas of peoples desires; if you’re pre-disposed, and are in some kind of dire straits, and can walk through walls, you may rob a bank. If you’re in a good place, and can walk through walls, you may save someone’s life.
BG: Superheroes are known as much by the villains as they are by themselves.
GM: The villains also need to be brought up to date, and need to make sense. Lex Luthor was initially a scientist, and about what can go wrong with science. In the 80s, he was suddenly a businessman, a commentary on Reganism, and Capitalism. For me, Luthor is a guy who, if Superman wasn’t here, "I’d cure cancer, I’d cure aids, but that guy is here." Luthor's too self interested. That’s tied to the culture we currently live in.
JL: When I’ve written about Superheroes in fiction, I basically took villains out of the equation… [My heroes] were stuck with the idea of helping people, without a foil. I stranded them in a way, in a world where evil is accidental, or so structurally horrible that you can’t fight against it. With Omega, I realized he needed something he could punch a lot. So I went with dumb, but diligently evil robots. So Omega is always needing to stop a bunch of evil robots from taking over the world.
BG: Let’s talk about limits… A superhero can do anything, so how do you sort of conceive of limits? How much danger is the hero supposed to be in?
MM: You know, Hellboy was conceived to be my father, a guy who seemed pretty indestructible. He stuck his hand in a machine one day, and sheared his knuckles off, and he didn’t seem to mind. He was always covered in dried blood. For Hellboy, he doesn’t want to beat the bad guys; he accidentally does the right thing, and the monster explodes. It's more that the villains are angry... Hellboy himself is pretty strong, but the biggest problem is, he's going to become the Beast of the Apocalypse. A large part of it is dealing with who you are.
GM: A man who can do anything has no drama. I like the Superman that can push planets, but Lois Lane can bring him to his knees. He can be misunderstood, he can be hated… That’s where you get Superman’s drama.
TK: There are three issues that determine their limits. The characters and heroes don’t have any agenda that’s driving them, in the hero aspect. They don’t know where they’re going. There’s a process of discovery. The other thing, I wanted to explore the idea, what if any of us woke up, and found this was happening to us? There would be a long journey of testing and affecting your power. Thirdly, we are pretending to be a 200 million dollar feature. We’re making a show every 10 days, so it forces the powers to be used in sparing ways. It limits how big they can get, how complicated they can get.
BG: Okay, who's the stupidest character? I say, Bouncing Boy.
JL: This was a game I used to play with a couple of friends. I know there’s been others with the same name, but our Chronos: his power was that he always knew exactly what time it was. Also, Inaudible Girl. She could render herself impossible to hear. A real one? Matter Eater Lad.
MM: I did work on Rocket Raccoon.
GM: A guy from the 40's called the Red Bee. He kept a belt full of bees, and he would press a button, and release a swarm of bees. My favorite one, though, was a one-shot I pitched to DC about a guy who had a time machine that could move in real time. So he’d say, “I’m off to the year 2020!” and then there would be page after page of him just sitting there.
TK: the one I came up with in the writers room was the ability to smell shit from great distances.
[Ed Note: Okay, so I missed writing down the next question, but I believe had something to do with having diverse Superheroes. My bad.]
TK: You know, the core of Heroes is it was not actaully a show about Superheroes. I wanted to create a series about connectivity. Post 9/11, we all realized the world was a lot smaller, and what happens 10,000 miles away really does effect us. Positing that this is happening in an evolutionary way, it seemed disingenuous that this was happening to only blue-eyed, blonde-haired kids from Orange County.
BG: Grant, you read mostly American comics growing up?
GM: The American comics would come over as ballast in British ships. The British characters... They would spend half their career as criminals before turning to heroism. Imagine the Joker as Superhero. So we grew up with those type of Superheroes... When the British invasion happened in the 80's, we brought that kind of character.
MM: I grew up reading Marvel comics. My favorite heroes were… Captain America, and my favorite villains were Nazis. So I wanted Hellboy set in that world. I wanted to go against the idea that the government was evil.
JL: It's funny, I grew up reading Marvel too, but I reacted in the opposite way. I hated Captain America, growing up in a commie hippie family. Except when he renounced America, and became Nomad. I loved that [Marvel Comics] took place in New York… Dr. Strange was OBVIOUSLY one of my parent's friends; Peter Parker was from Queens, and the Thing just a kid from the New York streets. For me, Claremont doing the X-men solved the problem of internationalism. Omega, the one I’ve just done, is set in Washington Heights.
BG: What projects are you working on now?
JL: Omega is a very sort of autistic Superhero, but very unlike the ones I’ve written in prose, who are very much earthbound. Omega, for what it's worth, is from another world. But like Superman, he never figures out Earth at all. I’ve clearly got a thing for ineffectual superheroes.
MM: I’m writing Hellboy, not drawing it, so its going much faster. It's kind of going now, where it's supposed to be going. Since I own it, and it's not going to go on for a hundred years, I can get it to where it needs to go.
GM: I’m working on Final Crisis, which is a big crossover. I’m writing more Seaguy, which I love.
TK: I’m currently working on the second season of Heroes, shooting episode 10 of 24, but I’m also working on a mini-series within the series, which will air at the end of the season, based on the idea of origin stories that exist in the world of the show, other people discovering these powers. Basically, an anthology series, each episode having one or two Rod Serling-esque cautionary tales. Kevin Smith, Eli Roth, Michael Dougherty, John August, and Jeph Loeb.
At this point, Ben Greenman turned it over to audience questions. I'd like to mention that, though I shortened the questions people asked considerably, they were often very in depth, articulate, and entirely unlike the questions you would hear at a comic book convention.
