In the 1980s, for the first time writers began writing superhero comics in which the characters were as much commentary upon superheroes as they were superheroes: Alan Moore led the way in this, as did Frank Miller.

One of the elements that fused back into comics at that time was the treatment of some comics themes in prose fiction: Superfolks and The Kryptonite Kid, short stories such as Norman Spinrad's "It's a Bird! It's a Plane!," essays like Larry Niven's (literally) seminal "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex."

The resurgence that hit comics at this time also surfaced in prose fiction-the early volumes of the George R. R. Martinedited Wild Cards anthologies did a fine job of reinvoking the joy of superheroes in a prose context.

The problem with the mid-eighties revival of interesting superheroes was that the wrong riffs were the easiest to steal. Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns spawned too many bad comics: humorless, gray, violent and dull. When the Wild Cards anthologies were turned into comics what made them interesting as commentaries upon comics evaporated, too.

So after the first Moore, Miller and Martinled flush of superheroes (they weren't deconstructed. Just, briefly, respected), things returned, more or less, to status quo, and a pendulum swing gave us, in the early nineties, superhero comics which were practically contentless: poorly written, and utterly literal. There was even one publisher who trumpeted four issues of good writers as the ultimate marketing gimmick-every bit as good as foil-embossed covers.

There is room to move beyond the literal. Things can mean more than they mean. It's why Catch-22 isn't just about fighter pilots in the Second World War. It's why "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is about more than a bunch of people trapped inside a supercomputer. It's why Moby-Dick is about (believe fifty thousand despairing college professors or not, but it's still true) a lot more than whaling.

And I'm not talking about allegory, here, or metaphor, or even the Message. I'm talking about what the story is about, and then I'm talking about what it's about.

Things can mean more than they literally mean. And that's the dividing line between art and everything that isn't art. Or one of the lines, anyway.

Currently, superhero fictions seem to break into two kinds: there are the workaday, more or less pulp fictions which are turned out by the yard by people who are trying their hardest, or not. And then there are the other kind, and there are precious few of them.

There are two obvious current exceptions-Alan Moore's Supreme, an exercise in rewriting fifty years of Superman into something that means something.

And then-and some of you might have thought that I might have forgotten it, given how far we've got into this introduction without its being mentioned, there is Astro City. Which traces its lineage back in two directions-into the world of classic superhero archetypes, but equally into the world of The Kryptonite Kid, a world in which all this stuff, this dumb wonderful four-color stuff, has real emotional weight and depth, and it means more than it literally means.

And that is the genius and the joy of Astro City.

Me? I'm jaded, where superheroes are concerned. Jaded and tired and fairly burned out, if truth be told. Not utterly burned out, though. I thought I was, until, a couple of years ago, I found myself in a car with Kurt Busiek, and his delightful wife, Ann. (We were driving to see Scott McCloud and his wife, Ivy, and their little girl Sky, and it was a very memorable and eventful evening, ending as it did in the unexpected birth of Scott and Ivy's daughter Winter.) And in the car, on the way, we started talking about Batman.

Pretty soon Kurt and I were co-plotting a complete Batman story; and not just a Batman story, but the coolest, strangest Batman story you can imagine, in which every relationship in the world of Batman was turned inside out and upside down, and, in the finest comic book tradition, everything you thought you knew turned out to be a lie.

We were doing this for fun. I doubt that either of us will ever do anything with the story. We were just enjoying ourselves.

But, for several hours, I found myself caring utterly and deeply about Batman. Which is, I suspect, part of Kurt Busiek's special talent. If I were writing a different kind of introduction, I might call it a superpower.

Astro City is what would have happened if those old comics, with their fine simplicities and their primal, four-color characters, had been about something. Or rather, it assumes they were about something, and tells you the tales that, on the whole, slipped through the cracks.

It's a place inspired by the worlds and worldviews of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, of Gardner Fox and John Broome, of Jerry Siegel and Bob Finger and the rest of them: a city where anything can happen. In the story that follows we have (and I'm trying hard not to give too much away) a crime-fighter bar, serial killing, an alien invasion, a crackdown on costumed heroes, a hero's mysterious secret . . . all of them the happy pulp elements of a thousand comics-by-the-yard.

Except that, here, as in the rest of Astro City, Kurt Busiek manages to take all of these elements and let them mean more than they literally mean.

