MattBrady
11-28-2002, 09:00 AM
Way back in the mists of time, somewhere during a year the ancients referred to as 19 and 88, there was a comic book writer named Grant Morrison. Now, he wasn't Grant Morrison yet - he was just Grant Morrison…even perhaps, just grant morrison, a young guy from Scotland who wrote comic books.
He'd had success on the U.K. comics scene, writing various strips for 2000AD, and Marvel UK, but his first serious foray into the big-time American comics scene was with a title called Animal Man for DC. It was a safe enough way to start - Animal Man was a third, maybe fourth-tier hero who's most recent appearances before his series started was with a group of other '60s heroes who proudly (?) called themselves the Forgotten Heroes. With the other Forgottens, he had an appearance or two in Action Comics (drawn by Gil Kane), and that was pretty much that. Animal Man made his appearance and by using him, DC's hold on the trademark was secure, end of story.
Heh. Right.
Morrison, a huge fan of '60-era DC pitched the publisher a proposal for a four-issue Animal Man series wherein the hero would return from limbo as a right-wing animal activist, with attitudes that would mirror some of Morrison's own. The proposal was approved with a caveat - Morrison would continue writing the series indefinitely. He jumped at the chance. Issue #1-#4 would stand as an homage and updating to both Animal Man and another wonky '60s hero, the B'wana Beast, and then from issue #5 onward, Morrison would, in his own words, "try some more interesting and experimental stuff, all of which is going to lead up to a major reworking of Animal Man's origin and abilities and an assault on the fundamental reality of the DC Universe."
Whew. And by the time Morrison's final Animal Man issue, #25 rolled around, he'd done pretty much just that.
Morrison got things rolling in a rather non-traditional way. Animal Man, a.k.a. Buddy Baker was the textbook definition of a reluctant hero who had just decided to go into the superhero business full time. Settled into suburban living with his wife Ellen, and his two kids, Maxine and Cliff, Buddy was unsure of his place in a world with so many more glamorous and powerful heroes. This was, after all, the later '80s, and Superman had been Byrned, we all knew Batman was the coolest superhero around, and the Legends miniseries had recently produced a new Justice League which had just split into the Justice League America and Justice League International. It was almost as if Buddy's reluctance as a hero mirrored the book's chances at success - after all, Superman, Batman and the League titles were sales powerhouses. Who would notice Animal Man?
Before he could decide how he'd re-enter the superhero world, Buddy was pulled back in at the request of STAR Labs who found a chimera made of several different species of monkeys in it's Metropolis facility. On the hunt, Buddy quickly realized he was dealing with something that could merge animals with other animals - including humans. Something had a terrific power, and it was insane. It was also coming to STAR Labs for revenge.
The first storyline brought both the B'wana Beast and Buddy head to head, and was packed with revelations and explorations of Animal Man's powers. No longer was he just able to arbitrarily lift the powers from any animal that happened to be nearby - he now had rules and limitations. He could keep a power for about thirty minutes, but once he had the power, he could apply human intelligence to it, something that allowed him to perform some fairly miraculous feats.
Without spoiling too much, the storyline revolved around a mutant strain of anthrax being developed by STAR for military purposes. Remember though - this was in 1988 - six years before Richard Preston would whack the masses upside the head with The Hot Zone and the realities of biowarfare. Sure, the concepts and information had been around for a while, but here they were in a comic book. Who says comic readers and creators aren't way, waaay ahead of the curve?
The storyline wrapped up with an ending that would've made Rod Serling proud in issue #4, and then things began their trip to hell in Animal Man #5. Ideas that would one day crystallize as Hypertime were played with in that issue, a touching homage to Wile E. Coyote and his never-ending chase. But the story stretched further - in the final panels, a hand was seen coloring the scene. Yes, a tribute to the classic Warner Brothers 'toons by Chuck Jones where Daffy Duck realized someone was drawing him…but it was more than that, and it would have serious ramifications for Buddy down he road.
Morrison toyed with the Invasion crossover, pitting Buddy against two Thanagarian warriors armed with a fractal bomb, had him join up with the JLA, and brought back the Red Mask in issues #6-#7, each story handled with Morrison's own style where you could almost feel him taking you down one road, only to switch at the last moment with a chuckle.
