Uzumeri x Godel #5: I Talked To God And Here’s What He Said (Animal Man 21-26)

Godel: Happy holidays! We’re back!

Uzumeri: So welcome to the final installment of Uzumeri x Godel’s look at Grant Morrison’s seminal run on Animal Man!

Godel: It probably goes without saying, but again this week our feature will include EXTREMELY MAJOR MASSIVE SPOILERS for Animal Man. If you’re considering reading this comic (which we recommend), buy the trades now and read us later. We’ll be here.

Also, this is our longest post to date, not only because we have many brilliant and insightful things to say, but also because I can’t bring myself to edit out any of the jokes.

Uzumeri: This time we’re covering issues #21-26, a full-out emotional and metaphysical roller coaster which features Buddy’s dark leather period, followed up by a frankly unsummarizable look at the fringes of the DC Universe – and then, of course, the long-fated meeting between Grant Morrison and Buddy Baker.

Godel: The plot here is Buddy’s quest to get his family back after their senseless murder back in #19. He tries to get revenge, he tries to rescue them via time travel, but ultimately he demands to see the real people responsible, whom he knows as the writers of his fictional life (since he sort of remembers his peyote-induced visions). After another curious metafictional vision quest, he succeeds: Grant Morrison himself invites him to his apartment for a heart-to-heart.

Uzumeri: Don’t forget he also gets called in by the yellow aliens to deal with the Second Crisis, with the whole old multiverse leaking from Psycho-Pirate’s head.

Godel: There’s a TON of material in these six issues.

Uzumeri: Let’s just kick it off with #21, where Buddy takes his revenge on the in-universe murderers, with him and Mirror Master performing a metric ton of ironic hits. It’s almost the Eighties Superhero Issue – turned HARD AND RESOLVED by the loss of his family, he pretty much becomes Dark Animal Man.

Godel: Exactly – this is Grant’s little dig at “grim and gritty” reinventions of superheroes as disturbed killers in dark clothes – – so perhaps the entire family-murder story was actually just him taking the piss out of your basic Woman in Refrigerator plot, where the hero’s supposed “growth” is him getting really pissed off when his defenseless female supporting cast is tortured.

It’s a bit of a balancing act, to be honest; Morrison wants to have the cake of the emotional payoff even while he eats the parody. Like, is the grieving back in issue 20 now supposed to be just a parody of grieving?

Uzumeri: That’s a really good point – here, it just leads to Buddy losing everything that made him unique, almost. Now he’s just yet another vigilante in a leather jacket willing to KILL FOR REVENGE. It is amazing how easygoing McCulloch is this entire time, though. He’s easily the best part of this issue – just palling around with Buddy, kind of sitting on the sidelines having a beer while Buddy exacts this insanely gory revenge.

Godel: I liked that – like Mirror Master watches guys go around getting bloody revenge every day. I think it might have been funnier if, again, Truog really turned it up to 11 on the grisliness of the revenge.

Also, Mirror Master was really just starting to annoy me…I mean, people get on Claremont for making sure somebody has a German word once a page, but this guy literally can’t say anything without it being a shoutout to Scottish mooks.

Uzumeri: You talking about the European City of Culture 1990?! It’s weird, since in Morrison’s ENTIRE REPERTOIRE, I think McCulloch might be his only actual Scottish character.

Godel: I think if you have Mirror Master in your repertoire, any other Scottish character pales in comparison. Also, you forgot to count Grant Morrison as one of Grant Morrison’s Scottish characters, but he’s pretty subdued, accent-wise, and we’ll come back to that.

I think where the parody actually really does click is (a) the costume, which is just ridiculous enough that you don’t cotton that it’s a joke the first time and (b) when he borrows a time machine under a false premises and Booster Gold – FAMOUS LYING TIME TRAVELER – is like “What kind of hero have you become?!”

Uzumeri: That was fantastic. Booster, you started your superheroic career with museum robbery!

Godel: But I could imagine a whole issue where he does these really minor, innocuous white-lie kind of things, and everybody is staggered by the DARK NEW ANIMAL MAN – that would have been hilarious.

The revenge issue reads really oddly if you take it straight, but sort of got a knowing half-smile out of me once I got that it wasn’t supposed to be taken straight. The revenges themselves are sort of perfunctory and anticlimactic, but that could also be taken as a reasonable directorial decision for the story, to show how unsatisfying the revenge is to Buddy. He’s just going through the motions. So it works on a couple levels, but I don’t think it works on any of them particularly well.

Uzumeri: The thing is, even on the level of dark revenge comics, it’s still better than most of them, you know? I mean, there’s some in-story logic at work here. Wearing leather? Animal totems.

Godel: Yeah, I almost buy that, but it makes more sense as the meta joke, like the last character that should be donning black leather in order to go DARK is the animal rights activist superhero.

