Twilight of the Superheroes
Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Twenty years ago, Alan Moore was working for DC, and had recently written a little comic called, “Watchmen.” In the wake of that, he wrote a proposal for a 12-issue series called, “Twilight of the Superheroes.” His argument for it was that the DC superheroes could never really become fully realized “legends” unless they had an ending written for them, since their serieseses are ongoing. Frank Miller had recently written an ending, of sorts, for the Batman, in “Dark Knight Returns,” so Moore’s pitch obviously had support from lots of different angles. Unfortunately, contract disputes got in the way, Moore quit, and “Twilight” never saw the light of day, until years later, when “Kingdom Come” came out and did something very similar to Moore’s original pitch, though not similar enough to be considered even remotely plagiarized. Just the general idea, I suppose.
Anyhow, I’d never heard of this until just today, at which point I was able to read the entire pitch as written by Alan Moore twenty years ago. Here’s a link if you have an hour or so.
The basic idea is that this is set in the future. It’s not your typical nuclear-torn dystopia type of future, but, rather, it’s dealing with a world that spent the past fifty years fearing nuclear destruction coming to terms with the fact that they have to actually keep living here. Social collapse occurs across the board, and the superheroes are there to save the day. Eventually, America is kind of “run” by several different factions of super-heroes. The east coast is controlled by the House of Steel, headed by Superman and his wife Wonder Woman (now Super Woman). They have a son and a daughter, both super. The west coast is run by the House of Thunder, which is the Marvel family, with Captain Marvel and Mary having wed and birthed some kids of their own. Several smaller houses control the rest of the country, notably the House of Titans, made up of the former Teen Titans, run by a badass, merciless Dick Grayson. The Batman’s been reported dead for years. All of the Green Lanterns and space beings have been exiled from Earth (other than Superman, who’s naturalized).
The main character, as it were, is John Constantine. From this future, he’s sent Rip Hunter back to the present day to convince his younger self to warn all of Earth’s heroes about this possible future and how horrible it is. He frequents a shitty dive bar with a bunch of other has-been heroes, including the Question, who’s trying to figure out an impossible mystery. A midget was seen going into an upstairs room at the bar with a tall blonde. Nobody leaves the room. Later, the door’s busted open and the little man is found alone, bound and gagged, with his neck snapped.
Anyhow, the backdrop for the story is that there’s going to be a giant merger of the two biggest “Houses,” as Superman’s son is going to marry Captain Marvel’s daughter. Fearing this consolidation of power, the other smaller groups are planning on teaming up to take them out. Constantine is the one organizing everything. He meets with Captain Marvel and tells him what’s happening, and not to worry about it. As he lights a cigarette, Captain Marvel bristles.
The wedding starts, fighting breaks out, and pretty much everybody is killed except for battle-torn Captain Marvel and Superman. Standing back to back in the aftermath, they await what could possibly come next, at which point, ta-da, all the exiled Green Lanterns show up to take over Earth, as they fear that Superman/Captain Marvel have been too controlling over Earth’s citizens. As the fight is ready to start, we realize that Captain Marvel isn’t Captain Marvel at all. Standing in his place is the Martian Manhunter. Captain Marvel’s been dead ever since he, as Billy Batson, went into an upstairs room in a bar with a tall blonde hooker. She quickly snapped his neck and walked out through the wall.
Martian Manhunter, standing back-to-back with Superman, ready to fight some Lanterns, turns back into his original form, and, with the rest of the GLs, kicks Superman’s ass. Sodam Yat, the ultimate Green Lantern, delivers the death blow.
In the wake of the battle, a different group suddenly emerges, a “secret counsil of the immortals,” comprised of Batman, the Shadow, Doc Savage, and Tarzan. They’ve been hiding in the shadows for years, waiting for their time to strike. Dressed in thin gold body armor, they suffer no harm from the green power rings and restore the rule of Earth to its human citizens after defeating the space invaders in combat.
I wish it had been made.
It sounds cool as hell. Hope I did it justice.
Niiice.