Mirror Master surprised Buddy at home in issue #8, and was handily beaten by Ellen and a well-timed kick to the crotch. Again, though - the issue had some weirdness - it opened with a page of a computer screen with Albert Einstein's quote, "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos," and ended with a stat of the same computer screen with the words, "He doesn't. I do," added. It was weird, experimental stuff, and was only going to get weirder - a man in black leather was stalking Buddy's family, and a Native American physicist named James Highwater was making some very odd discoveries about the nature of the world, and Animal Man seemed to hold the key.
Another note about the time while we're at it. For Morrison's entire run, Animal Man was printed in DC's "New Format," (priced at a then nearly outrageous $1.25) with no ads other than in house DC ads, and no approval by the Comic Code Authority. The lack of Code approval really didn't matter much - sure, there was some pretty graphic violence, and a few curses and bad names, but nothing that was absolute necessary to the storyline.
Something else that has to be mentioned is Chas Truog's art. Subtle and decidedly non-superheroic, Truog's people looked like people, making the intrusion of the superheroes seem that much more special as it stood out from the rest of the characters. It was a perfect, understated compliment to Morrison's story that was rapidly headed into the surreal with no signs of slowing. Of course, Brain Bolland's covers were masterpieces.
Buddy worked with the JLA'er Vixen to get his powers back in check in issue #10, only to disappear, with two yellow-skinned aliens show up in his place, allowing Morrison to thoroughly tweak and re-tweak Animal Man's origin in issues #11-#12. In doing so, Morrison began to seriously play with what it meant to be a citizen of a fictional universe such as Animal Man is - for example, when the yellow-skinned aliens destroyed the murderous Ali, telling him that "his story ends here," he didn't vanish in a puff. First, his inking went, then his text, followed by his rough sketch and stick figure. Along with the readers, Animal Man himself was shocked by Ali's regressive disappearance.
Following up with the origin story, Morrison replaced B'wana Beast with a new one, this time, an native African too the mantle, rather than the blond-haired blue-eyes Mike Maxwell, who's role as the African hero smacked a little too close of colonial patronizing of the natives. It was a change DC had needed to make fore decades.
The stalking got worse in #14, Aquaman made an appearance in #15, and Morrison got to play with time-travel stories in #16, which pitted the Justice League Europe against the Time Commander in a story which further demonstrated Buddy's development as a hero, and just how he no longer fit with the regular spandex crowd. It was a touching story whose paradise was ended with Metamorpho's single punch. Buddy took a mature step away from rabid animal activism in #17, which also acted to set up Morrison's final storyline from #18 - #26, eight issues that, frankly, changed how many readers thought about comics and what was possible within the medium.
Safe to say, it was a Morrison story, so there was tragedy - brutal tragedy that came as a total shock. But there were also revelations about the universe, theoretical physics, cosmology, suffering, redemption, discovery, and, of course, a touch of peyote. For readers who'd been with the series since it's beginning, the beginning of Morrison's final run was incredibly cohesive. Mirror Master's attack back in issue #8 was of key importance to what Animal Man was about to go through. His revenge was swift and horrible, and at the same time, satisfying, but hollow, leaving Animal Man saying to Mirror Master at the end of issue #21, "I can fix it. I can fix it all. I've had an idea. A time machine. All I need is a time machine. I can fix everything."
Animal Man tripped the light fantastic with the Phantom Stranger, and realized how bad of an idea he really was having relating to time travel, and actually came to some sense of acceptance of his fate.
And then Ultraman showed up, along with all of the other characters that met their final fates just four years earlier.
By now, it was 1990. Four years after Crisis on Infinite Earths wrapped up. Not taking anything away from Marv Wolfman's story, but Morrison had found a hole that he drove his truck through - the Psycho Pirate, who was the Anti-Monitor's right hand villain throughout the Crisis remembered. He remembered the multiverse as it used to be - Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-3, S, C, D, P, and all the rest. He remembered them, and he was somehow bringing them all back into his cell at Arkham Asylum. For fans who still felt a little betrayed by DC over Crisis, it was a wonderful epilogue - here was an up and coming creator who loved the DC multiverse as much as the fans did, and clearly didn't like that it was all gone. It was an "Oh yeah?" that resonated with a nostalgic twist. Give him eight years, and Morrison would bring it all back in a fashion with Hypertime.
