Elizabeth Sandifer

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s Animal Man contained frequent political issues, particularly ones focused on issues of animal rights.

Sometimes you can’t live with the contradictions, Grant. —Alan Moore, as quoted by Grant Morrison

Arguments against animal cruelty rooted in a sense of animal rights reach into antiquity. The Pythagoreans argued for vegetarianism based on the fact of animal suffering, while animal rights based arguments in Indian culture date as far back as the 8th century BCE. More contemporaneously, the 19th century led to Richard Martin helping to form the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, while philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Arnold Schopenhauer made ethical arguments for the legitimacy of animal rights. 

Come the 1960s and animal rights began to mingle with the rapidly fomenting political radicalism, commingling with the larger environmentalist movement in the form of things like Greenpeace’s anti-whaling protests. In the UK people opposed to blood sports like fox hunting formed the Hunt Saboteurs Association and embraced direct action, sabotaging hunts and sparking increasingly fraught confrontations with hunters. In 1972 an offshoot group, the Band of Mercy, itself a precursor to the Animal Liberation Front. This group embraced even more militant tactics, most infamously arson and raids on farms and laboratories.  These increasingly radical strains of activism coalesced in 1973 when philosopher Peter Singer published an article in which he coined the phrase “animal liberation,” expanding the notion in 1975 to a full-length book in which he critiqued the idea that animals have a lesser degree of rights than humans as “speciesism.” Singer went on to argue for the non-voluntary euthanasia of disabled children.

Among those influenced by Singer’s book was Ingrid Newkirk, who in 1980 helped found People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In 1981, working with members of the Animal Liberation Front, the group shot to national prominence in 1981 when they brought attention to the conditions of lab monkeys in a lab in Silver Spring, Maryland. They quickly became known for their ostentatious and eye-catching tactics like their “I’d Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur” campaign, in which celebrities posed for tasteful nude photographs to protest the use of fur. This deliberately confrontational approach did exactly what was intended: to garner attention, including that most effective form of it, controversy. Indeed, the animal rights movement was generally good at this, with its steadfast moral condemnation of everyday activities like eating dinner or wearing boots and its insistence on radical, fundamental change to day to day life.

For Morrison’s part, the thing that radicalized them was being “horrified by harrowing scenes from the animal rights documentary The Animals Film, and a single viewing was enough to bring about my conversion to vegetarianism.” This film was famously aired by Channel 4 in 1982 on its third day of transmission, with cuts demanded by the Independent Broadcasting Authority on the grounds that scenes could “incite crime or lead to civil disorder.” As Channel 4’s contract with the filmmakers forbade them from making cuts, meaning that they had to go back and negotiate exactly how to handle it.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: After a series of inventive one-shot stories, Morrison prepared for their larger plotline, aided by a promotional push when their was given a spot in the Secret Origins anthology series for Animal Man.

Return to the files. It’s been three days now, and the more material comes in the more confusing it gets. —Neil Gaiman, “Pavane”

It’s an effective and unfussed execution of the brief: introduce the book’s status quo, tell the origin story, and leave some hints about where the book might go next to encourage readers to buy it. But most importantly, it’s an accessible introduction to Morrison’s style—to the sly metafiction they intended to make use of, and to the larger questions of Crisis and its practical effects on continuity that they would deal with over the remainder of their tenure on the book.

Morrison went on to pen two further stories for Secret Origins in the book’s final months. These did not deal with Animal Man or indeed directly with any of Morrison’s books, but rather saw Morrison playing with the wider DC universe. Nevertheless, these stories were clearly revealing about Morrison’s larger interests and intentions. The first, “Ghost of Stone” in Secret Origins #46, saw Morrison writing for Curt Swan to tell the origin of the Justice League of American’s mountain headquarters. He did this with inventive whimsy—the plot involved the Justice League’s costumes coming to life and running off without them—but more to the point saw Morrison writing a loving homage to classic Silver Age Justice League stories for one of the iconic artists of the Silver Age.

