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

[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.