Uzumeri x Godel: Animal Man

Godel: Hello everyone and welcome to the second installment of Godel x Uzumeri, or the first installment of Uzumeri x Godel, depending. For those just joining us, our ongoing project is to plow through canonical, extended runs on a title, and give them a fresh, thoroughgoing look. This all began with me blackmailing David into wading through the Chris Claremont Uncanny X-Men saga, which we began in our last post. In return, I’m letting him guide me through Grant Morrison’s smash DC debut on Animal Man, beginning this week with issues 1-5.

Uzumeri: “Animal Man” #1-5, by Grant Morrison and Chas Truog, cover-dated September to Winter 1988 (this was the year DC did two “winter” issues between December and January so that their release/cover date differential was two months, the same as Marvel’s). This was Grant Morrison’s first Big Two work, and it’s a doozy. Animal Man was a perennial F-lister who Morrison pitched partly because of a childhood affinity and partly because they’d let him get away with anything – this was right on the heels of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing revamp and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, which was launched as a legacy character in the DC Universe. Like both of those titles, Animal Man was edited by Karen Berger and eventually became a Vertigo title, albeit long after Morrison’s departure.

As for the character HIMSELF, he’d last been seen in Crisis on Infinite Earths flying off into limbo with the Forgotten Heroes, which was actually a team.

Godel: So this was kind of a situation (at least according to the account Morrison gives in the letters pages) where UK creators were seen as having a golden touch. So to give a title to this guy, even though he was a sort of unknown, was seen as a safe bet…especially since the character was so obscure. It’s not like letting this nobody screw around with some major, A-list character like Superman, or Batman!

Uzumeri: Not for another ten years or so, anyway.

Godel: For those (like me) who were previously totally unfamiliar with Animal Man’s powers, his thing is that he can mimic the distinctive abilities of nearby animals, but only for a limited time. So, you know, the proportionate strength of a spider, or the thrifty planning for the coming winter of an ant.

Uzumeri: The fact that this was originally pitched as a miniseries makes a lot of sense, as the first arc really is largely self-contained; it’s a very Claremont/Moore-inspired, caption-heavy superhero comic blaring SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS across itself in neon type.

Godel: Totally – the plot is basically that EVIL SCIENTISTS are doing experiments on INNOCENT ANIMALS and it all gets out of control and Animal Man puts a stop to it. There’s some tragedy, misdirection, flashback, and very purple narration along the way, but that’s basically the story outline.

Uzumeri: Buddy’s midlife crisis, his kid Cliff’s mullet, Ellen’s fashion, Roger the sketchy agent, the fear of the AIDS virus and linking it to strange government experiments, references to Walkmen – this is totally ’80s as hell. I mean, WOW is it dated because it tried so hard to be relevant to its time period. And yeah, he uses a lot of really cute tricks he’d drop afterwards, things like the really obvious linking images between scene switches. “We’re going to drive ourselves into an early grave!!” <flip page, panel one: Ellen digging a cat grave>

Godel: Which is part of what charmed me at first…plus the general tone of the first issue. At a glance, this is pitched as a high-concept comedy about a kind of crap superhero with lame powers, who decides to get back into the game as a baby-boomer mid-life crisis. The contemporary equivalent, just in terms of the flavor, would be something like Irredeemable Ant-Man.

Uzumeri: Well, the difference being that Buddy’s supposed to be a fundamentally likeable guy. His head in the clouds a bit, sure, but he’s just a normal dude in the DC Universe. Eric O’Grady was a completely unlikeable asshole.

Godel: Oh, agreed totally, I just mean that it’s not put across as a “straight” superhero book, there’s definitely some winking going through the first issue, with his absurd training montage getting back into Animal Man shape, and that great scene where he meets Superman. Think, I dunno, Will Smith as Hancock. Like, you wouldn’t be buying this for the thrilling twists, blood-soaked battles and cosmic conflicts.

Uzumeri: Okay, yeah, true (although you certainly get those along with it). What did you think of the art? I remember hearing people shit on it a lot, but rereading it it’s perfectly clear and attractive superhero comics art. Nothing fancy, at least in this first arc, but it gets the tone and emotion and storytelling across, which is more than I can say for half of Morrison’s collaborators.