Uzumeri: Well, remember he’s given up on activism at this point, too. He was already 400% disillusioned even BEFORE his family got killed.

Godel: Good point. But I mean, if this is supposed to be a proper dark revenge comic, there’s one big missing element: darkness. Everything still looks like a sunny day in Toon-Town. I would have loved to see this art team stretch themselves to do a real atmospheric riff on Dark Knight Returns or pick your other 80s touchstone. It would have strengthened both the “straight” and the “parody” reading, IMO.

Uzumeri: It’s weird actually, since Paris Cullins DOES do the ‘darker’ thing really well in his fill-in on #22.

Godel: This is the one where Buddy goes back in time to try and warn his family… but the time machine is defective, and he only comes through as an inconsistent, ghostly shape in an unfamiliar costume. In other words, he’s actually the MYSTERIOUS FIGURE that’s been casing his own house for ages, which would have been a really awesome twist if it wasn’t given away by the cover for some reason.

Uzumeri: Yeah, that utterly mystified me.  I guess maybe they figured people had already figured it out? He IS wearing the dark costume fairly clearly in the earlier issues. If the Internet had been around, I’m sure people would have put together the puzzle pieces and Buddy’s old costume on the clothesline, and come pretty close to the eventual occurrence.

Godel: But yeah, Cullins does a nice job wrenching the pathos out of Buddy coming to terms with living this ghostly existence and being unable to save his family, again. We also get this strange scene, going further back in time to when Buddy suffered a bicycle accident as a kid. It pays off the mystifying comment from #14, when Buddy tells the MYSTERIOUS FIGURE “I saw you when I was ten!” …but it’s sort of a tail-chasing exercise in answering something that didn’t need to be asked.

Uzumeri: Yeah, I never really caught why that detail was included, other than maybe to stick Buddy in the ’60s so he can hang out with the Immortal Gang.

Godel: Speaking of things I felt like I was missing! Animal Man ends up at a cafe with three immortal people (essentially interchangeable for my purposes) who spend a few minutes half-listening to him complain about his terrible fate, before convincing him to LIVE! because someone has to fight for the animals or the side of good, or whatever.

Uzumeri: Yeah, the first time I read this I did not have a damn clue who any of those people were either. It’s Jason Blood, Immortal Man and the Phantom Stranger.

Godel: I mean, it sort of doesn’t matter for the purposes of this story. They could just as easily be three faceless Cosmic Beings, or a Greek chorus, or Virgil leading Dante through Purgatory or whatever.

Uzumeri: True, but they do mention Vandal Savage in passing, and — do you know who Vandal Savage is? Because Morrison will use him a TON later on.

Godel: No.

Uzumeri: OK, well, let’s just go through these guys. The Phantom Stranger has no set origin, actually. He’s a standalone mysterious mystic guide kind of figure.

Godel: Okay.

Uzumeri: Vandal Savage, though, is a goddamn Neanderthal who found this crazy space meteor and basically became an immortal cannibalistic warlord. Immortal Man was a caveman who wasn’t a dick who found the same meteor, and they’ve been fighting each other ever since.

Savage is an awesome villain, since you can always do all these flashbacks to him being a Nazi, being part of Caligula’s reign, being part of sacking Constantinople – basically every over-the-top historical event of violence, Vandal Savage was at. And he’s got this great dichotomy between “I have lived for fifty thousand years, I am a glorious man of wealth and taste” and “ARRRRRGGHHH BEAT YOU EAT YOUR BRAINS”

Godel: WHEN THE BLITZKRIEG RAAAAGED and the FIGHTING STANK!

Uzumeri: You can probably figure why Morrison would love him so much, and he uses him in quite a few storylines coming up. You may or may not get to see Bruce Wayne wearing a gigantic dead bat go a few rounds with caveman Vandal Savage before we’re through.

Godel: Wiki tells me that Immortal Man erased himself from continuity to save us all at the end of Crisis, making him kind of a continuity Jesus. So it’s interesting that Morrison has him turn up in the same issue where Psycho Pirate’s Crisis story comes to a head.

Uzumeri: Oh, good point on the Crisis thing – he was also a member of the Forgotten Heroes alongside Animal Man and Dolphin.

Anyway, Immortal Man, Blood (aka Etrigan) and the Phantom Stranger basically give Buddy this big pep talk in the middle of the ’60s when they’re all really hopeful, which I guess is part of it too – I mean there’s a reason he didn’t just visit these guys in 1990, you know?

Godel: It makes sense – a now-jaded superhero activist gets put back in touch with the optimism of a previous age. But other than that I thought the cafe scene was pretty wanky, like out of nowhere Buddy has wandered into a Vertigo book where deathless beings have blase chats about the meaning of existence. You know? Swap out those three for Death, Dream and Delirium…

Uzumeri: This is really the beginning of what I’d call Morrison’s sort of Vertigo period in general. I think a lot of it was, yeah, he probably started reading Gaiman’s stuff and getting inspired by it — this period (including the three-issue Kid Eternity miniseries as well as Doom Patrol and Batman: Gothic) definitely has his most Gaimanesque work.