Q: I was wondering if Grant could talk about the cosmic representations of evolution in comic books, ala New X-Men.
GM: One of the things about New X-men, I was talking with children… For the past few years, I’ve seen a war on children. We know they’re gonna take over, they’re gonna be successes, and we hate them. So I wanted to talk about hatred of success. Another thing I wanted to talk about was the body politic... Producing new cells in times of danger.
Q: You know, you guys used the word "archetype" seven times in the past hour. And are any of you aware of psychologists talking about superheroes in any way?
GM: Superheroes break down into the gods... Like Love, God, Communication, etc. So Batman is the same as Pluto, Superman is Zeus. The Flash is the Gods of Communication. These things do break down into the same archetypes that every culture has. For me, writing the JLA was setting up the Greek Pantheon.
TK: In the writers room, we talk about the heroes' journey in the classic Joseph Campell way.
GM: In the 90's, I was going through depression, so I created a monster that was a representation of my depression. I had Superman, The Flash, and the rest of them beat him up. So yes, you can use Superheroes in a theraputic way.
Q: What is your favorite work of fiction that influenced all of you guys?
JL: Lewis Carroll, the two Alice books.
MM: Dracula and Pinocchio; it's all in there.
GM: Enid Blyton mysteries.
TK: Catcher in the Rye.
Q: When you first started collecting comics, they were cheap, and stories were at most two or three issues. Now, stories are better, but also inaccesible, 12 issues long, 52 issues long… While the comic-based movies and TV shows have been more successful, are they really funneling people back into comics?
MM: The market is geared more towards to the graphic novel, which your chain bookstore's have, or the stuff is available on Amazon. The pamphlet is harder to find. So I use it as a teaser for the eventual graphic novel form. And I don’t think the films are leading people back to comics. It's a double edged sword… For Hellboy, the comic is well known now, but the comic doesn’t reflect what the second film is.
GM: It’s a shame, but we’ve always been this maverick, despised thing. At least we’re working as a farm for Hollywood. Comics are the well-spring of imagination in this country. There’s no budget in comics. People can only now do with CGI what Jack Kirby could do 40 years ago with a pencil.
Q: There seems to be a real lack of gay and lesbian characters in comics.
TK: You know, we’ve had a few plans, and they’ve fallen apart along the way for various reasons, but its something I’ve been interested in because of this very positive idea that it is happening to people no matter what their situation.
GM: I’ve noticed that post 9/11 everyone is angry. At conventions, people are saying, "You’re white middle class males, and you have no right to talk about people not of your gender, or your race." What we need are more creators coming in bringing in these types of influences.
Q: what about the other types of comics or graphic novels?
JL: This panel has quietly, complicity, taken the idea of comcs as synonymous with superheroes. It's like films, if they were all about Westerns, and every once in a while, people said, “What if you did it about other things?” You have to acknowledge that’s there’s a cross pollenation between novels and comics. The confessional styles of Dan Clowes, or the reporting style, are seeping into the Superhero realm. The medium can do anything.
MM: You have the small publishers, but the big publishers are getting their hands wet with other genres than the Superhero. The material is out there, you just need to look for it.
GM: Me personally, I found that Superhero stories were more like my real life. Superhero stories make me feel how I feel walking through this world. They make me feel better than talking about my life directly.
JL: It's almost impossible to imagine a young kid meeting the image [of the Superhero] in a traditional comic book. There are 10 year old kids who grow up reading the New York Times Magazine, and are more likely to encounter Chris Ware before a Superhero.
Q: How do you carry the world of a comic book to the movie screen?
MM: It’s a completely different medium, and I was lucky to have a director who wanted to keep true to the spirit of the medium. There are so many factors, so many voices, some other person's money involved. I helped put Hellboy on the screen, but at the end of the day, it's Guillermo's Hellboy; it's Revolution Studio's Hellboy.
Q: I loved the the themes that kept recurring throughout the first season of Heroes.
TK: The idea of touching back with [various themes] was what was intended in the pilot. I needed, or wanted to do this along the way, reground the material from where it started from. When you create a show, you write a script, you have total control, suddenly you turn it over to 400 people every week, you start to lose sight and lose connection with what’s going on. We rturned to these touchstones in small ways, in colors, in images. It was really important to me. The show is a really organic process, and when you don’t know where it's going, you have tentpoles: this is what happens at episode 10; at episode 15. But you also allow it to have organic flow in-between, things. Like chemistry between people, and you see that on dailies that it's not there, you realize that story is lousy, and you have to be able to shift gears.
Q: You all created a large body of work. Is there a favorite of your own work?
JL: I hate to say. But I think I’m most proud of Fortress of Solitude, because it has the most of myself in it. What I’m trying to do is put myself in view.
MM: I did a short story with my daughter when she was 7. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Having created something like Hellboy that’s out there, I’m pretty proud that I could create one charactrer. Jack Kirby did that every day before breakfast, but I’m glad I could create one.
JL: Flex Mentallo. The Filfth, which is the most consistently pleasing for me.
TK: To be able to control the story in the pilot, and then to give it up to the other people involved, has a whole amazing… This idea of allowing other people into your process, and allowing other things that you intended, is an amazing process, and amazingly rewarding.
At this point, Greenman said there would be one more question, and that would be it. Given the intellectual discourse we'd already seen, would this be a look at poetry in comics? The role of race and religion? Or perhaps just a disection of the hero as mythic figure? Instead, the talk ended as it had began (for me, at least):
Q: Who would win in race, Superman or The Flash?
GM: The Flash, come on.
JL: I’ll bow to his expertise.