The battle to save reality as he knew it took place in issue #24, with Animal Man actually stepping out of the panels of the comic to sneak up on his enemies. In the end, reality was saved, but Buddy had one final question for the yellow aliens - it's a question we all ask, but one that Buddy was going to have answered for him - "who makes us suffer this way? Who writes the world?" The yellow aliens faded away, and Buddy opened the front door of his house and entered comic book limbo - literally. There, he met by the Inferior Five, DC's Hercules, J'emm, Son of Saturn (this was before Morrison brought him back on the DCU, and with John Ostrander, established his race as an offshoot of DC's Martians), Quicksilver (who was still a few years away from being renamed Max Mercury and brought into the Flash family by Mark Waid), and others.
And then things got really weird.
But, you'll have to read that part for yourself - if you're a fan of Morrison's more recent work and writings, it all makes sense. Really. It's like looking at part of the foundation on which he's built many other ideas and stories. At the same time, it was frighteningly original, an act some called the ultimate in ego, while others hailed it for it's boldness.
In any case, it wrapped up Morrison's run on the series, and he took his weirdness over and fully applied it to Doom Patrol, which he'd been writing for a couple of years at that point. Animal Man continued along it's path for a little while longer, written by Peter Milligan, before heading off into different, more Vertigo-esque waters, farther from the mainstream DCU.
Call it some mismatched timing.
Or that we just like talking to Grant Morrison about his work.
Anyway - while comments from Morrison about Animal Man would've fit in perfectly with the retrospective we did of his run a little while ago, the writer wasn't available at the time. Since then, he found a few minutes to spare for some nosy questions about a series he wrote 12 or so years ago, and dropped us some thoughts on the series that began to establish him as a unique voice in comics.
Fair warning thought - there are a few spoilers in here, such as the ultimate twist at the ending of Morrison's run, as well as some other info. Safe to say, if not knowing what happened in a series before you read it is important, just back away. But - if you want to hear Morrison talk about some of his wilder ideas, keep reading…
NRMA: To begin with, how did Animal Man grow from a miniseries of four issues to an ongoing? Did your plot for the first four issues just blow away DC?
GM: I think so. I was as surprised as anyone when I got the call to continue the series after four. I'd only planned for four comics and had written them in a style I thought would appeal to the pro-British editors. To tell the truth, I was pretty dry of Animal Man ideas after the mini-series and had no desire to continue in that vein. I knew I couldn't add anything to the 'superheroes in the real world' current that was already showing its age by that time and had to rethink in order to wrench Animal Man in a different direction.
NRMA From the outset of having the series approved, did you know you were going to write yourself into the book?
GM: To help escape from the prevailing 'grim and gritty' 'realist' trend which I'd grown to loathe with all my heart, I turned back to the more psychedelic experimental stuff I'd loved in 60s comic, particularly those written by John Broome. I was also reading Brendan McCarthy comics and absorbing surrealist and dada influences. I was a practicing magician with the conviction that by studying living, breathing homunculus worlds created on 2-d paper surfaces I might come to a better understanding of higherdimensional intelligent space and its relationship to our own 3-d reality. Go figure.
There was the also the influence of the post-modern or magic realist writers popular in the 80s; I was reading a lot of Borges, Calvino, and others, and watching Dennis Potter plays where the writer was always consumed in his own creation. I loved how this very fashionable notion had a comic book antecedent in those stories where the Flash met Julius Schwartz in the DC offices or where writer Cary Bates traveled to Earth 1 and became a villain with 'plotting power'. That whole concept seemed to me to be a logical and fertile area of development beyond what Miller and Moore were doing at the time. I resolved to make my own niche in a decidedly anti-realist territory.
NRAMA: What was the first reaction from editorial when it became clear where you were headed - backing away slowly while laughing nervously, or fully embracing the idea?
GM: They began to back away on a speeding bullet. Karen [Berger] couldn't see how I could make it work without being campy but Art, I remember was convinced after a few pep talks. As the series progressed it was obvious how natural it could all be made to seem. It's still one of my favorite scenes when Buddy turns round and looks out of the page directly into the reader's eyes and says 'I can see you...'