Godel: I think I wouldn’t mind it so much except that – – and this is going to be my general commentary on this whole chunk of Animal Man – – there’s this really serious problem where you’re doing, on the one hand, a story that the reader has a major investment in: Buddy’s quest, his loss, his refusal to accept that loss, etc.

And on the other hand there are, once again, these mind trips which really work against that, since (a) they just plain interrupt the flow of the story and (b) most of them are involved in the big metafictional plot which is based on reminding us that the emotions are actually arbitrary fictions.

Uzumeri: I totally see where you’re coming from with that — but I think the point Morrison’s TRYING to make is that just because the emotions are written, doesn’t make them any less real. I don’t know if I totally buy it, but it’s a philosophy that at least works with the way the book is presented.

Godel: Certainly there’s a lot of insistence from Highwater to Grant himself that fictions are “real” in some meaningful way. I think my problem has to do with the way it works as a reading experience. Like, bottom line, I’m reading this because I’ve come to give a shit about Buddy Baker, but that gets really spectacularly derailed with things like this whole huge commentary on Crisis and how great the multiverse was.

I feel like Morrison’s answer would be, well, why should it bother you? It’s just a story. For all that he says that the characters are real and will live on long after he does and so on, he also beats Buddy over the head with the fact that he doesn’t exist and can’t control his own fate. He pulls just as much connection and emotion and substance out of the story as he can get away with, but then backs off, not wanting to get caught giving a shit – the ironic dancer problem.

It’s really weird in an activist comic. Which maybe just points up that he’s trying to do several things in Animal Man and they don’t necessarily make the perfect fit.

Uzumeri: I really loved the multiverse thing the first time around, but it does seem really kind of out of place. I see why it was something Morrison needed to touch on, given the way the book was going, and it was fun to see stuff like the Love Syndicate of Dreamworld, but to a certain degree I think this is where Grant Morrison the activist starts to really run up against Grant Morrison the big-idea superhero writer. Because at this point, the book seems to have totally switched themes from “be nice to animals” to “be nice to fictional characters.” And while I see that Morrison was trying to draw a parallel there, it just seems a little twee to equate real-world animal rights issues with, you know, the death of a comic book character on paper.

Godel: Yeah, good point. I can’t tell how much the two are supposed to really be equated, or whether they’re just two things he wanted to do and this is the comic he happened to be writing. Another thing he wanted to do was do a story about how Crisis sucked, so that also went in. Because, to be precise about it, the metafictional stuff really does have at least two distinct thrusts; one is this broad thing of characters realizing they’re in stories and what their relationship is to the audience and so on, and the other is this much MUCH narrower thing of “I didn’t like Crisis.”

Uzumeri: I don’t know if it was “I didn’t like Crisis” as much as “I didn’t like what Crisis has done to the DC Universe.” I’ve seen him, on a few occasions, complimenting the story itself; I think it’s the endgame, the reduction of possibilities, that annoyed him so much. Like, he finally gets to break into DC Comics and he can’t travel to Earth-3? What is this shit?!

Godel: Okay, yeah, that’s more precise: I don’t like what Crisis did.

You know, I would probably be less interested in it, but you could imagine a much more coherent Animal Man that just ran animal rights stories for two straight years. No Coyote Gospel, no peyote on the mesa, just a man really passionate about animals who, as he says in 26, can’t do anything in the real world about it, and this is his soapbox. Which he then distances himself from by saying “but didn’t you think it was getting awful preachy?”

Uzumeri: It’s interesting that Morrison himself pulled the plug on the animal rights stuff rather than any sort of editorial influence, and also that it apparently wasn’t part of his initial plan, if it was something he CAME AROUND to, you know? At least, according to the character Grant Morrison.

Godel: It’s really interesting to look at character-Morrison’s entire speech in 26, just as a study in someone trying to make sense of what they’ve been working on, andat the same time conveying this sort of cool, ironic, writerly persona, but not so cool that he seems like he’s trying to make himself seem cool, etc.

But we should get into the Crisis thing in a little more detail: Psycho Pirate, who previously just seemed like a signpost for Highwater, finally boils over and his powers enable him to resurrect a bunch of lost multiverse characters. The continuity cop aliens smell imminent disaster, and it’s a kooky night at Arkham Asylum as Highwater and Animal Man try to get settle things down.

Uzumeri: It turns into Morrison inventing or reintroducing a bunch of characters who all discover that they’re fictional, and then it ends – and I’d totally forgotten about this – with the payoff to the Invasion! tie-in issue, where Buddy remembers Hawkman’s advice and just turns off the big super-bomb from Earth-Alan-Moore.

