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

Warning for gore.


From Animal Man #5 (Winter 1988). Unless otherwise noted, this and all my subsequent posts from this run are 8 pages of 24.



The issue begins the year before Animal Man's fateful encounter with B'wana Beast and S.T.A.R. Labs.





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.

Over the ensuing year, the trucker's life falls apart. His best friend (lover?) Billy dies in a vehicular accident; he loses his job, and his mother dies of cancer. When he sees in a newspaper that Carrie, who'd since become a sex worker, has been killed in an L.A. drug raid, that's the last straw. 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.

Nearby in the desert, Buddy, the S.T.A.R. case having awakened him to the animal rights cause, goes for a fly-about to calm down after an argument with Ellen over his insistence the family immediately go vegetarian. (It didn't help that she'd caught him tossing out all the meat in the kitchen.) Noticing the explosion, he touches down to investigate, just in time for the coyote to hand him the scroll he's been wearing rolled around his neck. It's titled The Gospel According to Crafty.
















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










While the bleak, sad tone is still in full force, there's at least some fine dark comedy in the "gospel" segment riffing on Chuck Jones's Duck Amuck and Road Runner shorts. More importantly, Morrison, after four issues of imitating Moore, has begun to make the book their own. That's right, it's Anxiety of Influence: The Comic. It's also, as we'll see, a condensed, compressed version of the epic that makes up Morrison's subsequent run on the title.

But before that epic starts, there are a couple of editorially-enforced tie-in issues with DC's Invasion crossover. The first of these -- Buddy's bizarre encounter with a Thanagarian performance-art bomb -- in my next post!

Comments

[lordultimus]

Ain't I a stinker?

[superfangirl1]

This remains me of the that Daffy Duck cartoon. When the artist did things humiliate Daffy. Which upset and drove Draffy insane.

Then at the end, it was revealed that Bugs bunny was drawing the episode the whole time.

[superfangirl1]

What a heartbreaking story. I like to think craft death got recon and live a happy existent somewhere in the multi-verse.

[silicondream]

I was, I wanna say, 19 when I found "The Coyote Gospel" on trade. I took it to work, read it while I was entering disease incidence data, and wept solid for half an hour.

I was a well-read, smartass, AMAB, Lovecraft aficionado. I was not a weeper. I didn't know a comic book could do this to me. It changed everything.

Morrison would go on to do better. Others have done better. But, well. This was it for me.

[tcampbell1000]

I think I'm in the minority here considering how often I've seen #26 quoted and cited, but I think this is the single best Animal Man story. In most of their run, Morrison's anti-cruelty and metafictional themes barely intersected with each other at all, but here they manage to fuse them into a single whole and make it look easy.

The reimagining of cartoon icons to reflect our sadder world outside their "natural habitat" is still a pretty Alan Moore-ish idea (it's a bit of a riff on the Swamp Thing tale "Pog," and this wouldn't be the last time Morrison nodded to that series, intentionally or otherwise). But no one else who'd tried it, Moore included, had had the gleeful boldness to fuse Wile E. Coyote with Prometheus and Jesus.

Crafty's story is so compelling and his end so heartbreaking, it ends up outshining most other incidents of cruelty in the series, even though his end isn't even intended as cruelty by the one who ends him (assuming God and that cartoonist's hand don't count as accessories). The trucker spends his last breaths doing what he believes will kill all the evil in the world, just as Crafty did. This sort of misunderstanding-based violence seems more in line with what Grant's protesting than the really hissable bad guys of the series: the overwhelming majority of people who kill or support killing animals neither revel in sadism nor really think they're doing any significant harm.

Not sure why anyone tracking a supernatural opponent would save their best bullet for last, though.

[silicondream]

and this wouldn't be the last time Morrison nodded to that series, intentionally or otherwise).

Oh yeah. The Morrison/Millar Swamp Thing run (and I personally think it was 90% Morrison even after Millar got solo credits) was a very faithful sequel to Alan Moore.

Not sure why anyone tracking a supernatural opponent would save their best bullet for last, though.

The trucker's evangelical Protestant, and his mentality is apocalyptic. This entire affair is a pageant for God's glorification. You save the best bullet for last, because that's where the climax is. And then you "die", and wake in Heaven where Jesus and your loved ones can appreciate the story that was your earthly life.

Proud drama queens for Jesus, evangelicals are.

[tcampbell1000]

I'll accept this.

[shakalooloo]

You save your expensive silver bullet for last in the hope that you can kill the monster and still have it left over. You never know when you might meet a werewolf in the future.

[tcampbell1000]

I mean, not gonna do you a lotta good if your first bullet makes them mad and draws their attention and then they kill you before you can reload. But maybe I'm expecting too much rationality out of someone with an irrational goal.

[tripodeca113]

I must try and read this in full.

[icon_uk]

You really should, it's THAT good.

[nyadnar17]

" 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."

Real talk. Honestly the most impressive thing to my about Morrison is that I can read his stuff ten times and STILL have zero clue why it works. This should be fucking nonsense, but its utterly compelling and I have no idea why.

[sabertoothlotus]

STILL one of my favorite single issues of anything.

[hollasa]

This is the only issue of anything that I ever bought, read, and then went back to buy another copy. A classic.

[lego_joker]

Great timing - I've just started reading through this run myself at the local B&N.

As (media-proclaimed) Moore successors go, it doesn't grab me quite as much as early Sandman did, but that might be because I already know The Big Twist in advance. Or maybe because the art just so rarely distinguishes itself - anyone know anything else this Truog guy worked on?

As for this particular entry... it's certainly the most memorable of all the ones I've seen so far, and my big complaint is more of a nitpick. Slapstick violence was never all or even most of what the Looney Tunes relied on - the Roadrunner shorts were a bit of an anomaly in that regard. In fact, didn't Chuck Jones say he developed them specifically to mock how formulaic the likes of Tom and Jerry were?

I'm getting into wild (and not even especially-useful!) speculation, but it feels Morrison based this more off the flanderized 'Toons of Who Framed Roger Rabbit than the actual 'Tunes.

[informationgeek]

Maybe one day I will like this comic... but not today. Still really don't get it. It's just so cruel and unpleasant, but in a way where I felt nothing and got nothing out of it. It just sort of happened. Its almost like The Mist film's ending in how cruel and mean it was, but at least I was left impressed the sheer audacity of it. Here... nothing.

[gnarll]

I kind of felt this books art was a bad fit for it. It wasn't bad art, but it just didn't work with the mood of the story.