Superheroes 'R' us: we're all supergods now.

• Author: Seavey, Todd
• Position: Grant Morrison on comic heroes

IN SEPTEMBER, DC Comics, America's oldest comic book publisher, relaunched the series in which its signature character, Superman, made his 1938 debut: Action Comics. DC's updated Action will be written by a bald, Scottish, mysticism-practicing, psychedelic-drug-taking, punk-music-making anarchist named Grant Morrison.

Fans wondering what effect such a character will have on the Man of Steel are in luck: Morrison recently authored Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God From Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human (Spiegel & Grau), a moving, often poetic history of superhero comics and how they shape the modern world. "Could it be that a culture starved of optimistic images of its own future has turned to the primary source in search of utopian role models?" Morrison writes. "Could the superhero in his cape and skintight suit be the best current representation of something we all might become?" The comics published by DC and its main rival, Marvel, Morrison maintains, offer a forum for a dialectical conversation about humanity's future--and, he hopes, a vision of a better world.

DC began that conversation with what were essentially costumed World War II-era G-men, detectives, and circus strongmen. In the 1960s, Marvel responded with angst-ridden everymen like Peter Parker, a.k.a. the Amazing Spider-Man, and noble outcasts such as the mutant X-Men. DC regained the initiative in the late '80s with even darker characters, such as Alan Moore's Watchmen, who called into question the sanity of the whole superhero enterprise.

Morrison started writing comics as a teenager, going on to create stories featuring Doctor Who, the robotic Zoids, and satirical superheroes before gaining industry notoriety with Animal Man for DC Comics in the late '80s. He sees his role as a sort of anti--Alan Moore. Although both men sought to interrogate and re-imagine comics, Moore went into the project as a deconstructionist and critic, whereas Morrison approached it as a humble anthropologist, donning a "fiction suit" to visit his long-lived, indestructible, endlessly revisable friends.

Characters should be given their due, Morrison argues, even to the extent of treating the dream logic of their cartoonish worlds with as much respect as the physics of our own reality. It misses the point entirely to demand that Superman explain why wearing glasses is sufficient to hide one's identity, or to attempt to rationalize the convention that...