How Grant Morrison Learned to Stop Worrying about the Bomb
By Falling in Love with the Superhero
I love superhero fiction, comic books especially. My favorite creator in the genre, by far, is Grant Morrison. He wrote my favorite superhero story—the 2005-2008 comic book series All-Star Superman—as well as my favorite non-fiction work about superheroes—the 2011 book Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human.
Morrison’s bold thesis in Supergods is that superhero stories can literally save the world.
He begins the book by relating how superheroes saved his world by rescuing him from a childhood existential crisis.
Morrison, a Scot, was a precocious and sensitive laddie. From his early childhood in the 1960s, he absorbed the preoccupations of his parents and of the broader culture.
His father was a World War II veteran turned antiwar activist who took young Grant to anti-nuclear protests and even enlisted him in antiwar espionage.
“I was kind of used as a decoy,” Morrison related in a documentary. “My dad would go in and he’d kick balls over fences, and we'd climb in and he’d pretend his son was looking for his ball while he would take photographs of these underground nuclear bases.”
Morrison revered his idealistic father. And his early exposure, through his father’s eyes, to the existential horror of potential nuclear armageddon was deeply formative. His childhood was overshadowed by “the Bomb, always the Bomb,” a ”grim and looming” ever-present threat that was “liable to go off at any minute, killing everybody and everything.”
Morrison remembered looking through his father’s antiwar magazines which “were illustrated with gruesome hand-drawn images of how the world might look after a spirited thermonuclear missile exchange.” These mimeographed “zines” would depict:
“…shattered, obliterated skeletons contorted against blazing horizons of nuked and blackened urban devastation. If the artist could find space in his composition for a macabre, eight-hundred-foot-tall Grim Reaper astride a flayed horror horse, sowing missiles like grain across the snaggle-toothed, half-melted skyline, all the better.”
But, because of his beloved mother, young Morrison also had formative encounters with images of the future that were—not dark, fearful, and apocalyptic—but bright, hopeful, and utopian.
“Like visions of Heaven and Hell on a medieval triptych,” Morrison wrote, “the postatomic wastelands of my dad’s mags sat side by side with the exotic, triple-sunned vistas that graced the covers of my mum’s beloved science fiction paperbacks. Digest-sized windows onto shiny futurity, they offered android amazons in chrome monokinis chasing marooned spacemen beneath the pearlescent skies of impossible alien worlds.”
What, young Morrison wondered, will be the fate of humanity, of civilization, of his family, of himself? Are we doomed to be destroyed by our own Atomic Age scientific horrors? Or are we destined to be saved and elevated by our own Space Age scientific wonders?
Events occuring in the wider world indicated that we could go either way:
“On television, images of pioneering astronauts vied with bleak scenes from Hiroshima and Vietnam: It was an all-or-nothing choice between the A-Bomb and the Spaceship. I had already picked sides, but the Cold War tension between Apocalypse and Utopia was becoming almost unbearable.”
This crisis was resolved for Morrison by his discovery of American superhero comics, and especially of Superman. As Morrison explained:
“It’s not that I needed Superman to be ‘real,’ I just needed him to be more real than the Idea of the Bomb that ravaged my dreams. I needn’t have worried; Superman is so indefatigable a product of the human imagination, such a perfectly designed emblem of our highest, kindest, wisest, toughest selves, that my Idea of the Bomb had no defense against him.”
Through his childhood as an avid, perceptive comics reader and his adult career as a professional, genius comics creator, Morrison came to a profound conviction: that, in the superhero, humanity created for itself a powerful, incandescent symbol that can light our own path away from apocalypse and toward utopia.
That, Morrison theorized, is why superhero stories—from the comic book racks to the movie theaters—have proven to be so enduringly fascinating to so many, including adults.
“Could it be,” Morrison asked, “that a culture starved of optimistic images of its own future has turned to the primary source in search of utopian role models? Could the superhero in his cape and skintight suit be the best current representation of something we all might become, if we allow ourselves to feel worthy of a tomorrow where our best qualities are strong enough to overcome the destructive impulses that seek to undo the human project?“
Morrison clearly believes the answer to this question is a resounding yes.
But how can fictional fantasy characters help guide real-world people away from self-destruction and toward self-actualization?
As Morrison explained, “we have a tendency to reenact the stories we tell ourselves. We learn as much (and sometimes more that’s useful) from our fictional role models as we do from the real people who share our lives.”
This is a fundamental characteristic of the human condition, and it is the reason why, since time immemorial, we have been telling ourselves stories: especially stories of superhuman scale and import, from ancient myths to modern fantasies.
And the kind of stories we tell ourselves is a momentous matter. As Morrison warns:
”If we perpetually reinforce the notion that human beings are somehow unnatural aberrations adrift in the ever-encroaching Void, that story will take root in impressionable minds and inform the art, politics, and general discourse of our culture in anti-life, anti-creative, and potentially catastrophic ways. If we spin a tale of guilt and failure with an unhappy ending, we will live that story to its conclusion, and some benighted final generation not far down the line will pay the price.”
Such nihilistic narratives have become tragically prevalent in today’s corporate, government-corrupted, media, even “subverting” our superhero stories. I regard it as no mere coincidence that a culture steeped in such narratives is now, as I write, once again on the brink of nuclear war.
A steady diet of bad stories will make us worse people. And the more we thereby indulge our self-destructive impulses—our despair, cowardice, wrath, hubris, etc—the more likely we will be to actually destroy ourselves.
To avoid such a universal cataclysm, we need better philosophies embodied in better stories. As Morrison wrote:
“If, on the other hand, we emphasize our glory, intelligence, grace, generosity, discrimination, honesty, capacity for love, creativity, and native genius, those qualities will be made manifest in our behavior and in our works.”
That is exactly what great superhero stories—like Morrison’s own All-Star Superman—can do for us. Superheroes, when done right, crystalize some of our highest aspirations into personified ideals and transcendent role models for us to emulate and be inspired by.
To paraphrase the full title of Dr. Strangelove, Grant Morrison learned to stop worrying about the Bomb by falling in love with the Superhero. Superheroes can be more powerful than the bomb, because they can inspire us to become better people: the kind of people who would never precipitate or start a nuclear war.
“We live in the stories we tell ourselves,” Morrison wrote. We must choose whether to tell ourselves stories that bring out the worst in us, or the best. That choice will determine the world we create: whether a totalitarian hellscape of dystopian, postapocalyptic horrors or a free and harmonious super-civilization of scifi wonders.
To save the world, we must save our souls. To save our souls, we must save our stories. And to save our stories, we must save the superhero.