Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison conceived of Animal Man as a postmodernist comic, a school of thought that was in many ways comparable to their beloved school of Chaos Magic.

The God of Watchmen was far from shy. He liked to muscle his way into every panel, every line. He strutted into view with his blue cock on proud display, and everywhere you looked the Watchmaker was on hand to present his glittering structure for our approval and awe. —Grant Morrison, Supergods

As Morrison explained it, “Chaos Magic as I understand it is simply a description for a type of modern quasi-shamanic practice which incorporates ALL other magics, allowing the practitioner to choose from a constantly changing postmodern menu of techniques, gods, cosmologies, rituals etc. Chaos Magic might use a traditional Enochian ritual as the framework for an invocation of Clive Barker’s Pinhead or Mickey Mouse. Chaos emphasizes work and results over abstract theorizing. In addition to sorcery, it makes use of Reichian body therapy, NLP and Ericksonian hypnosis to facilitate the creation of multiple creative selves.” 

More directly related to Animal Man, however, is the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, mentioned by Morrison in several interviews as an influence on their work. Like chaos magic, this is an influence that can be found on multiple Morrison works, including explicitly in their Doom Patrol run. But two stories apply particularly to Animal Man. The first is “Pierre Menard, Autor of the Quixote,” which Borges writes in the form of a mock essay analyzing the work of Pierre Menard, a man who threw himself into Don Quixote and the life of Miguel de Cervantes with such vigor that he was able to recreate Don Quixote from first principles, composing a version of it which is in practice word for word identical to the original. Borges’s story, with straight-faced humor, then proceeds to elucidate the ways in which these identical works are in fact profoundly different, discussing how  “It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth!–the idea is staggering.” There is a clear line from this sort of game and the metafictional play of Morrison’s interpolation of Crisis, cheekily remixing “I Was the Man With Animal Powers” into his narrative as an actual comic, at once a living origin and a cast off piece of pre-Crisis continuity.”…

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading