It leads to a musing on where characters go once they’ve been erased from the continuity and whether greater imagination would be preferable to the easy option of rebooting.

In the infinite worlds of infinite possibilities that Morrison eventually entrenched at DC there’s one where the art sparkles as much as the script on Animal Man.Ī tragedy having occurred, Animal Man uses what he’s learned, and the possibilities Morrison’s dropped during earlier stories, to attempt to reverse the tragedy. Truog tells the story clearly, but so unimaginatively, and his people look strange. Nothing wrong here, no need for change, move along. While Morrison is straining at the boundaries of what superhero comics can be, Truog is unshakeably drawing everything the way it’s always been. While that’s happening tragedy occurs at home.Īs before, almost the entire book is drawn by Chas Truog, and there can surely have been no greater polarity in creative vision between writer and artist. It’s when Buddy goes on a peyote trip that the bigger picture is partially revealed to him, as he comes to believe he’s just a character in a story. Morrison doesn’t head there immediately, instead offering a chapter of foreshadowing and a couple more smart superhero stories, although hectoring on animal rights issues, something he puts his hands up to near the end. Metaphysically, though, he still has a fair way to go.

It tied Buddy Baker’s talent of being able to mimic the abilities of nearby wildlife into the morphogenetic field theory, and this picks up with Animal Man at least knowing who he is in once sense. Book One closed with Grant Morrison reworking Animal Man’s origin, random even by the standards of the 1960s, into something that made sense of aliens and their presence of Earth.

Animal Man, Vol. 1 by Grant Morrison