Godel: “Clear and attractive” about sums it up for me. It’s a bit pedestrian but I actually think that suits the book. Not because flashy art might have trouble carrying tone and emotion, but just that this IS a story about a kind of Joe Schmoe, and it deserves Joe Schmoe art. I could probably point to specific panels that I think are kind of ugly or off, but it’s not bad.

It does have the problem, in this opening arc, of being saddled with a completely stupid looking antagonist/opposite number, but, (as I was surprised to learn reading the letters pages) he was actually an established character, so the design is kind of a given.

Uzumeri: Yeah, B’wana Beast was always a problematic concept too, because he’s this gigantic white dude who protects the jungles of Africa. It’s classic well-meaning-but-dumb-in-hindsight shit, you know? This isn’t the last we see of the character and his legacy in the run, so Morrison does get to that, but I can certainly understand why half of the readers in the letters page didn’t recognize the guy (or wouldn’t have if not for that Swamp Thing Annual that Art Young, Assistant Editor mentions).

Godel: When does he originally date from? B’wana Beast I mean? Like is he a 1940s character or a 1970s character?

Uzumeri: Late ’60s. Created by Bob Haney, further explored in an issue of DC Challenge (have you ever heard of this? I’ll explain in a second) and then in Crisis on Infinite Earths and the Swamp Thing Annual. So this was his sixth appearance. DC Challenge, if you aren’t aware, was a 12-issue series where they actually straight-up switched the creators every issue and everyone was sworn not to communicate. So you inherited some asshole’s impossible cliffhanger and then you had to generate your own for the next one to get out of. I’ve been hoping for years they’d do that again.

Godel: That’s great! Although to be fair, if you extended the “challenge” round from one issue to, you know, six months to a year, that would kind of be how EVERY book works now. “Welcome to Spider-Man! By the way, Uncle Ben is alive again, have fun with that.”

Uzumeri: But yeah, B’wana Beast hadn’t appeared in a lot of comics when Morrison used him. He’s probably appeared in way more since.

Godel: This is an interesting first arc, though, because it does give you a sense of why Morrison would have gravitated towards Animal Man, beyond this childhood appreciation for him or whatever. Like, on the one hand, for the story he’s telling here about a suburban superhero in his 40s, he sort of just needs any character nobody’s used in ages. But then all the animal rights stuff, and issue 5 having Buddy throwing all the meat out of the fridge, and it starts to become a bit more specific to an animal-themed character.

Uzumeri: We also get to see the first of those instances where Morrison extrapolates awesome uses for powers from existing data, which is when Buddy uses B’wana Beast’s lifeform-merging powers to create super Anthrax-fighting blood cells.

Godel: Agreed. Animal Man just seems like a fun challenge to write, because you really have to keep coming up with clever applications for his powers. He can always find some way to be strong or to fly, but the sequence where he gets his arm ripped off and you figure, well, this guy is dead… and then he realizes that earthworms can regenerate their body parts when severed….that’s fun. I would almost tune in every issue just for that kind of thing.

Uzumeri: And he had SO much fun with Buddy Baker in space in 52.

Godel: Haha, I’m guessing because there’s no animals? Or the opposite?

Uzumeri: “I… I think what I just merged with.. shoots lightning out of its face?” Actually, that particular line was Geoff Johns in Infinite Crisis, but they had him using the powers of all kinds of totally retarded space animals.

Godel: Yeah, see, Animal Man might be the classic case of an actually novel and interesting superpower that depends totally on who’s writing them whether it’s interesting or not.

And then, there’s the assault scene. I think it’s sort of hard to know how to take it, because we’re cutting back and forth from this to giant cockroaches, which are kind of grotesque and horrifying but treated a bit cartoonishly, and then unambiguous comedy scenes like a kid asking for Animal Man’s autograph until he realizes he’s not talking to Aquaman. And, I mean, I get the idea, that the inhumanity-to-animals theme gets taken a step further and it’s shown as basically overlapping an inhumanity to other human beings etc. It’s just unfortunate that apparently the only way we can get that is by having Bill from King of the Hill threaten to rape the hero’s wife in the woods while throwing kittens to hunting dogs.

Uzumeri: The thing is that this was back at the very origin of putting these sorts of scenes in comics, ostensibly to draw attention to the problems back in the late ’80s, the fertile temporal feeding ground of the Public Service Announcement. From our vantage point, it seems totally tacky the way it’s narratively incorporated into a story where they get shot and punished by a surly Mr. Wilson from Home Improvement.

