Animal Man: Out of Africa

[alicemacher]

From Animal Man #11 (May 1989).



Somewhere in Africa, inside their landed spacecraft the Traveller, one of the Yellow Aliens works on restoring Animal Man, whom mysterious ghost-beasts had disintegrated in the previous issue. The other uses some sort of biofeedback/thought-powered device to prevent the time continuum from unravelling. This proves something of a challenge.







The above is a William Burroughs "cutup"-style remix of a scene from the pre-Crisis Buddy's life, as shown in my previous post. It's also an early case of Morrison indulging in his love of language games, as he'd subsequently do in Doom Patrol and later works. (Also, compare Buddy's hair and earlobe in the two versions of the scene.)







Inside the template, Buddy's consciousness once again senses the presence of all animal life. Despite not wanting this ecstatic state to end, he feels his body begin to take shape and he reappears... in the African wilderness, to his surprise. Right beside Vixen.







As they eat in silence, Buddy realizes he's picked up powerful erotic impulses from the apes and finds Vixen's mere presence turns him on. Before he can do anything foolish, however, they both come under attack. Buddy is amusingly grateful to God for this.







Hamed Ali's minion soon gets the better of Vixen, while one of Ali's soldiers hits Buddy with a tranquilizer dart and he passes out. Meanwhile in San Diego, Ellen hangs out at home with her next-door neighbour Tricia.
















As Ali's men breach the Traveller, Buddy and Vixen spend the night wide awake, he trying to come up with a strategy and she quietly despairing. Then dawn arrives, along with Ali and Tabu. Time's up.

Next: Buddy learns the truth about his origin. Well, one layer of the truth anyway.

Comments

[tripodeca113]

Hamid Ali here is actually a pre-existing character. From what I can tell he fought B'wana Beast, twice and then disappeared for over twenty years.

[alicemacher]

He's a very obscure character indeed, but you're right. According to the DC Database wiki, his first appearance was in Showcase vol. 1 #66 (Feb. 1967), which also saw the debut of his foes B'wana Beast and Djuba. Their face-off continued in the following issue.

[silicondream]

There are two little things I love about this issue,

Hamid Ali giving his introductory monologue to a tranquilized Buddy who can't even comprehend words anymore, with the reader's vision fading out as well. Normally the reader's expanded viewpoint lets them appreciate a villain even as the hero rejects them, but Ali's narcissism and brutality prevent him from conveying his story to anyone. We can't sympathize with him because he never actually talks to us.

Buddy having his little non-verbal communication crisis without any suggestion that Vixen is deliberately flirting with him or wrestling with her own desires or anything like that. She's just enjoying her barbecue, and Buddy's pantsfeelings are not her problem unless he chooses to dump them on her.

[tcampbell1000]

Buddy's socially inappropriate boner was, honestly, the most interesting thing about this whole arc to me. A baseline of decency is assumed: no, Buddy is not gonna just start sexually harassing a colleague or worse, and there's no sign she has any reciprocal interest. He wouldn't even do such a thing if he were traumatically widowed single, and he's a devoted family man. And Vixen may've stolen a man once, early in her career (Dale Gunn from Zatanna), but she seems to have matured past that quickly, and even if she hadn't, it's a big leap from "competitive in romance" to "homewrecker." Nothing she throws Animal Man's way in the whole arc is anything less than professional.

Given all that, there's only so far one can go with this sort of thing, but the idea was still dropped way too quickly for my tastes. I'd've preferred a version of the story where Buddy had to work to keep those feelings at bay, or resolve them himself, rather than have them vanish the instant the action plot kicks in and never return.

Yes, I understand the conceit is that he only starts "noticing" Vixen because ape "powers" are messing with him. But in my experience, even if extraordinary circumstances make you start thinking of someone that way, it can be hard to stop.

Ape impulses or not, this is one of the few times superhero comics acknowledged the sort of "Hollywood infidelity" likely to be a temptation when one spends so much time in emotionally charged situations with incredibly attractive people. (In the previous issue, Ellen and Tricia briefly mention that Vixen is an actual supermodel, and Tricia at least seems to be wondering whether someone like that coming to Buddy might be a Problem.) There've been other little whiffs of temptation or suspected infidelity among comics' long-married couples, and Morrison, in New X-Men, may've been the only one to show infidelity blowing one up (still beats selling it to Mephisto). But most of those rival connections (Sue-Namor, sometimes Clark-Diana) are still about longstanding, deep emotional connections; anything more physically based would make well-loved heroes look shallow, unless it were portrayed with a great deal of sophistication and grace. Morrison is capable of such grace, and Buddy is a bit more of a babe in the woods than many heroes, so this coulda been something.

As for what it turned out to be, well... Hamid Ali's not as stereotypically Arab as he looked at first, I'll give him that, and the death-trap is fairly inspired. But Tabu looks like what you'd get if you outlined a villain-mirroring-the-hero archetype for Vixen and never filled in any details, Buddy going down so easily while in Africa and without any power failures is pretty unimpressive even by his standards. Let's just say it's a little too clear at this point that Morrison is more interested in some of their ideas than others.

[alicemacher]

"Hamid Ali's not as stereotypically Arab as he looked at first"

It's perhaps significant that Morrison seems to have changed a couple of things about Hamid Ali from the original Showcase story. There, both Hamid and others said he was about (or nearly) a thousand years old. That would still place him well after the rise of Islam. Morrison, in contrast, has him born "before Christ." Therefore, he isn't necessarily a Muslim.

Also, when introducing himself to his captives, he says he's "currently known as Hamed Ali" (emphasis mine). Thus, he isn't necessarily an Arab either. Taken together, this suggests to me that Morrison may have been uncomfortable with the ethno-religious stereotyping in the original story and accordingly they made those subtle yet significant changes.

Whether that was really the case, I of course have no idea. But when we get to Issue 13, we'll see how Morrison finally addresses the colonialist and "Mighty Whitey" implications of B'wana Beast as originally conceived. So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine they were aware of the just-as-blatant stereotyping with Hamid (or "Hamed," as Morrison spells him) Ali's character.