Animal Man #19-26

Animal Man #19-26

Originally released in 1990

Written by Grant Morrison

Art by Chaz Truog (#19-21, 23-26), Paris Cullins (#22)

Still high on peyote, Animal Man discovers several major secrets about the universe.  In addition to learning about the full nature of his powers (he doesn't have to be near an animal to use their powers; he can simply think of any animal from any time period and it will work), he encounters a vision (?) of pre-Crisis Animal Man, who rants about how "they" kill billions for entertainment and asks if he was good enough for "them".

However, the third secret is yet to come.  Hearing a voice telling him to turn around, Animal Man does so, and he's met with the most disturbing and horrifying sight that he's ever seen.

By "you", he doesn't mean some mysterious in-universe figure; he means you, the person reading the comic. It continues the idea of fourth wall breaking being used for horror rather than comedy, as Animal Man seems unsettled by what he sees and it doesn't seem like his brain can handle it.

As Buddy and Highwater discuss what they saw, a fox tells them that knowledge comes with a price. Buddy immediately realizes that it's referring to his wife Ellen, and then he vanishes.

As Buddy's vision ends, Highwater is met by the eagle totem of his ancestors, who convinces him that he needs to make a leap of faith.  He follows through with it, believing it will help him reach a new understanding of time and space.

Despite my initial thought that Highwater died here now that his role in the plot was done, it's quickly revealed that this jump was simply part of the vision and he's still alive in reality, with Buddy on the ground next to him. Buddy returns home, filled with a new sense of purpose, only to discover that while he was gone, the unthinkable happened.

His wife and children were all senselessly murdered by the hitman Lennox from the previous issues.  He spends the next issue lost in a fog, depressed and tempted to end it all, before he gets a phone call from Mirror Master, who's willing to help Animal Man find his family's killers. (he had misgivings about the job because he didn't want to kill women and children, and the heads of the conspiracy still owe him money)

Over the next issue, Animal Man mercilessly slaughters the people behind the assassination along with Lennox.  It reminds me of what happened at the end of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, though more cathartic.  In Swamp Thing, the government conspiracy tried and failed to kill Swamp Thing before they were killed.  Here, these people were responsible for the deaths of Animal Man's family, and try as he might, there doesn't seem to be anything that he can do to bring them back. (also, they're slightly more fleshed out as characters, which serves to make them all the more hateful)

He certainly tries, though.  After lying about why he needed a time machine, Animal Man uses it to go back in time and to try and warn his family about September 27th, only to realize that he's doomed to failure because he already saw this happen from his younger self's perspective.

While stuck in the past due to the malfunctioning time machine, where he's effectively a ghost, Animal Man is surprised that a total stranger can see him.  Then again, the stranger is something of a phantom himself. (it's the Phantom Stranger - for a character that I knew nothing about and one who I haven't gone out of my way to focus on, he's shown up surprisingly often in my readings this year)

In the present, the Psycho-Pirate (the only person who remembers pre-Crisis DC) is slowly going crazier from that knowledge, with comics and characters from that era leaking out around him.  It feels like Grant Morrison commenting on how much potential is lost by wiping some of these characters away, though given that it's coming from the Psycho-Pirate, I'm not sure if that's intended to be the case or not.

Some of his visions of alternate universes would feel like they were making fun of The Boys or Injustice nowadays, except this issue predated those stories by decades.  I guess the whole "evil Superman" bit was a cliche even back then.

By talking things over with the Phantom Stranger and his fellow immortals, Animal Man is convinced to focus on life rather than death and returns to the present, where the yellow aliens are waiting to bring him to Arkham Asylum.  As he's manifesting more out-of-continuity characters, Psycho-Pirate is slowly fading, though in the process, he's making these other characters more and more aware of the fourth wall.

Weirdly enough, Ultraman, the Earth-3 version of Superman (from a world where morality is reversed and heroes are villains) gets a lot of development here - he remembers Crisis on Infinite Earths, he remembers charging into an anti-matter wave in a futile effort to stop it from consuming his world, and when faced with Overman, a psychotic version of Superman armed with a doomsday bomb, he refuses to let that happen again.