It’s too bad Moore refuses to work with DC anymore. I’d love to see something like this. Heck, with this AND Kingdom Come, maybe we’d stop getting the DCU’s “inescapable future” shoved down our throats.
-M
I have to disagree with you – this was a terrible idea that rightly never saw the light of day. This book reeks of “Iron Age” comics cynicism and the mistaken notion that deconstructing/destroying characters is somehow the same thing as developing them.
In this pitch, Billy Batson is a sexual deviant; the faux Captain Marvel (whom everyone believes, apparently, is the genuine article) is in an incestuous relationship with his sister, who is screwing his best friend/protege behind his back and no one in the extended Marvel Family has an issue with it.
In fact, no one in the entire superhero community has a problem with it, as Superman and Superwomen (the former Wonder Woman, who turns her back on her people, her mission, and her own identity to become a piece of ass/incubator for the Man of Steel) are hot to pawn of their son on seemingly inbred Mary Marvel, jr.
Oh, and did I mention that Superman – the embodiment of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” is a combination despot/warlord?
The man behind the curtain in all of this is John Constantine, one totally non-powered alcoholic nicotine addict who is one of the poster children for the “kewl” antihero comics of the period. The story itself is a predestination paradox that may or may not (have) happened at all – not much different from the mess we have now with return/revelation of the existence of the new/doomed multiverse.
I could go on and on with this, but frankly I don’t have the stomach for it. Suffice it to say that this was a grotesque idea whose only advantage I can see over DCs current continuity freak show is that is would have been self-contained to a single “event” instead of a mega-mega-mega-mega crossover 25 years in the making.
Yuck.
I liked it. I think it’s a cool story, and I think it is faithful to at least one man’s veiw of the dc universe.
Superman, by the way, is a huge liar, not the embodiment of truth. Sha-BOY!
Basically any story which showcases a shadowy alliance between Batman, Doc Savage, the Shadow, and Tarzan is worth reading. Nuff said.
Regardless of whether Moore’s project would have been good or not (as a fan of Moore’s I suspect I would have liked it – with the exception of including Tarzan(WTF???)), your photo implies that you didn’t think “Kingdom Come” was any good. We can only speculate on how much we might have enjoyed Moore’s “Twilight”; but I for one absolutely loved “Kingdom Come”. Am I misinterpreting you? Are you saying that you iddn’t like “Kingdom Come” or are you just saying that you think you would have enjoyed Morre’s “Twilight” even more?
I’m saying I don’t like “Kingdom Come.” I know it’s supposedly great, and it’s blasphemous to say you didn’t like it, and, technically, I can find very few flaws in it, but I just was extremely bored while reading most of it.
So, yes, my photo is implying I don’t like it because I don’t.
I still don’t see where taking characters who are supposed to be able to rise above this sort of behavior and building a story around them wallowing in it is supposed to help cement their “iconic” status.
I’m not saying that it isn’t possible to inject pathos and even tragedy into the DC cannon, but nothing I’ve read in the accounts of “Twilight” even cast the characters in a recognizable light (except for maybe Batman).
If “Twilight” is meant to be a tragedy (and I don’t know how else it could be read), then at least have these characters hang themselves on their own petards. Superman and Wonder Woman building a dystopia cast in their own larger-than-life (and impossible for other humans to emulate) image, for example. The Marvels doing likewise; I can easily see Superman creating a soul-sucking technocracy and the Marvels at the head of a luddite/neo-pagan movement, for example.
Also, a more logical take on who would side with who (in terms of back-story and motivation, Wonder Woman has almost nothing in common with Superman, but has A LOT in common with the Marvels) would be a nice change of pace in these stories.
The kind of prolonged mind-f*ck it would take for Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Marvel Family to become petty tyrants acting as feudal warlords just isn’t in character for these people, especially Wonder Woman and the Marvels who are charged by higher powers to nurture and protect ideals diametrically opposed to those at work in “Twilight.”
