Uzumeri x Godel #4: What About Crying Whales?! (Animal Man 15-20)
Godel: Welcome back, Animal Fans! This is Uzumeri x Godel, our ongoing reader’s journey through Grant Morrison’s DC Universe super-project, as outlined by our spirit-guide, Morrison mega-fan David Uzumeri. I’m Addison Godel: a general comics fan reading most of this for the first time. This week is our next-to-final chapter of Morrison’s Animal Man, with Chas Truog (pencils), Doug Hazlewood (inks), Tatjana Wood (colors), and Brian Bolland (the covers).
Even by the standards of this comic, issues 15-20, it turns out, are where things get a little weird.
Uzumeri: You’ve got a few fairly low-key oneshots, and then someone basically cuts the brakes on the narrative vehicle and there are two absolutely major events in those last three issues, as well as the introduction of imagery that’ll carry on through the rest of Morrison’s DC work.
Godel: I should also say: this conversation contains major, major spoilers. If you haven’t read Animal Man, and are sort of thinking about it, close this window and buy the trades now, or you will totally, totally regret it.
Uzumeri: I’m not sure which Big Moment to start with, honestly. I guess we could just start with the dolphin issue.
Godel: Yeah! This is Animal Man versus the Faroe Islands, which in 1989 was a hot-button issue for animal rights activists; they have this custom of, I guess, hunting dolphins that come near the shore. You can read more about it on Wiki; anyway, Animal Man signs up with some self-proclaimed eco-terrorists to disrupt the action.
Uzumeri: It’s probably the most political of Morrison’s run. Or, not political, but proselytizing. The South Africa issue was more overtly political, but this is pretty much a PSA.
Godel: I admire it on a certain level, because god, if you put a comic like that out today, Fox News would be having people like boycotting DC or something, you know? Making HEROES out of ECO TERRORISTS! a SO CALLED superhero KILLS a man for THREATENING to stab a dolphin etc
Uzumeri: Yeah, I’m happy to say that’s really the last “message” issue. In terms of the real world issues stuff, I mean. It definitely doesn’t work as well as the South Africa one. There’s way too much exposition and “look at how horrible this is,” you know? Very little time was spent on the actual story, it was mostly just teaching.
Godel: And again, I do sort of admire that. Like, G-Moz found out about this thing, and was so upset by it that he said, “cancel everything else we’ve got going on, my metatextual obsessions are nice and all but I have to do whatever’s within my power to make sure more people know about this.”
Uzumeri: Also, Dolphin’s presence was like totally random.
Godel: And adds nothing – what is with this comic and pointless animal-themed female guest stars?
Uzumeri: What’s interesting is Dolphin was one of the Forgotten Heroes with Animal Man, so I kept misremembering that Morrison did something with that, to tie it into the metatextual plot… but nope!
Godel: By the way, according to Wikipedia, recently the Faroe Islands medical authorities “have recommended that pilot whales no longer be considered fit for human consumption because of the levels of toxins in the whales.”
Uzumeri: hahahaha holy shit
Godel: That would also have made a good ending to the issue, instead of Animal Man deep-sixing the bad guy only for him to be IRONICALLY SAVED BY THE ANIMALS, the guy gets to eat his dolphin flesh…and then drops dead of mercury poisoning, HA HA HA HA!!!!
Uzumeri: Man, how sort of cliched was the dolphin-saving-him thing? OH, THE NOBLE DOLPHINS! You know, maybe all they communicate to each other in the ocean is insults, and they really wish they could kill each other and have a big dolphin war but they don’t have opposable thumbs to do it with – – you ever consider that, Grant? The Dolphin Wars?!??!
Godel: The sad thing is, Morrison probably could write a really good dolphin war comic.
Uzumeri: Morrison could write a really good * comic. The only thing I’ve heard him say he’d never even try to do is Spider-Man. He said the character was “too specific” for the way he writes. Like, he digs Spidey stories, he just doesn’t think he could get his voice.
(Frankly, I think he’s totally fucking wrong – he wrote a 20-something dude just fine in JLA with Kyle Rayner – but whatever.)
