Animal Man #1-5

 Animal Man #1-5

Originally released in 1988

Written by Grant Morrison

Art by Chaz Truog

Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man gets talked about a lot, as the character gradually becomes self aware and the story starts messing with the fourth wall in numerous ways, but I was unprepared for how gruesome these initial issues could be.  It starts simply enough - Buddy Baker, the titular Animal Man, is going through something of a mid-life crisis.  He wants to make a name for himself, to amount to something, when his stuntman work isn't working out and his superhero identity is so obscure that a kid who's a fan of superheroes thinks that he's Aquaman.

After a few false starts, he seemingly gets his big break when he gets a call from the San Diego branch of STAR Labs, which was supposedly experimenting on animals to find a cure for AIDS, only to discover that dozens of monkeys had been fused together into a horrifying monstrosity.  This turns out to be the work of a superhero by the name of B'wana Beast, who's gone a little insane after the death of his college friend and the kidnapping of his ape sidekick.

Despite his goofy looking costume, B'wana Beast's powers include the ability to fuse two animals together to combine their abilities into one (fusing more than two animals results in the aforementioned blob of monkeys), which it utilized to horrifying effect here.  The story also expands on Animal Man's powers - he can use the powers of any animals in his vicinity, such as the flight of a bird or the relative speed of an ant, and he learns the hard way that this also includes the regenerative ability of an earthworm.

The series doesn't shy away from realistic horrors as well, as Bobby's wife Ellen and their daughter Maxine take a trip to the woods, only to be accosted by a sadistic pig of a hunter who threatens to have his way with Ellen.  Fortunately, things don't go that far, but Morrison doesn't hold back on how disgusting some ordinary people can be, whether it's the hunter or Dr. Myers who runs the San Diego branch of STAR Labs.

By contrast, there aren't any supervillains in this story - even B'wana Beast, as berserk as he is, is understandably furious upon learning that his ape sidekick (along with countless other monkeys, dogs, and possibly other animals) has been infected with a biological weapon that STAR Labs had been working on.  The scenes of animals suffering from sadistic and cruel experiments reminded me of Rocket's backstory in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, and it really drove home that things haven't changed much in the thirty-five years or so between those two stories.

I could have stopped here, but I read that issue 5 was where Morrison started to take things in a more metafictional direction, and it certainly lived up to that.  The whole thing plays out like a gruesome take on a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, with a character who's very similar to (but distinct from) the Road Runner's nemesis being taken out of his cartoony world and sent to DC's universe for questioning his role in life.

The coyote can regenerate from any injury, but these injuries are portrayed far more gruesomely here than they would be in any Looney Tunes cartoon, with the narration giving vivid and disturbing descriptions of the process.  Animal Man is more of a side character here, showing up towards the end of the story (which involves a man trying to hunt and kill this coyote, viewing him as a Devil figure who's responsible for various misfortunes) and having no direct involvement in the plot, but there's still flickers of this self aware, "Duck Amuck" style relationship between the writer/artist and their creation.