Animal Man: WTF?

The fact that they needed to continually throw the increasingly unlikeable characters thru even more shit with each story-arc just made it worse. And then at the end of each major one, they just say, fuggit, time for a reset button, and killed the guy again.

And they wondered why the run got cancelled at #89. I know! maybe they shoulda had more fucking scenes!

I doubt this is of any interest to any of you, but I wrote a paper for my Literature + Ethics course partially on Animal Man. Linking it here just in case someone gets REALLY bored.

http://m.shinefield.googlepages.com/comix%2Bchronos

And some of it is really WTF, in honor of this thread.

My friend David and have started a blog project where we're reading G-Mo's Animal Man chunk by chunk and then commenting on it. (On alternate weeks we'll be continuing our temporarily stalled journey through Claremont's X-Men.) Anyway, if you're into that kinda thing, it's here: http://kangaratms.com/

I thought you were doin the X-Men!

Well, it's been a bit of a stalled start, with my co-blogger having a lot of travel/work/family visit stuff going on in succession, but the IDEA at least is that we'll be alternating X-Men weeks and Animal Man weeks. Cross fingers!

That was an interesting read, thanks! To be honest though, as fun as "Coyote Gospel" is, I've never really understood what Morrison was trying to say with it. That fictional slapstick cartoon animals suffer too, and we should care about their suffering? That creators tend to treat their creations sadistically, and that is wrong? Does anyone have any idea?

Hmm, maybe "fun" wasn't a good word to describe "Coyote Gospel", it's more like "interesting".

can you ask Uzumeri to please annotate the Neal Adams Batman? Needs to be done. Thanks.

Yeah, I have no idea whether there's really a deep meaning to be taken away from Coyote Gospel - - - I enjoyed it basically as a good yarn with a twist, the payoff being that this perfectly serviceable zombie coyote story actually turns out to be about Wile E. Coyote thrust cruelly into our own world, where death and mayhem involve a lot more suffering than they do onscreen.

re: Adams, I'll mention it but I think he has his plate well full with Morrison! :)

Yeah, I have no idea whether there's really a deep meaning to be taken away from Coyote Gospel - - - I enjoyed it basically as a good yarn with a twist, the payoff being that this perfectly serviceable zombie coyote story actually turns out to be about Wile E. Coyote thrust cruelly into our own world, where death and mayhem involve a lot more suffering than they do onscreen.

This is true for most of the story, but the crucifixion image in the end plus the final meta twist certainly imply that Morrison was trying to do something deeper here; the coyote died as a martyr for all the suffering of fictional characters, or something like that. I don't really get it.

I don't think there's much more to get, and that you're way overthinking it.

I think there's a definite connection between "Coyote Gospel" and the final issue of Morrison's AM... IIRC in the final issues Morrison argues to Animal Man that suffering of fictional characters is necessary for a good yarn, but in the end he still shows AM the kind of mercy the coyote's (in-story) creator didn't have for the coyote. So what/whom did the coyote die for? I don't asking this question is "overthinking it", why would Morrison have put such an obvious crucifixion image to the comic if it didn't have some meaning?

He was obviously drawing a parallel between Wile E. and that other fictional character who suffered injuries that would be fatal in any non-fictional person and yet was in nearly-perfect physical condition in his very next appearance in the story.

Jesus was a real jump the shark moment for the Bible.

Before Happy Days, those moments were known as "rolling the stone".

Yo hey, we finished the Morrison run! Collected posts here: http://en.wordpress.com/tag/uggu-animal-man-by-grant-morrison/ . SPOILERS aplenty though, especially in #4 and #5.

Er, this link is prettier: http://kangaratms.com/category/uggu-animal-man-by-grant-morrison/

lmfao @ Crisis on Infinite Earths summary

Favourite bit is the Dibny diversion.

haha, thanks guys!

Really enjoying these! Gonna go back and read my old back issues before I read the last two posts, so I don't re-spoiler myself.

Back when I was a young nerd, Brian Bolland drew me an Animal Man sketch. Gotta dig that out...

I had no idea about that Red Mask/Wes Anderson homage thingy.

