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An Exclusive Preface to Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes by Christopher Knowles

Following the example of Joseph Campbell, some academics have claimed that our society has no room for myth, no room for legends, and certainly no room for gods. But look around; modern Western culture is not lacking in mythology, it's actually swimming in it. Everywhere you look there are comic books, cartoons, video games, novels and movies recycling ancient mythological themes, as well as incorporating ideas and imagery from paganism, the occult, Gnosticism and the ancient Mysteries. And ironically, it was with the Star Wars films, created by Campbell's patron George Lucas, that this whole modern mythological explosion began.

Many younger people don't realize how much Star Wars changed the landscape of pop culture. Prior to Star Wars, science fiction and fantasy were pretty much box office poison. It didn’t help that most sci-fi films on the early-to -mid 70's were dystopian sermons such as Westworld, Silent Running, Soylent Green and Logan's Run. In fact, Lucas had to fight tooth and nail just to get financing for his sci-fi epic.

Besides raking in billions of dollars, Star Wars single-handedly injected mythology back into the mainstream. And to do so, George Lucas hijacked a whole buffet of riffs straight from the comic books. Despite this success, it would take some time for Hollywood to consolidate the formula for broad-spectrum branding and marketing that Lucas had pioneered. But not coincidentally, one of the most successful initial attempts was the first Superman film. Ultimately, it would be the first Batman film in 1989 that truly perfected the idea of the big-budget movie franchise. Hot on its heels, the comic book property Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would launch a film and toy franchise that would rake in billions and codify this formula.

Today, these franchises not only produce massive revenues at the box office, they also sell lunch boxes, breakfast cereals, action figures, party favors, and yes, even comic books. And aside from franchises like Harry Potter (which bears a very strong resemblance to the earlier Books of Magic comic series), and the Pirates of the Caribbean and James Bond series (both of which draw heavily upon the feel and rhythm of comic books), it's the comic book properties like Spider-Man and The X-Men that make the rest of Hollywood weep with numismatic envy. But these films would never do so if the themes they put forward did not strike a powerful chord in the collective unconscious.

The chord these characters strike is something very deep and profound in the human psyche. It's the need to be protected, the need to have wrongs righted, and injustices avenged. It's one of the basic human impulses that gave rise to mythology in the first place. But there is also a vicarious impulse there, to be something more than human, something better. Sometimes this impulse can go horribly awry and give rise to racism, genocide and totalitarianism. It can create the yearning for a strongman dictator, a big brother to protect us against inflated, often illusory threats. In contrast, the writers and artists who have created our most compelling modern mythologies have, consciously or not, by-passed the authoritarian strictures of religious and political mythology entirely and tapped into another current...

Throughout history there has been a parallel spiritual tradition, a counter-culture to the official cults of the state. In the pre-Christian west, there was a wide-ranging class of initiatic sects known today as the "Mystery" religions. These cults offered a personal revelation to their followers, something taken for granted by many modern believers, but deeply radical in those days. These cults often attracted the best and the brightest of their time, and from these cults some of the greatest scientific and cultural thought would emerge. Yet they were often the breeding ground for sedition and revolution, and so were often subject to bloody repression by the political elites. The Mystery tradition was strongest in Egypt, and the many of the finest thinkers of the Hellenistic world (like Plato and Pythagoras, to name two) would travel there to initiated in the ancient pyramids and tombs.

The ecstatic cults of Egyptian gods like Osiris and Horus would mutate into the Greco-Roman Dionysian and Mithraic mysteries, respectively, but the "Great Mother" goddess Isis would rise to great prominence in Roman times with her identity intact. Yet, all of this would be swept away with the rise of totalitarian Christian theocracy in the Fourth Century. The magnificent schools and libraries of the ancient world would be unceremoniously destroyed, as would many of the great ancient teachers. Hypatia, the last of the great Platonic scholars, would be tortured to death in a Christian church by a fanatical mob of monks in the Fifth Century. The result of this suppression was the poverty, violence, ignorance and disease of the Dark Ages. Unsurprisingly then, followers of the ancient Mysteries went underground. But the ancient teachings would reemerge in the Renaissance, and would soonafter give rise to powerful secret societies like Rosicrucians and the Freemasons.

A new flowering of the ancient Mysteries would come with the convulsions of the 19th Century, where millions of people were uprooted from the agrarian environment their families had known for ages and crowded into filthy, chaotic cities to work the "infernal machines" of the Industrial Revolution. This revolution created a social crisis of a scope unseen since the fall of Rome. At the same time, Charles Darwin's theories on the origin of species pulled the rug of cosmological certainty out from under the feet of the educated classes. Mankind didn't seem so special after all, and what's more, seemed destined to be replaced by smoke-spewing machines. It was in this environment that a group of eccentric thinkers turned once again to those dusty old books for an answer.

My book, Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes tells you exactly how the pipe dreams of Victorian mystics would eventually mutate and filter down in to the lowly comic book and then come to dominate the box office charts. It tells you exactly who helped bring the ancient gods back to life and dressed them to the nines in the latest synthetic fabrics. It tells you exactly why the idea of the superhero has become so compelling to the mainstream yet again. And it tells you exactly what brave new future superheroes may be unwittingly pointing to for the human race...
©2007 Christopher Knowles