Uzumeri x Godel #2: Superhero Rushmore (Animal Man 6-9)
Uzumeri: Welcome back to our now-biweekly look at Grant Morrison’s overriding DC Universe megaplot, starting with his first US comics work, Animal Man with Chas Truog (#9 by Tom Grummett). After the opening arc and “Coyote Gospel,” these four oneshots (#6-9) are each largely standalone while continuing the main plots of the series, while also tying into Invasion! and teasing upcoming events and their relationship to the at-the-time-recently-concluded Crisis on Infinite Earths.
We should probably just go through them one by one. #6 is a tie-in with the Invasion! crossover, which featured a bunch of different aliens invading the Earth. Fun fact: Invasion! was by Keith Giffen, our X-cowriter buddy Bill Mantlo and Todd McFarlane. It was basically a big sci-fi clusterfuck, where almost every alien race in the DCU came to fuck up Earth.
Godel: Ahhhh, okay, so it’s not just Bird-Man’s people in this.
Uzumeri: No, it’s started by the Dominators, who were basically like “hey, you guys ever notice something on Earth keeps turning out superpowered people who screw up all of our plans?”
Godel: Actually not a bad plot idea, really. Marvel basically did the same thing a decade later with Maximum Security but I never read any of that. Since Animal Man is still a D-lister, the Invasion! tie-ins in this book are really peripheral, on-the-margins stuff that just use the event to tell stories it seems Grant Morrison wanted to do anyway. At the same time, I sorta wish I’d known the larger plot of the event, because clearly something important happens to our hero, outside of the pages of this book.
Uzumeri: Yeah. Buddy’s powers get fucked up by the gene bomb, and that doesn’t actually occur in the pages of Animal Man. What happens is, the Dominators decide they’re going to do this gene bomb to screw up everyone with the metahuman gene, but it ends up actually just creating a bunch of metahumans and futzing with the powers of others. That group was mostly like Martian Manhunter and Superman and stuff I think, people who were just aliens themselves, not metahumans.
For all of his current reputation as someone who “ignores continuity,” Morrison deferred to other titles a TON in the ’80s and ’90s.
Godel: Well, also, this is not continuity that really throws a serious wrench in his plans. Presumably the powers will get fixed, and in the meantime, Animal Man’s powers being messed up only adds to what he’s already got going on with the character as a not-really-that-great-at-this superhero. I mean, in all four of the issues we review this time, Animal Man and his animal powers are basically irrelevant to the outcome of the story. Even his kid is making fun of him for it.
But, right, #6! “Birds of Prey.”
Uzumeri: This is basically the story of a Thanagarian artist, whose big final masterpiece is to martyr himself with a bomb that psychically transmits his life to everyone in a range, who’ll then die, just like him. It’s an imaginative look at what whiny self-expression would be in a warrior culture.
Godel: This is an interesting way to tell the story, too, since the setup is Animal Man and his manager talking about animal rights, and the manager being like, “But humans are intelligent and animals aren’t!” So the way it seems like it’s going is a story where the aliens think of humans the same way humans think of animals, as something that can just be used and abused for whatever purpose, in this case art.
But the guy who actually encounters the aliens is Animal Man. So it’s not like the anti-animal bigot learns a lesson. In fact, the climax is a hilarious sequence of Animal Man desperately jumping up and down trying to figure out how to turn off the “art-bomb.”
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen!
Uzumeri: And then Hawkman showing up to just switch it off, which I thought was hilarious.
Godel: I love that no matter what comic we review, we always come back to warlike races of alien bird-people. The real meat of this issue is the life and times of…art-bomb guy.
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Uzumeri: Yeah, I already totally forget his name, some typical Thanagarian shit like Korok Bol or something. It doesn’t really matter, he’s basically what Morrissey looks like if he’d grown up in Sparta.
Godel: Morrissey or, just any “conceptual artist” whose parents wouldn’t get what they do for a living.
Uzumeri: I’m being specific for the point of humor! I just like the idea of a screeching birdmusic version of There Is a Light That Will Never Go Out.
Godel: Detractors would say “You mean the one the Smiths put on The Queen is Dead“? ZING!
Uzumeri: It’s funny, since from all of that, you’d think Morrison’s being autobiographical here, but his dad was a big anti-bomb protester and peacenik after coming back from World War II.
I’d forgotten how great this issue was. It seems really purple at first, until you realize he’s writing the space hawk version of a whiny emo. Like, what does the sensitive artist look like in a hardcore warrior culture?
