Bowie in the comics…

Several days ago I posted about a graphic novel adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth, featuring a cartoon version of Bowie. Many months earlier I mentioned that the image of Bowie was the inspiration for DC Comics version of Lucifer, who has now appeared in two television adaptations. Bowie has, in fact inspired comic adaptations for years, often as a comic book version of Ziggy Stardust. What promoted this post was an article I came across referencing a recent X Men spinoff in which Spider Man and Dr. Doom have a brief conversation in which Spider Man suggests that Bowie was a mutant. You know, like Wolverine…

Marvel comics were a big part of my life around the time I first starting becoming a Bowie fan, which is to say in high school. I certainly enjoyed what people like about comics at the time, but also I took certain life lessons from them. Most Marvel comics were morality plays, and certain lessons were repeatedly imparted to their presumably intended teenage audiences. The most famous, of course, is associated with Spider Man— “with great power comes great responsibility.” The X Men and mutants in general are stand-ins for any outsiders or discriminated-against group. Director Bryan Singer pretty heavily implied that mutants were specifically avatars of LBGTQ people (“Have you ever tried not being a mutant?” Asked Iceman’s mother). So there’s an obvious Bowie parallel.

Bowie himself used imagery and concepts that also found their way into the comics— space aliens, occultism, megalomaniacal villains, scary monsters— he even had a song called, “The Supermen” (it wasn’t about Super Man, though). His bizarre costumes and makeup, which he kept cycling through into middle age, lent themselves to comic adaptation.

A recurring moral within Marvel comics, at least when I read them, had to do with the responsible use of power. I’m thinking about a kind of corollary to the Spider Man rule, which was less directly expressed but nonetheless was demonstrated in many storylines. This was the idea of the responsible use of power. A dividing line between good guys and bad guys was often found when good guys, powerful though they may have been, rejected the opportunity to become more powerful still, while bad guys hungered for absolute power. Built into this dynamic was the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Time and again, the bad guys would obtain power beyond their control, and that would be their downfall. They took it all too far, but boy could they play guitar. So, that theme was also found in some of Bowie’s songs.

Another appeal to linking Bowie with the comics is simple nostalgia. I don’t really have time to read the comics much these days, but part of the appeal of the Marvel movies of the past two decades is that many of them borrowed from story lines I recognized from the late 1980s.

I didn’t then and don’t now look to Bowie’s music for life lessons or philosophy. I’m not trying to observe anything profound here, either. Bowie was a kind of living comic book character, so it’s not surprising that his image, or his memory, makes the occasional appearance in actual comic books.

Besides, as Spider Man knows, David Bowie really was a mutant…