Grant Morrison, 'Supergods. Our World in the Age of the Superhero'

Excellent book. A history of superhero comics by a creative genius who turns out to be very articulate about his work. He doesn't dwell on his own biography, relating his experiences as a comic book reader and writer only insofar as they illuminate the industry.

He grew up in Scotland under the shadow of the nuclear bomb threat, and explains the appeal of Superman as an imaginative response to that. 

We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions ... Traumatized by war footage and disaster clops ... preyed upon by dark and monumental Gods of Fear, we are being sucked inexorably into Comic Book Reality, with only moments to save the world, as usual. .. Could it be that a culture starved of optimistic images of its own future has turned to the primary source in search of utopian role models? (pp. xvi-xvii)

Superman was a hero of the people, but unlike Charlie Chaplin, for instance, he was one who embodied "fantasies of power and agency" (p.7). He was a God. Batman, who came along next, occupied "the territory of the dark unconscious" (p.22). So the comic book pantheon began with the separation of light from darkness.

Captain Marvel represented the "eternal human hope for transcendence":

Eventually, everybody searches for his or her own magic word: the diet, the relationship, the wisdom that might liberate us from the conventional into the extraordinary. (p.33)

Mac Raboy's artwork made him "a lithe Ariel, effortlessly capturing the blue-sky freedom and potential of youth" (p.34).

Captain America was created by a WWII veteran, Jack Kirby.

His memories of war informed his work for the rest of his life, but nonetheless, Kirby portrayed violence as a joyous expression of natural masculine exuberance. (p.3)

As superheroes proliferated and new gimmicks were found for them, there was a "radical enchantment of the mundane" (p.48). They also moved beyond their American origins in a "glorification of strength, health, and simple morality ... born of a corn-fed, plain-talking, fair-minded midwestern sensibility" (p.49). Local legends, for example in Britain the Arthurian legends, "could always be relied upon to produce superheroes from whole cloth" (p.51).

The Golden Age ended with the end of WWII, and comics turned to other genres, though Superman remained iconic. There was an obsession with the dark and the deranged, and comic books were demonised as a corrupting influence.

Superman comics in the Silver Age of the 50s were preoccupied with abnormal psychology. In the 1960s, the US State Dept asked the industry to cultivate the readers' interest in science and technology, and this was embodied in the Flash. Then came Stan Lee's Marvel stable of Promethean superheroes, for whom superpowers brought great responsibility and could be a curse.

The economically depressed 1970s coincided with family break-up for the young Morrison:

I'd watched  men leave footprints on the moon ... but now everything was running in reverse. With no excuse or apology, I was being offered instead of Starfleet a bleak tomorrow of fuel shortages, urban decay, and economic and social unrest. If anything drove the anger of young punks like me with our disaffected "no future" rhetoric, it was partly this sense of absolute betrayal. (p.161)

This is as far as I've got. Morrison is only four years younger than me, so the comics he talks about in the early part of the book are the ones I read as a child/teenager. I'm not familiar with the later material (apart from a recent taste for Gaiman), so I'm not drawn to finish reading the book just now.