Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, Tom Grummett, et al — Animal Man - Page 8

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?

Article Author: David Fiore

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