Also a good way to deal with comics that grow out of control!

I know you said you weren’t crazy on this issue, but it does have some great moments – Psycho-Pirate imagining the terrible universe Overman is from is kind of hilarious, since it’s just him having worse and worse ideas.

Godel: So wait, the dumb evil Superman is an Alan Moore thing? That’s hilarious, given what you’ve said about their relationship, and how explicit the writing is, with Psycho-Pirate basically going “god, what a stupid idea for a Superman story.”

Uzumeri: Oh, it’s not EXPLICITLY an Alan Moore thing, but it’s a pastiche of a bunch of stuff – Rick Veitch’s Maximortal, Alan Moore’s Miracleman, all those late-’80s self-consciously superdark comics about how superheroes are really dumb and for children and what the Hell is wrong with you for liking them, get out of your parents’ basement.

Godel: Yeah, it seems like Morrison maybe just recently read a lot of those comics and got really irritated by them. I mean, we had the Watchmen thing back with the Red Mask, but it’s really just in these last couple issues that Morrison turns his ire on this idea that the way to make superheroes “grown up” is to act like you’re too cool for them and add lots of pointless sex and violence. As much irony is in play in #26, it’s clear that the dude really does love superheroes (and resents violence) and that’s pretty cool.

Uzumeri: I’m maybe being unfair to Miracleman, but – I think in the Grant Morrison documentary, someone pointed out that Moore and Morrison both wanted to bring the real world and comics worlds together, but went in totally different directions. Moore tried to make the world of the superheroes more real, while Morrison tried to move us into the world of the superheroes.

Godel: That makes a lot of sense. Like there’s something powerful to him about the wide-eyed wonder and imaginal possibility of superheroics (or maybe science fiction generally), and what it could mean to people to embrace more of that. I mean, not that that’s all stated in Animal Man but I could believe the seeds are there.

Not to be That Guy, but I’m really interested in this because it corresponds – albeit loosely – with some key points of contention in contemporary architectural debate. But I’ll save that for whenever I revive my architecture blog.

Uzumeri: It’s interesting, since his basic idea here from a metafictional perspective is to say that you really need to respect the universe and the characters; his writing philosophy is “bend, don’t break.” But he communicates this by taking the DC Universe and sticking it in a Cuisinart.

Godel: I would say that he wants the multiverse because he wants the playground, and he wants the playground because he wants to produce a feeling of play and possibility. And maybe bend-don’t-break comes in because the playground is only fun to play in when it has a certain consistency and dreamlike internal consistency. If you push it too hard you wreck that for everybody. But I mean, this is a comic where people literally knock down the walls of panels and behold the terrible gaze of the readers, so I’m not sure he’d really thought all this through.

Uzumeri: Yeah, exactly. “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Godel: There’s actually a lot in this story that interested me – I was just resentful, on maybe an unsophisticated level, at having Buddy’s story knocked aside for the sake of this little tangent. Even if Buddy’s story is a metafictional one, this isn’t really the metafictional story he’s working his way through, and anyway it would have made more sense back as part of the last yellow aliens story, all the post-crisis “fixing the universe” stuff. I just can’t imagine that Buddy at this point cares one bit about the multiverse or making sure it stays contained within Psycho Pirate’s mask.

Uzumeri: I also totally don’t get what Highwater was really there for, considering how his story ended. His entire role in Animal Man is still kind of a cipher – I mean, I guess maybe the POINT was that he was the writer’s tool for throwing in some Native American cosmology and mythology combined with the modern-day POV of a physicist, but you still have a character who only exists to drive the plot forward.

Godel: Highwater’s whole schtick from his early appearances was that he had no idea what he was doing or why, he just did what the plot made him do. But when someone gets that much page time and that many word balloons I’m going to want something more to hold my attention. Animal Man’s a walking device for Morrison to talk about animal rights – he tells us that – but he’s also an interesting person with aspirations, emotions, relationships with other characters, and interesting flaws.

Uzumeri: Yeah, exactly, whereas Highwater…. like, I still don’t get the point of his hallucination, and him getting tricked by the talking eagle. If the bird told him to put on the mask, leading to where he ends up I’d see the point, but this way … I don’t.

Godel: Has he ever shown up since? It’d be kind of ironic if the continuity de facto erased him by never referring to him or this story again.

Uzumeri: That’s basically what happened. The next time we saw Psycho Pirate, it was inexplicably Roger Hayden again, with mask, in Infinite Crisis.

Godel: ….nice.

So, then we have #25, in which Buddy undertakes your classic Hero’s Epic Journey across many seasons and many deserts, on a quest to find his creator and demand answers.

Uzumeri: It also introduces Limbo, the home of DC Comics characters when they aren’t currently being written. And it’s great to see how many of these guys have since totally gotten out, like Detective Chimp. And, I mean, Mister Freeze?!

