Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, Tom Grummett, et al — Animal Man - Page 9

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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