Is Ben Stokes Alan Moore?

Or... the comic bookification of cricket

I’ve been thinking recently about cricket and superhero comic books. For those of you who’ve read my newsletter for more than about a minute, this will come as no surprise.

But more recently, I’ve been pondering how these two things - both of which I’ve loved for literally as far back as I can remember - are related. Where the Venn diagram between them intersects. And I’ve come to some perhaps fun conclusions. So if you, too, are in that Venn diagram intersection, read on. (And if you’re only in one of the non-intersecting circles, hold on for as long as you can? And if you’re in neither circle, then, honestly, bless you for sticking around this far.)

The immediately obvious way to think about what the sport of cricket and the medium of superhero comics have in common is to map various players to various superheroes.

After all, the cricketers often perform feats of heroics in their matches. They come to the rescue of their team. They attack. They defend. They’re on the ropes. They fight back. Sometimes they dress in colourful outfits. Sounds pretty superheroish to me.

Is Jasprit Bumrah Doctor Strange? Wielding magical spells and accomplishing feats of wizardry that defy our understanding of the natural world?

Is Glenn Maxwell Deadpool? Unpredictable, off-the-wall, unwilling to bow to the orthodoxy that everybody else treats as sacrosanct?

Is Jimmy Anderson Galactus? Because he’s, I dunno, hungry for wickets or something? Sure, why not.

And so on and so forth. It’s fun and easy to make such a mapping. Why, I did so myself during the 2023 Ashes, when Pat Cummins’ belated rescue of his side in the first Test reminded me of a certain greatest ever scene in the history of cinema.

But there’s a much better mapping than that.

Because I think one of the things that I find inherently fascinating about superhero comics is their serialised nature, particularly when it comes to the shared universes of Marvel and, in particular, DC. These shared universes both existed before I was born, and they will, I imagine, go on long after I die. Each month, these universes expand, as new stories are added and new mythology created. The story of Marvel and DC - the one massive, ongoing tale of each that contains every single comic published by them - is enormous. Beyond the scope of any single person to fully read. The best you can do is leap into it (in a single bound), get your bearings and pick things up as you go along. That’s what I did roughly half a century ago, and I’ve been dipping in and out of that story ever since, sometimes with great enthusiasm, sometimes with a vibe that’s a touch more ‘wait, why is Superman made of electricity now?’

It is in this sense that I find the best overlap with the sport of cricket - particularly, Test cricket. (If you’re a superhero fan trying to make sense of this piece, Test cricket is the oldest form of international cricket, tracing back to 1877, and it’s the form of cricket that goes for multiple days each match. All cricket is good, but Test cricket is my favourite form of cricket. Why? Because it contains the most cricket.)

Test cricket, like superhero comics, has a vast, sprawling history that predates (and will presumably post-date) me. Match by match, it expands, adding new stories and new mythology to its history. Nobody has seen all of Test cricket. The best you can do is leap (back and forth over the boundary) into it, get your bearings and pick things up as you go along. I also did that roughly half a century ago.

The Venn diagram intersection of these two circles should now be clearer. Cricket and superhero comics are both giant universes built up of individual stories, with new instalments arriving on a regular basis. Those stories are thrilling or ridiculous or comforting or just plain fun. Enough to keep me checking in regularly.

And once we define the Venn diagram in that way, a better mapping emerges. The cricketers aren’t the superheroes. Superheroes are effectively immortal. As long as the medium exists, Superman will never go out of print. Nor will Batman. Or Spider-Man. Their stories are ongoing and infinite. That’s nothing like the life of a professional athlete, which is notoriously very limited.

So, no, the cricketers aren’t the superheroes. The cricketers are the storytellers. The writers and artists (and yes, yes, the letterers and colourers-in) of the story. The superheroes, under this mapping, are the nations that play cricket.

Obviously, this isn’t a perfect mapping either. There are, after all, far more superheroes than there are cricket-playing nations. But it’s a better mapping, I think.

Players have a finite lifespan in the game. So do comic book creators. They both come in, make their mark, tell their stories, before being moved on as somebody newer and more exciting is called upon.

Players can define eras, in the same way comic book creators can. Cricket fans talk about, say, Ricky Ponting’s Australia in the same way comic book fans talk about Frank Miller’s Daredevil.

Cricketers’ stories are built from the bottom up, via their feats on the field, as opposed to the top-down approach of storytellers. But they’re still doing the same kind of thing. They’re crafting a new instalment in an ongoing, serialised tale.

Now, I’m not going to get bogged down on which nations map to which superheroes. Like I said, there are far too many superheroes out there for a one-to-one mapping, and do we really want to puzzle through which fictional billionaire superhero India most resembles? Of course not. (*cough* Iron Man *cough*)

(Also, another fun deviation from the mapping is that nations in cricket are defined by competing against one another, which superheroes don’t often do. Sure, it’s famously a Marvel Comics tradition that superheroes upon first meeting will often have a misunderstanding that leads to a fight. But a better way of thinking of how the cricket matches map to comic book confrontations is that the nations can be both the hero of the book or the villain of the book, depending upon which side you support (and maybe whether your mother has the same name as a cricket team’s?). Another reason not to bother mapping specific nations to specific superheroes.)