I’m afraid my condition leaves me COLD to your pleas for mercy.

Godel: Yeah, Mister Freeze is the highlight of this comic. I dunno how long he was out of circulation at the time but it’s still hard to imagine.

Uzumeri: Did you also notice the parallel made between limbo characters and endangered species? Limbo has monuments to the dodo and the great auk, and this grave-in-progress for the tiger….

Godel: Well, plus the little aside that it’s the out-of-circulation ANIMAL characters that nobody will ever bring back. I guess thinking animal characters are corny is the same as running sadistic experiments on lab animals?

Uzumeri: Man, now I want to see SUPER-animal testing in the DCU. Hoppy the Marvel Bunny with incurable cancer and lipstick all over him. Comet the Super-Horse being brutally beaten.

Godel: Yeah, uh, I don’t think Morrison will be writing that one any time soon.

Uzumeri: That is probably a safe bet.

Godel: This is very similar to the Psycho Pirate story in that it’s not so much about the relationship of characters/fiction to readers/reality, as it is about the DC Universe specifically. I think it’s more successful, because Buddy is at the center of things again, and even though it’s all kind of dreamlike and unreal in its pacing, I still want to see whether he gets where he’s going.

Uzumeri: This issue was probably great for people who’ve been reading DC for years and years — but I’m really not the target market for “oh man, yeah, the Inferior Five!”

Godel: Me either; I sort of just took them as “well, here’s these goofy people” and was fine. Except for Mister Freeze, I didn’t recognize any of the people Buddy meets along his way, but the mythological/storytelling structure of this is so well-established that it kind of carries it along.

I’m a big fan of using strong genre conventions as an armature when you want to do formalistic weirdness. And basically this is a Wizard of Oz story: Buddy starts at home, finds that home whisked away to a land of kooky oddballs, he sets out along the road towards a special city, meets three people along the way, eventually gets to meet the Wizard (who turns out to be a humbug) and ends up home again.

Uzumeri: I hadn’t made the Wizard of Oz connection, but holy shit, you are so dead on I don’t even know where to start.

Godel: It gets better: he’s carrying a little furry animal along with him the whole way.   Mister Freeze is clearly the Tin Man, looking for “heart” in Buddy’s family photos, the Red Bee stutters like the Cowardly Lion (although it’s blamed on the cold weather)….

Uzumeri: I love the desperate feeling everything has in Limbo, like this is the last time anything could happen there. And then there’s the monkey, who’s apparently writing all the scripts of the DC Universe, as far as I can tell – I’m still really unclear on whether or not he was supposed to be an existing character. Since, I mean, he had to end up IN Limbo somehow.

Godel: Yeah, I hadn’t really considered the conceptual status of the monkey. Everyone else in Limbo takes the monkey really seriously, but it doesn’t actually make sense to say that the place where DC comics get written is the place where characters go when no one’s writing them. Was the monkey supposed to be writing all the comics, or just this one? Is there really a monkey at all???

Uzumeri: I’m pretty sure the monkey wrote ALL the comics. But I have no evidence for that within Animal Man.

Godel: It’s too much monkey business for me.

Uzumeri: Ha! But this all leads up to the point we’ve been dancing around this entire conversation – Buddy taking a leisurely stroll through Glasgow until he ends up at Grant Morrison’s front door, and they have a little chat.

Godel: Just for the record, I know I’ve expressed some ambivalence, maybe even a certain conservativism, in reference to the metafictional material here – but Grant opening the door and inviting Buddy in to talk was totally awesome. It wasn’t a blindside twist, it really felt like the natural payoff to a story that had been building at least since “I can see you!” as far as Buddy was concerned and since “Coyote Gospel” as far as Morrison was concerned.

Uzumeri: I know you called this a while ago, and truly, ever since “Coyote Gospel,” this was the ONLY way this story could reasonably end. Anything less than this, especially after “I CAN SEE YOU!”, would have almost been a copout. Especially considering the little vignettes peppered in earlier with Morrison.

Godel: Which turn out to be really significant foreshadowing for that final zing – – Morrison is insistent that Animal Man is fictional and has no capacity to speak for himself, just like his imaginary friend Foxy couldn’t really flash a light back at him. But when Morrison turns his back, it turns out the light flashes. Which, of course, Morrison wrote into this comic. But it’s essentially as miraculous as Animal Man being able to convince Morrison to write his family back to life, which he does.

Uzumeri: Yeah, that original Foxy story was no joke. And he wrote Foxy in earlier, even, as Buddy’s spirit guide during the peyote trip.

Godel: The Foxy thing is also, the point where I do buy into Morrison’s point about the “real” power of fictions. He’s a grown man, out at night flashing a light in the dark, feeling ridiculous probably, but praying that this character he made up in his head will speak back to him – – – and his faith is rewarded, even though for the sake of pathos the Morrison drawn on the page doesn’t get to see it. His imaginary friend, despite being imaginary, offers him some kind of answers, some kind of support.

