CULTURAL STUDIES: KATHERINE FARMARreviews Supergods: Our World in the Age of the SuperheroBy Grant Morrison
Jonathan Cape, 444 pp, £17.99

GRANT MORRISON is a controversial figure. He has an army of fans who consider him a visionary genius, and a contingent of detractors who find his work pretentious and confusing. But on one matter both his fans and his enemies are agreed: he is an extremely unusual man. Having been a writer of superhero comics since the late 1970s, and the most influential superhero writer of the past 20 years, it’s unsurprising that he should write a book that is essentially a hymn of praise to superheroes and all they represent. Being the very unusual man that he is, it’s equally unsurprising that the book is part manifesto, part memoir, part idiosyncratic spiritual/philosophical tract.

Based on the blurb and subtitle, you might expect Supergodsto be a history of the superhero genre, and it is, in part, but this is the book's least satisfactory strand. In particular, the early chapters, dealing with the genre's origins in the 1930s with the creation of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and its rise, fall, and subsequent reinvention in the 1960s with Marvel's characters, the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, are history of a kind that has been done better elsewhere.

Morrison knows the genre and loves it deeply, and both that knowledge and that love shine through even in these chapters, but his explanations cover too much familiar ground for readers who already know the genre, and are too patchy and inconsistent to be helpful for newcomers. He lacks a historian’s discipline; he cites few sources and makes a number of contentious and ill-supported claims. For example, when he deals with psychiatrist Frederic Wertham’s chilling effect on the development of American comics, he serves up the same tired old story of Wertham-the-censor that comics fans have been telling each other for decades, despite the fact that Wertham did not advocate censorship, and the draconian Comics Code that came about partly due to his influence was a voluntary measure created by the comics publishers themselves.

Morrison's attack on Wertham is not only inaccurate but also intemperate, perhaps because in his assessment of Superman, Wertham drew a conclusion which is the polar opposite of Morrison's thesis in Supergods. Wertham felt that superhuman characters "undermine the authority and dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children", making real people seem inadequate by comparison. Morrison, by contrast, sees superheroes as embodiments of all our best qualities, godlike figures who are nonetheless grounded and human enough to encourage us to aspire to better things in every aspect of our lives. This is where the second strand of the book comes in: a meditation-cum-manifesto on the power of the superhero as a transformative figure in our culture.

Here Morrison starts to pile on the strangeness, because when he talks about fiction becoming reality, he's not talking about children reading superhero comics and resolving to be as brave and noble as the characters they love. He's not even talking about ideas from superhero comics inspiring real-world technological developments (although he finds it exciting when that does happen). With his groundbreaking series Animal Man, Morrison wrote himself into the superhero's universe as a character who could talk to Animal Man and explain how the events of his life were orchestrated for the amusement of readers, thus breaking down the walls between fiction and reality in one direction. Morrison believes, quite sincerely, in the possibility of the walls breaking down from the other side.

This is a very trippy belief to have, and I don’t use that word lightly. Morrison’s spiritual beliefs are eclectic, and have been shaped by his use of hallucinogenic drugs. One of the most gripping parts of the book deals with a period of his life when he was travelling through Asia in search of enlightenment, and found it, in the form of a powerful psychedelic experience he underwent in Kathmandu. No summary could possibly do Morrison’s description justice, so I’ll quote him instead:

“ . . . there were what I can describe only as ‘presences’ emerging from the walls and furniture. Perhaps someone else would call these rippling, dribbling blobs of pure holographic meta-material angels or extraterrestrials . . . My sense of being was rotated through a plane I could not now point to . . . I could not feel my body or open my eyes in the physical world . . . My real eyes were wide open now.”

There's more of this heady stuff in the third, autobiographical, strand of the book, an often funny and sometimes very moving account of Morrison's life as seen through the lens of his relationship with superheroes, which began in childhood. This is the most interesting and best-realised aspect of the book. Indeed, if Morrison had cut the genre history and given Supergodsthe subtitle My life in the age of the superhero, I would have been happy to praise it. As it is, there are long stretches of Supergods that are a chore to get through, not helped by Morrison's dense, overripe prose. Sentences such as "McCarthy's [Brendan] melting superpsychedelic visuals could sprawl across pages in a trancelike pageant of phosphorescent dream imagery" litter almost every page. There's a certain mad poetry to it, but that doesn't make it any easier to read.

Supergodsis a strange, frustrating, thought- provoking, contentious, and ultimately rather cheering book. Perhaps Morrison is right in believing that superheroes represent our best selves, in which case the recent rise to prominence of superheroes in the culture beyond comics is a cause for optimism. They may not be crossing the dimensional borders between fact and fiction as Morrison claims, but superheroes are showing no sign of losing their power to inspire.

Katherine Farmar is a freelance writer and editor. She blogs about the arts at katherinefarmar.com