Godel: OK, I love us both trying to make sense of this scene by finding a sitcom analogy for the guy, and I think that sort of speaks to the depth of the characterization here.

Uzumeri: Oh, I’m talking about the neighbor who shows up and caps the rapists.

Godel: Oh oh right. I also got confused there because I think the guy on Home Improvement is just “Wilson,” and “Mr. Wilson” makes me think of the guy from Dennis the Menace… who Animal Man’s neighbor actually resembles, suspiciously.

Uzumeri: But yeah, for the most part — it’s that ridiculous, you know? And that problematic. It’s like he jumped 20 years into the future and channelled the mind of Brad Meltzer, but it’s probably more appropriate to put the blame at the feet of the late ’80s. I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that I can’t tell if the scene is dated or inherently ridiculous. And it ends with people crying over some dead kittens.

Godel: But there is a tough balancing act to doing a Serious Message Story in the midst of a gimmicky funny-book that’s elsewhere busy with meta-humor, sitcom humor…and for that matter, sitcom humor that functions as meta-humor because it’s just funny to flip through an escapist superhero book and find the lead having to struggle with problems like the wife thinking he’s just on another one of his silly dreams again.

Which I don’t think is a problem of being dated, so much as just that it’s really hard to shift tones like this without the Serious scene sort of buckling.

Uzumeri: A lot of the book, and I don’t want to spoil anything, spends time in that gap, trying to pay equal service to fantastical meditations on the concept of metaphysics and exposing the evils of whaling. I think it’s probably telling that this is the last comic I can think of where Morrison tried to be actively political.

Godel: It depends what you mean by actively political – – I mean, there are really active political themes in Invisibles or New X-Men, although they don’t resolve into concrete issues like “Vote NO on Prop 41!”

Uzumeri: Yeah, that’s true, but they feel political on an ideological rather than pragmatic level, you know? Animal Man is the last time he seemed to really get close to being timely rather than trying to be AHEAD of the time. His politics in all of his works after this were progressive to the point of being sci-fi in and of themselves. He’s a writer who does his best work with abstract concepts and pushing the form, and as a result, he works best with guys like J.H. Williams III or Frank Quitely who are extremely adaptable.

Godel: OK, I do get what you’re saying there, like he’s not so much trying to comment on present-day issues or whatever. At the same time, I mean, New X-Men has all that stuff that’s blatantly about Che Guevara t-shirts and radical chic and what he thinks about that. It’s definitely not a book about predicting the wild new future when “sub-cultures” will come into being, y’know? It’s a meditation on what sub-cultures are now. But we’re sort of ranging from Animal Man.

Uzumeri: Hey, it’s not like we didn’t range from X-Men when it comes to Claremont! The problem is that X-Men IS Claremont’s career.

Godel: So, since you brought up Quitely and J. H. Williams – – I do think the art is a problem for Animal Man, because while Truog is competent to depict everything in the comic, he’s not so good at suggesting different moods and flavors. In #5, which we’ll get to in a minute, there are some sequences which want to be done by a straight-up grim and disgusting horror artist, and another sequence that needs to be done by someone who can do a pitch-perfect sendup of Looney Tunes animation. Truog is neither of those artists, though.

Uzumeri: I honestly thought Truog did a better job than you’re giving him credit for with the Looney Tunes sequences, but I won’t dispute that JHW3’s Coyote Gospel would probably be astonishingly better.

Godel: The Looney Tunes thing isn’t bad, it’s just not different enough from the surroundings. This might also be the coloring – I think in a book published today, they A) have access to better coloring and B) would be really conscious of using that to heighten the difference.

Anyway, just to sum up my reactions to 1-4: fun, entertaining superhero arc, competent art, well-executed high-concept with an unusual mix of gentle comedy and freak-out gross horror moments. And if you’re not yet convinced it’s the comic for you, check out this narration:

Funny how sometimes it seems to start out that way. Everything seems to make sense.

Like today.

A laboratory ape, infected with a deadly mutant strain of the anthrax virus, was abducted from S.T.A.R. and taken to the San Diego Zoo by a superhuman in a red helmet.

Uzumeri: My reactions to 1-4: More dated, but also more confident, than I remembered them being when I first read them a few years ago. Completely above-average superhero comics, definitely something I would have followed at the time, but I wouldn’t have expected #5.