NRMA: Together with Doom Patrol, Animal Man was the first place you really began to infect the American audience with your ideas that you've been developing since. Espouse a little on what you hit with Animal Man, if you could - we create the fiction, and therefore it exists - somewhere. Getting there is the trick, right?
GM: I have a million obscure and pseudo-technical explanations for my theories about fictional events and their relation to 'real life' events but the basic idea can be understood as a kind of sympathetic magic or voodoo doll extension.
As Animal Man progressed, I moved away from miserablist heroes in their grainy, rainy 'real' world (that looked like no real world outside my window) and instead twisted my head into thinking not what would it be like for superheroes to live in the real world but what would it be like for a real person to live in a superhero world - an actual comic continuum, a universe drawn on paper, as thin as the ink surface but as rich and deep and involving as a 50 year-deep, shared, living universe could be.
Once I'd worked out the cosmology I decided to start playing with it a little more seriously. I wondered if I could make a comic so close to real life that by writing an event or person into the comic I could make the event occur or the person appear in my own life or in the lives of others around me. I experimented with the Flex Mentallo comic then got serious with The Invisibles, which changed my life and rewrote the world around me.
Suffice to say that Animal Man was an early attempt to descend into the real DC universe. I figured that if I put myself into a comic, it could be considered an actual voyage into the 2-d comic book reality, wearing a suit to make myself look like on e of them - a drawing. Exploring the place a little, I found that I could talk to characters; influence lives (even lives of famous characters who'd existed in this little paper universe long before I was born, like Superman for instance) and affect the structure of the 'continuity'. After Animal Man, I realized that I didn't have to enter that world looking like myself but that I could go in wearing different 'fiction suits' as I came to call them. A fiction suit being simply any character we create as a disguise to allow us to wander around in the 2-d four-color continuity cosmos without freaking out the natives the way I did Buddy Baker.
NRMA: While you did freak out Buddy a little, he really was your voice in those days - the outsider commenting on the sheer ridiculousness of the spandex crowd and where the industry stood at the time, right?
GM: Buddy was definitely my American voice at that time, as Zenith was my British persona. I'd just come into the US comics industry and was surrounded by famous and not-so-famous characters I'd once only read about. Like me, Buddy was trying to make his mark and learning a little about what was really important in the process.
NRMA: In the latter part of your run, you took a serious poke at Crisis on Infinite Earths. Were the seeds that eventually became Hypertime planted here - you'd been looking for a way to undo what had been done since Animal Man days?
GM: Crisis was a great 'event' series and made a lot of sense at the time but I felt that any comic universe which denied itself the story possibilities of parallel realities and alternate superheroes was a poor universe indeed. From the moment I started working at DC I began to lay plans to swallow up the Crisis in a larger, wilder more creatively exciting paper cosmology.
Hypertime as it became known in 1998 is already present as a full-blown concept in Animal Man comics from 1987. I just had to wait until I get hold of a bigger-selling book like JLA before I could make it stick. Hypertime actually includes the Crisis and every other revision but since very few people have ever quite grasped the theory and the story potential of Hypertime it may have to wait until I decide to do something for DC again.
NRMA: Even after all the years and stories in between, any Animal Man stories stand out as gems from the run?
GM: There are a few of them I love - "The Coyote Gospel" still stands and I'm very fond of "Clockwork Crimes of the Time Commander" in #16 along with "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" in #19, and "Deus Ex Machina," my final issue.
NRMA: What was the fan reaction that you heard during the run?
GM: In those wonderful pre-message board days, fan reaction was confined to a few magazines which came out a month or so after the story. People seemed to like Animal Man. The book did well throughout my run and beyond. I think Buddy Baker's humanity and humor and his humble, questing nature touched a lot of readers in ways that 'cooler' characters miss.
NRMA: Do you ever have nostalgia for Buddy and company, or was that something you had a chance with, and got out of your system, completely?
GM: I have nostalgic memories of all the characters I've written intensely but nostalgia is nostalgia and tomorrow is now.
NRMA: On final sidenote - what was your reaction to appearing in Suicide Squad, as "The Writer" only to be killed off in issue #58?
