Animal Man: Birds of Prey

[alicemacher]

"At least as important, and closely intertwined [...] with [the] metafictional concerns [in Animal Man], is Morrison's interest in fractal geometry and holographic scale. Issue 6 [...] introduces this new element and points to one of the series' chief organizing patterns. [...] Rokara Soh, an "art martyr" from [...] Thanagar, has created a doomsday weapon that operates on fractal principles. [...] [A]t certain points, the fractal generates identical shapes at increasingly smaller scales. Animal Man follows a similar structure, in which even the most apparently self-contained stories often feature a plot or detail that reflects the themes or structure of the series of the whole."


--Marc Singer, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 57-58



From Animal Man #6 (Holiday 1988). This is the first of two consecutive tie-in issues with DC's Invasion event in which a coalition of planets attacks Earth.







Roger claims that our intelligence makes humans more important than animals. Buddy says if humans are so intelligent, why is it they're the only species wiping out rainforests and piling up nukes? At this point, a Thanagarian spacecraft, flying overhead, cuts their debate short. Animal Man goes to suit up and investigate.

He comes upon two disembarked Thanagarians and demands to know what they're up to. One of them, the warrior Skalla Kol, attacks him with her spiked mace on a chain. Buddy realizes he has no chance against her in her own territory of the air, so he takes the fight underwater, borrowing the usual abilities from fish.










Skalla's history, but her fellow invader, the artist Rokara Soh, easily subdues Animal Man by whistling up a flock of birds and setting them on him. Congratulating Buddy on defeating a Thanagarian warrior, Rokara sets him in a tree so he can watch his "grand finale, my martyrpiece."










No sooner does Animal Man jump to the ground than the poison hellshade takes effect on Rokara, who collapses. His death sets off a cascade of his memories from birth onward, which Buddy experiences. Disoriented and freaked out, he thinks the tectonic bomb's been detonated.













Yes, Hawkman, very smug of you. Heehee.

Comments

[tripodeca113]

Wow Skalla Kol's outfit is terrible.

[alicemacher]

If all Thanagarian warrior women dress like her and Keela Roo, then whoever got the military contract to produce double-sided tape on their planet must make a fortune.

[tcampbell1000]

I was going to point to Keela Roo if you didn't!

[agharta75]

That would be interesting cosplay.

[icon_uk]

I'm sure there are important tactical reasons for that design....

For the life of me I can't imagine what they are, but then I'm not Thanagarian, perhaps they are reflexively intimidated by topless people wearing straps?

[agharta75]

More clothing slows down flight speed. Yeah, that must be it.

I'd like to have an explanation for the heels, though.

[icon_uk]

For Skalla wearing them, or Rokara and Katar NOT wearing them?

[agharta75]

Either one will do.

[super_fly]

"All you had to do was switch it off" was a great moment that leads to an amazing callback

And the clothes in this comic give in interesting window into how dudes wore a lot more short shorts back in the 80s

[nyadnar17]

Hawkman is such a dick and honestly I wouldn't change him for the world.

[icon_uk]

It's fun, but I have to say that randomly touching something you knew was a primed bomb goes against every law of self preservation EVER!

[donnblake]

I have heard first responder training in cases of suspected terrorist activity summed up as "DON'T poke the bomb."

[tcampbell1000]

I got a bone to pick with that quote by Marc Singer: most serialized creative work includes moments on a smaller scale that reflect the larger whole. If they don't, in fact, they're probably doing something wrong. Morrison didn't invent thematic consistency.

Many superhero comics fans, especially those willing to write university theses about it, wanted to believe that the next Alan Moore-level talent was right behind him, just waiting to burst out. This expectation, ironically, allowed Morrison to flower into something like that by the time they got onto X-Men and Justice League. But Animal Man only really hits that level twice, with "The Coyote Gospel" and with its finale. The rest is worthy of study as the work of a promising talent who's not quite there yet.

For instance, Morrison's clearly nodding to Swamp Thing's Thanagarian adventure, but comparing the two stories' fight scenes results in a clear winner. Morrison's resolution is close to a deus ex machina that nerds will forgive because it conforms to the lore ("Ah, yes, I too have heard that is how Thanagarian flight works!"): Moore's involves planting and payoff within the space of the story itself.

And it's not at all clear to me why Skalla Kol can't control her descent by flipping the antigrav on and off, which would allow her to survive while removing her relevance to events. But I feel like I'm meant to see her as falling to her death, thanks to the simplicity of her last few panels and the irony of Buddy's "Hmmm... I'm sure she'll be fine" narration. (Which is a nice touch, to be fair.)