Add to this the ready acceptance of an (apparently) incestuous relationship between Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel, whose inbred offspring Superman and Wonder Woman are eager to foist their son on; and what is in reality Mary Marvel being raped repeatedly by Martian Manhunter, and I find myself really wanting to know just what is so compelling about this idea that so many people seem to lament it never happened?
Really, what’s the attraction to this sort of story? Apart from their costumes, there’s nothing even remotely familiar about these characters. And if these aren’t the DC characters we all know and love and sometimes loathe, who cares what happens to them?
I’m sure it would have been good (it is Alan Moore, after all), but like Jeff said, it doesn’t really sound like the DC characters I know and love. The nice thing about Kingdom Come is that is was the new wave of heroes that caused the downfall of everthing, and it was the old guard that realized what was wrong and set about to right it. Kingdom Come Superman is one of the greatest iterartions of the character in his 70-year history. Twilight Superman sounds like he would have been ASSSupes.
Originally reading through this blog post, I thought “This sounds interesting.” But I’ll be darned if I can find a single thing about Jeff’s comments that I don’t agree with.
I especially enjoyed the insight in this line:
Yeah, I hear you on that, Jim. However, I always find it interesting when you take a character out of his typical environment and/or timeline and put him in a situation where he has to develop to these changes. One of my favorite such examples is in Superman: Red Son, when it shows Batman as a “terrorist” of sorts against the communist regime. I’m easily impressed, and this sounded quite interesting.
I guess I can’t say for certain that this would be good or bad, or that the characters are acting out of character, though, since I’d be willing to allow any writer the chance to prove it to me. Saying, “In the future, Superman acts as something of a warlord, and Captain Marvel is involved in an incestuous relationship with Mary Marvel,” is perfectly fine to me, since the next question out of my mouth would be something to the effect of, “Okay, now tell me how that happened.” Given certain circumstances, I’d be willing to accept just about anything, but it would have to make logical sense as to how they got there.
In the pitch here, I don’t think Moore has the chance to really explain how all of these characters got here, although I’m certain he would’ve if the final product had ever seen the light of day. There’s a lot about this that’s really rough, but, still, it’s big and drastic and epic in scope, so it still interests me. I guess I’d feel bad nitpicking something that’s obviously so early on in its stages of development.
The whole point of Twilight of the Gods is that, with Valhalla in flames and the order of the gods torn asunder, humans emerge to claim their world.
So I’m saying, in that sense, Moore was staying true to the idea of Ragarok/Gotterdammerung while using the DCU characters as a sort of framework/context. You don’t have to agree with the nitty-gritty, but the concept of it is intrinsically appealing. It works on a type of level which has been active in literature/fiction for centuries, details be damned. Your favorite/dearest characters are pawns in a greater movement.
It just dawned on me how abstractly subjective this topic is. Most reviews boil down to the moot argument of “This comic is good/bad” (using the original definitition of “moot” meaning a point that cannot be proved one way or another). But here we are arguing about what our hypothetical reviews would be of a non-existant series. What’s next? “Supposed this one artist (who was never born) created this one superhero (who doesn’t exist) and then another non-existant artist were to write a post-modern mini-series about the hero. Personally, I think that would be the coolest series ever!”
Yeah, but I think the point is that any attempted meaning obtained by using the favorite and dearest characters is contrived and ultimately hollow, because they’re being forced into a literary framework that they don’t necessarily fit for a purpose that doesn’t seem to extend beyond “ooh, wouldn’t that be shocking…”
To say the purpose of the project wouldn’t extend beyond shock factor is, i think, selling it short (though we will of course never know for sure) but from the link DeLuise provided, here’s Moore on the whole point of the piece:
“What I’d like to do creatively with the series is to create a storyline that [lends] the whole superhero phenomenon a context that [is] intensely mythic and [extract] from the characters involved in it their last ounce of mythic potential, [cementing] the link between superheroes and the Gods of legend [with] something as direct and resonant as the original legends themselves. One legend in particular will be the main thematic drift of the storyline: the Norse legend of Ragnarok, twilight of the Gods.”
Moore wanted to write the story of the end of the DC heroes, and elevate them. Since many are practically immortal or indestructible, this would have to be done by making them functionally irrelevant–that is, inherently UNheroic.