Godel: I mean, Spidey’s got a pretty specific voice. But yeah.
Dolphin war comics… I don’t want to trivialize or reduce the complexities of the animal rights issue, but I think Morrison’s already done that in this comic by portraying those in favor of the hunt as bloodthirsty bar-fight psychopaths.
Prior to the Gulf of Faroe incident, the Dolphin Wars were primarily an undersea, intraspecies conflict.
But it’s still weirdly refreshing to see a nakedly political, issue-driven superhero comic from the Big Two. No one does stuff like this now, except through really labored in-universe metaphors, and maybe that’s saved us some groaners, but it’s nice to imagine a comics creator getting really passionate about something and thinking it’s more important to him than who the shadowy figure outside Animal Man’s house is.
Uzumeri: I have three words for you: Joseph. Michael. Straczynski.
Godel: OK, linking my support for political comics writers to JMS is about as fair as what Morrison’s doing to the Faroese here.
Uzumeri: Joe Kelly did this one really controversial issue of JLA, with President Lex and Superman, that was a VERY VERY VERY THINLY disguised examination of bush waging war on Iraq. As Luthor wages war on, I think… Qurac.
Godel: I just like seeing every so often that the writers are people and citizens and mothers and stuff first, and then somewhere down the line, “comics creator” is also part of their priorities. Yeah, a lot of it would be ham-handed and something you’d roll your eyes at later, but the same is true of protest songs and stuff.
Uzumeri: The last, most political superhero comic I can remember was probably … actually, Final Crisis, although that was tons of layers of metaphor. But, I mean, #7, which came out the month Obama was inaugurated, starts with a black President on an alternate Earth opening up his jacket in the Oval Office to reveal he’s Superman.
So it’s not TOO veiled.
Godel: hahahahaha, wow.
Uzumeri: Morrison repeatedly said he based Darkseid and his cronies after Bush and his, and that it was something like his ’emotional diary of the Bush era.’ Under all the metaphor it’s his most political work since Animal Man.
Godel: “Emotional diary” seems like a much smarter way to do a political comic than “here’s this controversy, now superheroes get involved!”… like I think getting across your feeling of political frustration or helplessness or outrage or whatever would be really powerful, audiences would connect with that.
Uzumeri: But yeah, you’re right, it’s not done that often without being horribly hamhanded like that child abuse issue of Superman, where Superman threatens the father and says if his son doesn’t call a certain cellphone number every day he’d basically come and heat vision him into nonexistence.
Godel: Wow. I mean, that’s dumb for a lot of reasons – but particularly for the same reason the South Africa story is dumb, putting it in a world with superheroes trivializes it and also raises so many other questions about why this problem is exactly the same in a superpowered world as it is in our world.
So the child abuse thing… I mean there are a thousand better ways to do a child abuse story in a superhero comic, starting with, like, having one of the existing characters be a survivor or something. It would all be a bit Very Special Episode but god, all that heat vision thing does is make you finish reading the comic and go “That would be helpful…. but there’s no Superman in our world, so I guess there’s nothing we can do.”
Uzumeri: That’s basically the entire problem with JMS’s run. He also solves the auto industry crisis in Detroit.
Godel: Wait. What?
Uzumeri: Superman finds a group of aliens with magical healing machines, who are living in secret in Detroit, and yells at them about being illegal immigrants to Earth.
The irony of this is never mentioned.
Godel: ahahhahahaahahha, wow
Uzumeri: Then he’s like “I’ll have to decide what to do with you!” so he goes to an auto factory and talks to some dude who was working there who has this lung cancer attack or something. So he takes him to the magical healing machine and he’s like “I have an idea!!!! Let’s turn all of the auto factories into factories for the magical healing machines!”
So the aliens become the directors of this corporation manufacturing the machines, and it reignites Detroit’s economy, and everyone wins, and Superman moves on!
Godel: So, wait, does nobody have cancer in the DCU now? I mean, with all these made-in-America healing machines out there.
Uzumeri: I really doubt this will ever be addressed.
Godel: This comic sounds amazing.
Uzumeri: Have I mentioned the part where Superman tells Batman that he needs to get grounded, you know, and Batman wouldn’t understand because he doesn’t deal with street crime.
