Animal Man
Animal Man is a superhero character created by Dave Wood and Carmine Infantino, making his first appearance in the 1960s in the comic series "Strange Adventures." The character, also known as Buddy Baker, gains the ability to mimic the abilities of animals after a spaceship crash. Initially appearing sporadically, Animal Man was revitalized in the 1980s through a critically acclaimed miniseries by British writer Grant Morrison, which led to an ongoing series due to strong sales. Morrison's work is notable for its unconventional narrative techniques, particularly the breaking of the fourth wall, where Animal Man becomes aware of his status as a fictional character.
The series explores themes of identity, consciousness, and the consequences of storytelling, as Animal Man grapples with both his superhero responsibilities and personal life as a family man. Over the course of the comics, he evolves into an animal rights activist, advocating against the exploitation of animals while navigating complex storylines involving existential themes. Morrison's distinctive approach not only redefined Animal Man but also influenced subsequent comic book storytelling, allowing for deeper character exploration and emotional resonance. The series remains significant within the DC Comics universe and is remembered for its innovative style and thought-provoking content.
Animal Man
AUTHOR: Morrison, Grant
ARTIST: Chas Truog (illustrator); Paris Cullins (penciller); Tom Grummett (penciller); Doug Hazlewood (inker); Mark McKenna (inker); Steve Montano (inker); Helen Vesik (colorist); Tatjana Wood (colorist); Janice Chiang (letterer); John Costanza (letterer); Brian Bolland (cover artist)
PUBLISHER: DC Comics
FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1988-1990
FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1991-2003
Publication History
DC Comics received much critical acclaim for British writer Alan Moore’s work on his revamp of Swamp Thing (1983-1987), and publisher Jeannette Kahn and editor Karen Berger sought out several other English and Scottish authors to reinvigorate other characters. They met with Grant Morrison, laying out an initial four-issue miniseries featuring Animal Man, a character that had appeared in several issues of Strange Adventures in the 1960’s, with sporadic appearances afterward, primarily in the early 1980’s.
Sales were strong enough to warrant an ongoing series, and Morrison continued writing through the twenty-sixth issue. The first trade paperback, comprising the initial miniseries as well as several stories that tied into a companywide crossover, Invasion!, were collected under the DC logo in 1991. Two subsequent volumes, which constituted the remainder of Morrison’s work on the title, were published under DC’s Vertigo imprint, intended for mature readers, in 2002 and 2003.
The monthly issues were published by DC even though an early issue depicted an attempted rape. The decision to reprint later volumes under the mature imprint was a marketing decision, as another of Morrison’s works, The Invisibles, had been released as individual issues and in trade format under the Vertigo imprint.
Plot
Animal Man, created by Dave Wood and Carmine Infantino, first appeared in Strange Adventures 180, although he was not known as such until Strange Adventures 190. While hunting in a wooded area with his friend Roger Denning, Buddy Baker hears a loud explosion and sees a spaceship that has crash-landed in a clearing. Another explosion follows, and Baker suddenly finds himself with the power to mimic other animals and, for example, gain the strength of an elephant or the ability to fly like a bird. Animal Man also appears as a member of the “Forgotten Heroes” in Crisis on Infinite Earths, which compressed DC’s multiple universes into one.
At the beginning of the first arc of Morrison’s revival, Animal Man is married to his high school sweetheart, Ellen, and has two young children, Cliff and Maxine. Baker is unemployed, and his wife supports the household by doing storyboarding. An animal-rights activist, Animal Man finds himself involved with an experiment dealing with the mutation of monkeys at S.T.A.R. Labs in San Diego. He wears a jacket with his costume, not made from animal skins, and refined goggles. He becomes a vegetarian, and he eventually fights ecoterrorists and foils a foxhunt in England.
After these events, Morrison sets up the deconstruction of the hero. Animal Man meets an anthropomorphic coyote named Crafty, who has carried his indecipherable gospel to Earth. He has come from a world where animals perform endless feats of destruction against one another; they seemingly blow up yet remain unhurt, free to cause more turmoil. Wanting to be free of this existence, Crafty is banished to “the second reality” by a creator who holds a paintbrush in his hand. The coyote is killed, and as Animal Man stands over his crucified form, the page pans back to show an unfinished background and a large brush dripping red ink.
The second volume reintroduces the yellow aliens seen in an Animal Man story from the 1960’s. “Desleeped” by their higher power, they realize Animal Man has changed; this is an indirect reference to Crisis on Infinite Earths. Jim Highwater, a physicist studying implicate theory, visits Psycho-Pirate, who contains the lost multiverse within his Medusa mask. Highwater starts questioning his random actions, and after he and Animal Man take a spiritual journey, Animal Man learns “the second secret” from a ghost messenger named Foxy. In an example of breaking the fourth wall, a literary technique in which a fictional character becomes aware of and acknowledges the readers’ reality in a direct or metatextual manner, he turns toward the reader and states, “I can see you!” He then returns home to find his family murdered.
Psycho-Pirate releases the multiple analogues of heroes from the destroyed universes, and the aliens tell Animal Man and Highwater that they have no choice in matters; each can play only his assigned roles. After Animal Man leaves to confront the “creator” who murdered his family, Highwater tells the teeming crowd of heroes that they will long outlive their own gods, every time someone reads of their adventures. Placated, they fall apart into pieces of colored paper.