Godel: Right, yes! #5!

Uzumeri: “Coyote Gospel.” I don’t think you’d read this before. What was your take? There’s a very strong argument to be made that every story Morrison’s told since, or at least in the ’90s (and certainly Final Crisis), has been a variation on Coyote Gospel.

Godel: Definitely my first read. For those just joing us, the premise of this issue is basically that Wile E. Coyote appeals to the god of the Warner Brothers Universe for release from the cycle of cartoon violence. As punishment for his hubris, he somehow takes the sins of that world on his shoulders, ascending to the DC Universe, where he still dies over and over again, now with more grotesque real-life violence, but is somehow now a Christ figure expiating the Warner Brothers sins.

Uzumeri: Well, even more than “the god of Warner Brothers” I took it to be very specifically Chuck Jones.

Godel: He has a brief encounter with Animal Man before being finally finished off by a grudge-holding trucker with a silver bullet, who is convinced that the DC world is too full of sin, decrepitude and violence, implicitly I guess being fed up with all these darn depressed Vertigo- and DKR-era comics.

Uzumeri: One quick note that I caught from skipping ahead to the letters column that discussed this issue: the song they’re singing in the beginning, when they truck hits Crafty, is “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers.

Godel: You don’t know Roadrunner?! Dude, download now! 100% classic. But, uh, yeah, it’s called “Roadrunner,” so that’s another tie-in. This is definitely the kind of comic where you start to feel rewarded for looking for significance in all the little choices like that. Like, this is one of the great rock-and-roll “freedom of the open road” anthems. BUT FOR THE ANIMALS YOUR OPEN ROAD SIGNIFIES DEATH AND DESTRUCTION! Or the fact that a Bakker-esque televangelist is on TV at the Baker household, setting up the whole Jesus-dying-for-your-sins theme.

Uzumeri: This is a very specific meditation on the relationship between creator and created, and sets up the themes that go through the rest of the run. I really can’t say enough as to how clever this issue is, and also how totally cruel – that first panel on the last page where Crafty’s dying, and he has the absolute saddest look on his face… it’s amusing, almost, that Morrison basically gets to blame all of this horrible artistic cruelty on Chuck Jones, when he’s just a cruel for writing this. Which… will come up later. And even more bizarre is the fact that this issue, and I’m sure this wasn’t fully intended, sets up imagery and framework that ends up becoming the core narrative of the DC Universe itself by the ’00s.

Godel: That’s really interesting, and I sort of have to trust you as the Morrison scholar, but definitely that stuff is all over the place in Invisibles. Plus yanking the audience’s chain about their investment in the violence…when it starts out and the coyote just comes off as this monstrous werewolf, it’s really nasty and horrifying when it regenerates itself. Then when we cut to how things were when he was in a Chuck Jones cartoon, the violence is harmless and the regeneration is taken for granted.

Uzumeri: That’s a really great point about the regeneration; I remember he really seemed like a demonic figure the first time I read the book, and the Warner Bros scene took me totally by surprise.

Godel: As for DC in the 00’s, no way was he looking that far ahead, but if I read you right, you’re onto something anyway – – I mean, this is not that long after Crisis, and presumably Morrison would have been interested in the idea of these multiple universes and continuities resolving themselves basically by editorial fiat.

Uzumeri: Oh, it’s definitely all over Invisibles and Filth and his creator-owned work as well. This absolutely was right after Crisis, so yeah, a lot of the meta-story comes out to him thinking about what was lost in that story. To a degree, actually, you COULD say he was planning as far ahead as Final Crisis, but he just never thought he’d ever get there.

Godel: I will say, though, that this issue sort of suffers from needing the “coyote pleads with Chuck Jones” sequence in order to spell out the idea. Like, you have to have that scene for this to work, but it sort of spoils the fun of the preceding pages, where it slowly dawns on you, this werewolf thing in the desert is totally Wile E. Coyote, oh my god! Like, on page 12, the sequence of vertical panels showing him slo-o-w-l-y falling down the canyon. It works perfectly well as just a straight comics sequence where the “long fall” is just to enable the pacing of the narration. And then you go, wait….coyote, desert, long fall… And that he also gets crushed by a rock, then blown up with TNT.

It’s set up really well to just end like that and let the audience “get” the gimmick, but if you did that, you lose the meta-thing and the Christ bit and so on.