(Again, I am not talking about allegory here. I'm talking story, and what makes some stories magic while others just sit there, lifeless and dull.) Astro City: Confession is a coming-of-age story, in which a young man learns a lesson. (Robert A. Heinlein claimed in an essay in the 1940s, published in Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's collection of SF writer essays Of Worlds Beyond, that there are only three stories, which we tell over and over again. He said he had thought there were only two, "Boy Meets Girl" and "The Little Tailor," until L. Ron Hubbard pointed out to him that there was also "A Man Learns a Lesson." And, Heinlein maintained, if you add in their opposites-someone fails to learn a lesson, two people don't fall in love, and so on-you may have all the stories there are. But then, we can move beyond the literal.) It's a growing-up story, set in the city in Kurt's mind.

One of the things I like about Astro City is that Kurt Busiek lists all of his collaborators on the front cover. He knows how important each of them is to the final outcome. Each element does what it is meant to, and each of them gives of their best and a little more: Alex Ross's covers ground each issue in a photoreal sort of hyper-reality; Brent Anderson's pencils and Will Blyberg's inks are perfectly crafted, always wisely at the service of the story, never obtrusive, always convincing. The coloring by Alex Sinclair and the Comicraft lettering by John Roshell are both slick, and, in the best sense of the word, inconspicuous.

Astro City, in the hands of Kurt Busiek and his collaborators, is art, and it is good art. It recognizes the strengths of the four-color heroes, and it creates something-a place, perhaps, or a medium, or just a tone of voice-in which good stories are told. There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean, and this is certainly true in Astro City.

I look forward to being able to visit it for a very long time to come.

This was written as the introduction to Kurt Busiek's Astro City: Confession, 1999. The Batman story idea I talk about, that we came up with in the car, wound up being one of my favorite sequences in "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?," a Batman story I would write a decade later.

Batman: Cover to Cover

I've almost never written Batman, but he's what drew me into comics. I was six years old and my father mentioned that, in America, there was a Batman TV series. I asked what this was, and was told it was a series about a man who fought crime while dressed as a bat. My only experience of bats at this point was cricket bats, and I wondered how someone could convincingly dress as one of those. A year later the series began to be shown on English TV, and I was caught, as firmly and as effectively as if someone had put a hook through my cheek.

I bought-with my own pocket money-the paperback reprints of old Batman comics: two black and white panels to a page drawn by Lew Sayre Schwartz and Dick Sprang, Batman fighting the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin and Catwoman (who had to share a book). I made my father buy me Smash!, a weekly British comic that reprinted what I now suspect must have been an American Batman daily newspaper strip as its cover feature. I was once thrown out of our local newsagents-literally picked up by the proprietor and deposited on the sidewalk-for spending too much time examining each and every one of the pile of fifty American comics, in order to decide which Batman product would receive the benison of my shilling. ("No, wait!" I said, as they dragged me out. "I've decided!" But it was already too late.) What got me every time was the covers. DC's editors were masters of the art of creating covers which proposed questions about mysteries that appeared to be insoluble. Why was Batman imprisoned in a giant red metal bat, from which not even Green Lantern could save him? Would Robin die at dawn? Was Superman really faster than the Flash? The stories tended to be disappointments, in their way-the question's sizzle was always tastier than the answer's steak.

You never forget your first time. In my case, the first Batman cover artist was Carmine Infantino, whose graceful lines, filled with a sly wit and ease, were a comfortable stepping-off point for a child besotted by the TV series. Text-heavy covers, all about relationships-Batman being tugged between two people: look at the first appearance of Poison Ivy (will she ruin Batman and Robin's exclusive friendship? Of course not. Why did I even worry about such trifles?), looking here as if she's just escaped from the label of a tin of sweetcorn. Batman thinks she's cute. Robin's not impressed. That was what I needed as a kid from a Batman cover. Bright colors. Reassurance.

While humans tend to be conservative, sticking with what they like, children are utterly conservative: they want things as they were last week, which is the way the world has always been. The first time I saw Neal Adams's art was in The Brave and the Bold (I think it was a story called ". . . But Bork Can Hurt You"). I read it, but was unsure of whether or not I liked it: panels at odd angles, nighttime colors in strange shades of blue, and a Batman who wasn't quite the Batman I knew. He was thinner and odder and wrong.

