Animal Man #19 (DC)
From January 1990
This is a very famous issue in the Grant Morrison run thanks to this page:
 |
| via Any Eventuality |
The thing about the issue, and the greater story surrounding it, available in the Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina collection, is that it may be the essential Grant Morrison story, the one by which he should be forever known. It's awkward, this defining thing being in an extended run (after this issue there are seven more before his departure from the series). A writer like Alan Moore, you can point to all these standalone works, many of which have become movies at this point, real iconic stuff that's allowed many observers, including Moore himself, to be able to say [given title] and like a famous historical author it's a classic you can point to and read by itself and say, that's why he's so respected. With Morrison, especially with something like this, it's not so easy.
This is an issue filled with philosophy, in a story that famously breaks the fourth wall. But it's not just about metafiction. It's about life in general. Moore has written any number of stories that are memorable stories, and to a certain extent they've made their readers think, but Morrison, especially in this story, has the potential to make a reader think and rethink, not just the story but their life as well. It's real meaning-of-life material.
Buddy Baker, the erstwhile Animal Man, whom Morrison resurrected from obscurity and comic book limbo for this run, has this to say about what he's experiencing, including the above moment ("you" being the reader, as Chas Truog's expressive art hopefully conveys well enough):
Now, in later issues, Buddy indeed meets "God," who is of course the writer of Animal Man, Grant Morrison himself. This takes nothing away from the thoughts expressed above. The fact that Buddy breaks the fourth wall and that isn't the end of the story, that's the beginning of the impact this run has in the career of Morrison, in fiction, not just comics.
Deus Ex Machina is a large part of why I love Morrison so much. I didn't read Animal Man in its original run. I wouldn't even read comics regularly for the first until a few years after it was done. I read Morrison for the first time when he began JLA above five years after the end of the run on Animal Man. I had a break from reading comics, for about five years, right around the time the JLA run was ending. Wanting to read how he ended that was part of how I worked myself into the kind of reader I am now. Reading Seven Soldiers of Victory was another part. But I still wasn't the fan I am now, or close to it. I realized what Soldiers was, its incredibly ambitious scope, but I didn't realize who Morrison was. But then I read Deus Ex Machina for the first time.
And I became a Grant Morrison fan for life. There's something about the way he approaches superheroes that's different from other writers, even Moore. Most British writers seem to have a kind of distance from the concept that their American counterparts don't. That'll always be the biggest difference between Morrison and his closest contemporary, Geoff Johns. What Morrison and Johns share is an expansive view of the mythology, and an interesting not only in exploring but expanding it. What Morrison does that Johns doesn't is write his stories as if he's deconstructing, reconstructing, and constructing all at the same time. It's dizzying. It's not for everyone. It seems completely impossible. Most writers can manage a few of them. Some of them do so quite brilliantly. But Morrison manages to do all three, and he's been doing so for years.
Deus Ex Machina is where he puts all of his ideas to their biggest test. In this issue, he even talks about a second Crisis, as in Crisis on Infinite Earths, a famous crossover event that at that point was...five years earlier. (Everything is in five-year intervals!) A second Crisis did happen. It was written by Johns. Morrison wrote the third (Final Crisis). He was the first to identify the idea of the Crisis as a seminal comics moment, not just for DC as a publisher, but as a story, an event in the lives of the characters themselves. Marvel will always have its "Phoenix Saga," and DC its Crisis.
If you read only this issue, you would even have a Buddy Baker origin story, a Buddy Baker crisis, and the fourth wall being broken. Collapse the whole run into this one issue, and I think it would still be the defining point of Morrison's career.
Glad I had a chance to read it again, just this issue. But I think the whole arc deserves more attention. Could it be a movie? Could we push the experience to that point? Maybe. After The Matrix, which itself is something Morrison always liked to say probably owes a huge debt to his Invisibles, maybe. I'd love for someone to tackle the idea. With the current popularity of superhero movies, maybe something like this could slip in.
