... A DREAM OF FLYING - COMIC CRUSADERS

How Alan Moore“s Marvelman made me believe a man can fly

Since this is my very first column let me introduce myself. I hail from Germany. Yes, we read comics, too. But those of us who do so, are even smaller in number than in the US and are looked down on even more. I fell in love with American superhero comic books when, at the age of six in the early 70’s, a neighborhood kid handed me the translated editions of Fantastic Four # 8 and Showcase # 22. Right away I knew these were for me and I couldn“t get enough of them. And I loved talking about them. And creating my own stories which I would relate to the other kids who liked comics and who could draw. For us, these books were magic. They were springboards to let our imagination wander, to create.

“Superheroes are not real“, adults would explain to me whenever they spotted me with my comic books while suggesting that there must be better things for me to be spending my allowance on. “These are power fantasies“, I was also told when I was too young to even understand what that was supposed to mean. Had I understood then and had I been gifted with the agency I now possess as an adult, I could have answered: “I don“t read them because of the fighting. These characters possess godlike powers and yet they struggle like we do. This makes it alright that we struggle. That we face challenges. These characters teach us how to dream up the answers to our struggles. How to do better. This is what I like.“

In 1979 when Superman The Movie was finally shown in Germany after it had been endlessly teased in the pages of the German Superman comics, even the adults went to see it. Some liked it since the movie was cleverly targeting the adult audience as well. I was disappointed. There he was, a powerful alien sent to Earth to show us the way, imbued with a code passed on to him by his white-haired father. He dressed up as a human being and had feelings like us, but after all, he was born with superpowers. Superman was from Krypton. On Earth, of course he could fly. I knew that already. While he pretended to be bumbling reporter Clark Kent, all he needed was a phone booth to take to the skies once more.

Cut to 1982. I was fourteen and still reading comic books while the world had become a darker place. Nuclear War seemed at hand. Ronald Reagan was president. Margret Thatcher ruled the UK with an iron fist. In Germany there was a protest march every other day. We didn“t want American ICBMs stationed on our soil, nor radioactive waste from our own nuclear power plants stored underground anywhere. The Green Party made a lot of noise. They were on the move. Yet every day very much felt “silent and grey“, to quote a line from The Smith“s Morrissey, a band I was listening to together with Joy Division and The Sisters of Mercy while I wondered if there were jobs in the future. If there was a future at all. But I had acquired fairly good English skills and had begun reading my comic books in English. Even better I had discovered a store that sold used and new comic books from the US, and also the UK, a country that seemed more depressing than even Germany at that time. This was when I found Warrior # 1, and in a way it changed my life. This sounds hyperbolical, but isn“t art supposed to do that now and then?

While this black and white magazine, that felt adult to fourteen-year-old me, featured a number of cool stories (chief among them Chapter One of V for Vendetta set in the Great Britain of 1997, which lined up perfectly with what I thought the UK was like in 1982), the very first story got me hooked. I had not heard of Alan Moore (who of course also wrote the V for Vendetta series) or Garry Leach. However, what attracted me: the setting felt real, something I had grown accustomed to reading Marvel books of the 60s in the 70s while imagining that this was the real world of America in the 60s (as I understood it from the movies and TV shows made in 60s I had been watching since my early childhood). This first story in Warrior was about a superhero called Marvelman. He is right there, after a one page prologue, all powerful and confident in the first panel, together with the story“s title: “… A Dream of Flying.“

But after the first panel of the story proper, Marvelman is no longer triumphant. His confidence and the bodies of his superfriends melting away by what surely seems like nuclear disaster, as Marvelman falls with a dream-word on his lips. And then, the hero was gone, reduced to a figment in what seems to be a nightmare of one guy as ordinary as they come. Mike, who very much felt like the adults I knew, with a wife as ordinary human as he who slept with no clothes on (which felt also very real to me, remember I am from Europe). And then we are off with Mike, a depressingly ordinary middle-aged guy, a reporter who has been haunted by the same nightmare for years… of a time when he believed a man can fly.

Mike“s dream felt like what I saw in the people around me at the same time, adults at Mike“s age. And I still see it today. And sometimes I see it, when I look in the mirror. They all had been full of hopes and dreams and past glories, full of optimism and imagination. In their youth it seemed, they had been able to imagine things. Sometimes purely for fun or how their lives should go. But like that inferno Marvelman and his friends experienced, these got burned away by the fires of growing up. They had left the dreams behind and were reminded of them in the form of their own personal nightmares. There was a dullness and a bitterness behind their eyes. Even at age fourteen you can tell. Maybe this is the best time when you can tell, when you are no longer a child and not yet an adult. They had stopped reading books and whenever I was watching a film with an adult, they were eager to point out: “No, this cannot happen in real life. This is not real.“ A shark like in Jaws does not exist. No way an action hero can survive a fall from this height. They were like my chemistry teacher in high school for example, who told us after he had been watching the movie The Fog, that there simply was no way Father Malone could have lifted that cross made of pure gold. Yes. I had heard that one before. “Superheroes are not real.“

But the very first chapter of Moore“s and Leach“s Marvelman was not only about an ordinary adult who was bitter, frightened even, about what presents itself in form of a recurring dream, his glory days and how they ended, the confidence he once felt. His imagination long gone or maybe never possessed. Mike remembers. He remembers because he has accepted that the dream is real after all. If he wants it to be. Mike can be anything. Once he remembers. He even can be not human. And he can be free. We can be free, no matter how old we are. If we don“t view our past dreams as nightmares. If we allow ourselves to dream again, to imagine, to create. This is what I have learned from Marvelman.

A man can fly. This I believe. I also believe we can dream and discover our magic dream-word to make us go back and go forward and grow at the same time. My dream-words are comic books. They always have been. They are a constant reminder that in order to make something real you have to dream first.

Indeed, the adults had always been right. Comic books are power fantasies. The power of fantasies. They are about dreams. Dreams that are the first step to give us the power to shape our reality. Before dreams become reality, you must dream. You cannot stop dreaming. But if you do… it is never too late to dream again.

And thus Alan Moore concludes the first chapter of Marvelman with the words: “The Beginning…“

September 2018

Chris Buse

Follow me on Twitter: @buse_chris

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Chris Buse

A comic book reader since 1972. When he is not reading or writing about the books he loves or is listening to The Twilight Sad, you can find Chris at his consulting company in Germany... drinking damn good coffee. Also a proud member of the ICC (International Comics Collective) Podcast with Al Mega and Dave Elliott.