Some Animal Man.

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

Two pages from when Animal Man met his maker, but first, an unrelated panel from the same trade:



The whole scene made me love the Crime Syndicate of America, but this panel in particular.

Recap: Animal Man has met his maker, who took him out and pitched him against some bad guys...so that he could run through his credits. Animal Man gets his arse kicked.





I love this whole trade. It really makes you think. :) (Apart from the Red Bee bit, which just made me feel sad. ._.)

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

Comments

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

Ask for Gail Simone as writer, and 10% of all action figure and graphic novel sales.

Oh, and Perez on art.(I may not appear too often, but by all the gods I'll look spectacular when I do!)

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

Hell yes to Perez on the artwork. He is fantastic. :D

[aaron_bourque.insanejournal.com]

Ask for Alan Moore, Kurt Busiek, or Gail Simone as the writer, with Alan Grant, George Perez, or Mark Bagley as artist.

Aaron "The Mad Whitaker" Bourque; maybe Troy Hickman and Aaron Lopresti could be added as alternates . . .

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

Alan Grant.... as artist

Really? Not Norm Breyfogle? Of the two, I know who I'd want. :)

[aaron_bourque.insanejournal.com]

Duh, Alan Davis. . .

I know who I meant . . .

[troyhickman.insanejournal.com]

Do you mean I could be an alternate writer, or an alternate to your life?

At this point, I'll take either job...

[aaron_bourque.insanejournal.com]

Alternate writer, unless they want to give scripting duties to myself . . .

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Start killing. Everything in sight. Because in a comic, that could make me become a god.

Then, I'd be really disappointed to find out it was an EC comic.

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

I do like that Morrison depicted himself as a completely unsympathetic and pretentious jerk. I really do think he's more self aware than people give him credit for, and I appreciate that he's at least trying to say something with his work...Now if only he'd stop writing Batman, or at least stick to fun, trippy adventures with Bat-mite. Damian and Ace the Bathound can come along too.

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

Wonder why I got cheated out of a fantastically well endowed chest and then contemplate why my series hasn't been canceled.

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

Yes, I agree. A Mary-Sue would have been far more disturbing. o.O

Wonder why I got cheated out of a fantastically well endowed chest and then contemplate why my series hasn't been canceled.

Find Power Girl's weakness and steal hers. :D

[volksjager.insanejournal.com]

Yeah , "depicted".....

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

He actually says out loud that his role is not that of a creator, but of a demiurge, someone who comes in afterward and ruins everything. (one of the earliest critiques, right in the heart of when it was in vogue, of "darkening" characters, which he had done with AM a few issues earlier) In fact, if you look at the whole issue, it's a restaging of the usual "villain reveals his evil plan" scene, with Morrison as villain.

[parsimonia.insanejournal.com]

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

Invent the invisible sports bra and make a killing off of it in comic book land.

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

...You'd be able to buy out LuthorCorp with a move like that.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Wonder if he now regrets endorsing Peta...

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

Any particular reason why he should?

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

...because they're batshit insane?

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

Only the ones we actually hear about are batshit insane. Although I'd never endorse PETA, the majority of them are alright.

[nagaoka.insanejournal.com]

Maybe individual members are okay but the "batshit insane" parts tend to come mostly from stuff the corporation does as a whole. The advertising/publicity campaigns and a lot of its policies are seriously just...wrong. If you want to help animals nowadays go for the humane society or something along those lines. PETA is pretty extreme.


I think the only effective thing they do is get people talking and paying attention to animal rights causes simply because people want to talk about the latest controversy PETA brings up.

[foxhack.insanejournal.com]

Their leaders are the worst part. I'd rather support small charities than those hypocritical assholes.

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

Tbh, I can't stand huge corporate charites. My family support three local ones, where you can actually see the money being spent on the animals. :|

[cissie_king.insanejournal.com]

Don't know if he regrets it, but in an interview I read a year or two ago he mentioned he was no longer so into the whole thing. He started eating meat again quite a few years ago and all that.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

This would explain why he's still alive and looking a bit more healthy than he used to. I wonder if this had anything to do with that terrible illness he had around the turn of the century.