Uzumeri: It’s like — if you believe it, does it matter whether or not it’s real? And it all kind of ties in with that high-level Bohm stuff he was expositing during the peyote trip, the idea that it’s ALL an illusion or a representation of a higher level of reality.

Godel: Have you ever read Flatland?

Uzumeri: No, I’m afraid not. What’s the deal with it?

Godel: Oh, it’s great! Late 19th century novella, about a square from a two-dimensional world, who makes contact with a line in a one-dimensional world, before being visited by a terrifying sphere from our three-dimensional world. He then visits our world and is flabbergasted; naturally when he goes back to Flatland and tries to explain this mind-bending “third dimension,” everybody thinks he’s crazy. They might kill him, just to make the whole Plato’s Cave thing a little more explicit.

Uzumeri: Yeah, that’s VERY similar to the stuff Morrison’s getting at here. The entire 2D/3D space intersection becomes way more explicit later, ESPECIALLY in Invisibles.  I mean, this is really the beginning of those ideas of cross-sectioning time, like panels are cross-sections of a 2D world.

Godel: Obviously there are lots of stories with higher/lower levels of reality or whatever, so I dunno if Morrison necessarily had Flatland up his sleeve here. But it’s worth a skim.

Uzumeri: It’s an idea that could have come from a bunch of sources, but Morrison’s really made it his own in terms of the specific application to comics.

Godel: But I really was charmed by this finale – there were some awkward bits as I’ve suggested above, but the Grant/Buddy conversation actually clicked really well, and had this very peaceful rhythm to it.

Uzumeri: It’s interesting how he portrays himself, not too geeky, not too cool, definitely the most Regular Joe he’s ever represented himself as. But he makes no apologies for being the villainous mastermind pulling the strings: he manipulated Buddy to do what he wants, and he did it because he wanted drama. The cover even highlights this: it’s Morrison, sitting in a chair, STROKING A CAT like a Bond villain for God’s sake, seemingly stepping on Buddy’s body.

Godel: Plus, all these things where he calls forth random dumb supervillains for Animal Man to beat up, saying this is how it works in comics, the artist needs to have something interesting to draw and it seems like the best we can do is turn complex ideological disputes into dumb fistfights.

Which is funny by itself – Morrison giving his long spiel of thank-yous to everyone who worked on the comic, while Buddy gets his ass kicked in the background…. but it also calls upon the reader to review the whole previous 25 issues with a more cynical eye. He’s not just criticizing the shortcomings of other comics, but also drawing a sigh looking at what he’s penned and knowing it can’t really live up to his ambitions.

Uzumeri: It’s a very self-deprecating stance, right down to him saying that he hasn’t said anything worth saying. This is before Morrison made a big point out of mythologizing himself, before he started inserting himself into the comics in OTHER ways, to transform himself into his characters. Basically, before he did King Mob, which he’s said he did because he noticed Neil Gaiman was attracting all kinds of cute goth chicks.

Godel: Ahahahahaha, that’s hilarious. And it could also be because he realized the limitations of what he did with Animal Man. You really can only do this story once, and I wouldn’t be interested in reading another Grant Morrison series where the hero eventually battles his way to Grant Morrison’s flat.

Uzumeri: There’s no reason to do it again – the surprise would be gone, and more important, the novelty. This is the only time Morrison’s ever explicitly inserted himself into his work, even though he revisits the themes in Animal Man over and over and over again. When we see this material again in Final Crisis, he’s replaced himself as the evil writer with the otherworldly Monitors.

Also, John Ostrander and Kim Yale killed off Morrison in an issue of Suicide Squad.

Godel: Really!?

Uzumeri: They introduced “the Writer,” who looked just like Grant, as part of this team, and I believe Deadshot shoots him square between the eyes.

Godel: Hahaha, that’s also really funny.

It’s particularly interesting in Animal Man, because the continuity cop aliens could have played the part of the arbitrary force moving Buddy through the paces… but it’s important for all the “this is just a comic book” material to have the real-world writer actually show up. I get the impression Morrison did this, and found he’d said all he wanted to say about it being “just” a comic book. So he went back to seeing what he could do with just-comic-books.

Uzumeri: Also, this is Morrison’s first big work for US comics, and throwing yourself into the comic is exactly the kind of thing a 20-something does, not a 40-something (usually).

Godel: Yeah – it’s something I’m sure everyone who’s ever drawn a comic has been tempted to do, even for just asides and little gags. Hell, we saw Claremont and Cockrum running from Firelord a few weeks ago, although this is obviously somewhat more central to the aims of the comic.