GM: I think it probably served me right after everything I'd put Buddy Baker through. I just come back from the dead, stronger and stranger, like everyone else in comics.
He'd had success on the U.K. comics scene, writing various strips for 2000AD, and Marvel UK, but his first serious foray into the big-time American comics scene was with a title called Animal Man for DC. It was a safe enough way to start - Animal Man was a third, maybe fourth-tier hero who's most recent appearances before his series started was with a group of other '60s heroes who proudly (?) called themselves the Forgotten Heroes. With the other Forgottens, he had an appearance or two in Action Comics (drawn by Gil Kane), and that was pretty much that. Animal Man made his appearance and by using him, DC's hold on the trademark was secure, end of story.
Heh. Right.
Morrison, a huge fan of '60-era DC pitched the publisher a proposal for a four-issue Animal Man series wherein the hero would return from limbo as a right-wing animal activist, with attitudes that would mirror some of Morrison's own. The proposal was approved with a caveat - Morrison would continue writing the series indefinitely. He jumped at the chance. Issue #1-#4 would stand as an homage and updating to both Animal Man and another wonky '60s hero, the B'wana Beast, and then from issue #5 onward, Morrison would, in his own words, "try some more interesting and experimental stuff, all of which is going to lead up to a major reworking of Animal Man's origin and abilities and an assault on the fundamental reality of the DC Universe."
Whew. And by the time Morrison's final Animal Man issue, #25 rolled around, he'd done pretty much just that.
Morrison got things rolling in a rather non-traditional way. Animal Man, a.k.a. Buddy Baker was the textbook definition of a reluctant hero who had just decided to go into the superhero business full time. Settled into suburban living with his wife Ellen, and his two kids, Maxine and Cliff, Buddy was unsure of his place in a world with so many more glamorous and powerful heroes. This was, after all, the later '80s, and Superman had been Byrned, we all knew Batman was the coolest superhero around, and the Legends miniseries had recently produced a new Justice League which had just split into the Justice League America and Justice League International. It was almost as if Buddy's reluctance as a hero mirrored the book's chances at success - after all, Superman, Batman and the League titles were sales powerhouses. Who would notice Animal Man?
Before he could decide how he'd re-enter the superhero world, Buddy was pulled back in at the request of STAR Labs who found a chimera made of several different species of monkeys in it's Metropolis facility. On the hunt, Buddy quickly realized he was dealing with something that could merge animals with other animals - including humans. Something had a terrific power, and it was insane. It was also coming to STAR Labs for revenge.
The first storyline brought both the B'wana Beast and Buddy head to head, and was packed with revelations and explorations of Animal Man's powers. No longer was he just able to arbitrarily lift the powers from any animal that happened to be nearby - he now had rules and limitations. He could keep a power for about thirty minutes, but once he had the power, he could apply human intelligence to it, something that allowed him to perform some fairly miraculous feats.
Without spoiling too much, the storyline revolved around a mutant strain of anthrax being developed by STAR for military purposes. Remember though - this was in 1988 - six years before Richard Preston would whack the masses upside the head with The Hot Zone and the realities of biowarfare. Sure, the concepts and information had been around for a while, but here they were in a comic book. Who says comic readers and creators aren't way, waaay ahead of the curve?
The storyline wrapped up with an ending that would've made Rod Serling proud in issue #4, and then things began their trip to hell in Animal Man #5. Ideas that would one day crystallize as Hypertime were played with in that issue, a touching homage to Wile E. Coyote and his never-ending chase. But the story stretched further - in the final panels, a hand was seen coloring the scene. Yes, a tribute to the classic Warner Brothers 'toons by Chuck Jones where Daffy Duck realized someone was drawing him…but it was more than that, and it would have serious ramifications for Buddy down he road.
Morrison toyed with the Invasion crossover, pitting Buddy against two Thanagarian warriors armed with a fractal bomb, had him join up with the JLA, and brought back the Red Mask in issues #6-#7, each story handled with Morrison's own style where you could almost feel him taking you down one road, only to switch at the last moment with a chuckle.