Animal Man #23 (DC)
From May 1990
As the arc continues, we spend some time with Psycho Pirate, a villain who happens to be the only character who intrinsically remembers that the first Crisis happened. It's not easy being him. Buddy is spending time with the Phantom Stranger trying to figure things out. I think Morrison writing more Phantom Stranger would be a good thing. This issue becomes a little like Neil Gaiman's more famous Sandman. (Another series that took a loose interpretation of a superhero, by the way.) Buddy and Phantom Stranger talk to a group of immortals, and so there's more talking about the nature of life itself.
Doom Patrol #21 (DC)
From April 1989
This is the third-of-four chapters from Morrison's opening arc in Doom Patrol, "Crawling from the Wreckage." The whole idea was that the previous writer had blown the team to bits, you see. And they didn't relaunch the series for this arc. I know. Seems strange, radical. Last time I talked a little about the fourth chapter and wanting to know what previous ones were like. I've read a good bit of Morrison's run on this series, but never the opening arc. I probably need to just go ahead and read the whole arc.
Hawkworld Book Three: Phoenix Flight (DC)
From 1989
Since this was one of those prestige format mini-series, there is no indication of exact publication month. I could do the research, of course, but I'm not going to. Hawkworld was part of a trend at the time of allowing characters who had slipped through the cracks a little to be explored as properties other than as merely superheroes. Aquaman got the same treatment. Aquaman and Hawkman are two of DC's perennial candidates for reboot treatment as they're both fairly iconic but have never proven as popular as even Flash or Green Lantern, although moreso than the New Gods, sort of third-tier characters.
Anyway, while I was reading this one, which is sort of an urban crime mystery on an alien planet (Thanagar, the erstwhile Hawkworld), I realized that Brian K. Vaughan's Saga is in some ways a pastiche of this particular version of Hawkman, the one who's an alien, who gained his wings from a whole planet filled with cops who wear them as part of their uniform. When in this mode, Carter Hall is known as Katar Hol. Exotic sounding!
It's pretty good stuff from respected veteran Timothy Truman, a nice reminder that Hawkman doesn't just have to be the muscle who also happens to be in an endless cycle of death and rebirth with his one true love, Hawkwoman. Since Hawkman is one of those characters who is frequently stuck in a team book for wont of something else to do with him, how about hooking him up with one of the Green Lantern corps? I'd suggest the Red Lanterns, personally.
This is an issue filled with philosophy, in a story that famously breaks the fourth wall. But it's not just about metafiction. It's about life in general. Moore has written any number of stories that are memorable stories, and to a certain extent they've made their readers think, but Morrison, especially in this story, has the potential to make a reader think and rethink, not just the story but their life as well. It's real meaning-of-life material.
Buddy Baker, the erstwhile Animal Man, whom Morrison resurrected from obscurity and comic book limbo for this run, has this to say about what he's experiencing, including the above moment ("you" being the reader, as Chas Truog's expressive art hopefully conveys well enough):
"I saw into another world, and it was worse than this one. It was like I glimpsed Heaven and...and it wasn't paradise. It was more like Hell. What if God, or whoever it is, created us to be better than himself? What if God's reality...Heaven, if you like...what if it's so bad that he had to imagine us to help make his life bearable?"
Now, in later issues, Buddy indeed meets "God," who is of course the writer of Animal Man, Grant Morrison himself. This takes nothing away from the thoughts expressed above. The fact that Buddy breaks the fourth wall and that isn't the end of the story, that's the beginning of the impact this run has in the career of Morrison, in fiction, not just comics.
Deus Ex Machina is a large part of why I love Morrison so much. I didn't read Animal Man in its original run. I wouldn't even read comics regularly for the first until a few years after it was done. I read Morrison for the first time when he began JLA above five years after the end of the run on Animal Man. I had a break from reading comics, for about five years, right around the time the JLA run was ending. Wanting to read how he ended that was part of how I worked myself into the kind of reader I am now. Reading Seven Soldiers of Victory was another part. But I still wasn't the fan I am now, or close to it. I realized what Soldiers was, its incredibly ambitious scope, but I didn't realize who Morrison was. But then I read Deus Ex Machina for the first time.