Godel: The interesting thing I think is that, even the rebellious artist that no one understands still operates within that warrior culture’s norms. Like, he’s not a pacifist or anything, his masterpiece is going to be killing a whole bunch of people, it’s just in this high-concept, expectation-challenging way.
There’s also this suggestion that these art-bomb performances are “cheap entertainment” for the Shi’ar Thanagarians, and the whole issue of being entertained by violence and destruction is something that, I think, we’ll be coming back to in Morrison.
Uzumeri: In any case, it’s the best kind of sci-fi story since it translates a common human thing into a totally alien culture. It’s like the opposite of exoticizing the other. It’s like “hey, those angry alien birdpeople who want to kill us all? They’re not so different!”
Godel: There are also lots of real-world parallels that sort of almost get hinted at but aren’t really developed, like the role of the arts in actual fascist societies. Bird-Woman calls the artist a “degenerate,” which Morrison has to be using as a specific and loaded term: the Nazis staged a famous exhibition of “degenerate art” to mock the experimental artists of the Weimar period.
But that actually confuses things, since the artist here is on board with the fascist program. So it’d be interesting to compare the things he says with, I dunno, the Italian Futurists babbling about the glory of mechanized death and destruction or something.
Uzumeri: It’s one of those things where you can tell Morrison had fun with the concept. I didn’t know about that angle, that’s really interesting. Morrison does have a little bit of a World War II fetish, especially earlier on with stuff like this and Zenith and, this title is not a joke, New Adventures of Hitler.
Godel: That’s a good lead-in for #7 (“The Death of the Red Mask”), which, like Watchmen, is a 1980s story that uses Golden Age characters as a stand-in for the World War II generation, and (speaking broadly here) the different approaches to morally sanctioned violence in the 40s versus now. Frankly, the Watchmen shoutouts are almost too cutesy, with the slow-zoom on the blood spatters from the mustachioed old mercenary who fell to his death from a tall building.
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Uzumeri: Well, here’s something you’re going to run into about 40,000 times in Morrison’s DC work: he really, really didn’t care for Alan Moore. And I’ll tell you why, since he recently finally talked about it in the recent documentary.
Godel: Really! That makes this even more interesting.
Uzumeri: When he was first breaking into comics, Alan Moore was doing Marvelman in Warrior magazine, and Morrison submitted a five-page Young Marvelman story that got approved by the publisher, Dez Skinn. Moore found out about it and got it removed, saying that only he was to write Marvelman. Flash forward a few years. Moore’s leaving Marvelman and is off to continue with his DC shit, stuff like Swamp Thing and Watchmen. So Dez Skinn asks Grant Morrison if he wants to take over Marvelman. Morrison’s like, sure, but first I’m gonna send Alan Moore a letter asking for permission.
Now, I don’t have the DVD around so I can’t get the exact quote, but the first line of Moore’s return letter went something like “I don’t mean to sound like a mob leg-breaker, but let me say this strongly: back off.”
Godel: hahahahha. Wow.
Uzumeri: He then threatened to kill Morrison’s career, and said “You are messing with forces outside your control.
Godel: So, like, was anybody allowed to write Marvelman?
Uzumeri: Neil Gaiman came on.
Godel: Who was unafraid of the powerful forces outside his control.
Uzumeri: No, Moore gave HIM his blessing. Then Eclipse folded and it’s been in legal hell ever since.
Godel: Wow. Just wow.
Uzumeri: Marvel just bought back the rights from the original creator (Dez Skinn apparently never fully got them for when HE published it) and are working on getting the rights to the Moore/Gaiman stuff now, and then they’re going to bring Gaiman on to finish up the story, theoretically. And also finally release it all in trade, since it’s been out of print for like over twenty years. And it’s a pretty seminal work.
Godel: So, that’s the personal backstory, and if that’s the case, then reducing Watchmen to an old coot apologizing for boring a youngster with his reminisces about the good old days is kind of funny just as a jab. But I guess we should bring people up to speed on the plot of this issue.
Uzumeri: It’s basically about an old, retired supervillain who was gifted by a meteor with the absolute cruelest superpower ever, a death touch. He unleashes these big crazy Jetsons-looking red robots to bash up town and is about to commit suicide when Animal Man decides to try to talk him off the ledge.
Godel: He’s dying, see, and he wants to go out with a bang. Hence the robot rampage.
Uzumeri: Then Superman shows up and says he wishes Castro was dead, and …. sorry, wrong comic.
J. Michael Straczynski: master of subtlety. (from Superman #701, 2010)
Godel: There’s almost no plot here, in the sense that the malfunctioning robots basically finish themselves off, and the Red Mask ends up offing himself anyway when Animal Man leaves for a minute. So really this is all about the Red Mask and his monologue.
