Animal Man: The Coyote Gospel

[alicemacher]

"Initially, ANIMAL MAN was conceived as a four-issue miniseries [...] however, I was asked to continue the series into a regular monthly comic book [...] Having no desire to produce yet another grittily realistic exploration of what it is to be superhuman and/or an urban vigilante with emotional problems, I cast desperately around for a new direction. What I finally came up with was 'The Coyote Gospel,' which became the template for the further development of the series [...] Hilariously enough, during [its] writing [...] I was utterly convinced that what I was writing was absolute unreadable gibberish and that it would hammer the final nail into the coffin of my fledgling career as a writer of American super-hero comics. The success and popularity of the story took me entirely by surprise and encouraged me to go on to produce the entirely unreadable gibberish which has since become my stock-in-trade."
--Grant Morrison, Introduction to Animal Man TPB vol. 1, 1991

Trigger warning for violence/gore.


From Animal Man v.1 #5 (Winter 1988). Pencils by Chas Truog, inks by Doug Hazlewood. 8 pages out of 24.





A giant, strangely bipedal coyote suddenly appears in the road, too late for the trucker to avoid running it over. After he and the horrified Carrie have gone past it, the coyote's body slowly and painfully fuses itself back together.

A year passes, during which time the trucker's best friend (lover?) Billy dies in a vehicular accident; the trucker loses his job, and his mother dies of cancer. When he sees in a newspaper that Carrie, now a sex worker, has been killed in an L.A. drug raid, that's the last straw for the trucker. He snaps and becomes convinced that the creature he'd run over is the Devil, blames him for all that's gone wrong, and drives back out to Death Valley to kill him. After setting up some trip-wire triggered dynamite as a backup, the trucker spots the "Devil" and takes aim with his rifle.





The coyote resurrects once more and, dazed by falling rocks, shambles over to the trip wire, as the trucker's just within the dynamite's range. The explosion critically injures the trucker, who watches in horror as the "Devil" revives yet again, then goes right past him toward Animal Man, who's just landed from a fly-about in the desert. The coyote hands Animal Man the scroll he's been wearing rolled around his neck. It's titled The Gospel According to Crafty.











Meanwhile, the trucker, with his last reserve of strength, manages to shoot Crafty with his ace in the hole: a second, silver bullet.

Comments

[alschroeder3]

Messiahbus Miserabilus.

Beep! Beep!

[informationgeek]

I never really got this issue or got what made it so special other than a Wile E. Coyote stand-in came into the DC universe and things just sort of happened. Could someone please explain to me what makes the issue so great?

Then again, I never really got into Morrison's entire run on Animal Man. The metafiction never did anything for me (having read Opus now, I found a better series involving metafiction and a creator & his creation), the villains are so 1 dimensional, and the whole family angle felt underdeveloped.

[alicemacher]

I think for you this may be a case of what TV Tropes calls "Seinfeld Is Unfunny," which they define as "A once-innovative work seems derivative after its original tropes become commonplace."

Not that Morrison's Animal Man was the first metafictional comic ever, of course. But it was one of the earliest sustained metafictional stories in a mainstream superhero comic. As such, in its time it was most definitely considered groundbreaking. By now, of course, not only Morrison himself (e.g. The Invisibles, Multiversity) but other comic writers (on mainstream titles and otherwise) have made metafiction so commonplace that his Animal Man run--including "The Coyote Gospel" which is the epitome of it--may seem like not such a big deal.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

It was on a different level and was done for laughs, but metafiction was pretty common in DC and Marvel during the sixties and seventies; Hedy asking Stan and Al for a better part in the next issue of Patsy Walker, for instance.

And,wow, that is a really dark ending.

[night4345]

Cary Bates became a DC villain for the Justice League and Society at one point when he traveled to their universe via Julius Schwartz's Cosmic Treadmill which he built prior to help Flash get back home from Earth-Prime.

Seriously, DC even destroyed the 'real world' in Crisis of Infinite Earths.

[icon_uk]

I'd just like to go on record as saying I never found Sienfeld remotely funny on it's first run.

[junipepper]

Seconded.

[walkingthroughforest]

It was ground breaking at the time.

Unfortunately this is the same thing that has happened to Frank Miller and Alan Moore's work. What was once groundbreaking has been repeated to the point of ad nauseam and is now common place.

[sagrada]

walkingthroughtheforest, that's a brilliant summation! You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to copy-paste that on all the other meta-fictional and self-referential and pastiche-oriented posts on the site. I'm sure it will be JUST as brilliant when repeated like 1000+ times.

[captainbellman]

...I'm not sure if you're being mean or being meta or being both, and it's hurting my blood-brain barrier. Please stop.

[sagrada]

I'm being sarcastic but how can I really know my own motivations??

[captainbellman]

GGGAAAHHHHH

[walkingthroughforest]

No need to be a dick about it.

[sagrada]

Actually, in a shocking twist I'm not being a dick about it. It's supposed to be an example of the "too much of a good thing" you describe.

[icon_uk]

It's treating the endless suffering of Wile E Coyote as a Christ allegory, his suffering being for our sins (or to make us laugh) and what happens when a cartoon being meets the real world (as a sort of allegory for comics being able to translate into something more than heroes punching villains)... or something like that.

[silicondream]

Man, I cried for like an hour the first time I read this. I was at work. It was fairly embarrassing.

[donnblake]

Thanks! A podcast I follow just referenced this, so it's good to see the actual story.

(The actual, heartrending tragic story).

Somewhat surprised it didn't continue panning out to a horrific Rabbit-God.

[captainbellman]

"Nyyyahhh, what's up, God?"

[icon_uk]

Thanks! A podcast I follow just referenced this, so it's good to see the actual story.

Rachel and Miles?

Somewhat surprised it didn't continue panning out to a horrific Rabbit-God.

"Ain't I a stinker?"

[donnblake]

The very one!

[icon_uk]

I've been enjoying it mightily, and since the last episode included two of mu favourites, New Mutants Annual #2 and X-Men Annual #10 I've been posting on their blog a bit... these are stories about which I have OPINIONS! :)