Grant Morrison. Photograph: Allan Amato
Photograph: Vinmag Archive/DC Comics This was the first ever superhero comic. Not only did it start everything off, the first image of the story is incredible. It's Superman – who was an unknown character at that time – leaping through the air with a tied-up blonde under his arm, with absolutely no explanation of how he got there, or why. What I like about it is that, as a piece of storytelling, it's very modernistic, and having always thought about it in terms of nostalgia, when I was researching it for the book it was great to go back and see it for what it was. From the first panel on, it sets up everything for the next 70 years.
Photograph: DC Comics This was from the time of pop art comics in the 1960s when DC Comics had go-go chicks, and almost Bridget Riley-style op-art across the top. It's a great cover that shows the head and shoulders of The Flash, holding up his hand to the reader. He's yelling out, "STOP! DON'T PASS UP THIS ISSUE – MY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!" A supervillain sets up a machine whereby everyone forgets that The Flash ever existed, and his body begins to attenuate into this red mist; there's a very odd, paranoid feel to the story. In the end he's only saved because there's this little girl sitting by the side of the docks who still believes in him.
Photograph: DC Comics This was from the height of the "relevance" period – the tail-end of Vietnam and Nixon, when comics began to confront headline issues in a way they'd never done before. The Green Lantern/Green Arrow comic was at the vanguard of this: they'd already looked at Malthusian over-population, drugs and Manson-style cults. This was the last issue of the series, about a Christlike environmental activist called Isaac who is fighting against an aerospace company. The way he does this, at the end of the story, is to crucify himself on the tail of a 747. God knows how a man manages to crucify himself, but the image is incredible: it's Christ in the middle, with Green Arrow and Green Lantern also chained up to two 747s, so it recapitulates the Golgotha but with planes. Green Lantern has been portrayed all the way through as a representative of the regressive forces of the law, and Green Arrow has been played as the hippy idealist; suddenly Green Lantern snaps and he destroys the aircraft with a green beam. The head of the aerospace company is shouting at him: "WHAT'S THE IDEA? THAT WAS A NINE MILLION DOLLAR AIRCRAFT!" Green Lantern just says, "SEND ME A BILL." The whole arc of that story ended with the reactionary cop becoming a revolutionary – a very powerful moment, especially when you're 11.
Photograph: DC Comics Jack Kirby was the William Blake of comics and New Gods was his masterpiece, an epic cosmic war between evil gods and good gods. The story opens with the cosmic seeker Metron, an amoral science god, who travels about the universe in a Mobius chair, which is like a comfy version of the Tardis. He's able to go anywhere he likes just by sitting, so he's very much the god of couch potatoes, and in this one Metron is travelling to the very edge of the universe. There are three pages of giants who are miles across – very reminiscent of Blake – with suffering Gnostic presences chained to gigantic rocks. Kirby's descriptions are really great: he talks about one man whose heart takes a billion years to beat once. It was the first time that comics came with a cosmic dimension. They actually started to feel biblical in scale; that was a breakthrough for the type of stories they were able to tell.
Photograph: Marvel Comics Jim Starlin was very influenced by Kirby. Starlin was a navy photographer who'd come back from Vietnam; he was one of the first of a new generation of hippy, counter-cultural creators. He did this amazing story which I first read when I was 14 about Captain Marvel (who was previously a space warrior) finding himself up against a cosmic tribunal of floating potato-headed creatures who judge him. Captain Marvel is on this world and must fight his own inner demons, which are portrayed as these mad-eyed, cackling statues. There's an incredible fight sequence over 15 pages, which is basically Captain Marvel kicking the shit out of his own inner demons. At the end he gets the gift of cosmic awareness, so suddenly his face clouds over in a kind of starry sky and that's him in full acid consciousness. At 14, it was a real thrill to see comics that could deal with interior stuff.
Photograph: Marvel Comics Writer Don McGregor was very popular in the mid-70s. He had an obsession with morality and relationships that comics had never had before. There's a fight scene in this issue with the Black Panther, who's obviously a black superhero, up against a Marvel version of the Ku Klux Klan – the Brothers Of The Dragon. There's a scene in a supermarket with the Panther doing his thing – kicking arse and beating up the bad guys – and then he turns round and an old white woman picks up a tin of cat food and splits his head open with it. It's such an amazing moment in a superhero comic where we're so used to men throwing each other through walls or tossing planets around. This horrible old white woman suddenly realises there's a black man in her supermarket … It's an intensely powerful moment that brought home what was going on in America.
Photograph: Marvel Comics This was when the X-Men was really Marvel's biggest book. They'd revitalised the concept and it became very much the favoured book of punks and rebels. This was the climax of a story with the Phoenix character, Jean Grey, whose powers increase to the point where she's almost a god and she starts to take matters into her own hands. Everyone else has to take her out. She's killed an entire planet, she's been judged for it, and we know she's going to die: no one that big had ever died in comics before that. The shock of seeing a beloved character that had been around since the 1960s actually killed was amazing. There's a moment where she and her boyfriend Scott Summers – Cyclops – run out, both knowing they're going to die. They hold hands in a perfect Bonnie and Clyde moment, rushing to face death … A heart-wrenching depth of emotion was compressed into those panels.
Photograph: Marvel Comics This was Alan Moore's signature work, for me. Seeing someone approach superheroes with hard science fiction, it was like a BBC Play For Today. Miracle Man started as a Thatcher-era intrusion of the fantastic – the idea was that some time in the 1950s a spaceship had been discovered in Dorset, and from the technology that was salvaged they'd been able to create superhuman beings. By the end of the story the characters find out that they've been lied to all their lives, and they emerge into the real world. There are beautiful sequences where the superheroes are escorting Thatcher out of No 10 and she's sobbing helplessly: suddenly there's this new power that bombs can't stop, weapons can't stop. The whole last issue is this fabulous liberal fantasy of what the good guys would do if they got in charge and got rid of all the bastards! I like it much more than Watchmen; it was a real triumph for lefties everywhere!
Photograph: DC Comics It's a very short book, only 48 pages long, but one of the best superhero comics ever, and one of the first examples of multicultural superhero comics. It's about a Hindu superhero, a blue-skinned karmanaut who comes from the future to enlighten a really stupid boy from south London. It's got elements of Martin Amis and Joyce – very indicative of the type of grown-up psychedelic comics we started to produce in the 1980s in Britain after the comic-book boom created by Watchmen, Maus and Dark Knight. You can see the Stone Roses and the Smiths reflected in the book. [Peter] Milligan's probably the best literary writer to have ever done superhero stuff, and [Brendan] McCarthy is a hidden gem, our Salvador Dali. It's 48 pages with a completely new use of computer colouring, collage, beautiful drawing, complete breakdowns of traditional comic structures, and pages that were like poems or songs.
Photograph: DC Comics This "widescreen comic" paved the way for the superheroes of the last ten years, which have been very politically aware. The leader was a girl called Jenny Sparks, who was drawn to look like Kate Moss. In the final issue they kill God: it follows on from the Moore stuff – what would happen if we had superheroes and they were lefties and they were on our side? We believed in them as working-class readers; they existed to fight the bastards who were threatening us. In the story, God returns to earth after six billion years, is horrified to find that it's overrun by a virus called humanity and decides to clean it off. They work their way through God's capillaries and veins, get to his brain and then fry it, leaving God orbiting the sun as a divine vegetable. It raised anti-authoritarian cheers around the world!
Supergods: Our World In The Age Of The Superhero by Grant Morrison is out now, Jonathan Cape
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