This was probably my favorite issue so far, honestly. First of all, the Red Mask is really funny.
Like, he has the right world-weary dry humor that also feels like an average Joe Schmoe from the 40s. I’d suggest Bill Murray to play him in the movie, if there weren’t already a fan-made movie that reinvents the character as a vague homage to Murray’s performance in Rushmore.
Uzumeri: Yeah, he’s almost enacting a sort of pragmatic nihilism. He’s just a working joe who got the worst hand in life. Of course he’s taking people out with him when he dies, he’s a supervillain, that’s just what he does, man.
Godel: And he’s got that wry smile about it. This is a dude who’s decided to end his life, but he’s not really maudlin about it, he’s just kinda done with it all. So all that, plus the goofiness of the robots, takes the edge off the story and makes him a sympathetic character for the duration of his monologue.
Uzumeri: It kind of reminds me of Best Man Fall in terms of being a really good standalone character piece – you know, that issue in Invisibles of the dude King Mob shoots in the face in the first issue.
Godel: Love that issue, and yeah, nice comparison, this is Morrison digging in to the kind of guy who could have been a minor Golden Age throwaway villain that nobody ever paid much attention after his time in the spotlight.
In fact, I’m not even sure if he’s a historic character or not. He supposedly fought Captain Triumph, who was a minor and forgettable Golden Age hero, so maybe Red Mask is actually in some obscure issue of that.
Uzumeri: He actually is brand-new, and this is his only appearance, although Morrison ended up reusing the character design for Jason Todd a year or two ago.
Godel: I’m always a supporter of shiny red metal masks, mainly for the “so wait, how do they see anything?” factor. I was going to add Ruby Thursday to the list, but apparently the red stuff is actually her head, a “mass of organic circuitry.”
Uzumeri: Yeah, she’s like The Orb. You think it’s a helmet, but nope, his head is actually just a gigantic eyeball. That somehow talks.
Godel: So anyway, the Red Mask is great. Not only is he our actual source of Morrissey quotes for the week (“and if you have five seconds to spare, then I’ll tell you the story of my life”), he opens up this whole riff about getting stuck with a lousy superpower, which Animal Man seems to sort of relate to. Red Mask always just wanted to be able to fly, but instead everything he touches he kills, so of course he became a supervillain. It makes a nice pair with the previous story, about the guy who has a perfectly good talent (art), but within his culture/biography, inevitably turned that into being a mass murderer.
Also, Truog did a great job with the art here. The page where he finally jumps off the building is just perfect… he really sells the old grump’s one moment of total bliss thinking he can fly.
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Uzumeri: Sometimes great things come out of having to mark time until the end of a crossover, man. There’s not much more to say about Red Mask, really, it’s just very good. The last page is certainly evocative and kind of a fuck-you-too-Buddy to Alan Moore, but even outside of that context it works really well.
Godel: So that leaves us the two stories which actually seem to need to be Animal Man stories, with Buddy and the kids back at the house. Which, after 5, 6, and 7, I’d almost forgotten about, but this is actually what a lot of the appeal of 1-4 was: this dude and his family dealing with all the wacky hijinks that come from him being a featherweight superhero.
#8 is a fight with Mirror Master, who is a supervillain who apparently does… anything that has to do with mirrors. He shows up at the house on the orders of a sinister, shadowy council (apparently including President Reagan) who are upset with his animal rights activism.
Uzumeri: Yeah, Morrison’s animal rights activism starts to get way preachier for the next few issues, and the villains more moustache-twirling. But this is a fun issue – Truog sells the crazy fight, the reverse lettering is kind of annoying but not TOO intrusive, and it’s nice to see the damsel in distress scenario reversed.
This is actually the introduction of Evan McCulloch, the second Mirror Master, since Sam Scudder died in Crisis.
Godel: Wow, it totally doesn’t play as an introduction of a new character, but knowing that it sort of makes more sense how much of the page space is devoted to showing off the villain’s personality (basically “Scottish jerk”). The reverse lettering is gimmicky in the sense that, you wish they were saying more interesting things, so that when you read it backwards it was worth your time. Has anyone ever done a Mirror Master gimmick issue where it ships with a little, like, piece of cardboard covered in aluminum foil so you can reverse everything?
Uzumeri: I don’t think they’ve done the lettering gimmick since.
Godel: But you’re right about reversed (mirrored?) damsel in distress narratives: the highlight of this is Ellen just knocking the Mirror Master around, especially since we’ve just watched Animal Man have a devil of a time trying to do anything to stop the guy.