Meanwhile in the book’s final issue, released the week before Morrison’s final issue of Animal Man, they took Gardner Fox’s classic “Flash of Two Worlds” story, which introduced the idea of the Multiverse by having the Barry Allen and Jay Garrick versions of the Flash meet, and reworked it into something that made sense within post-Crisis continuity, telling the story of Keystone City and Central City as twin cities one of which had been erased from people’s memory by the machinations of the Fiddler, the Thinker, and the Shade, the villains from Fox’s original. Another element of the original story, meanwhile—the Flash’s appearance as a replacement stage magician—served as a frame story, with Morrison’s version being a school essay, revealed in the final panel to be penned by an eight-year-old Garfield Logan, eventually to become Beast Boy in the Teen Titans. Combining Morrison’s love of the old Multiverse concept and their longtime fondness for the Flash, the story was yet another demonstration of why Morrison was, that point, one of the hottest talents at DC.

Morrison used the Secret Origins boost for Animal Man to set off on a three-part story that expanded on its implications. This was a somewhat intensely overstuffed arc in which Animal Man teams up with Vixen, a superhero with similar animal powers who starred in Gerry Conway’s Justice League of America run to fight Hamid Ali, the immortal simian Arab nemesis of B’wana Beast, as they attempt to excavate a mysterious crater in Africa.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man quickly came to intersect with the company’s linewide Invasion! crossover, which saw a bunch of aliens invading the Earth and triggering some mysterious effect that resulted in a cliffhanger splash of Animal Man in dramatic monochrome negative image and an injunction to read the third issue of Invasion!

It’s Doctor Destiny: claiming he dreamt the JLA into existence and threatening to ‘de-imagine Detroit’ if you can’t prove him wrong. —Grant Morrison, JLA

Readers who obeyed would discover that the black and white effect was the Dominators’ gene bomb, which sent anyone whose superpowers were a factor of the hazily defined “metagene” (which was, in a rather bald-faced pillaging of Marvel’s massively popular X-Men franchise, apparently responsible for most superpowers on planet Earth) into a deathly coma after their powers briefly exploded out of control. This was eventually reversed after a group of unaffected heroes (mostly those with purely technological powers or whose powers were either from or because they were aliens) successfully struck back, restoring the status quo at last. Animal Man’s role in the book was minimal—he was seen on a rooftop as his powers raged out of control and then simply became one of the many comatose heroes in the book—but the events of the book would have long-term implications for him on a number of fronts.

The first of these began to become clear in Animal Man #8, in which Morrison revamped the occasional Flash villain the Mirror Master as a Scottish mercenary and had him attack Animal Man in his house. The threat is repelled, in part because Mirror Master turns out to have been under explicit orders not to hurt anyone, but it’s notable that at no point in the fight does Animal Man use any of his powers. Although mostly an excuse for Morrison, an avowed Flash fan, to do a trippy romp with a beloved favorite, this also served to set up a plotline in which it would turn out that Animal Man’s powers had not fully recovered from the gene bomb, and that his attempts to reach out and grab a specific animal power were typically going awry. The second was also mentioned in Animal Man #8, but was in practice not primarily a concern for Morrison themself, since it was mostly going to play out in a book they didn’t write: the newly launched Justice League Europe.

The Justice League is a concept within DC that is, to say the least, historically complex. Its origins lie all the way back in All-Star Comics #3 in 1940, where Gardner Fox assembled various DC superheroes like Hawkman, Green Lantern, Flash, Sandman, and Hour-Man who were operating below the Batman/Superman tier of popularity into a team. (Wonder Woman eventually joined as, in one of the more cringeworthy moments of 1940s comics, the team’s secretary.) The structure of the comic was convoluted—the characters spent most of every issue on solo adventures drawn by their primary creative teams with only a frame story stitching it together into a team book.…

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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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