Uzumeri: I can certainly understand why this gave him an early reputation as someone fearless, and also someone who absolutely pisses off DCU continuity nerds to no end.

Godel: Really? This seems so totally harmless, not to mention he throws the die-hards a lot of bones, digging up these limbo characters like the Inferior Five, our old buddy B’Wana Beast, etc.

Uzumeri: It’s funny, because you can imagine that this was a fringe title when it first hit, and even though it played so much with the DCU characters, it must have been somewhat under the radar since it pretty much takes a gigantic shit all over DC’s post-Crisis editorial fiats. And they basically go, “let’s never mention this again” – for a while, this entire comic was considered outside of DC continuity, I think, and retroactively Vertigo.

Godel: I think we have to concede that he sort of paints them into a corner here. Like, either you never mention this again, and treat it as an out-of-continuity, creator-driven oddity, or it wrecks the whole universe. He frankly paints himself into the same corner; once he opens the can of worms, the best he can do to end the run and pass it on to someone else is flat-out hit the reset button.

Granted, the reset button is sort of woven in thematically so that it doesn’t feel cheap, but he pretty much admits he has no other ideas for how to end this comic.

Uzumeri: The thing is, it’s NOT an end. He even says so – “someone else is going to take over.” And Peter Milligan did, for a few issues.

Godel: So he also gives Buddy his family back partly so there’s a workable status quo for Milligan. Has any of the rest of the title ever been anthologized? I can tell from ILX reactions that a lot of people realllllly hated where it eventually went.

Uzumeri: It went on to 89 issues, and no. It eventually had Buddy starting an animal cult and he turned into a gigantic bird and it completely left the DCU, which I really can’t imagine since it started out so incredibly tied to it.

This may have something to do with the fact that Karen Berger left the book after #26. Berger was editing this, Sandman, Hellblazer and a bunch of other titles, as well as having edited Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. She basically single-handedly jumpstarted the Vertigo imprint, and found the entire first wave of British writers.

Godel: Yeah, kudos to her on that – has there ever been a more influential non-EIC editor at either of the Big Two? I mean, that’s a hell of a legacy.

Uzumeri: Julius Schwartz, maybe, or Mort Weisinger… but yeah, the book is pretty much completely forgettable after this as far as I’m aware.

Godel: And at the time they probably figured that, whoever inherits it, it’s going to have to be a bit more normal without Berger at the helm. Although I would not have previously categorized gigantic bird animal cult comics as “normal.”

Uzumeri: Nor Peter Milligan comics – I don’t think it got more “normal” at all, just less metafictional.

Godel: Yeah, different type of “weird” altogether. I have to say I’d love to read that abortive Milligan run, but that’s neither here nor there.

Uzumeri: So Morrison knows this is going to go on to someone else, that this is the end of his story. He sticks around on Doom Patrol for a long while longer, but that book moves farther and farther away from the DCU and more into standalone territory.

I imagine that Morrison probably figured he’d go from here to more and more avant-garde comics, which he really does until he receives the JLA job offer.

Godel: Yeah, it’s kind of funny to think back and consider that at this point Morrison might have seen Animal Man as like, his one and only proper superhero comic, like he gets to go play in this particular genre for a while.

Uzumeri: Exactly – here he’s just sort of this weird off-side critically acclaimed guy getting decent sales, while today he’s basically sitting on top of the entire mainstream market.

The thing about this issue, though, is that it also brings forward the marriage of Morrison’s life and work. It’s the reason I recommended you watch Talking With Gods – I know you’ve said that you aren’t as interested in authorial intent, but the problem is that Morrison is VERY interested in studying his own authorial intent through his comics.

Godel: I think that’s actually the most interesting thing about #26 – not that he’s having a chat with the characters, but that he’s using them to question himself. He starts off very clear, giving Buddy a talking-to about his place is in the universe… but by the end he’s flashing his light to Foxy, not at all certain about what he’s expecting to happen.

Uzumeri: Well, there’s the line in the peyote issue when Highwater says that someone’s controlling the writer, as well. Which is really the first major hint of the fifth-dimensional entities influencing OUR lives, that we saw in Invisibles and JLA. It’s not just Grant questioning himself, it’s him wondering if some dick is writing the drama of HIS life.

Godel: To be completely honest, that’s maybe the least interesting aspect of this for me, just because all it really does is open up really well-worn debates over free will. But I’m willing to keep an open mind if it turns out he really has something new to say about it.

Uzumeri: Honestly, other than Invisibles, he never really comes back to it later, thankfully, since it is very tiring and a totally pointless question to ask. I mean, since we’re never going to have K’klox the God-Man come down to tell us about how he made me answer that exam question wrong.

Godel: Or restore our lost loved ones, unfortunately. I’m holding out hope for Time Commander though.

Uzumeri: When you look at it, Morrison really is conflating the animals and the characters here – might makes right, you know? Since the writer is more powerful than the character, therefore they have the right to abuse them as much as they want.   This whole thing:

Hence the restoration of the Bakers.

