Animal Man: Mirror Moves

[alicemacher]

From Animal Man #8 (Feb. 1989).



The issue opens with a close-up of a computer monitor, on which there appears Albert Einstein's quotation: "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos."

Buddy, recovering from a fever, wakes up to Ellen handing him mail containing some good news: his Justice League Europe membership card. The bad news is that the gene bomb, from the alien invasion, has scrambled his animal powers. As he heads for the bathroom, Buddy dreads telling the JLE this and wonders what'll become of his career. He doesn't have long to ponder this, as his reflection (wearing his costume) mocks him, then pops out of the mirror and attacks.

The doppleganger soon reveals himself as the Mirror Master. (This isn't the original Flash villain by that name; that was Sam Scudder, who perished in the Crisis. Rather, it's a new guy, Evan McCulloch, in his first appearance.) Spouting Glaswegian insults, he forces Buddy to dodge blasts from his energy gun and tells him to get dressed already. So Buddy gets in costume, but his opponent, with his various mirror tricks I wish I were free to post more of, still has the upper hand.







Ellen returns from grocery shopping, as a silhouetted figure watches her from behind a bush and whispers her name. (This is the first of a few mysteries introduced this issue, as the main plot kicks back into gear.) Angry at the sudden damage to the stairs inside, she finds Buddy explaining it's the Mirror Master's fault and following the villain into the mirror. This proves disorienting for our hero.













As the Mirror Master struggles to his feet, the now surer-footed Animal Man looks down at him, asks "Did you hit my wife?" and sends him flying outside the house.







Animal Man, to his horror, becomes the mirror image first of Ellen, then of a jogger he bumps into. Ellen, acting on intuition, smashes a small mirror, returning Buddy to normal. All as the shadowy figure continues to watch from afar. And now, the other three mysteries this issue introduces:













Next post: the Martian Manhunter guest-stars as Animal Man tries to cope with his scrambled powers.

Comments

[dcbanacek]

Next post: the Martian Manhunter guest-stars as Animal Man tries to cope with his scrambled powers.

Ah yes, the issue with the question that made me forget about this storyline and ignore almost all of what Morrison wrote from then on.

(For those wondering, Buddy asks "Why is Blue Beetle in the Justice League?" and J'onn can't answer him.)

[tcampbell1000]

To be honest, that bit didn't seem to do much more than follow Justice League International's lead. Giffen and DeMatteis' work on the series was generally amusing and refreshingly blue-collar, but they never met a main character they couldn't Flanderize, and by the time Buddy joined the League, they were remembering less and less frequently that Beetle was a genius inventor, Olympic-level acrobat, or much of anything besides a costumed quipster with poor life-decision skills. They'd trot his resume out every once in a blue moon, but that felt like editorial course-correction.

I don't think it's fair to blame Morrison for that dis, is what I'm saying. (If I'm misreading you here, I apologize.)

[mazway_75]

As much as I adore that era of the League, yeah, it was rough when they openly go "we're the Justice League of course we're going to screw things up!"

Which became a real issue when Giffen and DeMatteis left and the new writers now the challenge of actually making these guys an effective team which led to several rough years before Morrison revived it with the Big Seven.

[tcampbell1000]

The main plot here seems like early Morrison trying not to be cute: this is their version of a traditional superhero story with almost no bells or whistles. Ellen arguably outperforms Buddy in this fight, but that's a relatively mild subversion. It's funny, too, and both sets up future developments and derails us from expecting them.

Even so, the Scots dialect (which bedeviled other writers like Mark Waid when they tried to replicate it) and occasional ϱniɈiɿw ɿoɿɿim seem to be Morrison's attempts to amuse themself while MM otherwise offers up an otherwise fairly generic supervillain monologue of threats, sass, and "it's just business, mate, nothing personal." There's a bit more to McCulloch than meets the eye here, but we're given no reason to guess that from this.

The mysteries seeded in this story are Morrison's declaration of intent for the rest of the series, and most of them will take the majority of remaining issues to resolve.

[icon_uk]

As someone who had lived for years in Glasgow, it was terrific to hear a regional British accent which A) Wasn't super posh, or Cockney and B) actually sounded quite like what the accent was supposed to sound like (Unlike, say... Rogue/Banshee/Gambit/Wolfsbane)

[donnblake]

⸮bɘɿoɿɿim ʞɒɘqƨ ƨnɒiϱɘwƨɒlӘ

[icon_uk]

On a Friday night? Yup

I have to ask, how are you doing that mirrored alphabet?

[donnblake]

Lingojam.com/mirroryourtext

I think what it's technically doing is substituting each letter for a unicode character that looks more or less like the mirrored form of that letter, which is why some of the proportions may be a little odd.

[mazway_75]

Still love Luthor's line in JLA: "I don't understand a word of your, let's be charitable and call it brogue..."

[icon_uk]

One of my favourite quotes from that entire run! :D

[tripodeca113]

This is of course a fictional story, because the US government isn't nice enough to send warning messages like this.

[alicemacher]

I'll just say that the actual identities of those who hired McCulloch have yet to be revealed.