Uzumeri: I guess I was dumb at the time, because I totally didn’t get that from the comic until that sequence the first time, it completely blindsided me. I guess I wasn’t going on expecting anything special, though, you know? I wasn’t looking to be subverted.

Godel: To be fair, I watched a lot of Warner Bros. cartoons as a kid.

Uzumeri: So what was your overall take on Gospel? I enjoyed it more this time, and it’s a really interesting historical artifact in the context of what it ended up meaning for this run and for both Morrison’s career and DC at large, but as a 22-page $1.25 (fuck you, 1988) investment?

Godel: I mean, it’s great, right? Really neat idea, solidly executed. I was maybe a little severe earlier about the art – he does a pretty good job selling the key moments of this thing. Maybe needs more gross, hairy, fluid-splattering physicality to the deaths and rebirths of the coyote – – as it is, the narration has to do a lot of the work selling us on how different dying is in our world than in Chuck Jones’s, or whatever.

But that’s sort of quibbley; this is a solid story and one of those where the “twist” makes you want to reread the story, rather than making you feel cheated. I can’t really elaborate on this vis-a-vis Morrison’s career, but I would have thought this was a totally awesome comic if I’d stumbled across it as a kid. I’d love to meet someone who felt ripped off, though, like, “I paid for an Animal Man subscription and Animal Man is barely in this comic!” (a la Penny Arcade)

Uzumeri: Man, you know what’s astonshingly embarrassing? The fact that Penny Arcade used Comic Sans in 2001.

Godel: Dude, the hotel I work at hosted a bear convention a couple weeks ago (great guys, good tippers) and their event schedule sign was all in Comic Sans but it was stuff like, “6:30 – Shuttle to Lube Wrestling Event.”

So, uh, yeah. Animal Man 1-5, everybody! Two thumbs up.

Uzumeri: Haha! I guess we don’t have much more to say on this classic, you know? We could talk about the use of metafiction or etc etc etc, but I think everyone can figure out that Crafty is Wile E. Coyote, the world is Roadrunner, and we’re watching and laughing from his pain.

Godel: Yeah, that’s one thing, it’s not actually that sophisticated of an idea, but it’s clever, with some wide-open implications, and this is exactly the right length of a story to play with it. The twist comes just in time, the story of a driven man hunting a were-coyote is interesting on its own terms, and basically there’s 22 pages of material there.

Uzumeri: And what’s really great is that it serves as an early warning of Morrison’s pervasive “as above, so below” writing technique of working a microcosm into a macrocosm, but that’s something we’ll get to.

Godel: One thing that’s really striking about it is knowing that this was the first issue of Animal Man after it got green-lit as a true ongoing, if I understand you right. Like, all the stuff about really wanting to do Animal Man since he was a kid and so on, that’s really out the window – – if this is the direction for the rest of the book, basically “Animal Man” comes across here as a Trojan horse to do weird stories that might include animals of some sort.

Which, like, I’m totally fine if this does turn out to be an ongoing parade of weird one-shot short stories, but clearly there was some goodwill and momentum built up around Buddy Baker’s nutty superhero sitcom….I just think it’s fun to imagine it being 1988 and these things coming out only once a month and people just having to go “Huh… I wonder what on Earth this is going to be next month.”

Uzumeri: Yeah, exactly — but it never loses sight of Buddy, honestly, this is sort of a weird interlude as it is that ends up becoming really important to the overall scheme. And here in the solicitations-heavy era we sort of know what’s coming in the long term; I remember after Funeral for a Friend Superman’s books like ENDED for three months and nobody knew what in the fuck was going on.

Godel: Yeah! That was so cool.

Uzumeri: The next issue is a tie-in to DC’s “Invasion” crossover, which I’ve honestly never read, but was about alien races invading Earth and had this absolutely hilariously misleading recent TPB cover. That came out, of course, in the second half of 2008.

Godel: They should have just called it “SECRETive INVASION.” I wonder why it looks like all the superheroes are leaving Earth, given the title. Is it actually about Earth invading some other planet? “Do you think they actually get shrunk, or is it just a really big sack?”

Uzumeri: (I’m too dumb to get what that’s a reference to)

Godel: Look forward to these and other thrilling attempts to deduce the larger plot of 1988’s “Invasion” in roughly two weeks’ time, when we take on the next chunk of Animal Man continuity.