No, I'm not slagging vegetarians--it makes no difference to me what people eat, though I really do question full-on veganism--but it's always seemed to me that(judging by friends, many of whom, including my ex-wife, are vegetarians), unless one works at it much harder than most want to or have the time to, over time it's somewhat insufficient and causes cumulative damage to health. Partly because it's so hard to get enough protein and complex carbohydrates that way. Like I said, it's possible, but those I've seen pull it off seem to have to make it almost a full-time job--I could never put that much planning into my food.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

I question full-on veganism for the simple reason that most vegans are so damn full of themselves. I mean, no offense to any vegans who may be reading this at the moment - I'm sure you're fine - but I went to a college that had a LOT of vegans, and while some of them - a number of them, actually, to be fair - were perfectly nice, normal people, the ones who were serious about it were SERIOUS about it. I got nagged about my eating habits on several different occasions, and actually had one guy try to convert me to veganism through persuasive argument over the course of something like TWO WEEKS. Every time I sat down to eat lunch in the cafeteria, this guy would come over and start preaching at me. It's like the liberal arts version of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Oh - and their pies suck.

[bluejaybirdie.insanejournal.com]

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

To be honest...the first thing I would do would be to jump off a building to see if I could fly. I mean, death in comics isn't permanent and physics don't apply! And then, like the previous commentor, I would wonder why I, in all defiance of comicbook traditon, remain curveless. Following that, I'd let my writer just have it for all the crap he's put me through and demand he fix my body and my mom's brain. Angsting done, I would make myself a badass superhero costume and go around being a fourth wall-breaking, ass-kicking vigilante.

I have put wayyy too much thought into this...

That scene with the CSA is AWESOME.

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

...I like it. (Also, I would read it. :D)

It is! I especially like Power Ring's "EEK DON'T DO IT" face.

[bluejaybirdie.insanejournal.com]

Heh. I actually just had a journal entry about my "superhero identity" (I'm a creative kid with way too much time on her hands). Just skip the angst 'till you hit the costume design, if you're interested :)

http://bluejaybirdie.livejournal.com/13337.html

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

Ooooh, that's awesome! I especially love the tied up hair and knee-pads ;) Quite a practical hero! :D

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

Not bad (pretty cool, actually). Though detachable or not, you'd still lose points with Edna Mole for the cape.

[bluejaybirdie.insanejournal.com]

I figured the benefits outweighed the potential danger. Warm, waterproof, fire-and-chemical resistant, camoflague in shadows, and making a small girl appear slightly larger vs. JET ENGINES (or revolving doors). Took the risk :)

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

A bold choice. I like it.

[lieut_kettch.insanejournal.com]

Kudos to you for making the cape detachable. If it ever did get sucked into a jet engine or a baddie got a hold of it, you'd be free in a jiffy.

[aaron_bourque.insanejournal.com]

Edna Mode can suck it. Capes rule.

[kagome654.insanejournal.com]

Why the heck did I write it as Edna Mole?

Actually, I tend to agree, or at least most of the superhero costumes I love have capes. It generally is worth the risk.

[darklorelei.insanejournal.com]

Motto!

[bariman1987.insanejournal.com]

I just noticed the number for that entry. 13337, or LEEET. Yes there's an extre 3/E, but that post is elite.

I can't tell whether it's awesome or really sad that I noticed that.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Cool costume - I like. You do realize, though, that kevlar weave, in the real world, is REALLY dense, heavy stuff? Your cape alone would weigh about forty pounds.
I would suggest, instead - well, I actually can't remember what it's called, but it's some sort of new sports fabric that hardens dramatically upon impact with something. So, if, for example, a crook tried to punch you in the stomach, he'd probably break his fist, while you'd just get a slight bruise. Much more practical than Kevlar.

[bariman1987.insanejournal.com]

I'm very amused that your priorities are 1) superpowers, and 2) boobs.

Of course, my priorities are similar, though replace "boobs" with "lose 50 pounds." But it would be just my luck that any diet I'd try would be some supervillain plot and I would die horribly or something. Or get superpowers somehow, that's how it seems to work.

[freddylloyd.insanejournal.com]

My favorite moment in this run is when one of the costumed characters points straight out of the page and yells something like, “Don’t you see? It’s them! They want us to fight! They...like to watch!”

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

Psycho-Pirate! :D Totally not the reason I originally bought this >.> But yes, it is rather disturbing o.O Mainly because it's true, I suppose.

[foxhack.insanejournal.com]

Grant Morrison supports Peta?

Is he TRYING to get me to hate him?

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

Hard to believe, but back in the day PETA was relatively sane. Relatively.

[lieut_kettch.insanejournal.com]

Hey, I'M a PETA member.

You were talking about People Eating Tasty Animals, right? Not that other, lesser known fringe group with the naked supermodels?