Still, when I saw Adams's cover for "The Demon of Gothos Mansion" (Batman 227), I knew that this was something special, and something right, and that the world had changed forever. Gothic literature tends to feature heroines, often in their nightdresses, running away from big old houses which always have, for reasons never adequately explained, one solitary light on in a top-floor room. Often the ladies run while holding candelabras. Here we have instead a dodgy-looking evil squire running after our heroine, between what look suspiciously like two wolves. The spectral, Robin-less, Batman is not swinging from anything. Instead he is a gray presence, hovering over the image: this tale is indeed a gothic, it tells us, and Batman is a gothic hero, or at least a gothic creature. I may only have been ten, but I could tell gothic at a glance. (Although I wouldn't have known that the cover that Adams was intentionally echoing, Detective Comics 31, was also part of the gothic tradition-an evil villain called the Monk reminds the reader of Matthew "Monk" Lewis's novel The Monk, and, as I learned a couple of years later, when the story was reprinted in a 100 Page Super Spectacular, the Monk from this story was a vampiric master of werewolves. Or possibly vice versa, it's been a long time since I read it. I do remember that Batman opened the Monk's coffin at the end, and, using his gun-the only time I remember Batman using a gun-shot the becoffined Monk with a silver bullet, thus permanently confusing me as to the Monk's werewolfish or vampiric nature.) By the time I was twelve Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing was my favorite comic; it was, I think, the comic that made me want to write comics when I grew up. Swamp Thing 7, "Night of the Bat," was the comic that sealed Batman in my mind as a gothic figure. The cover only implies what's inside, as Batman, his cloak enormous behind him, swings towards the muck-encrusted swamp monster, inexplicably hanging from the side of a skyscraper. The feeling that this was something happening at night, artificially lit, in the city, was there, almost tangible. But the things that made me remember this cover fondly are really inside-Bernie drew Batman with no pretense of realism. It was as far as one could get from Adam West: behind Batman an unwearably long cloak blew out: was it fifteen feet long? Twenty feet long? Fifty? And the ears, stabbing upward like devil horns, were even longer than Bob Kane's Batman ears on the cover of Detective 31. Wrightson's Batman was not a man-obviously: a man would have tripped over that cloak when he walked, the ears would have poked holes in ceilings-he was part of the night. An abstract concept. Gothic.

One of the greatest joys to the concept of Batman is that he isn't one thing, that he contains all the Batmans that have walked the streets of Gotham City in the last sixty-five years, Infantino's elegant Batman, Sprang and Schwartz's big gray Boy Scout, Frank Miller's Dark Knight. None of them more real, more valid, more true than any other. But in my heart, he is a spectral presence, a creature straight out of the gothic romances, and that, for me, is how he will always remain.

This was written for Batman: Cover to Cover, 2005. It's a book of covers of comics with Batman on them, with occasional essays. A web search will show you the covers I talk about here.

Bone: An Introduction, and Some Subsequent Thoughts

I. An Introduction I WAS READING Bone from almost the beginning, handed the first two comics by Mark Askwith after a signing in Toronto. "You'll like these," he said. I bought Bone until I met Jeff Smith and he started sending them to me, and I stopped buying it, but, month in and month out, I read it as the years went by, until at last it was done.

I even wrote an introduction to the second volume of Bone, The Great Cow Race. (Which-because the edition with the introduction in it has been out of print for over a decade now, you probably haven't read, and if you have you've forgotten it-I shall now proceed to reprint here.) Readers tend to have two reactions to Herman Melville's remarkable novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.

Either they respond to the seafaring adventure yarn, with its huge, gaping, obsessive travelogue, but they hurry through Melville's chapters with titles like "The Sperm Whale's Head-Contrasted View"; or they find themselves becoming obsessed with Melville's retelling of the minutiae of whaling and the physiognomy of whales, and with all the strange, experimental layers of creaking, wind-lashed, bloody-handed life aboard the Pequod, but becoming almost impatient with the tale of Ahab and Moby Dick (and why Moby-Dick is hyphenated when it's the title of the book and not when it's the name of the whale is a mystery that passeth all understanding).