Godel: hahahahaha.
Uzumeri: Or real people’s problems. He just fights crazies.
Godel: “I seen you do a lot for the WHITE GREASEPAINT SKINS, and the HALF CAUCASIAN, HALF ACID VICTIM SKINS…”
Uzumeri: It’s an astonishingly bad comic. ….But yeah, Animal Man.
#16 is another fun oneshot, where Buddy goes to Paris on an impromptu holiday with Ellen to celebrate her new book being published, and they get wrapped up in this insane fight with a random D-list time-travel-based villain, alongside husband and wife detective team Ralph “Elongated Man” and Sue Dibny.
Godel: I’ve never read a comic with these characters in it before, but can I just say, I was really won over by those wacky Dibnys, are they still up to these kooky, all-ages adventures?
Uzumeri: Hahah, okay, you know about that?
It’s really just nice to read these characters just having fun again before they both got royally fucked up in Identity Crisis. For those who don’t know: Sue had an aneurysm and got flamethrowered by the Atom’s wife, to try to make the superheroes afraid of a wife-killer, so that the Atom would get back together with her, because she was crazy. The flamethrower was brought along “Just in case”, since she just wanted to give her a little brain hiccup, not kill her, and then she burned her to remove the evidence supposedly.
Then it’s revealed that Doctor Light savagely raped her during the Satellite Era of the JLA and had his mind lobotomized as a result.
There’s a reason Identity Crisis is reviled as misogynist trash, and it’s an absolute shit murder mystery on top of everything else.
Godel: Well, that sucks.
Uzumeri: Ralph gets one amazing run of stories after that in 52 courtesy of Mark Waid, though. But we’ll get to that.
Godel: In all seriousness, I actually thought the JLE cast came off as really boring and one-dimensional here. Like, I guess Elongated Man is the “prankster” or something, presumably because Plastic Man was busy? But Metamorpho is also some kind of jokester, disguising himself as a chair for no real reason…it just comes off really lamely.
Uzumeri: The whole thing feels like a rough sketch of the jokier parts of his later JLA run – the chair trick is totally a Plastic Man thing, you know? I also wasn’t aware Metamorpho could just, like, transform like that, since then he could just look human all the time.
Godel: I’d assume if Morrison was actually doing JLE that the cast would be a lot more interesting than this from month to month. But here the focus is really on Time Commander – like “Death of the Red Mask,” the story is really just a device to put this weird villain in the spotlight and tell a little story about him and his power.
For the first time I’m a little disappointed in Truog’s art. The weirdness is maybe stacking up in a way not suited to his style….but, like, when the text says time is running backwards, it’d be nice to see that in a sequence of panels rather than a single still image. There’s also a really, really sketchy aerial shot of Paris that makes me wonder if he just got behind on the deadline.
That aside, it’s good. The Time Commander is trying to do everybody a favor by time-traveling their dead loved ones back; this has dire side effects, so the heroes unfortunately have to stop him. I liked that Animal Man did try to talk him down from it, but (as with Red Mask) he’s actually not that articulate or convincing and fails totally.
Uzumeri: Well, not just that, but this also brings out the theme that the way superheroes solve problems isn’t really kind, you know? That they torture each other for our entertainment. You’ve got Buddy going “look, I’m getting through to him, don’t do it”, and then Metamorpho just clocks him, no pun intended.
Godel: Good call! Like, there’s really no reason for them to solve this with their fists or any reason to think it would work, but it’s a superhero comic so that’s what they do. That Buddy instinctively sees through that is a kind of foreshadowing, really.
Uzumeri: I take the ending of this as really being an excoriation of the big superhero punch-out fight, and a call to solving problems in more imaginative ways. Which, again, is really what you get in JLA, where most of the problems AREN’T solved by just punching the guy in the face.
Godel: So in this sense, it’s a much more narrow critique of the genre than we’d expect – it’s almost like a fan letter complaining that with their neat powers, the heroes could beat the villains in so many better ways. It’s not as much about the pointless violence of the superhero universe – which we’ll get to in a moment.