Godel: I stand by my earlier reading – restoring the family is (1) just tidying up, since the death of the family was really just a way to kickstart his commentary on DARK and REALISTIC comics (2) trying to give the next writer something to work with, and (3) a way of paralleling Grant’s experience with Foxy, that the fictional character is able to reach back and make an impression on his creator.

As far as Buddy’s story is concerned, it’s enough; the issue is a sort of extended apology for putting Buddy through so much crap just to make a point. But there’s enough of a surrounding story to the retraction so that it has some weight of its own.

Uzumeri: When you think about it, this issue is very much a psychodrama not just in the dramatic sense, but also in the psychological treatment sense. Yeah, it’s Morrison talking to Buddy, but more than anything, this is 22 pages of Morrison working out how to write comics in his own head.

Godel: Yeah, and since both of them are actually written by Morrison, it’s pretty much just externalizing an argument he was presumably having with himself.

Uzumeri: Exactly. In any case, I think the fact that we’ve talked for this long about it means the book achieved what it wanted to. Animal Man is probably one of the most purely thought-provoking runs in superhero comics, and the fact that it’s all packed into 26 issues is pretty impressive.

Godel: It’s definitely been a satisfying journey. I could easily imagine a fourth-wall finale that made the whole rest of the series feel like the setup for a cheap joke, but this was a solid landing, and plus, I think most of the stories held up on their own terms anyway. You don’t need this ending for Coyote Gospel to work, let alone the Red Mask, the mourning issue, or any of the other highlights.

Uzumeri: And yet, nothing feels unnecessary, you know? Even if not to the plot, pretty much every issue slowly builds on the THEMES, taking us here.

Godel: Well, what I really like about it, as a whole, is that while he clearly had a plan, the run as a whole is this unlikely hodgepodge. We alternated between comedy sit-com superheroics, animal rights activism, jabs at the post-Crisis status quo, and meditations on the “realness” of fiction. It’s not a singularly conceived thing with one Big Message that it all adds up to, it’s a guy writing a superhero comic and trying to use it to tackle some stuff that was on his mind, and I think it’s actually better for that.

It wouldn’t have been as fun to read if it’d been conceived from the top down as a self-contained graphic novel of a few hundred pages. There’s something really organic and almost improvisational to the miscellaneity of it as published month-to-month.

Uzumeri: Absolutely. People often complain that the month-to-month of Morrison’s writing, and the way he kind of switches things up on the fly, is a detriment to his writing, but I really don’t agree. He’s excellent at the month-to-month — even though we read these in chunks, the single issues in arcs could be pretty satisfying experiences.

Godel: Yeah, almost every issue was a complete story in itself. It sort of surprises me looking back at how much would happen in a single issue – like, the entire Limbo quest/Oz thing is contained in 25! That’s really great.

Uzumeri: These last few issues were actually really discrete. The grieving issue, the revenge issue, the time travel issue, the Immortals of the ’60s issue, the Psycho-Pirate incident, Limbo, Talkin’ Wit Grant.

Godel: Well, Psycho-Pirate overlapped the Immortal thing a little. But honestly, it’s true of the entire run, and I wish every comic was like that today. It really justifies the price tag, for one thing.

Uzumeri: I’m happy to tell you that it’s something that won’t go away as long as we do this. Even when he does a 3- or 4-part arc, each issue has recognizable events in it that make it distinct from others, as opposed to, like… what issue of Secret Invasion did they rescue Reed in? I dare you to remember

Godel: Ahhahahah, yeah, exactly!

Uzumeri: While, I mean, you ask me what issue something happened in Final Crisis, and I can tell you immediately. And not just because I’m a Morrison’s Whorrison.

Godel: So, what’s next for us?

Uzumeri: Next up is BATMAN: GOTHIC with Klaus Janson, as well as a story he did in Secret Origins #50 re-explaining the famous Flash #123 in the post-Crisis continuity. You saw Flash #123 tons in the Psycho-Pirate issue – it’s actually the comic that introduced the multiverse, with Barry Allen traveling to Earth-2 to hang out with Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash. Morrison rewrites it to not involve multiple Earths at all, which is no mean feat.

Godel: Awesome! We will get a little break from Morrison first, though; to compensate for the double-whammy of Animal Man, we’ll be doing two consecutive X-Men sessions before returning to our regular rotation. Spoiler alert: the next X-Men chunk does not feature Cyclops arguing with Chris Claremont about the meaning of his comic-book suffering. I mean…. not more than we already got back in issue #94.

Uzumeri: DAMN!

Godel: Thanks, everybody for joining us on our waltz through Animal Man. It’s been a lot of fun, and we hope to have you onboard as I continue getting schooled in the ways of Grant Morrison!