The first time I read Moby-Dick, as a boy of ten, I read it for the exciting bits (and finished it convinced that it would make a terrific comic; then again, I recall, at about the same age, finishing King Solomon's Mines utterly certain that it would make a brilliant musical. I must, in retrospect, have been an odd child). More recently, as an elderly gentleman of three-and-thirty, sent back to Moby-Dick by the urgings of Jeff Smith and a long plane flight or two, I discovered that I was enjoying the thing as a whole: a great, misshapen humpbacked whole, with the broken spars of previous drafts sticking out of its side.

Which is analogous in some ways to the experience of reading Bone. When I first read the stories here assembled, the parts I prized were the glittering set-pieces: the stupid, stupid rat-creatures, the honey hunt, the Great Cow Race, Fone Bone's heartbreakingly heartfelt love poems. That stuff's the accessible level of Bone, the stuff one latches on to immediately. It took a second reading-significantly, it took reading the whole six issues in one go-for me to appreciate the subtler backstory, the delicate, dreamlike hints about Thorn's childhood, the sensation of huge forces massing on innocents.

The first long slurp of Bone has a certain aroma of Walt Kelly, and a bracing tang of Chuck Jones. It's the second sip that lingers, though. That's when you realize that there's more than that, a little Tolkien, a touch of Mallory, even a smidgen of the Brothers Grimm . . .

I was introduced to Bone by Mark Askwith, who (and I place my life upon the line here for revealing one of the Big Secrets to the reading public) is one of the Secret People Behind Everything. He gave me the first few Bones when I was in Toronto being interviewed on the television show Mark produced, the late, lamented Prisoners of Gravity. I read them in an airport waiting room, and I laughed and winced and admired as I read. Since then my admiration for its creator and publisher has only increased.

Jeff Smith can pace a joke better than almost anyone in comics (the only person who gives him a run for his money here is the brilliant Dave Sim); his dialogue is delightful, and I am in love with all his people, not to mention his animals, his villains, and even his bugs. This collection, the second, contains a number of individual moments you will enjoy (I say this without knowing you, perhaps presuming on our relationship a little, foreword-writer to potential reader, but I daresay I'm right nonetheless), and, I repeat, it bears rereading.

The locale of Bone is that of the imagination. "It is not down on any map," as Melville said of the island of Kokovoko. "True places never are."

The world of Bone is a true place. And the map is only another part of the puzzle . . .

And with that, I pass you over to Jeff Smith. You are in capable hands. There is no one else I would trust to orchestrate a cow race; except, perhaps, Herman Melville, and his wouldn't have been anywhere near as funny.

Neil Gaiman, 1995 II. Some Subsequent Thoughts.

THERE. THAT WAS what I thought when I wrote that, fourteen years ago. I'm happy to say that there's nothing in there that, with the benefit of hindsight, I'd want to retract or amend.

Still, as the comic went on I began to miss the earlier issues-in Woody Allen's phrase, "the early funny stuff." I missed the shtick, the perfectly paced jokes. The cow race. The slapstick. I wasn't convinced that the adventure comic that Bone seemed to have transmuted into was enough of a replacement.

Rereading Bone now that it's all over and collected and in one place, I am struck chiefly by how wrong I was while I was reading it, and how very right Jeff Smith was, and how it was always, unquestionably, one thing, albeit one thing with tension-and a tension that, I suspect, helped make Bone what it was.

The economic model of making long comics stories is one that is based upon the theory that the creator will need to eat while writing and drawing a page (perhaps) a day. So the food and roof are provided either by a healthy advance from a publisher (for longer works), or, more often, in a regular paycheck, by publishing a story in installments. So the normal model-the one on which Bone was built-is to publish a comic of around twenty pages every month or so. These comics are then collected together and published in book-length collections every year or thereabouts, and thus food happens, and a roof, and, in the case of successful comics, even clothing and shoes.

Thus the challenge for a writer or a writer-artist is to create something that works in installments, and also works as part of a whole. In a monthly-more-or-less story you need to recap information about a character last seen four years back, or about the sweep of a grand plot, or just to remind your readers what was going on in the story they read a month ago. (A lot can happen in your reader's life in a month.) You need to give your audience moments and sequences complete in themselves, resolutions that pay off, and most of all, you need to make it a sensible thing for the readers to have spent their dollars and cents on an installment of serial literature.

Dickens had similar problems.

But what you create as a monthly installment will eventually be read as a whole. A recap at the beginning of one episode might throw the timing of what you are doing off completely. The rhythms of the entire story-in the case of Bone, a story covering more than a thousand pages-and the rhythms of the collected part of the story, and the rhythms of a monthly comic have different demands and different needs.

