A young caveman brandishes his stone axe and marvels at a mysterious apparition: a luminous figure hovering in a sci-fi chair who addresses him as follows:
“Man. I am Metron. Have no fear. Here is knowledge.”
The godlike Metron generates a flame from his fingertip and ignites a burning bush for “Man” to behold.
The Space Gods Meet the Flintstones
This is the first scene of the first issue of Final Crisis, a comic book series written by Grant Morrison and published by DC Comics from 2008 to 2009.
Metron is a DC Comics character created by comics legend Jack Kirby who first appeared in Kirby’s New Gods #1 (1971). Kirby’s New Gods are mythological deities recast as superheroes and supervillains from beyond: cosmic “space gods” empowered by super-tech like Metron’s teleporting, time-traveling, and dimension-spanning “Mobius Chair.”
The recipient of Metron’s gift of fire is Anthro, a “caveman as superhero” character created by cartoonist Howard Post and who first appeared in DC’s Showcase #74 (1968). Anthro is dubbed “the first boy,” because he is the first Homo sapiens. That is why Metron addressed him as “Man.” “Anthro” is derived from the ancient Greek word for “man” in the sense of “human.”
As I elaborated in my earlier post, “Behold the Super-Hominid,” Anthro’s encounter with the space god Metron is the experience that literally makes a man out of him. The gift of fire is a superpower that transforms him into something new: something beyond his Neanderthal peers, parents, and ancestors. It empowers him to become a superhero. He subsequently wields the superpower of fire to heroically defend his tribe from marauders.
As Morrison explained in an interview:
“We have big ambitions for Final Crisis, and the Anthro scene was a way of laying down a kind of primal creation myth for the superhero concept. Anthro (which means ’man’ of course) is equivalent with Adam, the First Boy, encountering an ‘angel’ or higher intelligence which gives him an incredible new weapon, technology, or ‘power’, which then makes him more than human and moves him to defend his tribe against the forces of chaos and lawlessness. We’re seeing a kind of aboriginal genesis of superheroism itself here, so it has resonances with various creation stories, Biblical and otherwise.
Morrison’s superhero genesis resonates with the Biblical stories of Adam, Eve, and the Tree of Knowledge, as well as Moses and the Burning Bush.
It also echoes the Theft of Fire, a mythological motif that most famously occurs in the ancient Greek legend of Prometheus.
Prometheus is one of the titans, a race of superhuman beings who once ruled the earth before they were overthrown by the Olympian gods. Prometheus is the creator and benefactor of humanity. By decree of Zeus, overlord of the world, the secret of fire was denied to mortals and reserved for the gods. But Prometheus smuggled fire out of Mount Olympus and gave it as a boon to mankind.
Morrison’s story is a superhero-genre retelling of the Theft of Fire myth, with Metron as Prometheus and Anthro representing mankind.
Morrison later revealed that Metron’s true gift to Anthro and his descendents was not the invention of fire as such, but invention itself: that is, the fire of creativity. As I explained in another post, “Dawn of the Dynamic,” this notion parallels the real-world origins of humankind. It also echoes interpretations of the Prometheus myth throughout history.
Brute Strengths
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato, in his dialogue the Protagoras, has one of his characters tell a creation myth, beginning as follows:
“Once upon a time there were gods only, and no mortal creatures. But when the time came that these also should be created, the gods fashioned them out of earth and fire and various mixtures of both elements in the interior of the earth…”
The gods then ordered Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus to assign qualities and abilities (or “powers,” as a superhero writer might say) to all the mortal creatures, so as to equip them for survival.
Epimetheus gave to each animal species physical strengths that offset their weaknesses, “with the view of preventing any race from becoming extinct.” Some slow animals were made strong, and some weak animals were made swift. Some small animals were empowered “to fly in the air or burrow in the ground” so as to escape from predators. Other animals were “armed” with bodily weapons like fangs, claws, and horns.
