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What Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel teaches us about superhero mythology.

Neil Gaiman’s 1602, published in 2003 - 04, continues the tradition of revisioning the superhero universe that began with Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns (1985), Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986), and Gaiman’s own Sandman in 1989. Those three graphic novels had simultaneously announced the maturation of the graphic novel as a medium together with the onset of the decline of superhero mythology. In 1602, Gaiman conducts a thought experiment in which he displaces almost the entire cast of Marvel comics superheroes back to the turn of the seventeenth century in order to see what might result from such a temporal disjunction.
Gaiman’s choice of date is an interesting one because it happens to coincide with another cycle of superhero mythology that was then coming to its end and which was captured by Cervantes in his great novel Don Quixote (1605). With the appearance of that novel, the mythological hero cycle of the Arthurian romances that had been inaugurated with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain in the early twelfth century was brought to its conclusion, for in Cervantes, the age of knights is already a thing of the past and reality will no longer yield to the soft contours of the dreaming imagination of the old romances. Quixote, his head full of visions from these romances, sets forth in quest of an adventure, looking for giants and dragons, but ends up finding only windmills and a staunchly indifferent universe, a universe now ruled by the laws of falling bodies and planetary motion, and in which masses are moved about by impersonal forces rather than angels; a universe that is beginning to become indifferent to the deeds of a tiny horseback - riding microbe on a dust grain of a planet that is no longer at the center of the cosmos.
But to continue with the results of Gaiman’s thought experiment: what do we discover about superheroes once they are removed from the fully urban, late capitalist cosmos of postmodern New York and placed into the middle of seventeenth century Baroque society?
For one thing, we discover that when superheroes are taken out of the contextual situation for which they were designed—namely to defend the modern megalopolis against invasion by ancient mythical entities—they take on an entirely different function. For in Gaiman’s narrative, these superheroes are no longer defending a single megalopolis, not even London, for in this narrative they have become emissaries of the crown of Queen Elizabeth and have therefore been transformed as it were from playing the role of immune system of Manhattan to becoming antigens in the seventeenth century war of Baroque nation states. London, Spain and the fictional state of Latveria are all at war with one another in 1602, and superheroes are sent out upon missions in order to attack the other nation states. Matthew Murdoch, a.k.a. Daredevil, for instance, is sent out by Elizabeth to retrieve the treasure of the Knights Templars (which turns out to be Thor’s hammer in disguise) while Otto von Doom (Doctor Doom) holds the Fantastic Four captive in his dungeon. Sir Nicholas Fury is the Queen’s chief of intelligence operations and he must partner up with Sir Stephen Strange in order to find out the nature of this mysterious treasure. When Doom has the Queen assassinated, the future King James wishes to make it look as though the mutants (X-Men) are guilty of it and so arranges to have them captured.
On one level, 1602 is a disguised espionage novel in which the superheroes, like James Bond, are in the role of antigens working for rival governments, each attempting to infect the other’s intelligence machineries with falsehoods and disinformation that will have the effect of crippling the other nation state’s military and technological powers.
But another result of Gaiman’s contextual displacement of superheroes from one world to another, is that they mostly lose their dual identities, which is interesting because the other great literary figure of this age was Descartes, the man who first fully articulated the newly emergent properties of the Self as a thinking entity alone in a universe of doubtful perceptions. Descartes isolated the modern ego as a single entity closed off into perspectival space and put it into a grid capable of isolating its exact position in space and time. The modern superhero, on the other hand, is mostly tantamount to a dismantling of this linear Cartesian Self, for the superhero is a polytropic personality with multiple identities. With Gaiman’s displacement into the seventeenth century we note that these dual or multiple identities have a tendency to disappear: Matthew Murdoch is always himself, wearing merely a scarlet blindfold and never shifts back and forth between his diurnal and nocturnal personalities; Peter Parker remains Peter Parker and never transforms into Spider Man; Sue Storm is always invisible; and even the Hulk does not emerge out of Banner until the very last page of the story. True, there is a man who metamorphoses into Thor, but this is the center around which the entire plot revolves and the transformation is very temporary. Captain America, too, remains hidden to the end beneath the persona of a man who looks like an Indian named Rohjaz.
So Gaiman seems to have made, at the very least, two points about the superhero: in the seventeenth century, he would not be a dual or multiple personality but a single, Cartesian mono-egoic one; and as there were as yet no megalopolises, he would not be part of the psychological immune system of a city, but rather an antigen working on behalf of one or another of the various governments of the battling nation states. Such is the essence of the spy genre. But superheroes were never meant to be spies working on behalf of governmental powers; indeed, we notice that whenever they appear in such a context—as in the case of the Comedian or Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen or Frank Miller’s Superman in The Dark Knight Returns—it is always associated with a degradation of the superhero in some manner. The core of superhero mythology is absolutely subversive of governmental powers, especially democratic ones, for the superhero represents a short-circuiting of all powers of due process. He is not part of any government, but rather an extension of the Overmind of the modern megalopolis itself.
So the results of Gaiman’s experiment actually tell us more about the function of the superhero in our modern narratives than they do about the seventeenth century.
Aesthetically speaking, however, it should be remarked that Gaiman’s graphic novel represents the decline of the superhero mythos into Mannerism, for his narrative is as complicated and overburdened as a sixteenth century Mannerist painting out of Italy. The cluttered canvases of Tintoretto or El Greco find their analogue here in the overburdened plot of Gaiman’s novel, in which there are far too many superheroes for the plot to function coherently. Gaiman’s narrative suffers from the same artificiality and self-conscious contrivances of Mannerist artwork, which is generally stilted and precious and overly elaborate. And just as Mannerism signaled the beginnings of the end of the dominance of Italian Renaissance artwork (which was just about to shift north to the Protestant world) so Gaiman’s overwrought narrative signals the decline of the superhero universe into contrivance and artifice, full of self-conscious quotations and eye-winking that at times is nauseating. Indeed, the plot of the novel is so complicated as to defy any easy synopsis, and this reader must confess that he found the book largely a failure.
But not every experiment has to work in order for it to be valuable, and 1602 teaches us many useful notions about modern superhero mythology.