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

I would join 'People Eating Tasty Animals'. Where do I sign up?

[lieut_kettch.insanejournal.com]

http://www.mtd.com/tasty/

Enjoy!

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Whoa, it actually exists? I thought you were joking. Well, I don't think I'll actually join it - not much of a joiner - but it's pretty cool to know that something like that exists.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

PETA wasn't so terrible then(1989, I think) as now. But then, they didn't have so much celebrity money(that any number of non-profits, including the ASPCA, could use better; I say this as someone who's worked a lot in non-profit) to waste on paying towns to rename themselves "Veggieburg" or re-brand fish as "sea kittens."

Remember too that, not long before this, Morrison did a whole issue on the ambiguities of the subject of animal rights activism, where an AR group sets fire to a lab and firefighters are killed putting it out, at which point Buddy is not really sure what's right or wrong anymore.

By the way, OH MY GOD THAT WAS 20 YEARS AGO I AM NOW SO EFFING OLD. Argh.

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

Start looking for the really powerful, reality-altering gizmos that seem to be scattered around. Then, when some smart-arsed writer comes prancing in to establish his avant-garde cred by breaking the fourth wall, I'd take him back to Earth-Wherever-He's-From and see how he likes having his life fucked with.

[leikomgwtfbbq.insanejournal.com]

I would panic.

Then I would whine at my creator about when I get my superpowers, or when do I meet the handsome superhero and get to be his sidekick... Basically, I'd be that really annoying character in the creator's head that's always pestering for her own story and for cool things to happen.

(I have two such characters myself. I know how they roll.)

[killermoth1.insanejournal.com]

The one thing I didn't like about that Morrison vs Animal Man scene was that at the end it became more about Morrison himself, especially with the end. That said, the previous parts were a great examination of comic characters.

Now, if I found out I were in a comic, (despite the fact that only the writer would allow me to find out and even then he'd control my actions) I'd ask Paul Dini to write me, give me superpowers (but no enemies) then tell him to finish the book with "And he had fun for the rest of his life". Hopefully that means I'm in control then, or else I'm suddenly on hold..

[proteus_lives.insanejournal.com]

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

Breathe a sigh of relief and thank the gods.

Then I'd head for the X-Men!

[jarodrussell.insanejournal.com]

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

Get drunk and sleep with Maria Hill, because at that point no writer could inflict any worse agony on me.

[cainofdreaming.insanejournal.com]

Oh, that's just asking for it. Do that and next thing you know you're likely to get written into a relationship with Buffy Summers, making buds with John Constantine, marrying Wolverine and being revealed as a Summers' kid from the future just in time for a family reunion. Oh, and you're also Hawkman.

Better not pose any kind of challenge to the powers that be.

[dorksidefiker.insanejournal.com]

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

My book would probably be one of those weird indy things that about 10 people read, put out by the friend of one of the guys who runs the comic store. So the first thing I'd do is demand that my writer give me a better, much less depressing job that DOESN'T involve dealing with people very much.

[nymphgalatea.insanejournal.com]

I had to have a little lie down after reading Morrisons' run on Animal Man. It was just so beautifully strange, unlike anything else I'd ever read.

And if I were in a comic I'd go out into space, find some of the Green Lantern Corps and go exploring with Kyle Rayner, get drunk with Guy Gardner. Maybe try to rehabilitate Ruffles the Ragecat. Wear a big floaty blue cloak. Stuff like that; it'd be fun.

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

I had to have a little lie down after reading Morrisons' run on Animal Man. It was just so beautifully strange, unlike anything else I'd ever read.

The first thing I did was to check if Red Bee (the guy Buddy meets in the snowstorm) was a real character. When I found out he was I felt really, really bad. This comic really does make you think about what happens to characters nobody wants anymore. D:

[buttler.insanejournal.com]

Mmm-hmm, "go exploring."

DO NOT DATE KYLE! Bad things will happen! Always! Every single time!

[endis_ni.insanejournal.com]

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

Lose a lot of weight and take up that offer of magick boot camp. Actually, I'll skip the weight loss- I'll have a nice slinky astral form instead. Possibly outlined in purple, why not?

[hyperactivator.insanejournal.com]

Use all the info I've learned to convince all the other characters that I'm god and get them to do my bidding.

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

LOL. I think I like this one best. XD

[ashez2ashes.insanejournal.com]

If I found out I was in a comic book I'd be really really worried about why I hadn't been canceled already... Or more likely I'm a reoccuring background character (the girl that always sits at the cubicle behind the main character)....