Mirror Master surprised Buddy at home in issue #8, and was handily beaten by Ellen and a well-timed kick to the crotch. Again, though - the issue had some weirdness - it opened with a page of a computer screen with Albert Einstein's quote, "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos," and ended with a stat of the same computer screen with the words, "He doesn't. I do," added. It was weird, experimental stuff, and was only going to get weirder - a man in black leather was stalking Buddy's family, and a Native American physicist named James Highwater was making some very odd discoveries about the nature of the world, and Animal Man seemed to hold the key.
Another note about the time while we're at it. For Morrison's entire run, Animal Man was printed in DC's "New Format," (priced at a then nearly outrageous $1.25) with no ads other than in house DC ads, and no approval by the Comic Code Authority. The lack of Code approval really didn't matter much - sure, there was some pretty graphic violence, and a few curses and bad names, but nothing that was absolute necessary to the storyline.
Something else that has to be mentioned is Chas Truog's art. Subtle and decidedly non-superheroic, Truog's people looked like people, making the intrusion of the superheroes seem that much more special as it stood out from the rest of the characters. It was a perfect, understated compliment to Morrison's story that was rapidly headed into the surreal with no signs of slowing. Of course, Brain Bolland's covers were masterpieces.
Buddy worked with the JLA'er Vixen to get his powers back in check in issue #10, only to disappear, with two yellow-skinned aliens show up in his place, allowing Morrison to thoroughly tweak and re-tweak Animal Man's origin in issues #11-#12. In doing so, Morrison began to seriously play with what it meant to be a citizen of a fictional universe such as Animal Man is - for example, when the yellow-skinned aliens destroyed the murderous Ali, telling him that "his story ends here," he didn't vanish in a puff. First, his inking went, then his text, followed by his rough sketch and stick figure. Along with the readers, Animal Man himself was shocked by Ali's regressive disappearance.
Following up with the origin story, Morrison replaced B'wana Beast with a new one, this time, an native African too the mantle, rather than the blond-haired blue-eyes Mike Maxwell, who's role as the African hero smacked a little too close of colonial patronizing of the natives. It was a change DC had needed to make fore decades.
The stalking got worse in #14, Aquaman made an appearance in #15, and Morrison got to play with time-travel stories in #16, which pitted the Justice League Europe against the Time Commander in a story which further demonstrated Buddy's development as a hero, and just how he no longer fit with the regular spandex crowd. It was a touching story whose paradise was ended with Metamorpho's single punch. Buddy took a mature step away from rabid animal activism in #17, which also acted to set up Morrison's final storyline from #18 - #26, eight issues that, frankly, changed how many readers thought about comics and what was possible within the medium.
Safe to say, it was a Morrison story, so there was tragedy - brutal tragedy that came as a total shock. But there were also revelations about the universe, theoretical physics, cosmology, suffering, redemption, discovery, and, of course, a touch of peyote. For readers who'd been with the series since it's beginning, the beginning of Morrison's final run was incredibly cohesive. Mirror Master's attack back in issue #8 was of key importance to what Animal Man was about to go through. His revenge was swift and horrible, and at the same time, satisfying, but hollow, leaving Animal Man saying to Mirror Master at the end of issue #21, "I can fix it. I can fix it all. I've had an idea. A time machine. All I need is a time machine. I can fix everything."
Animal Man tripped the light fantastic with the Phantom Stranger, and realized how bad of an idea he really was having relating to time travel, and actually came to some sense of acceptance of his fate.
And then Ultraman showed up, along with all of the other characters that met their final fates just four years earlier.
By now, it was 1990. Four years after Crisis on Infinite Earths wrapped up. Not taking anything away from Marv Wolfman's story, but Morrison had found a hole that he drove his truck through - the Psycho Pirate, who was the Anti-Monitor's right hand villain throughout the Crisis remembered. He remembered the multiverse as it used to be - Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-3, S, C, D, P, and all the rest. He remembered them, and he was somehow bringing them all back into his cell at Arkham Asylum. For fans who still felt a little betrayed by DC over Crisis, it was a wonderful epilogue - here was an up and coming creator who loved the DC multiverse as much as the fans did, and clearly didn't like that it was all gone. It was an "Oh yeah?" that resonated with a nostalgic twist. Give him eight years, and Morrison would bring it all back in a fashion with Hypertime.