Uzumeri: But yeah, Buddy totally sees through it, he’s like look at this poor mental patient, he needs help. He’s thinking like a regular guy, he has that awareness. And it’s related to his whole kindness to animals too, I think.
Godel: Yeah! Despite the pages and pages about how Animal Man taps into the morphogenetic field or whatever, it seems pretty clear that his real power is empathy, although he’s kind of inconsistent with it… like killing the Faroe Islands guy or being unable to talk to his son about vegetarianism without it being a big lecture.
I think he’s really getting through to him!
Uzumeri: I think that just because you have empathy doesn’t mean you don’t make mistakes, though. Those things happen out of his empathy for the dolphins or the cattle or whatever, not out of maliciousness.
Godel: No, that’s totally true – which is also just a nice point about the difficulty of trying to be a good, decent person in the world. I mean, #17 almost feels like a personal reflection on the part of the author, like he looked around and realized that all these causes he believed in were making all his friends avoid him, and what kind of empathetic, involved-in-the-world person did that make him?
The politicking of the dolphin issue takes on a very different light after reading #17, where Animal Man’s activism goes horribly wrong. A firefighter is badly injured due to Buddy’s eco-terrorist friends. And, I mean, that kind of thing DOES happen when people start blowing up buildings in order to publicize their notionally progressive, anti-violence politics.
So Buddy decides he doesn’t want to be a superhero or a spokesperson for anything anymore.
Uzumeri: Morrison’s spent a lot of issues messianizing the animal rights movement; it only makes sense that, at some point, he’d have to turn it around and examine the other side. I’m sure Buddy didn’t just start eating meat after quitting his activism; he’s still a vegetarian, he’s still empathetic and believes in things, but this is the issue where he stops trying to force those beliefs on others. For better or worse.
And let’s not forget Animal Man’s disastrous talk show appearance, where he lasts THREE PANELS before going all Godwin’s Law.
Godel: This whole development gets overshadowed quickly by the next plot developments, but it’s a really bold thing to do with a superhero character – – – he wants to quit, not because someone died or, you know, whatever kind of normal genre plot point, but because he’s actually lost faith in the idea of heroic spokespeople being able to advance a liberal politics. And because what he’s doing has violence hopelessly embedded in it. It’s basically the thesis statement for Invisibles.
Uzumeri: Yeah, that’s a really good point – I’d never thought about the comparison to, say, King Mob’s character arc, but you’re totally right. Still, as we’ll see, this pacifism won’t last particularly long.
Godel: King Mob, and also the whole big discovery that every “revolution” just turns to violence and destruction and the only way out is to reject the binary altogether – – – but, uh, yeah, back to Animal Man.
Uzumeri: The firefighter/talk show issue, ends with our plot-motion device James Highwater arriving (with Hamed-Ali-style breakdowns for legs), which leads us into the momentous events of 18-20.
Godel: Just so everyone’s up to speed with us here: Highwater, the guy who was talking to Psycho-Pirate, finally tracks down Animal Man; they go on a peyote-fueled vision quest on a mesa, and Buddy momentarily realizes that he’s a guy in a comic book, recognizing either the reader or the creators looking down at him.
(Click for the full-size image.)
While all this is going on, though, Buddy’s family is brutally murdered by Lennox – the assassin who was posing as a Jehovah’s Witness a while ago. He’s working for the same council that first sent Mirror Master.
Buddy gets home and finds the bodies; he’s understandably traumatized and lapses into a suicidal depression.
Uzumeri: Now, this might surprise you, but from all indications, Morrison has said that he had never experimented with drugs when he wrote this arc. He was still 100% straight-edge.
Godel: You know, I sort of buy that about the drugs, if only because the vision quest is really stock in certain ways. Like, it’s alarmingly close to that Simpsons episode where Homer eats the hallucinogenic chilis, which was a parody of stories like this one.
Uzumeri: Hahaha, that’s true! Look, brother, we will find our spirit animals! I’m not sure why I hadn’t realized that, but you’re totally right.
(Click for the full-size image.)
It’s a far more STRUCTURED drug trip than anything in Invisibles. I mean, contrast this with Lord Fanny’s origin story: very similar, with the Native American ritual and the peyote and everything, but way ….. weirder.