Animal Man travels through Limbo, where obscure comic book heroes come and go. Several forgotten heroes recall Animal Man, but he has no recollection of ever being there. Wanting to meet the writer who killed his family, he walks for five years toward the City of Formation, along the way meeting a character from the Golden Age, the Red Bee. The Red Bee claims to be freezing, so Animal Man offers his jacket. Minus the jacket, his hair shaped in a buzzcut, Animal Man looks exactly as he did in the 1960’s. When he reaches for a doorknob, he is confronted by Grant Morrison.
Morrison points at his computer screen, telling Animal Man that he has twisted his life to please himself and that the next writer might do whatever he wants to change his character yet again. Morrison shows him several comics, one of which shows Ellen and the children lying dead on the kitchen floor of their home. When Morrison tells Animal Man he killed them off to add drama to his story, the hero claims that it is not fair.
Morrison then shows Animal Man a photo of his cat, Jarmara, who died just after her third birthday. He says that her death was not fair either, but to whom can he complain? At the very least, he can include her in the story. Comparing comics to life, he asks why blood and anguish excite everyone and why people cannot try to be kind. He then fades to pencil lines, and Animal Man finds himself sitting on his own couch. The doorbell buzzes, he answers it, and he finds his entire family there, Ellen having forgotten her key. The last two pages are of Morrison, ending Animal Man’s story and then walking outside, narrating how he used to signal a childhood invisible friend named Foxy, who lived in the hills. Would he still answer after twenty years? Morrison shines a light into the empty night, morose over his dead cat and the idea that he did not tell a thrilling enough story. He walks away, and in the final panel, a light flashes back across the deserted street.
Volumes
•Animal Man (1991). Collects issues 1-9 and features Animal Man as an animal-rights activist and the start of Morrison’s deconstruction of the hero, with “The Coyote Gospel,” in the fifth issue.
•Animal Man: Origin of the Species (2002). Collects issues 10-17. Animal Man discovers his true origin in Africa, as he learns that aliens have graphed him into a morphogenic field.
•Animal Man: Deus ex Machina (2003). Animal Man’s family is killed, and a rip in the continuum allows him to trek through Limbo and meet with Morrison, whom he asks to give him back his family.
Characters
•Buddy Baker, a.k.a. Animal Man, is thirty years old in his 1960’s incarnation but is in his mid-twenties in this series. He gained his powers from an exploding spacecraft when he was nineteen.
•Ellen Baker is Buddy’s wife and has a full understanding of how crazy superhero life can be. Mother to their children, Cliff, eight, and Maxine, five, she works as a storyboard artist.
•James Highwater is a physicist visiting Arkham Asylum and is an expert on superstring theory and the theory of implicate order.
•Unnamed yellow aliens, working for a higher power, manipulate Animal Man’s origins.
•Roger Hayden, a.k.a. Psycho-Pirate, is an inmate at Arkham who releases multiple realities through a Medusa mask, threatening the world.
•Grant Morrison is the writer of the story, the creator of Animal Man’s adventures.
Artistic Style
Chas Truog and Tom Grummett provided an early attempt at clean, realistic images. Rather than leaning heavily on inflated muscles and exaggerated proportions, they presented a world that was visually calm and normal, all to serve the unique and engaging writing. This technique fit in well with the many scenes set within the Baker household, as Animal Man is presented as a hero more attached to his wife and children than one compelled to defend a dark and urban city.
Each piece of cover art, created by Brian Bolland, depicts a single scene from the issue. Following Morrison’s theme of reality, there are covers in which the reader is looking at the scene depicted and others in which an object is propped up, giving the impression that the viewer is being forced to look at an event with ramifications.
Themes
Animal Man is notable, first and foremost, for breaking the fourth wall. Early on, the protagonist encounters a coyote who lives in a world of cartoon violence, with cats and pigs resembling Warner Bros. cartoon characters. The coyote asks his creator, who sits in a high throne with an artist’s brush at hand, to send him to hell, which for him is Animal Man’s reality. In Animal Man’s world, animals are treated to extreme violence via experimentation by humans. Morrison is Animal Man’s creator, allowing him to talk with the original version of himself from the 1960’s; to learn the secret of his reality, that he and others in his adventures are simply characters in a story; and to understand that everything that happens, primarily the murder of Animal Man’s family, can be rewritten. Writers and artists will die, but their creations will live on through their works; nonetheless, creators can do nothing to “fix” their own reality.
Impact
Animal Man was Morrison’s first work in which he “rebooted” an existing, albeit obscure, character. He did so with such vigor that the series continued for another four years after he left the project. In most of his work, Morrison presents a complex story involving hidden conspiracies and religious references. DC had not had any luck with updating old characters to any lasting degree, but based on the high sales that Animal Man provided, DC was able to reboot Shade, The Changing Man, and Hawkworld, a more straightforward look at the Hawkman mythos.
Further Reading
Azzarello, Brian, and Cliff Chiang. Doctor 13: Architecture and Mortality (2007).
Ellis, Warren, and John Cassady. Planetary (1998-2009).
Morrison, Grant, and J. G. Jones. Final Crisis (2008-2009).
Morrison, Grant, and Richard Case. Doom Patrol (1987-1992).
Wolfman, Marv, and George Perez. Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-1986).
Bibliography
Beatty, Scott, et al. The DC Comics Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Characters of the DC Universe. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2008.
Blankfield, Bryan Boyd, and Christopher Lyle Johnstone. “Framing Animal-Rights Activism: An Analysis of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.” University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2010.
Callahan, Timothy. Grant Morrison: The Early Years. Edwardsville, Ill.: Sequart Research and Literacy Organization, 2007.
Kwong, Sophia. “Post-Modern Pop: Reinventing Comic Book Literacy in Selected Works by Grant Morrison.” Austin: University of Texas, 2007.