The battle to save reality as he knew it took place in issue #24, with Animal Man actually stepping out of the panels of the comic to sneak up on his enemies. In the end, reality was saved, but Buddy had one final question for the yellow aliens - it's a question we all ask, but one that Buddy was going to have answered for him - "who makes us suffer this way? Who writes the world?" The yellow aliens faded away, and Buddy opened the front door of his house and entered comic book limbo - literally. There, he met by the Inferior Five, DC's Hercules, J'emm, Son of Saturn (this was before Morrison brought him back on the DCU, and with John Ostrander, established his race as an offshoot of DC's Martians), Quicksilver (who was still a few years away from being renamed Max Mercury and brought into the Flash family by Mark Waid), and others.
And then things got really weird.
But, you'll have to read that part for yourself - if you're a fan of Morrison's more recent work and writings, it all makes sense. Really. It's like looking at part of the foundation on which he's built many other ideas and stories. At the same time, it was frighteningly original, an act some called the ultimate in ego, while others hailed it for it's boldness.
In any case, it wrapped up Morrison's run on the series, and he took his weirdness over and fully applied it to Doom Patrol, which he'd been writing for a couple of years at that point. Animal Man continued along it's path for a little while longer, written by Peter Milligan, before heading off into different, more Vertigo-esque waters, farther from the mainstream DCU.
Call it some mismatched timing.
Or that we just like talking to Grant Morrison about his work.
Anyway - while comments from Morrison about Animal Man would've fit in perfectly with the retrospective we did of his run a little while ago, the writer wasn't available at the time. Since then, he found a few minutes to spare for some nosy questions about a series he wrote 12 or so years ago, and dropped us some thoughts on the series that began to establish him as a unique voice in comics.
Fair warning thought - there are a few spoilers in here, such as the ultimate twist at the ending of Morrison's run, as well as some other info. Safe to say, if not knowing what happened in a series before you read it is important, just back away. But - if you want to hear Morrison talk about some of his wilder ideas, keep reading…
NRMA: To begin with, how did Animal Man grow from a miniseries of four issues to an ongoing? Did your plot for the first four issues just blow away DC?
GM: I think so. I was as surprised as anyone when I got the call to continue the series after four. I'd only planned for four comics and had written them in a style I thought would appeal to the pro-British editors. To tell the truth, I was pretty dry of Animal Man ideas after the mini-series and had no desire to continue in that vein. I knew I couldn't add anything to the 'superheroes in the real world' current that was already showing its age by that time and had to rethink in order to wrench Animal Man in a different direction.
NRMA From the outset of having the series approved, did you know you were going to write yourself into the book?
GM: To help escape from the prevailing 'grim and gritty' 'realist' trend which I'd grown to loathe with all my heart, I turned back to the more psychedelic experimental stuff I'd loved in 60s comic, particularly those written by John Broome. I was also reading Brendan McCarthy comics and absorbing surrealist and dada influences. I was a practicing magician with the conviction that by studying living, breathing homunculus worlds created on 2-d paper surfaces I might come to a better understanding of higherdimensional intelligent space and its relationship to our own 3-d reality. Go figure.
There was the also the influence of the post-modern or magic realist writers popular in the 80s; I was reading a lot of Borges, Calvino, and others, and watching Dennis Potter plays where the writer was always consumed in his own creation. I loved how this very fashionable notion had a comic book antecedent in those stories where the Flash met Julius Schwartz in the DC offices or where writer Cary Bates traveled to Earth 1 and became a villain with 'plotting power'. That whole concept seemed to me to be a logical and fertile area of development beyond what Miller and Moore were doing at the time. I resolved to make my own niche in a decidedly anti-realist territory.
NRAMA: What was the first reaction from editorial when it became clear where you were headed - backing away slowly while laughing nervously, or fully embracing the idea?
GM: They began to back away on a speeding bullet. Karen [Berger] couldn't see how I could make it work without being campy but Art, I remember was convinced after a few pep talks. As the series progressed it was obvious how natural it could all be made to seem. It's still one of my favorite scenes when Buddy turns round and looks out of the page directly into the reader's eyes and says 'I can see you...'
