Animal Man #26: "Deus Ex Machina"

[alliterator]

Newsarama: One final sidenote - what was your reaction to appearing in Suicide Squad, as "The Writer" only to be killed off in issue #58?
Grant Morrison: I think it probably served me right after everything I'd put Buddy Baker through. I just come back from the dead, stronger and stranger, like everyone else in comics.
-- Newsarama interview



The recent ending of Charles Soule's run on Daredevil got me thinking about the All Just a Dream trope and how many believe that any use of it is bad. But one of my favorite comics of all time used it and used it perfectly.

This, then, is the end of Grant Morrison's Animal Man.

Previously: while Buddy Baker was out figuring out the secrets of the universe (seriously), an assassin broke into his home and killed his wife and children. Traumatized, Buddy eventually gets revenge, but still feels empty. After a trip through time and limbo, Buddy ends up at the doorstep of the man behind the curtain: Grant Morrison himself.








Buddy asks for Morrison to bring back his family, but Grant says that that wouldn't be "realistic."



Buddy fights against some villains Morrison makes as Morrison talks to the reader. Eventually, the fight ends.

Comments

[tcampbell1000]

What this story has that most "it was all a dream" endings don't is a feeling of payoff, of meaning. Morrison's point about "kindness" still resonates all these years later, partly because it's a retort not only to his own prior work but to many other comics that his audience has likely read.

I wasn't really into Animal Man, but I got the sense that no one was too emotionally attached to Buddy's loss. Morrison calls it cheap and sensationalist here, and it reads like it actually was. So any complaints that Buddy's mourning process was short-circuited by "ha ha, none of this is real" would've been few and muted.

[agharta75]

Now I want to see Grant Morrison being killed off in "Suicide Squad". Scans, anyone?

[cygnia]

Oh man, I remember the issue now...my late BF had a copy.

[rbenchley]

[agharta75]

Nice.

[alicemacher]

One of my favourite conclusions to any comic-book arc ever. Especially with the final scene in which Morrison, having shown mercy to Buddy after all, reflects on his childhood imaginary friend, Foxy, and how he would signal to him with his torch (==flashlight) and wait in vain for a signal back. Then Morrison, on a whim, gives a signal outdoors in the darkness ("Foxy, I came back. I didn't forget") and after receiving no response as usual, turns and silently says goodbye as he walks off. Then, in the last panel, a light flashes in the distance.

...Excuse me, there's something in my eye; I'm just peeling onions; I'm not crying you're crying, etc.

[broblawsky]

I've read this a bunch of times, and it still gets me. It feels like Morrison is transcribing some kind of emotional breakthrough he had.

[icon_uk]

He pretty much is. IIRC he notes how uncomfortable he felt when he realised thst the death of his cat could be put to use as some sort of plot point in Animal Man.