Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, Tom Grummett, et al — Animal Man - Page 7

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...

Article Author: David Fiore

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