Uzumeri: Yeah, Ellen is totally the star of this one. Also, on the art side, I have to point out: the dog’s face on page 18 when Mirror Master gets knocked out of the house: priceless.
Actually, one thing I’m continually reminded of reading this book is that Chas Truog was actually pretty damn good. Not flashy, but it captures all the information the story needs.
Godel: Yeah, he’s growing on me in these issues! I still don’t quite get his bug-eyed faces for the supporting cast, but he just kills it on some of these issues. Whatever happened to him, anyway?
Uzumeri: Painting and sculpting these days, it seems. I know he’s largely left the industry.
Godel: Props to Tom Grummett on #9, too. And boy, I can’t say enough about Brian Bolland’s covers, very clean, very attractive, and they sell the vibe well.
Uzumeri: #9 is a reaction to the founding of Justice League Europe, which, thanks to the magic of teleportation technology, Buddy can be a part of despite living in San Diego.
Godel: So what’s the deal with Justice League Europe? I expected it to be like Great Lakes Avengers, but from the house ad, it looks like a legit superhero team, with Wonder Woman, the Flash, Power Girl, Silver Skin Guy, and, uh, Stretch Armstrong.
Uzumeri: Basically, Giffen and DeMatteis’s Justice League International comic was doing really well so they split it into JLA and JLE. It wasn’t a B-list title, it was totally just the second Justice League book.
Godel: Ahhhhhh, gotcha. And the JLA there is, like, the Superman/Fire/Ice/Booster Gold/Blue Beetle/Boadicea lineup, right?
Uzumeri: That wasn’t until after Giffen and DeMatteis left – Superman wasn’t there – but it was that group, yeah. So Animal Man’s on – well, it IS the B-team, but it’s a pretty well-staffed B-team.
Godel: Anyway, this is another cute issue: the Martian Manhunter comes to visit and brings a repair crew to fix up the house after the Mirror Man’s attack. Buddy has a chat with him about his defective superpowers, and they help young Cliffy deal with some school bullies. Martian Manhunter is surprisingly cavalier about the whole thing, even chuckling up his sleeve when Buddy gets dissed by his own son.
Uzumeri: J’onn’s always really boring when he’s aloof, I think, and way more entertaining when he’s just a dude who actually fits in. He’s a great character who just keeps seeming to get terrible stories, but I really like his portrayal here. The JLI era really humanized him a lot, though, including his addiction to Oreos, which is now a gigantic staple of his character.
Godel: Yeah, I like him a lot here. Like, he tells Animal Man straight up that if his powers don’t work, he’s not going to be a Justice Leaguer. But he’s willing to engage in these shenanigans with the bullies, and to join Buddy in hating on Ted Kord.
Uzumeri: Hahaha, to be fair, Kord isn’t hated on so much as picked on, but yeah. J’onn has this really wry sense of humor, at his best. And yeah, the scene with the bullies is fantastic – really, the whole issue is a nice, fun sort of downtime/transition issue. It’s almost like the vibe of JLI infected the book. You’ll see a lot more of Morrison’s J’onn when we get to JLA, where he’s frequently hilarious.
Godel: Sweet! Both 8 and 9 are reassuring issues for the hypothetical fan I imagined who got “Coyote Gospel” and went “Well….that was weird. Um… what happened to Buddy and his kooky adventures?” I’m still interested to see how the title balances this out in the long run – – – I’m equally interested in “random one-off stories about violence, the arts, growing old, etc” and “ABC presents the world’s wackiest hero, Animal Man!”
Like, so much of the material in this book actually would make a pretty reasonable sitcom… and then you hit the story about genocidal bird artists from space, and you sort of imagine Smallville reinventing that as “Animal Man goes to a bird-themed costume party and enters a drawing contest.”
Uzumeri: The next arc is kind of none of the above, being some straightforward Grant Morrison metafictional weirdness.
Godel: Meanwhile, as if trying to compensate for three issues which, though brilliant, didn’t really advance the story, we start getting subplots piling up in 8 and 9: IN AFRICA, some TRIBESPEOPLE, possibly friends of B’wana Beast, are worried about COMING DOOM. Back at the house, a SHADOWY FIGURE is casing the house from the BUSHES. And, SOMEWHERE ELSE, a GUY is wandering around in the desert with some sort of selective amnesia or alienation until he opens a MYSTERIOUS MANILA ENVELOPE, and meanwhile, a COMPUTER shows the quote from Einstein about God playing dice with the cosmos, until MORPHEUS starts typing a response.
Uzumeri: The computer will recur, I assure you that.
