MYTHCOMICS: "DEUS EX MACHINA," ANIMAL MAN #18-26 (1989-90)

 

  

The latter half of Grant Morrison's run on ANIMAL MAN wasn't originally given any particular title. However, by whatever contrivance, when DC issued its first softbound reprints of the title, they distributed the first half over two volumes, probably with supplemental material, while the latter half finished up in Volume 3, given the title of the last Morrison story, "Deus Ex Machina."

The first half of Morrison's ANIMAL MAN is a good basic reboot of the late sixties DC character, who in his original incarnation had never taken off. The first seventeen issues emphasize the attempts of Animal Man, who possesses the power to emulate the abilities of all animals, to fight for justice but also to care for the wife and children he maintains in his "Buddy Baker" identity. Morrison also invests Baker with a passionate protective feeling toward the many lower animals maltreated by uncaring human beings, and the author succeeds in making this moral point without becoming preachy. The early issues include a lot of guest appearances by familiar DC heroes and villains. Moore's SWAMP THING and Gaiman's SANDMAN had pursued a similar course to attract regular DC readers. However, the latter half of MACHINA is devoted to doing a deep dive into the DC cosmos rather than emphasizing the main hero's milieu-- and on top of that, a deep dive into the concept of metafiction.

Issue #18 foregrounds a storyline hinted at in the first half: the nature of Animal Man's powers. He meets academic James Highwater and the two seekers go to the desert and chew peyote to bring about a "vision quest." Highwater relates Animal Man's powers to the "morphogenetic fields" suggested by parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake (whose work, BTW, I also admire). From a vulpine oracle named "Foxy," the seekers also learn of an impending "crisis," which is Morrison's metafictional reference to the 1985 CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. This in itself is a form of metafiction, given that the CRISIS over-wrote established DC continuity so that almost no one remembers the events of that cataclysm. What Morrison plays with is something of an "anti-CRISIS" as he begins bringing back all the untidy fictional creations that the 1985 event sought to banish.

 

However, Buddy Baker's experience goes even farther than CRISIS. Not only does Buddy meet the 1960s incarnation of Animal Man, whose existence was rebooted to make Morrison's version, he also beholds the audience that's reading his comic book. Further, Original Animal Man's rants about how their creators "twist and torture" their fictional creations are borne out when Buddy gets home and finds his family slaughtered by an assassin.

     

For three issues, Buddy puts metaphysics on hold as he seeks out the men responsible for the killings, though later he'll conclude that the real murderer is his writer, Grant Morrison. Issue #23, entitled "Crisis," shows how the Psycho Pirate-- one of the few characters from the 1985 series who remembered how reality had been structured before-- begins summoning all the banished characters from whatever conceptual limbo they occupied. However, he also summons bizarre alternate forms of famous DC characters, all calculated to reflect the "grim and gritty" trend of eighties superhero comics. 

In issue #24-- graced by an evocative cover that celebrates the birth of DC continuity in the Silver Age-- Animal Man defeats the immediate menace of Overman and his purification bomb, satirizing current tastes for "realism." But the hero still wants to know what entity is responsible for the deaths of his family, so he's sent to the limbo of cancelled comics-characters.  

Unsurprisingly, in limbo Animal Man meets a lot of characters who simply ceased to be published, rather than being banished in the 1985 CRISIS, such as The Inferior Five, The Green Team, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and (as seen above) The Gay Ghost. Though Morrison naturally only shows characters from DC or from companies DC acquired, he implies that the same limbo awaits other companies' failed icons, in his amusing line about "the great ruined cities of Atlas and Warren." (Atlas Comics ceased operation in the 1970s while Warren Comics went into bankruptcy in 1983-- though not all of Warren's characters were relegated to limbo.) 

 

As I've already stated, the architect of Animal Man's many torments is his writer on ANIMAL MAN the comic, and he only engineered the hero's sufferings for the sake of "drama." After spending the rest of the last issue outlining for the hero the absurdity of superheroes in the author's "real world," he concludes by expressing dismay at how reality has invaded fantasy. He vanishes and Buddy goes back home, where he's given one last gift by his author: a "reboot" in which Buddy's family never died at all. (I didn't regularly read the comic after Morrison left, but I suspect that this escapist fantasy probably ensured that subsequent authors left the Bakers unmurdered, since such a development would have been seen as thoroughly predictable.) 

And so ended one of the early runs that made Grant Morrison a popular comics-author. I don't agree with his implication that human beings create fictional characters solely to torture them, and I rather doubt Morrison really believes that himself. Indeed, everything that Real Author Morrison tells his readers may have exactly the same status as what Fictional Author Morrison tells his fictional hero-- that it's all done for the sake of a good story.