Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, Tom Grummett, et al — Animal Man - Page 3

You can't throw a rock at a page of Animal Man without hitting some nut who wants to bury the space-time continuum in gray matter. You may remember the Red Mask's friend--The Veil? An insubstantial avatar, to be sure. He's got the vision. But he's terminally lacking in the power department. Spoons his eyes out when he can't take it anymore...


The Time Commander is another story entirely. I believe I've read somewhere (haven't I?) that he's supposed to be a version of Dr. Manhattan--that makes sense, he certainly possesses the latter's enlarged temporal awareness--but he's not content (as the blue guy was) to keep this to himself: "There is no death! Love denies entropy! Through love, we abolish death!" uhhh... no dude! Through love, we give meaning to death--without love, death would be meaningless. And love needs time to grow. Yes, the man does beautiful things for people in this story--mourners steal moments with dead spouses, parents, pets...unfortunately, he's also turning Paris into a version of the whacko cartoon world that Crafty opted out of! "We've just seen German tanks and cavemen chasing Jean-Paul Sartre... The French Revolution's happening right around the corner!" Is there any doubt that the "final transformation" this man is preaching would fulfill the art martyr's mission?


Next up we've got the Psycho-Pirate--whose memory defies the raging current generated by the Big Bang of the Crisis... The end of time is bad enough, but the convergence of every dimension upon one poor asylum is catastrophic! How many story angles can dance on a pinhead? The Psycho-Pirate resolves to find out--chanting the names of the abolished dimensions... Meanwhile, Buddy walks through his own past trying to warn his family of the dangers that await them--unable to make himself known to them, like George Bailey in IAWL; or Scrooge in the Past; or Mary Henry in Carnival of Souls... There's a simple message here: "Time is cruel"... But the desire to go back is crueller still...and the desire to forget is worst of all... Only the (often jagged) ground of remembrance gives meaning to the present, gives us the power to be kind... There really aren't any other options--just canonball dives into loneliness and the void. Solipsism. There is no death 'cause I made this--and every choice is up to me. Emerson trod this path for years, off and on, but he could never quite rinse the dirt from his first wife's grave off of his fingernails--and if he had, he wouldn't have had much to say now would he...


Finally, from out of the catacombs of the Psycho-Pirate's hubristic mind comes the Overman--a memory that even this mad conjuror wants to repress...but the floodgates are open, and the super-demon leaks out, armed with a warhead. Ranting, drooling: "IvegotthebombIvegotthebomb", he stalks around the asylum, boasting of his plans... It's a clear case of unchecked ontological aggression upon the phenomenal world--the Overman comes to bomb Morrison's humane society back to the stone age.


But Buddy has learned a few things in the 18 issues since the Art Martyr landed--and this time he explains to the yellow alien chorus: "A piece of advice for when things are going badly... All you have to do is flip the switch." And he does.


From that point it's all academic. And not in a "death of the author" kind of way either--on the contrary, this author is "born again" into a world re-enchanted by Morrison's brave refusal to sacrifice Buddy and his family to an unappeasable longing for some vision of "acceptance". There is no acceptance in this story, no cathexis for the recurrent waves of apocalypse, no demolition of the Platonic Cave which is the only home that any human being with a sense of limitation will ever know. We find those limits at the border to other minds. We may not be able to pass through the barrier. But we can shine a light across.


Treading Elseworlds



In "The Myth of the Creation" (which you can find in Secret Origins #39, reprinted in volume two of the Animal Man trade series) we get Morrison, Grummett, and Hazlewood's version of the events depicted in Strange Adventures #180 (1965)--it's a typical DC Silver Age origin: guy with not too much going on in his life gets a wake up call from space and an immediate opportunity to thrash some beasts--goes home feeling powerful, blurts out a marriage proposal to his breathlessly waiting sweetheart and faints... That's Buddy the first...


In Animal Man #11 we get the origin again (drawn by Truog this time)--featuring costumes and hair redone for the late seventies, and words scrambled into magnetic fridge poetry. Clearly, there's a problem here...although it's supposedly solved the following month, when the key scenes recur a third time, with the original syntax restored... So they rebooted the character and they're shameless enough to glory in this fact--so what, right? Wrong! There's so much more going on here than a critique of silly superhero conventions! The bookend "myths of the creation" (which bring to mind the two versions of the beginning of the world in Genesis) completely undermine each other, leaving the middle one--the meaningless one--to stand as the "true" secret origin of Animal Man... It's so secret, in fact, that it's absolutely opaque! These aren't "creation myths", this is creation as myth! And without a stable origin, Buddy Baker has no real identity--he will always be other than himself...In issue #12, the reborn character discovers an ability to multiply himself, by absorbing the powers of self-replicating bacteria... In more ways than one then--Buddy II becomes Animal Men...




There's a powerful anti-ontological argument running through this series. The mind instinctively recoils from the idea that consciousness springs out of the void. The standard antidote to this supposition is to posit a God or an Ideal which is the one and only something, and which we are all a part of (solipsism/pantheism)... I think most people would actually rather embrace nihilism than entertain the notion that whatever meaning there is in the world is founded upon radical absence! "Something" out of "nothing"? What the hell? So we lasso each other and the stars with mental umbilical cords, or hang ourselves with them...