I always thought it was weird that Animal Man was a G-Mo title and a Vertigo title, but at the same time, when it first started out, he was in, like, Justice League Europe...

It wasn't a Vertigo title when Morrison was writing it, since Vertigo started only a couple of years after his run was over. His run is all about mainstream DC superheroes. All the "mature" DC titles (Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Sandman, Hellblazer, Doom Patrol, Shade the Changing Man) that started before Vertigo were originally part of the main DC universe (even Sandman has that early issue with the Justice League, and other pre-existing DC characters such as the superhero Sandman and Doctor Destiny also appear in it), but they were gradually cut off of it when the new imprint was launched. Since then, Doom Patrol and Animal Man have returned to main DC universe, which makes sense I guess, since unlike the other pre-Vertigo characters they're superheroes with a long history in DC comics.

Yeah i know about the Justice League appearing in early issues of Sandman and all, but there's a difference between bringing J'onn in for an issue for a couple of jokes, and actually having a Grant Morrison character involved on an issue-to-issue basis in the height of the Giffen/DeMatteis era...i've yet to read Animal Man; I imagine Morrison can do his de-construction thing (if it can accurately be called that) with a character who punches the clock every thirty days in JLE and makes the transition seem seamless without once breaking a sweat--I just thought it was weird...

Animal Man was Morrison's first DC work at all, and he'd barely done anything in a shared continuity before (idk if Zoids had any real continuity, so his [excellent!] 2nd Dr Who is the only thing that comes to mind [since the other two were bottle eps]). Why did you think it was weird at the time?

The JLE thing in Animal Man is pretty superfluous. Animal Man is nominally a member, but IIRC JLE as a whole appears only in one issue, most of the time he's a solo superhero. But a lot of Animal Man wouldn't make sense unless it was part of the main DC universe. One of the main storylines in the series involves the changes that Crisis on Infinite Earths did to AM's continuity, and there's also a lot of Morrison's meta-commentary on what he thought were the negative effects of CoIE. None of this would make much sense if AM was a "Vertigo" title with its own continuity; it also means that, unlike with Sandman, the reader has to be aware of what's happened in the larger DC universe to really get the whole story.

Yeah. The tone of Morrison's run is proto-Vertigo, insofar as it DEFINITELY feels like a writer-driven book tackling Tough Subjects that also veers into people unraveling the nature of reality and having coffee with deathless entities while trying to determine their own existential and ontological status. But the content is all very wired into the DC Universe.

p much every single Vertigo launch title was either an ongoing DC superhero, or one of Art Young's Disney books, yeah?

I remember that at one point, in Morrison's 'Doom Patrol' run, the DP are sharing headquarters with the JLA.
And I like the DP villain who, when questioned on his credentials, says 'I called Superman an asshole once.'

the DP were using the original JLA cave headquarters through most (all?) of the Morrison run - the JLI team come into it as a standby for a few issues during Breakdowns when they get fired from the UN or something. (leading to a terrible, terrible scene where some JLAers get dosed with hallucinogens as a defence tactic set up by the DP - because no-one could possibly think up their antagonists and the style of their conflicts without it being purely the result of DRUQKZZZZZ do you see)

you guys are missing my point: I didn't think it's weird that Grant Morrison would be doing a DC Universe book, I thought it was weird that Giffen & co. would let a weird proto-Vertigo character written by Grant Morrison into the Justice League...

...but now Googling it, it seems Animal Man is one of Morrison's first DC books, predates Doom Patrol for sure. I didn't really know that (sic--I didn't get into DC until way after the whole Giffen JL run; I wasn't reading at the time, only in retrospect), so maybe Morrison at the beginning of Animal Man hadn't built up the reputation of bizarre, genre-defying, expectation-flouting cultishness yet?

Animal Man was Morrison's first DC work at all

― Urban Coochie Collective (sic), Sunday, 2 January 2011 17:18 (1 week ago)

Weren't the JLI books and Animal Man DC's bestsellers at the time? That would probably explain it.

er, no. JLA was one of the top, Animal Man was not.