Godel: I’m speaking here as someone who also hasn’t gone on any peyote-fueled spiritual discoveries, but yeah – this is like someone who’s read other stories about that and is re-presenting them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it sort of distracts from the content of the revelations. Again, I think weirder art would sell this better.
Uzumeri: I have to ask: did you know either “I CAN SEE YOU!” or the murder were coming?
Godel: I didn’t know about the “I CAN SEE YOU”! splash – that was an amazing payoff. I am really sorry to say that Wikipedia or ILX or someplace spoiled the family murder thing, like maybe a week ago. I can’t imagine how shocking that would be otherwise; the comic’s worked hard to set up the family as characters we cared about (although the daughter has always been a bit vague).
Uzumeri: Animal Man seeing us is a huge thing, as well as the murals detailing the Second Crisis. And also Buddy sort of realizing not just who made him, but WHY he exists – the idea that there’s a shittier world where people read his adventures for entertainment.
When he talks about it, he seems almost understanding. Like he has empathy for us.
Godel: Well, basically, it turns Animal Man as a whole into “Coyote Gospel.” I said before that the continuity alien plot was a nice move because it brought the metafictional material back around to the appealing character of Buddy. But once Animal Man perceives the next layer of reality above him, he’s basically Crafty Coyote.
Uzumeri: Yeah, exactly — notice that the “blood” he travels through is the same as the ink Chuck Jones had in #5. It’s worth noting that, back in Crisis on Infinite Earths, all the skies were red when the universes were colliding.
Godel: And in the Africa story, the big sign that the comic book reality was falling away was the sky going blank-paper white.
Uzumeri: I don’t think I’m spoiling too much with this, but I’d totally forgotten that Morrison had established the blood at the edge of reality that rains down this early.
“It’s Raining Blood” went number one on the US Disco Chart, debuting in October 1982. It made number 34 on the US R&B chart and number 46 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Godel: And is it blood, or the background color of the “Who’s Who” section?
Uzumeri: I think it’s more that the blood is between the panels and in the bleed space.
Godel: Which is where comics actually “happen,” in the McCloudian sense of comics’ unique thing, that leap of narrative faith that lets you step beyond the edge of one discrete panel and launch yourself to the next one.
Uzumeri: Exactly.
Godel: And, thus the thing you absolutely have to break if you’re going to do a fourth-wall story in comics. Really, him getting outside the panel boundaries should be a bigger deal than him seeing us, but it happens so often in the medium for stylistic reasons that we’re sort of used to it.
Uzumeri: Let’s also not forget his meeting with the Pre-Crisis Animal Man, who’s now established as basically a totally different dude.
Godel: And who gets to plead his case, which I thought was really nicely done, especially since our Animal Man is about to have his life ripped away from him, in a slightly more visceral fashion. It also seems clear now that the Pre-Crisis Animal Man was the guy stalking Buddy’s house for a while, although he doesn’t explain (yet?) what he meant by “9-27”, or what exactly he was doing there.
Uzumeri: We’re going into the belly of the whale in this story, a metaphor Morrison makes pretty damn literal. And then you’ve got the hilarious scene with Highwater. I’m a total sucker for mythological birds being dicks.
Godel: Yeah, what was up with that? The bird spirit leads Highwater into jumping off the mesa in a “leap of faith”… and he just straight up dies. But it was all a dream! The moral is “Don’t listen to talking animals,” which is funny in a book that up to now has always been about listening to the animals.
Uzumeri: I honestly forget what that’s setting up, which is nice. Don’t listen to Animal Man, maybe?
Also, didn’t the ghostly apparition cry at Cliff and Maxine?
Godel: Well, I was going to read that as the ghostly Animal Man being jealous of this family that he never got to have, because his powers came from the magic of radiation which rendered him sterile. But the Old Animal Man we see here saves his resentment for the erasure of his existence, and by extension, all the vast destruction and death that superhero books deploy in order to take on EPIC scale. Like, why does that entertain you people?!
Uzumeri: “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!”