At any rate, the action-adventure elements, while mostly skillfully done, are window dressing for the heart of this story: a bald, vaguely Morrisonesque Thanagarian scribbles out the essence of his life and releases it to a mass audience. He has carved out a role for himself as part of a larger war effort he doesn't seem to particularly care about but can use for his own ends. In other words, he's putting his heart and life into work for hire, fully aware that he has but one life to give. That core story is compelling, original, and powerful, and was especially so at the close of the war-and-profit-worshipping 1980s.

The story's comical anticlimax bears a little thinking about, too. Of course Buddy had no way of knowing the solution was just to tap a finger somewhere on the bomb's apparently featureless surface. Hawkman, knowing this, contents himself with a barely perceptible smirk. But another hero, even one with Buddy's powers, might've spent those last few minutes TRYING something: stampeding the bomb as a rhino to break it, flying it away from the fault line, or even just turning it over to figure out how it worked.

Buddy's sensitivity was therefore wildly mistimed here and could've gotten a lot of people killed. And yet it draws our sympathy: who among us hasn't just shut down in blind panic when all seems lost? Hawkman, despite growing up in Thanagarian culture, has missed the tragic dimension of the one death that we've been feeling: all he sees is a bomb, and all you have to do is switch it off. Much like the art martyr and his father, both Animal Man and Hawkman have found roles in a combat-focused society, but in both cases, it's clear which one is the warrior born and which one is the poet in warrior's dress.

[alicemacher]

Timothy Callahan, in Grant Morrison: The Early Years (Sequart, 2011), points out one of the ways in which Animal Man subverts reader expectations of superhero fiction. Buddy, though he has his share of victories, sometimes turns out to be ineffective, only partially effective, or even helpless in emergencies.

The end result, however, is that he comes across as all the more relatable for having a less than 100% success rate. This isn't Ennis's The Boys, in which the protagonists' flaws and failures as individuals and as a team are meant to ridicule the very concept of superheroes as a force for good. Instead, Morrison manages to render Animal Man sympathetic even when he fails.

[informationgeek]

I think this was the worst part of the run by far when I read it. I know this ties into some event at the time, but having no damn clue about it or even nothing knowing little about Hawkman, everything was just kind of gibberish to me. I remember it was a painful slog to read.

[alicemacher]

So you did like some of the run, then? Because both today and three years ago when I first posted "The Coyote Gospel," you said you didn't like that either. (That's fine. "No disputes in matters of taste" etc. and Morrison's work has always had its detractors as well as those who praise it.) I'm just curious as to which issues of the run you did like, and why.

[informationgeek]

Thats the thing about this comic... I can't recall anything I really liked about it. I remember reading it alongside stuff like Watchmen, Sandman, Y the Last Man, and similar titles to really dive into what people consider were the best comics. I was new to comic industry and wanted to start with the highlights... but nothing worked or clicked with me besides Batman Year One.

I understand why people like this but it just doesn't resonate with me. I just don't like Buddy, I find his family forgettable, the villains are cartoonishly evil, and the writing i don't remember a thing about it other than small points. I get that the metafiction aspect is good, but after reading later metafictional stories like Opus and Umineko, I find those takes more compelling.

I wish I could like this but trying to read this here, nothing still clicks.

[alicemacher]

I'm always up for a good metafictional read, so I'll give Opus and Umineko a try.

Given "Opus" is such a commonly used word, could you please tell me the author so i can look it up? Thanks!

[informationgeek]

Satoshi Kon's Opus. You may know him for Perfect Blue, Paprika, and Paranoia Agent. Sadly never completed before he died but it was published by Dark Horse. Basically the main character is an author is about to complete his manga... but his protagonist suddenly rebels against him.

[icon_uk]

Any title which is this early in it's run being derailed for two issues by an external event like "Invasion!" is going to suffer (see also Generation X and "Age of Apocalypse") .

I feel that Grant switched over to his "2000 AD done-in-one" mode for these two issues. (IIRC both Moore and Morrison have commented on how useful that learning curve was to their career, to learn to tell a done-in-one science fiction story with a setup, progression and pay off in five pages tops.)

I remember this coming out and was getting it because I'd loved his work on Zenith, so I think I could accept the switch because it was a version of his storytelling I was already familiar with, but I can entirely see why it might have been too abrupt a switch for others.

[alicemacher]

Issue 7 is actually an Invasion crossover only in a very loose sense, as the Red Mask simply takes advantage of the chaos in between the initial alien attack and the gene bomb to do his thing.

What it does have in common with #6 is that it has no overt connection to the ongoing narrative that began with "The Coyote Gospel." (Though as with the mention of fractals here, there's an aspect of #7 that makes an unexpected return much later for maximum "creep out the reader" effect.)