I'd probably see if I could hit anyone with my word balloon. *thwak8*

[interrobamf.insanejournal.com]

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

Interrobamf, Superhero Dominance Fetishist?

Hey, as long as I'm not on Earth-616.

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

What would I do if I found out I was a comic book character?

What I was written to do.

Logically, how could I do otherwise? In this Animal Man issue, Morrison makes it repeatedly clear that every single thing poor Buddy says or does since the beginning of the series--including protesting his fate and, earlier in the issue, losing his shit and seemingly impaling Morrison on a shattered window--he does because Morrison wills it.

The upside to this, if there is one, is that, as Morrison tells Animal Man in response to his "You existed long before I wrote about you and, if you're lucky, you'll still be young when I'm old or dead. You're more real than I am." I think there's a certain amount of truth to that, as there is for all fictional characters, in any medium, which remain popular for generations. No one heard of me before I was alive (duh!); after two generations at most no one will likely know I ever lived. In contrast, untold numbers of people have known who Achilles was for 2800 years, and may well know about him for 2800 more. So in a sense, which of us is "real" and which is "fictional"?

[khamelea.insanejournal.com]

Or: being real is just overrated.

[aaron_bourque.insanejournal.com]

You are obviously not a writer, or you would know that sometimes characters just do things the writer never expected.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Which we can change if we like, so it doesn't matter if they do(though you brought to mind that scene in Gorey's "the Unstrung Harp" when he meets his character at the top of the stairs and sees details he hadn't devised). Thing is, though, it's all coming out of you, whether consciously or not, so characters don't really do that, I think: it's an illusion based on our(probably necessary) ignorance of how our creative processes actually work. It's more like you end up coming to different conclusions while "in process" than you do in abstract planning: things change when you're doing it "hands-on." I mean, there have been many times a story took an odd turn just because when it came time to write a scene, I found what I'd planned bored me at the last minute. The work changes as your mind does.

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

I am a writer, and frankly I've never bought this "my characters just got away from me" bit. It strikes me (depending on the quality of the finished product) as either an excuse for slipshod, inconsistent, poorly-planned writing, or as a way for the writer to seem oh-so-whimsical and precious in interviews, prefaces, afterwords and such.

Characters come out of your mind. You create them and you see them through to the end. Even if the characters change radically between the inspiration and the finished manuscript, it is still you who made those changes.

Now if someone else (with or without your authorization or even knowledge) writes your characters, then yes, they do "get away from" you and do things you'd never expected. And if those characters genuinely reach something deep down in enough readers, they can indeed take on a life of their own. Maybe even a richer life than some of those who read them. Richard Bach writes in Illusions: "If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats."

If that happens to your characters, that's a wonderful thing even if you never live to see it. Nevertheless, when it's just you writing a character, then the character does exactly what you tell her, no matter what justifications or dressed-up rhetoric you use to convince yourself otherwise.

[aaron_bourque.insanejournal.com]

Talk to me after you've had a good argument with someone you've written.

Aaron "The Mad Whitaker" Bourque

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

With all due respect, I'll pass. If I were to start arguing with an aspect of my own mind, I might lose said mind. If you can pull it off, more power to you. I'm less confident in my own ability to deliberately fragment my personality and put it back together again. :-)

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Once, as part of a writing exercise, I wrote out an interview with one of the characters in a novel that I was writing. Oddly enough, even though I was writing it, I wound up kind of losing control of the situation; the character ended up berating me for not fleshing him out more, and asked me a number of uncomfortable personal questions, neither of which were things I had had the slightest intention of having him say. You can call it logical progression or the subconscious taking over if you want, but it was pretty damn eerie at the time, I can tell you.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

A little before this arc began, I wrote(ignorant of Morrison entirely at the time, and I was really weirded out to discover this had been going at the same time--this has happened to me more than once with that bastard Morrison; ask me sometime about the KID ETERNITY proposal I wrote right before reading about his one coming out) a play called "Suspension of Disbelief," which is pretty much all on this tack, and that's what I did to my protagonist: he finds out he's a character in a play, but thing is, this makes no difference, because his finding out is also in the script. As is his reaction. He starts destroying the set in a rage. That's in the script too. He even tries to kill the actor playing him(He holds a gun to his actor's head) but the gun doesn't work because I decided it wouldn't at that moment. So I devised a far worse method of torture than Morrison, I think, with no way out.

