This month sees the entirety of Grant Morrison’s classic run on Animal Man republished in a hardcover omnibus edition, so what better time to revisit this groundbreaking piece of superhero fiction, and remember just why it came to be regarded as a cult classic.
Running from 1988 to 1990, Grant Morrison’s renovation of the forgotten, B-list superhero Animal Man was his first major piece of work for DC, and was originally intended to be merely a four-issue relaunch for the character before the ongoing series was handed off to another writer. Fortunately for the world of comic books Morrison stuck with the title, having thought of an intriguing and novel direction in which to take the newly-reborn superhero. Starting with the fifth issue of his run, Coyote Gospel (itself a concise masterpiece of tragic metafiction and religious allegory), Morrison began to foreshadow the more complex spiritual and existential themes which would come to dominate the comic, as the main character’s consciousness is elevated to the point where he begins to suspect that he might just be a character in a comic book…..
Animal Man (real name Buddy Baker) is an unconventional superhero in that for him it’s a part-time job. Although able to absorb the abilities of any animal in his vicinity, he spends most of his time worrying about paying the mortgage, keeping his costume clean and landing TV spots to promote his services to the general public. For Buddy, a chance with the Justice League is an opportunity to help make the world a better place, but it also represents a steady salary, and a way to better support his wife and children. Deciding to take a chance and go full-time as Animal Man, Buddy’s first adventure sees him uncover barbaric animal experimentation at STAR Labs in San Francisco, an experience which gives him a new purpose: fighting for animals rights across the world. When the Justice League offer Animal Man a job it looks like things are on the up for the Baker family, but a series of increasingly bizarre occurrences causes Buddy to question his place in the world and whether he’s really in control of his own destiny. The aliens who gave Buddy his powers reveal that they’re only following the orders of a higher authority, and invite him to question the reliability of his memories; the supervillain Psycho-Pirate, imprisoned in Arkham Asylum, refuses to sleep for fear that he’ll be “removed from the continuity” before he wakes; and a physicist called James Highwater begins to suspect that he may not have existed until he became involved in Animal Man’s exploits, and his new theory of physics seems to suggest that the universe is shaped very much like a comic book page. Buddy endures profound personal tragedy and an epic battle to save the universe before his quest for existential certainty leads him beyond the boundaries of his reality, to the doorway of a young comics writer called Grant Morrison.
Morrison’s grounded depiction of Buddy’s home life was his concession to the trend of realism that started to dominate comics in the late ’80s, but casting his main character as an everyman who just happened to have superpowers also allowed him to satirise the superhero genre by addressing the inherent ridiculousness of the concept. Buddy’s musing about the nonsensical nature of his animal powers, for instance, is both a gentle swipe at attempts to bring realism to a fundamentally unrealistic world, and a foreshadowing of the metafictional odyssey which would come to define the character of Animal Man. Morrison also used the comic to address political issues, specifically environmentalism, animal rights and South African apartheid; his approach to these storylines was sometimes a little clumsy and overly earnest, but groundbreaking nonetheless. Also refreshing was his attempt to depict the awkward early career of an inexperienced superhero, twenty years before Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass, and the mixture of pathos and comedy that resulted from it. But what elevates Grant Morrison’s Animal Man into true cult classic territory is its brilliant combination of extensive metafictional elements and gut-wrenching emotional resonance.
You care about Buddy Baker. You care about his family, his pets and all the little things that make up his world. Despite having superhuman abilities, Buddy is essentially an ordinary guy, trying to do the right thing and find his way in the universe. You can’t help but root for him as he throws himself into a world of monsters, aliens, time travel and magic, so much so that when tragedy finally strikes it comes as a genuine, horrible shock. Buddy’s gradual realisation that he is actually a character in a comic book makes for compelling reading, but the true genius of the series is the way in which Morrison shows you that all the characters you’re following are nothing more than ink on paper, and then still makes you care deeply about what happens to them. In many ways, Animal Man is a paean to the magic of storytelling, something which becomes apparent in the series’ final pages. It tackles the cynical myth that darkness and violence somehow makes stories more “realistic”, and instead embraces the fragile wonder that lies just beneath the surface of the everyday. It is simultaneously a critique of the superhero genre and a celebration of it, and although Morrison would explore many of its core concepts more extensively in later works like Flex Mentallo and The Invisibles, his Animal Man remains to this day one of the most innovative and affecting superhero stories ever written.
The omnibus edition of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man will be published on 13th August (RRP £55.99).
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