NRMA: Together with Doom Patrol, Animal Man was the first place you really began to infect the American audience with your ideas that you've been developing since. Espouse a little on what you hit with Animal Man, if you could - we create the fiction, and therefore it exists - somewhere. Getting there is the trick, right?
GM: I have a million obscure and pseudo-technical explanations for my theories about fictional events and their relation to 'real life' events but the basic idea can be understood as a kind of sympathetic magic or voodoo doll extension.
As Animal Man progressed, I moved away from miserablist heroes in their grainy, rainy 'real' world (that looked like no real world outside my window) and instead twisted my head into thinking not what would it be like for superheroes to live in the real world but what would it be like for a real person to live in a superhero world - an actual comic continuum, a universe drawn on paper, as thin as the ink surface but as rich and deep and involving as a 50 year-deep, shared, living universe could be.
Once I'd worked out the cosmology I decided to start playing with it a little more seriously. I wondered if I could make a comic so close to real life that by writing an event or person into the comic I could make the event occur or the person appear in my own life or in the lives of others around me. I experimented with the Flex Mentallo comic then got serious with The Invisibles, which changed my life and rewrote the world around me.
Suffice to say that Animal Man was an early attempt to descend into the real DC universe. I figured that if I put myself into a comic, it could be considered an actual voyage into the 2-d comic book reality, wearing a suit to make myself look like on e of them - a drawing. Exploring the place a little, I found that I could talk to characters; influence lives (even lives of famous characters who'd existed in this little paper universe long before I was born, like Superman for instance) and affect the structure of the 'continuity'. After Animal Man, I realized that I didn't have to enter that world looking like myself but that I could go in wearing different 'fiction suits' as I came to call them. A fiction suit being simply any character we create as a disguise to allow us to wander around in the 2-d four-color continuity cosmos without freaking out the natives the way I did Buddy Baker.
NRMA: While you did freak out Buddy a little, he really was your voice in those days - the outsider commenting on the sheer ridiculousness of the spandex crowd and where the industry stood at the time, right?
GM: Buddy was definitely my American voice at that time, as Zenith was my British persona. I'd just come into the US comics industry and was surrounded by famous and not-so-famous characters I'd once only read about. Like me, Buddy was trying to make his mark and learning a little about what was really important in the process.
NRMA: In the latter part of your run, you took a serious poke at Crisis on Infinite Earths. Were the seeds that eventually became Hypertime planted here - you'd been looking for a way to undo what had been done since Animal Man days?
GM: Crisis was a great 'event' series and made a lot of sense at the time but I felt that any comic universe which denied itself the story possibilities of parallel realities and alternate superheroes was a poor universe indeed. From the moment I started working at DC I began to lay plans to swallow up the Crisis in a larger, wilder more creatively exciting paper cosmology.
Hypertime as it became known in 1998 is already present as a full-blown concept in Animal Man comics from 1987. I just had to wait until I get hold of a bigger-selling book like JLA before I could make it stick. Hypertime actually includes the Crisis and every other revision but since very few people have ever quite grasped the theory and the story potential of Hypertime it may have to wait until I decide to do something for DC again.
NRMA: Even after all the years and stories in between, any Animal Man stories stand out as gems from the run?
GM: There are a few of them I love - "The Coyote Gospel" still stands and I'm very fond of "Clockwork Crimes of the Time Commander" in #16 along with "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" in #19, and "Deus Ex Machina," my final issue.
NRMA: What was the fan reaction that you heard during the run?
GM: In those wonderful pre-message board days, fan reaction was confined to a few magazines which came out a month or so after the story. People seemed to like Animal Man. The book did well throughout my run and beyond. I think Buddy Baker's humanity and humor and his humble, questing nature touched a lot of readers in ways that 'cooler' characters miss.
NRMA: Do you ever have nostalgia for Buddy and company, or was that something you had a chance with, and got out of your system, completely?
GM: I have nostalgic memories of all the characters I've written intensely but nostalgia is nostalgia and tomorrow is now.
NRMA: On final sidenote - what was your reaction to appearing in Suicide Squad, as "The Writer" only to be killed off in issue #58?
GM: I think it probably served me right after everything I'd put Buddy Baker through. I just come back from the dead, stronger and stranger, like everyone else in comics.