But when we think about the players as comic book creators, some fun mappings do emerge. Let’s go straight to the big gun - Bradman. A depression era champion who went straight for the most preposterous, overpowered feats in the history of the game. Yes, the greatest batter in the history of the game is Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman.

Similarly, Shane Warne is Stan Lee, a larger than life personality who revived leg spin bowling in the early 1990s in the same way Stan Lee revived superhero comics in the early 1960s. A dynamic force of nature.

Garfield Sobers is Jack Kirby, an artist renowned for his explosive style, pulsing with energy. A foundational superstar. Incredibly versatile. Could do everything. Ellyse Perry is William Marston, a polymath who excelled in multiple fields (including inventing the polygraph!), but who is most famous for, if not inventing the idea of lady superheroes, at least popularising them via his creation of Wonder Woman.

Steve Waugh is Chris Claremont, most famous as the writer of the X-Men, who built an unstoppable franchise that utterly dominated the sales charts of his era. AB de Villiers is Keith Giffen, equally at home telling dark, moody, dramatic tales (the five years later Legion of Super-Heroes, batting out an entire day of Test cricket) or wacky, off-the-wall, comedic tales (Ambush Bug, scoring the fastest century in ODI history).

MS Dhoni is maybe Grant Morrison, with an unconventional approach built on chaos magic that somehow always seems to work (except when it doesn’t). Chris Gayle is Todd MacFarlane, a flashy showman who made his initial splash in Test cricket/Marvel Comics, before becoming the face of a new era, frustrating purists by devoting his energies to these awful, upstart T20 franchises/Image Comics.

(Aside: The infamous 1990s comics speculative boom came about because ‘investors’ suddenly realised that very old comics (such as Action Comics #1 by Sir Donald Bradman) were worth hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) of dollars. Therefore, they reasoned, why not buy multiple copies of the first issue of new series on the off-chance they, too, would become immensely valuable at some future date? And, also, isn’t it a curious coincidence that the publishers of these comics are suddenly now renumbering everything as number one and also printing multiple versions of those number ones with different covers, and, my, this is becoming very expensive, isn’t it? No matter, it’s surely not a bubble with no underlying foundational value. Let’s keep throwing money into it. Oh, wait. Turns out it is a bubble with no underlying foundational value? Whoops. Where did all my money go? Anyhoo, is this in any way similar to T20 franchise cricket today? Let’s not speculate.)

And, of course, Ben Stokes is Alan Moore.

Although, you’re going to have to keep working on the hair, Ben

Now, Alan Moore is widely considered the greatest superhero comic book writer of all time. I wouldn’t classify Ben Stokes at quite that level, despite some of the preposterous feats he’s pulled off over the years. (Is Ben Stokes’ twist ending of the 2019 Headingley Test, which I watched in person over all four days, in any way similar to the mind-bending twist in Moore’s Watchmen? Look, it’s not entirely different.)

But the sense in which Ben Stokes is Alan Moore is in terms of his captaincy. When Alan Moore takes over a book - most famously on Marvelman/Miracleman and Saga of the Swamp Thing - he examines the fundamental assumptions underlying the story, tossing aside those that don’t make sense and reinventing something new atop of whatever remains.

When Ben Stokes took over the England Test team, he did the same thing. The team he inherited was, much like the Saga of the Swamp Thing comic Moore inherited in the 1980s, stodgy and dull.

Moore famously deconstructed the entire premise of the Swamp Thing character in issue 21, The Anatomy Lesson, reimagining everything that was taken for granted, and imbuing new life into the book.

“We thought that Joe Root’s England cricket team, was a bunch of England cricketers, transformed into a laughing stock. It wasn’t. It was a laughing stock bunch of England cricketers that thought it was an England cricket team.”

Stokes did the same thing with the England cricket team, rebuilding it around aggression, risk-taking and entertainment. And achieved widespread critical acclaim (certainly among England cricket fans) for it.

But Saga of the Swamp Thing, as good as it was, wasn’t Moore’s superhero comics masterpiece.

No, Moore’s masterpiece is Watchmen, the smarter, more evolved version of what he was doing on Saga of the Swamp Thing.

Which means if Stokes truly wants to be Moore (and let’s assume for the premise of this piece that he wouldn’t sneer dismissively at me for being such an utter, loser dork for even proposing that he wants this), his Watchmen moment is still to come. The last time a men’s team won back the Ashes overseas (as opposed to retaining the Ashes overseas) was in 1989. (Or, to put it another way, Allan Border’s men did it 36 years ago.)

Watchmen asked the question ‘what if superheroes were real?’ and then took that question seriously enough to create one of the great stories (superhero comic book or otherwise) of all time.

Ben Stokes has similarly asked the question ‘what if the England cricket team’s chances of winning the Ashes in Australia by playing Bazball were real?’ And now, as the moment approaches, he, too, seems to be taking this question quite seriously indeed.

Seriously enough to create one of the great cricket stories of all time? That’s what we’ll find out in about six months or so.

Who watches the England cricket team? We do.

So yes, I've been thinking about cricket and comic books. And frankly, I'm surprised more people aren’t.