I don’t think this idea could so easily be written off as overly cynical. It seems like Moore just wanted to officially elevate the DC heroes to the same status as the gods and heroes of pagan myths.
I do think it could be a very interesting story, and I’d probably be excited to read it.
I just think that any added value gained by using established characters rather then creating new ones is fairly superficial. What he calls “extraction” is little more than taking away the qualities that make them three-dimensional characters. He’s taking one aspect of the character, amplifying it, and then acting as if that’s a statement in itself.
Thanks for the feedback (and not flaming me); it’s nice to be able to talk about something as ridiculous as this in all seriousness without people going ape-sh*t.
I’ve got to agree with Jim Doom – and not just because he agreed with me. You can’t inflate one aspect of a literary (or mythical/historical/religious) figure to an extreme and claim that you’ve made that figure iconic. I think the religious/mythical standard that Moore was claiming to shoot for proves the point:
Does “horny” summarize Zeus?
Does “wrathful” (or “bitchy,” as I guarantee it would be portrayed in the comics) summarize Hera?
And if you take your comics seriously, let’s kick it up a notch: does “compassionate” capture all there is to say about Jesus? Does “contemplative” summarize Buddha?
I would argue no.
The other thing that really bothers me about this story is that Captain Marvel really isn’t Captain Marvel at all, and writing-off Billy Batson as some sort of sexual deviant isn’t so much amplifying an aspect of the character as making a straw-man out of him. So right from the beginning, one of the major characters is a complete fabrication, *not* even a caricature of the genuine article.
Secondly, if Billy Batson’s use of his powers somehow stunted his emotional/psychological development and rendered him some sort of sexual deviant, why isn’t this also the case with the other Marvels, Mary and Junior? Moore, at least in his draft, immediately creates a plot hole big enough to fly the Rock of Eternity through.
As if this weren’t bad enough, the Martian Manhunter, who is *actually* the faux Captain Marvel, is so grossly out-of-character as to be unrecognizable. Where’s his inner monologue/conscience/telepathic rapport with Mary, who is 1) in actually a minor, 2) by the rules of the story some sort of sexual deviant, and 3) no matter how you slice it, a participant in an incestuous relationship?
Not to belabor the point, but I just see *anything* that connects these interpretations/reinventions to the DC cannon sufficiently to make me anything but contemptuous of this storyline. The *only* way I can see of getting around this is to write-off the Marvels *and* Martian Manhunter entirely so that Superman (and Superman alone, since Wonder Woman has given up her own identity as part of the premise of the comic) can stand alone.
IMO, the last thing in the world that Superman needs to achieve/prove his iconic status is to be compared to a bunch of faux characters that don’t really exist; the result is, in my mind at least, the complete opposite of what Moore says he was trying to achieve: Superman can *only* look good by comparison to other “heroes” who aren’t.
For my money, the “Marvel/DC After Hours” bits on YouTube do a better job of cementing Superman’s iconic status than Moore’s pitch – at least as I understand it; the “Twilight” interpretation of Superman would serve as the iconic poster boy for Superdickery.com!
Thanks for posting here, Jeff. We tend to save our flaming for each other. 😈
Well now you know Mean Gene * I mean Jim Doom, in response to your comment # 13, I really must say that I was about to qualify my own statements with that exact same argument. There is something damaging in foisting a larger framework on long-established characters to fit some sort of abstract “larger purpose.” I respect that.
Still, Team Human would’ve made the entire shock of the storyline worth it, IMHO. It’s Batman and Tarzan for cryin’ out loud!
A lot of Moore’s stories sound retarded on paper, but on … you know, COMICS paper, they’re pretty cool. Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow, case in point.
Batman hanging out with the Public Domain Posse is pretty weird, though. I guess it’s Moore’s way of placing the Batman legend where he thinks it belongs. And he has a point. Batman makes more sense in a Tarzan and Doc Savage world than he does in Superman’s. Why every “good” Batman story involves a conflict with Supes is beyond me.