This is most obvious in the collected Bone in the first couple of chapters, when the Walt Kelly influence is at its height, and when Jeff Smith most needed to make the work accessible and bring people on board and occasionally the pacing feels more like a newspaper Sunday page than an ongoing comic. The story is, or seems to be, in second place.

As a periodical reader, reading the book an installment at a time, when the story darkened I missed the tone of the first few years. I missed the Jeff Smith who could "pace a joke better than almost anyone," because the jokes were getting fewer and further between. I suspected that the nature of the comic had changed and I worried that the lurch from Walt Kelly and Carl Barks to something closer to Tolkien had unbalanced the whole thing.

As I say, I was wrong, and deep down I knew it, but it was not until I reread the whole of Bone that I understood how wrong I had been.

The Bones themselves are an anomaly. They stumble into the story much as Unca Scrooge, Donald and his three nephews might have crossed a mountain range and found themselves in a fantastic world. They are anachronistic, apparently irrelevant to the world they have found themselves in-twentieth-century creatures in a medieval world of the fantastic. And it's here, I suspect, that the narrative tension is created. In formal Carl Barksstyle storytelling, creatures like the Bone family inhabit a world like ours and wander from our world into another, more primitive world-a desert crossing, a mist-shrouded valley, an almost impassible mountain range, these are the things that keep us from Oz or the Lost World. They adventure, change things for the better, then cross the barrier to return to their own world.

Here, though, the world they enter is more complex than they-or we-initially perceive it to be. Characters who seem to be introduced for simple comedic effect have huge backstories, until the whole of the Bone tale begins to feel like the tip of an iceberg, or the end of something huge. The joy of Bone is that Jeff Smith knows more than we do. The events of Bone are driven by what has gone before. Lucius the amusing elderly innkeeper has a history with Granma Ben. Granma Ben is also Queen Rose. The Hooded One is her sister Briar. The love triangle between Briar and Lucius and Rose is one of the engines of plot. Still, even their plot seems like a postscript to the tale of the Locust spirit and the Dragons, as if the plot is a sequence of Russian nesting dolls, each of which is paradoxically larger than the one in which it was hidden. Each of the human characters changes hugely, both in our perception of them and in the way that they come to terms with their past and complete their already-begun stories.

The Bone cousins barely change, no more than Barks's ducks are changed by their experiences. Phoney is a creature of greed whose plans will backfire, Smiley always simple, good-hearted, easily led. Fone Bone undergoes tribulations including a broken heart, and takes a fragment of the Locust into his soul, but even he leaves the story more or less as he entered. Deepened, but still. Lessons learned are easily forgotten. Were Jeff Smith to take the Bone boys and send them into another adventure, it would be perfectly legitimate under the genre rules to which they are subscribed, although it might have the effect of lessening the impact of the first story, of Bone and the Harvestars. The Bones are cartoon characters (something that we are reminded of in the color editions of Bone-they work best with flat color, as if they are extra-real. The shading that works so well on everything else seems to lessen them by forcing us to consider characters who are looping brushstrokes are actually realistically drawn, in the same way that, say, Lucius is).

The Bones have served as a bridge between the ongoing comic and the huge overstory that fills the complete Bone. They acted as comedic relief, as subplots, as "bits," providing instant accessibility for readers who may not realize the significance of something set up, literally, years before. But most of all, they gave us narrative tension. They set the plot in motion (after all, without Phoney's balloon none of it might ever have happened) and they made us care about it and learn about it, incrementally, in a way that we could never have done if Jeff Smith had simply told us the story of Thorn. They solve the problem of the big story, and the problem of the issue-by-issue story.

I had always known, panel to panel, issue to issue, how good Jeff Smith was. There is a special delight, however, in realizing that over the long haul he proves himself a master.

This is an essay written for Bone and Beyond, the catalogue for the Wexner Center's 2008 exhibition on Jeff Smith and Bone, and includes the original introduction for The Great Cow Race, 1996.

Jack Kirby: King of Comics

I never met Jack Kirby, which makes me less qualified than a thousand other people to write this introduction.

I saw Jack, the man, once, across a hotel lobby, talking to my publisher. I wanted to go over and to be introduced, but I was late for a plane and, I thought, there would always be a next time.