And I became a Grant Morrison fan for life. There's something about the way he approaches superheroes that's different from other writers, even Moore. Most British writers seem to have a kind of distance from the concept that their American counterparts don't. That'll always be the biggest difference between Morrison and his closest contemporary, Geoff Johns. What Morrison and Johns share is an expansive view of the mythology, and an interesting not only in exploring but expanding it. What Morrison does that Johns doesn't is write his stories as if he's deconstructing, reconstructing, and constructing all at the same time. It's dizzying. It's not for everyone. It seems completely impossible. Most writers can manage a few of them. Some of them do so quite brilliantly. But Morrison manages to do all three, and he's been doing so for years.
Deus Ex Machina is where he puts all of his ideas to their biggest test. In this issue, he even talks about a second Crisis, as in Crisis on Infinite Earths, a famous crossover event that at that point was...five years earlier. (Everything is in five-year intervals!) A second Crisis did happen. It was written by Johns. Morrison wrote the third (Final Crisis). He was the first to identify the idea of the Crisis as a seminal comics moment, not just for DC as a publisher, but as a story, an event in the lives of the characters themselves. Marvel will always have its "Phoenix Saga," and DC its Crisis.
If you read only this issue, you would even have a Buddy Baker origin story, a Buddy Baker crisis, and the fourth wall being broken. Collapse the whole run into this one issue, and I think it would still be the defining point of Morrison's career.
Glad I had a chance to read it again, just this issue. But I think the whole arc deserves more attention. Could it be a movie? Could we push the experience to that point? Maybe. After The Matrix, which itself is something Morrison always liked to say probably owes a huge debt to his Invisibles, maybe. I'd love for someone to tackle the idea. With the current popularity of superhero movies, maybe something like this could slip in.
Animal Man #23 (DC)
From May 1990
As the arc continues, we spend some time with Psycho Pirate, a villain who happens to be the only character who intrinsically remembers that the first Crisis happened. It's not easy being him. Buddy is spending time with the Phantom Stranger trying to figure things out. I think Morrison writing more Phantom Stranger would be a good thing. This issue becomes a little like Neil Gaiman's more famous Sandman. (Another series that took a loose interpretation of a superhero, by the way.) Buddy and Phantom Stranger talk to a group of immortals, and so there's more talking about the nature of life itself.
Doom Patrol #21 (DC)
From April 1989
This is the third-of-four chapters from Morrison's opening arc in Doom Patrol, "Crawling from the Wreckage." The whole idea was that the previous writer had blown the team to bits, you see. And they didn't relaunch the series for this arc. I know. Seems strange, radical. Last time I talked a little about the fourth chapter and wanting to know what previous ones were like. I've read a good bit of Morrison's run on this series, but never the opening arc. I probably need to just go ahead and read the whole arc.
Hawkworld Book Three: Phoenix Flight (DC)
From 1989
Since this was one of those prestige format mini-series, there is no indication of exact publication month. I could do the research, of course, but I'm not going to. Hawkworld was part of a trend at the time of allowing characters who had slipped through the cracks a little to be explored as properties other than as merely superheroes. Aquaman got the same treatment. Aquaman and Hawkman are two of DC's perennial candidates for reboot treatment as they're both fairly iconic but have never proven as popular as even Flash or Green Lantern, although moreso than the New Gods, sort of third-tier characters.
Anyway, while I was reading this one, which is sort of an urban crime mystery on an alien planet (Thanagar, the erstwhile Hawkworld), I realized that Brian K. Vaughan's Saga is in some ways a pastiche of this particular version of Hawkman, the one who's an alien, who gained his wings from a whole planet filled with cops who wear them as part of their uniform. When in this mode, Carter Hall is known as Katar Hol. Exotic sounding!
It's pretty good stuff from respected veteran Timothy Truman, a nice reminder that Hawkman doesn't just have to be the muscle who also happens to be in an endless cycle of death and rebirth with his one true love, Hawkwoman. Since Hawkman is one of those characters who is frequently stuck in a team book for wont of something else to do with him, how about hooking him up with one of the Green Lantern corps? I'd suggest the Red Lanterns, personally.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.