Godel:Yeah, I’m willing to give him time to follow that stuff up (“Psycho Pirate” is a cool enough name, after all), but it does feel like playing catch-up.
Uzumeri: Oh, and an important note regarding the Psycho Pirate. The last time the DC Universe had seen that dude, he was in a basement cell in Arkham Asylum, babbling about how an entire multiverse died and nobody remembers, on the last page of Crisis on Infinite Earths #12.
Godel: So he’s, like, the equivalent of Bishop in Age of Apocalypse, the one guy who knows something big happened to the continuity.
Uzumeri: Exactly right. He’s the only one that remembers that, for instance, the Justice League and Justice Society actually used to be on separate Earths.
Godel: How long has it been since Crisis, in these issues?
Uzumeri: I mean, this totally gets explained explicitly later, but for now it’s worth mentioning that this was a Big Deal when it happened. Crisis ended in ’86, these issues are ’89. So it’s been three years since Crisis.
Seek the Pirate! The PSYCHO Pirate! Seek him, in the depths beneath the ARKHAM ASYLUM!
Godel: OK. So people reading this would have gone, “Oh man, this is reopening that can of worms,” maybe even expected a next chapter to Crisis or something.
Uzumeri: The fact that its main dangling plot thread would show up in a Z-list ongoing by a brand new writer was kind of weird, and speaks a lot to how much creative freedom DC gave people back then, especially in Karen Berger’s proto-Vertigo office.
Godel: Yeah, it’s like if Captain America had come back from the dead in She-Hulk or something.
BTW, I swear I can do other things besides come up with Marvel equivalents for every random plot point.
Uzumeri: It’s hard to name a Marvel equivalent for this, really, since I don’t think the MU has ever had something affect it this irreversibly. I mean, the changes of Crisis stuck for twenty years, and even now the JLA and JSA are still both on Earth-0.
Godel: So now I’m really interested in where this is going, because one the one hand you’re telling me that next up is this metafictional mind-trip, presumably somehow involving Crisis/Psycho Pirate, but also you mentioned earlier today that it’s the origin arc.
Uzumeri: Yeah, Animal Man’s origin is revisited. The Crisis stuff doesn’t come up until a few issues down the line, but when it comes, it comes hard. A lot of what’s coming up is material that gets explicitly reprised when Morrison returns to the DC Universe after New X-Men.
Godel: Arguably, the refusal to do giant continuity-tweaking stories is the main thing that distinguishes Marvel and DC. Like, as a Marvel reader, you just don’t care about the idea of making everything fit back together, which was the impetus for doing something like Crisis. For one thing there isn’t as much contradictory source material needing to be resolved because the stories only go back to the 60s. So it’s a different vibe over there.
Uzumeri: Well, what’s nice about something like Infinite or Final Crisis is that they were really designed as stories first. I don’t think Final Crisis rewrote ANY continuity. Infinite rewrote a bunch, but the original pitch didn’t even have the multiverse in it.
Godel: Yeah, I guess I’m really responding to things like the original Crisis and Zero Hour, where it seemed to me as an outsider like something only the most inside of insiders could possibly care about.
Uzumeri: Oh, that’s absolutely why those crossovers existed, which made them insanely exclusive, you know? Infinite Crisis is really just as bad when it comes to being exclusive from a continuity standpoint, but what’s nice about Final is that it really just riffs off of the whole apocalyptic everything-is-happening-at-once thing. It starts off slow and builds to about 5,000mph in the final issue, where everything is totally disjointed and happening insanely fast. We won’t see Morrison start to speed up until he discovers drugs and does JLA, though.
Godel: So! That’s these four issues. Kind of hard to get a grip on them as a whole in terms of discussion, but I think all four were definitely worth reading.
Uzumeri: They’re well-crafted oneshots that move forward the main story, or establish important characterization, or are just plain neat. It’s definitely still a young writer finding his legs, but these issues are filled with cool ideas executed well.
Godel: Agreed, more or less! The young-writer stuff does occasionally jump out, especially in the artist story which is a bit ham-handed. And I still feel like he could have drip-fed the subplot stuff a little more subtly But these are solid, entertaining comics with just enough Big Idea spiced around. Recommended for sure.
Uzumeri: Next up: the three-part origin arc – – – and the return of B’Wana Beast!
Godel: Excellent – see you then, Animal Fans!
[Note: apologies for the late reveal of this post – David has been swamped at work and we’re playing catchup. Next up will be another chunk of Animal Man before we return to X-Men for the proper start to John Byrne’s legendary string on pencils. Plus a circus, and Colossus in a turtleneck sweater! – AG]