Godel: It makes a lot of sense in light of the things you’ve been telling me off-mic about Morrison’s approach to comics continuity. You said, I think, that he was writing Batman as if every single Batman story ever – the 60s TV show, the Silver Age sci-fi stuff, whatever – had all really happened, no retcons, no continuity foolery. I could imagine it starting with Bat-Mite showing up in a story like this and having the same questions as Old Animal Man.
Uzumeri: Yeah, it’s something DC’s really actually been allowing him to RUN WITH recently. Like, this was a D-list DC title against continuity wank books, while now Morrison actually gets to run the A-list titles with this philosophy rather than doing a D-list title ABOUT the philosophy. He can walk the walk.
Godel: That’s a really good point. Part of the reason this gets so overwhelmingly meta is that it’s working as a critique of what was going on in other comics. Presumably, if he’d been allowed to just write all those comics, he wouldn’t have had to do stories like this.
And it does read pretty well, maybe not as MIND BLOWING as it thinks it is, but I also wasn’t rolling my eyes either, except maybe when he starts going OMG READ THIS BOOK IT WILL CHANGE HOW YOU THINK ABOUT EVERYTHING.
Uzumeri: Hahahaha yeah, the Bohm book. That was a pretty big plug.
Godel: He’s being an activist in the same way as he was for the dolphins, really – use the comic to wake people up to this thing.
Uzumeri: I think one thing Animal Man does, that most of Morrison’s later work does not, is take itself too seriously. There’s a tongue-in-cheek flavor to almost everything else he’s done that’s largely lacking here.
Godel: There’s maybe a global tongue-in-cheekness, insofar as he sets his proto-Vertigo trippy monologues in a comic book about a guy with animal powers who spends most of his time lecturing his kids about hamburgers. But that only goes so far, and at the end of the day, you’re still reading that proto-Vertigo comic.
Uzumeri: Yeah, there isn’t that willingness to take the piss out of itself at its most serious moment. New X-Men did that a bunch for example.
Godel: I keep coming back to Invisibles. I feel like writing that was a really long, slow realization of the difficulties of being a crusader for anything. He tries a lot of ways of dealing with that problem, at various “scales” of the story so to speak. And that tactic you describe, of self-parody at the point of crisis, gets thrown around there all the time. That’s also a risky move because it can just come off as the guy who uses irony to avoid making a commitment to anything. You know? “Oh, I wasn’t really dancing to that cheesy song, I was ironically dancing.”
Uzumeri: I think that’s a lot of what gives All Star Superman its power – there, he plays the big moments totally straight. Jimmy Olsen doesn’t run up and go “look, I got a parachute!” when Superman’s comforting Regan or whatever. But that’s largely possible because Quitely can sell it with this art.
Godel: It might also depend on the material. I recognize the overarching themes across various titles, but you can tell that he doesn’t confuse Superman with Batman with Animal Man – they lend themselves to differences that go beyond stories and moods. It’s almost a different genre, doing a Superman story. And the entire larger-than-life thing of Superman never gets problematized in All-Star Superman.
Uzumeri: That’s a really good point – the X-Men have always been catty and tongue-in-cheek to a degree, so he does that, and for Batman he just does very sardonic. His Bruce has a really dark sense of humor that you’d never see in a Superman book.
Godel: Right, and I think that extends to the specific devices that would be used to deflate the material. If you’re writing the X-Men, you don’t necessarily need a sardonic narrator: having Wolverine and Emma take Cyclops down off his high horse, you symbolically work against the X-Men’s pretensions. With Superman, maybe he’s just overwhelmed by the iconic character, and at that point he just can’t be the “ironic” dancer anymore. But that might not be giving him enough credit.
Looking at Animal Man‘s attempts at all these problems – if I wanted to pick on it, I would say that it “hasn’t dated well.” But honestly, if I’d read this at age 13 I would still be posting to message boards about how it proves that comics are art, or something.
Uzumeri: Oh God, yeah, if we’d discovered this at 13 we never would have left comics. We’d have been posting our theories on the Invisibles mailing list at 16, no question.
Godel: In full disclosure to our readers, Evangelion basically filled that gap.