Morrison's actually nice to AM in the end, finding possibly the only way "it was all a dream" could ever work.

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

Morrison's actually nice to AM in the end, finding possibly the only way "it was all a dream" could ever work.

It's definitely one of the only cases I've seen it work. The other that comes to mind at the moment is the film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. In fact, that ending worked so well that in popular culture it's overshadowed the ending of Baum's original novel.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Well, having decided on the b/w=Kansas/color=Oz motif, they both had to justify it somehow and transition gracefully back from color.

I'd also bring up something else re: Morrison's AM in regard to that play I wrote: I didn't put myself in it meeting Rick(the hapless protagonist that I was really cruel to, because I then resurrected him and made him the hero of "Vitriol" but without the meta-awareness). A couple of reasons for this, beyond that it's hard to do that without being narcissistic(Morrison, I think, is self-critical enough here to manage it--only Vonnegut and J.G. Ballard ever really managed it, I think)--one is that as it was on stage, obviously it wouldn't really be "me" and philosophically I didn't think it'd work if it wasn't. Also, the point was partly the power of the real world over the fictional, so the "creator" has to remain completely outside it or the characters' existential confusion doesn't work.

But the third reason was that, in any event, it would not have been "me" at all. Besides just that it would most likely be an actor playing me, even if "I" improvised each line, his would be scripted, and mine would be determined by the need to make his lines work. (although the confusion there might in itself be an interesting moment, as the character becomes revealed as a sort of automaton) But the point is, if you take this concept seriously, any representation of the creator in that fictional world is at best false, and a bit cutesy, but also, it's a bit grotesque; the world in the work becomes a completely closed system, a mind revealed as merely arguing with itself.

On that level, I wonder if others think Morrison goes over this edge here or not, always a risk when you put yourself in the work. The "Grant Morrison" character has certainly had quite a history since then, if you take into account how many Morrison characters have pointedly looked like him since then, two being King Mob and one of the "tailors" in Slaughter Swamp)

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead' seems to plat around in the same basic sandbox as your play does - the characters never quite get to the point of figuring out that they're in a PLAY, but they do figure out pretty quickly that they have an absolutely minimal part in the story of 'Hamlet', and spend most of their time arguing about why they're there in the first place. Had you read/seen 'R&GaD' before you wrote your play?

[cmdr_zoom.insanejournal.com]

Also the one that got killed in Suicide Squad.

[aaron_bourque.insanejournal.com]

That one wasn't written by Morrison, though.

[thandrak.insanejournal.com]

Realize that I am not the whacky sidekick. I'm the character that gives the sidekick a bit of depth. Whimper. Then get prepared to be killed off to show a plot point.

[silverzeo.insanejournal.com]

Morrison would never do the same with Bats, even under his control he will beat his ass.

[darklorelei.insanejournal.com]

I'd get cancelled!

[parsimonia.insanejournal.com]

I think most of us would, sadly. We are all too awesome for their world!

[mcity.insanejournal.com]

Figure my poor luck with women is a good thing, as they'd doubtless die the second I started to like 'em.

Unless I'm in a Deconstructionist comic, like Watchmen or Deadpool or Animal Man, in which case I'm screwed.

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

But maybe you'd be the Dan Dreiberg of your comic, in which case you'd end up with its equivalent of Laurie Juspeczyk. Rowrr.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Possibly one of the cleverest turns a story arc ever took. Best part is, anyone else tries it it'll always come off pale. (Much like our Scotsman here)

This was why I enjoyed SUPERMAN BEYOND, even if I wasn't as fond of the rest of FC. (well, not true. I pretty much liked all Morrison's and Johns' stuff in it--it was Rucka I didn't enjoy) SB is in fact a culmination of what Morrison began here, Morrison's bizarre "paperverse" view of the DCU. SEVEN SOLDIERS as well.

[d_moonbeam.insanejournal.com]

If I found out my life was a comic book?
I'd wonder how come I never see any superheroes outside of conventions and bitch at my creator for their lack of creativity. The only catch would be if maybe my life were the type of comic where I make the superheroes and such and the moment my work is published they suddenly appear.
At that point I might be (appropriately) freaked, then once I got over it I would revel in its awesomeness.
If I was in a Marvel comic, I'd go looking for the X-Men, if I was in the DC Universe, I'd somehow get in contact with the Green Lanterns just so I can kick Hal in the head.
Why? Because not only would I be able to do it (unless Hal is over 6ft 3in), but Hal is susceptible to head injuries, so it's bound to happen ^_^