Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, Tom Grummett, et al — Animal Man

A Fine Pyrrhonism; or, (Put Your) Faith in Crisis


(or, this whole review is a massive spoiler, so please avert your gaze if you haven't read Animal Man yet!)

A lot is made of Morrison's assault on the "4th wall" in this series--as if the whole thing was some damn-fool excercise in a Matrix-style revelation of "the way things really are"... So, um, take the blue pill and, uh... take the red pill--it'll...uh... Actually, I forget which did which, but my point is that Animal Man has nothing to do with this tradition! This series is not about "false consciousness" dispelled by a glimpse of The Truth. We don't get anything like a vision of "the Truth" in this book (despite what the peyote scenes imply)--what we get is a character who travels back and forth between several levels of narration. Emerson's "Circles" is the key text here...

What's special about Buddy Baker?


Just one thing--he occupies a liminal position between the pre- and post-Crisis DC Universes. For whatever reason, the reconfigured Animal Man of 1988 remembers his origin story exactly the way it was printed in 1965. As Buddy discovers in issue #22--"the mystery is solved. and the mystery is me." All of that stuff about a creator/God/writer up there pulling the strings is fun, and offers up boffo critical opportunities to the kinds of folks that use the word "liminal" in every second sentence, but the heart of this series (as with all meaning in Animal Man) is elsewhere. We've just spent a fun week with the ultimate structuralist super-hero work, but Animal Man is post-structuralist--nothing has any final relationship to anything else in the text (Morrison even brings in the names of lettercol habitues in issue #26!). We are never permitted to get comfortable with an interpretation of what's happening to Buddy (hmm...the government's messin' with him...no it's those aliens...no, wait, it's Grant Morrison!--or maybe, as the final flashlit peephole out of the author's browned-out layer of the abyss implies, it's all some character called Foxy's doing! and do you really suppose that the creative bleeding stops there? it's an infinite egress!)


One thing's for sure--no one's got any free will. Morrison does some big talking about the prerogatives of the artist, but he leaves some pretty crucial stuff out. For instance: "crisis-II"--what the Hell's that all about? Does anyone think that Morrison wanted to banish all of those wonderful Discontinued Characters back into the medusa mask? Why sacrifice a character like Highwater to the greater glory of the "new DC"? Did the author understand the anguish of the Time Commander, who wished to abolish the boundary between past and present--thus "rebooting" the Adventures of Adam and Eve? Did he empathize with the Psycho-Pirate, who remembers the whole mountainous corpus of a lost multiverse gnawed into a more Digestible Continuity by "the Wolfman", and whose tears sneak the unmentionable back into the conversation--even if it's only as wet colour-slicks on the pavement in the playground of "the real"? And did he feel the full impact of these characters' failures?


I would have to answer "yes" to all of these questions, which is all to the good! The only thing an artist requires more than "childlike madness" is a sense of limitation (and Grant had it here in spades! perhaps because of his earnest attempt to grapple with the insoluble contradictions of an animal rights commitment--let's not forget what generated this series in the first place!)--and whenever you find these moods in tension, "another circle is created", and the Crisis raves on!


"Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are."




So why doesn't Animal Man enjoy the critical prestige that Watchmen and Dark Knight do? Could it be the old "loose baggy monster" syndrome? A perceived weakness in the design? Reviewers praise the metafiction, wondering all the while what the hell it has to do with the animal rights content. Or they decry the narratological bells and whistles as a cop out--evidence of a failure of nerve on Morrison's part. Nowadays they're more likely to think--"well, this is a series that broke some ground, once upon a time, but, you know, so what if Buddy knows he's a character in a comic book? Didn't John Byrne do the same thing with She-Hulk?" Nuff said!


But Animal Man #1-26 is no schizophrenic experiment--it's an overgrown weed of a masterpiece; narrative moss coating the bare rock of Emerson's lament: "I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature."

Article Author: David Fiore

Visit David Fiore's author page — David Fiore's Blog