Uzumeri: So anyway, Buddy comes home and finds his whole family brutally murdered, and the next issue we basically get him trying to deal with the loss and being totally unable to process it.
Godel: This was really well done, in my opinion. Comic book funeral issues are almost always terrible (didn’t someone blog about that?) but here the grief feels authentic – – I love Truog’s device of these scratchy cuts to black, not so much a fade-out as a blackout, Buddy slips in and out of touch with reality in the wake of this absolutely horrifying thing that’s happened.
Uzumeri: He’s in denial, and he’s about to commit suicide when he gets a call from Mirror Master offering him the names of the people who killed his family. Meanwhile, in a kind of clumsy scene, the assassin, Mr. Lennox, is hanging out with the Evil Council, and meeting their new robot death machine thing, Bug-Man.
Godel: The Bug-Man scene was just baffling to me. It was so over the top, you know, outlining all the capabilities of their awesome killer robot. Which feels like a genre-parody thing, but the setup is really awkward….Lennox, despite being a hardcore assassin, is afraid of retaliation, and the council is like OH WELL CHECK OUT THIS COOL ROBOT
Uzumeri: It’s so jarring in between the scenes of stuff like J’onn trying to comfort him – and in case you didn’t know, J’onn CAN understand, he lost his wife and child and actually his entire race due to a psychic virus.
Godel: In a traditional book, Bug Man would be raising the suspense for an eventual fight between Animal Man and Bug Man – how will he ever defeat this monstrously well-armed robot? But I was really involved in Buddy’s story and so the suspense was the last thing from my mind, and Buddy’s, too, because he’s about to commit suicide.
There’s an aspect of this that’s again, a little too on the nose – this is a “One more week and I can retire from the force forever!” story. Animal Man’s got his life together, Ellen’s getting her book published, and since Buddy’s quit being a superhero, the council’s efforts to stop him from animal-rights campaigning are now moot. OH THE TERRIBLE IRONY
Uzumeri: It’s almost as if some devious puppetmaster were manipulating events to create the maximum amount of drama!
Godel: Well, yeah. I mean, this is one problem of doing fourth-wall stories – – how do we make the reader still care about the characters? If Buddy does know he’s in a comic, and everything that happens to him is cruel and arbitrary, why should he (or we) be surprised when horrible things happen?
One way is to do it as the story of Job – where he eventually cracks and confront his creators/tormentor. Why, Grant, why are you doing these things to me? I sort of expect that that’s where this is going – – but in the meantime, Mirror Master has given Buddy the chance to track down the in-story villains, in a normal, non-reality-shattering sort of story.
Uzumeri: We’ll get that next time, alongside the mindbending end of the metaphysical arc as well. I can’t wait!
Godel: This must have been insane to read on a month-to-month basis. The mysteries are big and the cliffhangers are compelling…and there are these periodic issues that don’t advance the subplots at all.
Uzumeri: Thing is, it’s a Morrison book, and I’ll just say almost all of those ‘unimportant’ periodic issues end up having payoffs.
Godel: Oh, no, I agree, we’re already seeing the payoffs of things that seemed like total one-offs when they first showed up. I just mean that the subplots are weirdly paced. Lennox could have recurred in a B-story, y’know? I realize that can feel like treading water, but the same thing basically worked to keep the Shadowy Animal Man story alive. Can you imagine being the guy who’s like “Oh man, this Psycho-Pirate scene was amazing, I can’t WAIT to see where this is going!!” – – – and then they get the dolphin thing?
Uzumeri: Hahaha, yeah, the dolphin thing is one of the ones that really doesn’t pay off, unfortunately. Still – it’s kind of mindblowing that something this well-structured and mature was Morrison’s first American comic work. I mean, it’s still pretty prototypical for Morrison himself, but fairly mature by industry standards.
Godel: I’m sort of holding off on a final verdict until we tackle the last chunk, but I think the fact that I’m really hungry to do so says that, on some level, these comics work.
NEXT WEEK: Sorry, X-fans! I just can’t wait to see what happens to Buddy, so we are going to finish up with Animal Man. After that, though, you get a double dose of Claremont – see you soon!
Mirror Master is awesome.