Issue #18 opens with a voice saying "...Buddy?..." in the dark, and a surreal vision of Tricia and Roger bearing down upon the unseen protagonist with tearful concern and a glass of water. In green boxes someone thinks "there's something important I mustn't forget... is that a door in the darkness?" Then we loop back into kitchen-brightness: Ellen pouring a glass of water for a flustered James Highwater (whose limbs have been disappearing for short periods lately), the kids chattering in the background... Then Buddy and James launch their adventure in monism, dreaming bridges across abysses under the influence of peyote, and the tutelage of an intelligent fox. A lot of cool stuff happens, but none of it counts for much against Buddy's return to consciousnes in #20, on the floor of his kitchen, where he'd been since Roger offered him the first glass of water. During that whole burst of a-mesa-ing grace, Ellen and the kids were already dead! Morrison beautifully dramatizes a mind attempting to cope with the unthinkable--not its' own anihilation, but the loss of what it loves! The cure is far worse than the disease. By plugging into "unity", we lose the capacity to relate (how can you relate to yourself?), and relation is the only fount of meaning in this fallen world!


The mystic's vision of union with the divine is a self-defense mechanism, a sop to the apocalypse, and humans generally gain access to it by poisoning themselves with intoxicants, starving themselves, or depriving themselves of sleep... I know a lot of smart people have bought into this over the years, but I prefer to believe my senses when they're working properly...


Far from being "at one with the universe", Buddy isn't even at one with himself! He has no identity--or, at any rate, he is not identical to himself! In issue #22 (illustrated by Paris Cullins & Steve Montano, not by Truog, or even by Grummett, who had filled in before) Buddy wanders, alienated, through his past, thinking: "sometimes I watch them but they don't seem real. They're his family, not mine. My family is dead. It's driving me mad. It's driving me mad." Unlike Dr. Manhattan, who is everywhere in the continuity at once, Buddy is never in continuity. His reality is fluid--he's treading "elseworlds"... I think we get a minor version of this shock every time we look at old photographs of ourselves. I certainly do. That's not my world in there. That's his world... I have no identity. Like Buddy, I fill in the blanks between the panels of my life with guesswork, not a continuous self. And so do you.


Do You Remember?


Finally, what I want to know is--what the hell is Morrison doing with that monkey-at-the-typewriter in limbo? On the surface, this figure seems like just another avatar of the author-creator, in the proud-mad tradition of the Art Martyr, the Time Commander, and the Psycho-Pirate. But is it really that simple? Let's not forget that this scripter-God shares a level of Hell with the alienated dregs of the DC universe... The monkey enjoys none of the world-historical significance that his predecessors did. The Art Martyr almost blew up the planet. The Time Commander did manage to destabilize the timestream. And the Psycho-Pirate reverses the Crisis on Infinite Earths through an act of memory/will. But our simian friend just types out a passage from The Tempest, smiles, and keels over--becoming a dead-weight in Buddy's arms as the latter wanders purposefully nowhere through the meaningless tundra. What's it all about? The creator as a burden upon the created? Well, yeah--but what else?


Bolland's cover for issue #25 shows us the monkey nervously scripting the issue at hand... and the first two panels deliver as promised. However, that second panel is a close-up of these words on a page:

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults

Mercy itself and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

Prospero, in his last extremity, asks the audience to abrogate the dire chain of cause-and-effect at work in the narrative... And this is exactly what Morrison does! Merryman tells Buddy that the monkey "used to be famous but no one's allowed to say his name anymore. He sits on a hill writing, you know? He did the complete works of Shakespeare, purely at random. There's a kind of legend that says one day the monkey will write us all out of limbo." This sounds like a joke, but if you think about, it's damned serious--The Tempest is believed to be Shakespeare's last play, and if this "omnipotent creator" is merely creating according to a predetermined plan, then of course it stands to reason that he would collapse immediately after "completing Shakespeare"! Is anyone free in this book? I would say no. Morrison saves the characters he has grown to love by splicing his hopes to the Shakespearian comedy, which brings something out of nothing by calling for a (customary) sympathetic response... But maybe it's just luck (the last play could have been a tragedy!)--Buddy's fate could easily have been Crafty's...


The creator himself collapses in issue #25, and the figure of the monkey metamorphoses into a stand-in for Morrison's dying cat, Jarmara, whom the author had carried back and forth on endless trips to the vet that ultimately proved to be of no help at all. Some may scoff, but Jarmara's death is THE preeminent symbol of limitation in this book. Literally anything else can be changed on a whim--but not this. As Morrison tells Buddy, her death was "not fair. But who do I complain to?" Clearly, there is no one...


But this is not the case with Buddy's family. They are inhabitants of a "world created by committee" (I interpret this concept, which Morrison introduces in #26, to mean more than just "created by a group of professional writers"--the commenters are boardmembers as well!), and this committee is quite as capable of conspiring to bring dead characters back to life--no matter (as letter-writer George Gustiness puts it in #23) "what sleazy stunt [they] have to pull"--as it is of visiting horrific persecution upon its' charges. It becomes a question of which convention the audience will embrace--comedy or ("grim n' gritty") tragedy, which, paradoxically, has always been far more satisfying to the tortured human psyche.

Article Author: David Fiore

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