Sometimes, in our hours of desperation, hope comes from the most unexpected places.
Three years ago, when I was in the throes of deep depression, that place was Jim Starlin’s run on Warlock, a comic published in the mid-70s, years before I was even born and one I’d been putting off reading for over a decade.
I don’t know why it took me so long to read what’s widely considered to be one of the seminal runs on any character, on any book, Marvel or otherwise. It becomes even more baffling that it took me so long considering Starlin’s Warlock directly informed my tastes in comics when I was first becoming an actual fan.
Back in the early 90s it was Starlin’s The Infinity Gauntlet miniseries that all but sealed my passion (i.e.- obsession) for all things super hero.
The scale and scope of The Infinity Gauntlet was almost too much for middle school me to handle, and to this day it’s still the super hero epic I use to measure all others by.
Yet as much as I loved the series and everything tied to it, it would be years before I would actually learn that it was a direct sequel to a more personal, experimental work Starlin had done in the 1970s.
Once it did finally pop up on my radar when I was in college, I added it to the growing list of required comic book reading.
It would languish on that list for the next 14 years.
By mid 2011 I was coming to grips with the hard fact that I was depressed.
It had been slow boiling for months and I knew something was wrong. I was waking up in the night in absolute panic. I was eating less and less. I was losing weight at an unhealthy rate. Finally, after one bad day at work, it was like the fuse had finally reached the detonator and everything exploded. I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. I lost more weight and I lost control of my emotions.
Still, despite knowing that I wasn’t well, I didn’t want to admit that I might be dealing with depression because depression meant mental illness and mental illness, as far as I’d been taught, meant weakness. In a show of personal strength, I decided to make a go at “just getting over it” making it all that much worse.
For the first time in my life I remember knowing what real suffering felt like.
This is when I finally decided to read Warlock.
Three months in, I was just looking for things to distract me, even if it was just for a few minutes. I wasn’t having any luck with TV shows, movies or books, so I figured I’d give comics a turn at bat.
So one morning, just after 3 AM, I cracked open volume 2 of the Warlock Marvel Masterworks collection, Jim Starlin’s run, and started reading.
By the time Jim Starlin took over the character, Adam Warlock had been a good many things: science experiment gone awry, Thor adversary, and even an alternate Earth’s Christ figure.
Starlin, however, decided to take the character in a totally new direction, one that was more cosmic.
Starlin would send Adam Warlock out into space to make his way in the cosmos and once there, he would not only come face to face with a slew of trippy new villains, but his own very precarious mental health.
Historically, mental illness in comics is handled in largely the same way it’s handled in real life: poorly. In real life we treat it, at best, as an annoying inconvenience and, at worst, as a sign of weakness both in ourselves and in others.
In the superhero genre, it’s the mark of villainy. At some point or another, I’d wager that all the major villains, from Doctor Doom and Lex Luthor to Magneto and Green Goblin, have been described as being insane.
In comics, “insane” and “evil” almost always go hand-in-hand, one inevitably leading to the other. And when a hero needs to transition to villain, a la Hal Jordan and Tony Stark in the mid-90s, that transition is made via, you guessed it, mental illness.
At the open of Starlin’s first issue, a young woman is desperately seeking out Adam Warlock.
She’s fleeing from The Universal Church of Truth, an oppressive galactic theocracy headed by a cosmic despot called The Magus.
She believes that of all people in the universe, Adam Warlock is a galaxy’s best hope for salvation.
She finds her hero but is murdered for her efforts by agents of The Church. Adam is enraged and sets out to avenge the young woman, to bring The Magus to justice.
He’s a hero after all, and that’s what heroes do. Simple enough.
Except, Adam soon learns that he and The Magus are the same person. At some point in the near future, Adam Warlock will succumb to mental illness. In the process he’ll travel back in time, rename himself The Magus and become the biggest bad in the cosmos. What’s worse is that this isn’t a matter of if. This is destiny and there’s nothing Adam can do to stop it. Meeting The Magus is proof positive that Adam Warlock will lose the internal fight with himself.
The implication The Magus carried for Adam Warlock struck a nerve with me. He was the self-fulfilling prophecy of depression. He was the feelings of hopelessness, despair and toxicity given physical form. The Magus was a living, breathing, convincing argument in favor of lying down and giving up.
As far as I was concerned, Adam Warlock’s struggle was my struggle and for the first time in months it felt like I was able to breathe again.
What I didn’t know at the time of that 3 AM reading was that it had been Jim Starlin’s struggle as well. See, back in the 70s, Starlin was dealing with mental health issues of his own and used his art to work through the things he was dealing with inside his own head.
“[I decided to] turn him into a suicidal paranoid/schizophrenic, which was the way I was feeling at the time,” Starlin said in a 2006 interview with Newsarama. “I’ve always used my work to examine what is currently going on in my own life. It’s cheaper than going to a shrink.”
Jim Starlin’s Warlock run didn’t pull me out of my depression.
No, support from family and friends along with professional help did that. What Starlin’s Warlock story did do, however, was give me hope.
For the first time it made me feel that the thing inside me might actually be surmountable. It made me feel like I wasn’t as alone as I had once thought. And talk about timing. I put off reading that story for over a decade and had no idea it dealt with mental illness in such a nuanced way.
That I read it at a time when I could really use a super hero story dealing with mental illness in a nuanced way made me feel like I was somehow cosmically aligned in much the same way as a certain golden skinned artificial man.
But that’s just the hallmark of good fiction though, isn’t it?
Whether it’s Joyce, Twain, and Vonnegut or Lee, Kirby and Starlin, good fiction isn’t just about story; it’s about shared human experiences. Good fiction gets into our heads and comforts us in the knowledge that the things we’re dealing with, sometimes fighting with, are not exclusive to us.
Or, in the case of something like mental illness, it breaks down taboos, speaks on them and to them and gives them form. In the end, with a little help of course, Adam Warlock beat The Magus.
So, too, did I.