Animal Man manages to resolve the situation by going through the breach in the panels, taking Overman there before squishing him within an increasingly shrinking panel.  Funnily enough, the idea that "darker and edgier means more realistic" was apparently prevalent when this comic was coming out as well; I've seen plenty of cases where people criticize lighter series because they're not "realistic" enough. (that is, they're not grim, gritty, and depressing)

The yellow aliens prove to be useless (figuring that they can't interfere with the story), so Buddy uses a lesson that he learned all the way back in the early issues of this series and just hits the off switch on the bomb.  As Psycho-Pirate fades out of continuity, Highwater takes his place, wearing his mask and keeping what was destroyed during the Crisis from entering the universe.

Upon returning home, Animal Man walks outside only to find himself in Comic Book Limbo.  He's greeted by Merryman, a character who also appeared in Final Crisis in a similar role - I'm not sure if he's some important historical figure (like the star of the very first comic that DC made), or if Grant Morrison just likes the character.

During Animal Man's time in Limbo, he encounters other obscure, outdated, or long-forgotten characters.  One of them is, funnily enough, going to wind up getting out of Limbo very, very soon, thanks to a successful reinvention in an animated series that turned the character into one of DC's most tragic villains.

Following a script page that he finds, Animal Man winds up in an ordinary-looking city where he discovers the architect of all of his pain and misery.  The source of seemingly every bad thing that happened to him, from the deaths of his wife and children to a bike accident when he was ten years old.  The person who seems determined to make his life a living hell.

The ultimate mastermind of the events of Grant Morrison's Animal Man run: Grant Morrison.  Despite what Animal Man thinks at first, Grant Morrison didn't create him, though they have been writing Animal Man's stories for the past few years.  Animal Man doesn't take it well.

Or does he?

Grant Morrison shows Animal Man some comics to give him an idea of what his world's like to the people outside of it, and to explain how much simpler things are in Animal Man's world by comparison.  Grant Morrison had been planning for this to happen for a while now, but now that it's actually happening, they have writer's block. (the line between Grant Morrison the writer and Grant Morrison the character in Animal Man is extremely blurry, so I'm not sure if Morrison actually had writer's block when writing this scene or not)

Morrison takes the time to admit the shortcomings in their own writing, and the conversation turns to the fact that this is Morrison's last story with the character.  Soon, someone else will take over, and for all Morrison knows, the next writer will go for shock value by turning Buddy into a meat-eater after Morrison's run had him become a vegetarian.

Morrison admits that all of this talking might have bored the readers, so they create some villains for Animal Man to fight while they give thanks to their co-workers and the audience, including supportive fans who kept them going.

Morrison's gone on talking for too long, and now they're running out of space.  Still, they take a final opportunity to deliver a message that they seem to want to leave with the readers, before telling Buddy to forget that this ever happened.

Buddy wakes up in his home, where seemingly as a favour to Buddy (or to the next writer, who might not want to deal with Buddy's angst over his dead wife and kids), it's revealed that everything from the past few issues was just a dream, and his family is alive and well.  Morrison is disappointed in this ending, having criticized it earlier, and adds an epilogue about his childhood imaginary friend Foxy, who (in the world of Animal Man, at least) might not be so imaginary after all.

This was certainly an unusual experience.  I knew about Grant Morrison being a character, and that Animal Man learned about the fourth wall, but I wasn't aware that by the end, so many characters broke the fourth wall that I'm surprised that there's even a fourth wall left at this point.  This was an enjoyable, bizarre, dark, touching, thought-provoking, and weirdly funny run that served as a love letter to DC's forgotten and ignored characters.  I've got less than a month left, and I can hardly believe that Animal Man and Swamp Thing wound up being two of my favourite DC comics that I've read for this blog. (I don't think I would have predicted that when I came up with the idea for this blog)