Animal Man: The Death of the Red Mask

[alicemacher]

Warning for suicide.


From Animal Man #7 (Jan. 1989).



Animal Man is in Miami, helping with the aftermath of the alien coalition attack in Invasion #2. Speaking with a cop, he learns that the city is inundated with a rampage of crudely-built red robots. They don't do much but randomly colide with things and sometimes explode, and are easy to stop before they do too much damage. Nevertheless, Buddy decides to investigate their source and takes to the air.

He comes across a red-caped, red-helmeted man who's about to jump off a building, and stops him from doing so. The man asks him, "What makes you think I can't fly?", then admits he can't. He introduces himself to Buddy as the Red Mask and offers his hand before quickly jerking it away, saying he was joking: you don't shake hands with someone who has a "death touch." Then he bends over in a coughing fit.
















Animal Man dodges yet another red robot. The Red Mask says offhand this one's rocket-powered and rigged to explode shortly, so Buddy hurls it high into the air, where it blows up harmlessly. He asks the Red Mask why he's doing this, since he doesn't seem like a bad guy. The older man finds this darkly amusing ("I think you could be in the wrong business"), but admits that he'd have preferred to be a hero (again, through being able to fly) and join the Justice Society. He ponders his helmet and the "old, half-blind guy" who made it for him.







The Red Mask says okay, so Buddy asks him to wait while he makes the call, and flies off. However, the man soon coughs up blood again and says, "Ah, screw this!"













The epilogue shfits back to Buddy, who tips over the last of the red robots while thinking "If only I'd...". (It's not clear whether he ever found out the Red Mask died rather than simply got bored of waiting.) He says his goodbyes to the cop, who calls "Fly carefully, now!" after him. Animal Man scoffs at this... then flies right into the shockwave of the alien coalition's gene bomb (as covered in Invasion #3).

So. Nothing high-concept or intellectual this issue, just the tragic tale of a super-powered reluctant "bad guy" who'd only ever wanted to fly instead. Which makes the Red Mask one of several instances, within this series, of villains who in one way or another are not so villainous after all.

To be sure, Morrison's epic includes its share of "evil to the core" antagonists, such as Buddy and Ellen had faced in the "originally meant as a mini" opening arc. However, as tcampbell1000 has noted, already beginning with Issues 5 and 6, these are balanced with antagonists who are either not evil at all (the trucker) or don't really have their heart in the overarching evil plan they're part of (Rokara Soh). And there'll continue to be such a balance throughout. Indeed, the most compelling villains in this run are by far the not-thoroughly-evil ones. Even the eventually revealed true Big Bad of the entire run turns out to have a soft side. :-)

Oh, and Red Mask's partner, the Veil? He makes an appearance near the end of the run. What he has to say is brief but most unsettling.

Next up: return of the metafiction, and the first appearance of my favourite villain from this run: the (post-Crisis) Mirror Master.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Quite a difference from Morrison's later claims that bad guys are bad and stupid and boring (see his terrible take on Magneto!)

[silicondream]

Morrison has claimed that Magneto is a worse human being than most readers like to remember, but I don't think he's ever attacked the concept of "bad guys" in general. There are tons of memorable villains in Zenith, JLA, Marvel Boy, Seven Soldiers, We3, Klaus, etc. The Filth, Klarion, Annihilator, Nameless, Happy!, all have bad guys as protagonists. The "Best Man Fall" issue of The Invisibles is possibly the most loving treatment of a comic book henchman that I've ever read.

[filthysize]

I also remember that he specifically said he wrote him that way because of 9/11.

He saw Magneto not just as a bad guy but specifically a "superior race" leader of a terrorist group. Morrison acknowledged that Claremont's work to give him a motivation that justifies his position was great writing, but then 9/11 happened and he suddenly couldn't see any violence done in the name of ideology to be anything other than madness and idiocy no matter the justification, so he decided to write Magneto as a mad idiot.

[beyondthefringe]

I'd give anything if someone wanted to claim that the Red Hood (Joker) took his original look from the Red Mask.

I've always had a soft spot for the previously-unknown characters who seemed to exist in the margins of previous stories. And the sidenote that Red Mask and the Veil fought Captain Triumph once--there's a Golden Age hero no one actually seems to like, based on his treatment in Robinson's Golden Age and the Titans. (I dunno how he was treated in Harley Quinn more recently.)

[cricharddavies]

I dunno how he was treated in Harley Quinn more recently.

A bit more respectfully.

[tripodeca113]

Huh, Captain Triumph is a preexisting character. Sometimes it can be difficult to work out which character was made up for an issue.
Apparently Triumph, debuted in Crack Comics (heheheh)

[icon_uk]

Yup, a guy empowered by the ghost of his murdered identical twin.

[scorntx]

Ah, the Golden Age of comics, when origins were simple.

None of this ridiculous hokey stuff like radiation, quirks of genetics or being around the wrong type of gas that later writers are so fond of!

[tcampbell1000]

Page 21 is all like, "What is Watchmen? Never heard of it." But in fairness, it serves a purpose of its own (lingering on the demise of the story's main character and the mortality that awaits us all) and this was less than a full year after Watchmen wrapped, so the repetition comes off more purposeful than stale.

I like the little detail that the Red Mask got his powers in the year 1945, specifically. We genre historians well remember that the first wave of superheroes crested with World War II and started declining in popularity immediately after the war was won, so 1945 kind of meshes better with the idea that RM is a creature of the Golden Age who was nevertheless too late to the party to be honored the way other Golden Age characters were. More so than if his debut year was 1942 or 1957.

Moore wrote Watchmen in the somewhat naive belief that the age of superheroes dominating the comics marketplace was coming to an end, with just a few mainstays like Superman to linger as they did in the 1950s. Morrison probably always felt otherwise, but he and most others at least agreed that the pulpy flavor of the Golden Age was fading from the genre and would soon depart it entirely. Roy Thomas, who loved early comics history like no one else before or since, had come out with The Last Days of the Justice Society not long before this.

Now, of course, it's nearly 2021 and we're still nodding to Alan Scott and Jay Garrick, who logically speaking must both be over 100 years old. They showed up in some Tom Taylor comics mere weeks ago... to be killed off or brutalized in a horrible alternate future, admittedly, but if you're a DC character, that's how Tom Taylor shows that he loves you.

"People keep dying on me. It's getting really depressing." After the trucker, Crafty Coyote, Rokara Soh, and now this guy, Buddy's been developing such a string of helpless bearing-witness experiences that even Morrison has to go "okay, last one of these for a while," or just turn him into a version of the angel of death who meets everyone at the end of their lives and goes "Oh, shit! Sorry! SORRY!" as they expire. And Neil Gaiman already had a version of Death to introduce in a few more months. Even though the gene-bomb event at this story's conclusion will mess with his powers, the next leg of the series will see Buddy become a bit more of an action-adventure hero until moral paralysis and personal trauma start weighing him down. I mean, you can't over-subvert a genre or you just never belonged to the genre in the first place.

[icon_uk]

"okay, last one of these for a while"

Yeah, but when the next big one's happen it's absolutely devastating.

[scorntx]

(Think by "naive belief" y' mean "fervent hope", judging by everything Alan Moore's said since the 1980s.)

Hey, Alan and Jay have also shown up other places besides the latest Grim'n'Dark timeline.
It could be seen as a positive sign they're still around after several attempts over the decades to shove them off to the side.
(Or what happened with Earth 2...)
And frankly, it'd be more interesting to see them than yet more Hal and Barry.