Elizabeth Sandifer

Previously in The Last War in Albion: After an initial arc widely and at least somewhat accurately described (including by Morrison) as an Alan Moore imitation, Morrison found their own style with the fifth issue of Animal Man, “The Coyote Gospel,” which featured a Wile E. Coyote pastiche trapped in the real world and trying to overthrow the tyrannical demiurge of his.

Hello alien friends! Do you like bullet violence? —Kieron Gillen, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt

The comic returns to Animal Man staring at a scroll of incomprehensible symbols. “I’m sorry… I… I can’t read it,” he explains, as the man returns, takes aim at Crafty once again, and shoots him again with a silver bullet. The man and Crafty both perish, Animal Man comforting the dying beast as the view pulls back, revealing him lying, arms outstretched, at a crossroads, while a hand hovering above the page with a paint brush adds his dying blood to the frame. “The end, folks!”  It is a spectacularly bleak piece of comics, full of righteous anger and heartbreaking bitterness. It is perhaps not entirely clear what Morrison is trying to say with it. In many ways it appears to simply be a grim and tragic joke—a morbid commentary on the fractured ethics of storytelling from the perspective of those within it. But to look at it in this sense misses the point. What is most bracingly evident about “The Coyote Gospel” is simply that it is a stunningly creative and effective comic—an invigorating fusion of clever ideas and emotionally powerful moments. This was, simply put, a comic that was self-evidently the work of a major talent.

Indeed, Morrison’s usual line on “The Coyote Gospel” is an assertion that it marked the moment they stopped doing an Alan Moore impersonation and began their career in earnest, claiming it as a personal favorite story of theirs. As Morrison put it, after acknowledging Moore’s influence on the start of Animal Man, “My personal work from the same time is written in a very different style, and is more in the vein of Doom Patrol or The Invisibles.You don’t have to take my word for this: it can be verified by looking at the Near Myths material or stuff like the ‘Famine’ strip in Food For Thought from 1985. It can even be gleaned by looking at the clear difference between the first four Animal Man issues and the fifth – ‘The Coyote Gospel’.” Morrison was even blunter at the time. Interviewed by Mark Millar in 1989 after slagging off their first four issues, they noted that “it gets better from issue 5 onwards, or at least I’M happier with the work I’ve done, which is the main thing.” And yet just as the first four issues of Animal Man show rather less Moore influence than Morrison disparages them for having, “The Coyote Gospel” is far more indebted to Moore than Morrison would like to admit. The central concept of dropping a pastiche of a familiar funny animal story into your DC series, after all, originated in Moore’s “Pog” issue of Swamp Thing in which Swamp Thing met a thinly-veiled Pogo knockoff.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Morrison’s first assignment from DC, the biggest in their career, was to revitalize the all but forgotten character of Animal Man, which they set about doing according to a template originated by Moore on Swamp Thing. But this was not the whole story.

There is a red and angry world… red things happen there. The world eats your wife, eats your friends, eats all the things that make you human. And you become a monster. And the world just keeps on eating.—Alan Moore, Swamp Thing

These Moore riffs existed, after all, in a comic where Animal Man treats superheroing as a job to support his family, musing on ways to increase his profile. Joining the Justice League International is mooted as a plausible option, but he reacts to his wife’s suggestion that the Outsiders might be more his speed with horror, saying that they’re “almost as bad as the Forgotten Heroes. I’m trying to get away from all that nohope stuff.” This is both sly metafictional commentary on the order of precedence within the DC Comics line and a clever vision for what superheroing is. Neither of these have any precedence in Moore, whose “superhero as ordinary person” riff in Miraceman never got bogged down in questions like how Michael Moran paid the rent. And they do have analogues in Morrison, who works with similar ideas in Captain Clyde and Zenith.

Similar examples abound. A scene where Animal Man briefly meets a distracted Superman who compliments the big A on his costume before flying off to rescue a plane, a riff where Animal Man signs an autograph for a kid who’s immediately disappointed he’s not Aquaman, and a repeated tendency to entertain himself by giving Animal Man weird powers from random animals instead of, as Dave Wood typically did, finding some excuse to put him near a tiger or something. Morrison even gets a cliffhanger set piece out of this, with Animal Man getting his arm ripped off in a fight and regrowing it with the power of earthworms. (And being Morrison, they then have Animal Man express a degree of confusion and horror at how weird this is.)

Perhaps more to the point, however, while Morrison uses many of Moore’s techniques and approaches, they use them as tools, not as basic modes of operating. Morrison throws in portentous narration, but they’re not as good at it as Moore, never capturing his poetic lilt, and they clearly recognize it, using it purely for Bwana Beast’s narration instead of as a core structural element of entire issues. Morrison writes Berger the Moore riff they know she’s looking for, but the result is clearly Morrison doing Moore as opposed to a Moore imitation with no further character or elements. It is perhaps most impressive against the backdrop of Veitch’s Swamp Thing and Delano’s Hellblazer, managing both to land closer to a successful Moore imitation than either and to more successfully do its own thing.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, an accidental magical ritual to avert nuclear armageddon. The ramifications of this were considerable. Moore withdrew from the mainstream comics scene both to recover from the exertion and to plot his next moves, while his magic’s unintended consequence transformed the Cold War into the Last War in Albion. This required that Moore have a rival, and so, equally unwittingly, the brash young Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison stepped into the role.

Morphogenic graft reset accomplished. Reassembly from template imminent. Reset personality parameters: subset goals, motivations, fears, desires. Reinsert subject into the continuum. —Grant Morrison et al, 52

The Great Work completed, its tyrant father absent, temporarily ensnared in its thunderous wake, his grand throne vacant, Grant Morrison was free at last to make their devil’s bargain and obtain all that they thought they wanted.

On the train down to London to meet with Berger and Giordano, they frantically scribbled ideas. Among them was Animal Man, a profoundly obscure 1960s DC character introduced in Strange Adventures in a strip called “I Was the Man with Animal Powers” by Dave Wood and Carmine Infantino. Strange Adventures was emphatically a book that belonged to an earlier era of DC. It launched in 1950, deep into the post-World War II superhero bust and well before Frederic Wertham’s moral panic transformed the landscape to make them viable again. DC’s superhero publishing line had been whittled down to a bare core of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman titles, with the last exception, the adventures of the Justice Society of America in All-Star Comics, a bare few months away from transforming into All-Star Western to join All-American Western, Western Comics, Dale Evans, and Jimmy Wakely, in DC’s western stable. Elsewhere DC published a bevy of funny animal comics, romance comics, a smattering of crime comics, and a couple of Archie knockoffs. But they lacked a science fiction comic in their stable, and launched Strange Adventures. Unsurprisingly, the editor behind the project was Julius Schwartz, who had previously been the literary agent of sci-fi writers such as Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, and H.P. Lovecraft. It was through these connections, presumably, that he was able to launch the comic with an adaptation of the forthcoming Robert Heinlein film Destination Moon.

By 1965, however, Strange Adventures had become the oddball in DC’s lineup. It and its sister book Mystery in Space were still running as a vestigial remnant of the science fiction line, just as Young Love and Girls’ Romances represented the bare core of the romance line. (Westerns and funny animals had already died off.) And “I Was the Man with Animal Powers” existed within this limbo state. On one level, it was clearly a superhero story; its plot concerns a man, Buddy (later Buddy Baker) who is exposed to a mysterious radiation from a crashing spacecraft, gains the eponymous animal powers, and fights a giant monster. And yet the story resisted such easy classification.…

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