Epimetheus gave some animals bodily protection against the elements, “clothing them with close hair and thick skins sufficient to defend them against the winter cold and able to resist the summer heat… also he furnished them with hoofs and hair and hard and callous skins under their feet.”
Still other animals were empowered to survive through a high birth rate.
And to all the animals, he assigned natural food sources: grass of the earth for grazing, fruits of the trees for picking, and other animals for hunting.
By the time Epimetheus came around to equipping man for survival, he had run out of physical powers to give. Man could neither fly in the air nor breathe underwater. He lacked spear-like horns or saber-like teeth. His soft and mostly bare skin offered little protection from predators and the elements.
How could such a weakling avoid extinction?
Stealing a Superpower
Fortunately, Prometheus came to mankind’s rescue. If there were no remaining physical gifts to bestow, Prometheus would ensure humanity’s survival by granting him a mental and spiritual advantage that no brute beast enjoyed. To do this, Prometheus would plunder the treasurehouse of heaven itself. He snuck into Olympus and “did enter by stealth into the common workshop of Athena and Hephaestus, in which they used to practise their favourite arts, and carried off Hephaestus' art of working by fire, and also the art of Athena, and gave them to man. And in this way man was supplied with the means of life.”
Hephaestus is the god of the forge and of metalwork. Athena is the goddess of wisdom and handicraft. Prometheus stole from Olympus, not only fire, but “the arts” themselves from the workshops of the gods, and gifted them to man as his chief means of survival.
And indeed, in reality as in myth, humanity’s ability to invent, manufacture, and improve upon our tools (from handaxes to smartphones) is indeed our unique advantage in the struggle to survive. We do not grow horns, but we can forge blades sharper than any horn. We have no natural pelts of our own, but we can mass-produce clothing and buildings that equip us to survive even in extreme climates. We are born wingless, but we can create airplanes and even spaceships.
Humanity’s ability to innovate and thus make technological progress is a godlike superpower that sets us apart from and above our bestial contemporaries and forebears: that enables us, not only to survive, but to thrive and to exercise dominion over animals, plants, and the earth.
Our Creative Spark
But our superpower of creativity is not limited to the invention and production of physical goods. Morrison touched on this in another comic book story that featured Prometheus himself as a superhero.
In 2015, the Philadelphia Museum of Art commissioned Prometheus Eternal, a collection of comic stories inspired by Peter Paul Rubens’s painting “Prometheus Bound.” The first story in the collection, titled “Prometheus Is Here!” is written by Morrison.
The brief story opens with an author wrestling with writer’s block (“I have no idea how to say what I am trying to say!”) and an artist suffering a crisis of confidence (”What if I never paint again!).
But then the two creatives hear the same words that Anthro heard from Metron: “Have no fear!”
“Prometheus is here!” proclaims a fiery superhero. The captions then echo the famous opening announcement from the Superman radio and TV shows:
“Prometheus… who came to earth with the power to enflame and inspire the human imagination!
And who, endowed with foresight, creativity and indominatable strength, fights a neverending battle for progress, illumination and freedom!
Where imagination fails! Where ingenuity reachs its limit! Where there is need of invention!
He brings fire that was stolen from heaven!
He brings light in the darkness!”
Prometheus breathes fiery inspiration into the writer, who begins hammering away at her keyboard, and the artist, who paints a bold initial stroke upon his canvas. Prometheus then flies throughout the city, inspiring architects, a musical performer, and a scientist.
Of course depending on how we use it, human creativity can be a curse as well as a gift. That is also represented in the myth of Prometheus, as well as Morrison’s superhero adaptation of that tale in Final Crisis. I will explore that dark side in a future post.
Creativity is a mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. Whenever fear and self-doubt has you feeling stuck or trapped, remember that you can light your way out of any dark pit by tapping the uniquely human superpower of creativity that, so long as we live and can think, burns within us all.