Animal Man: Secret Origins

[alicemacher]

This issue should not be confused with Morrison's Animal Man story in the actual Secret Origins series.

Warning for gore.


From Animal Man #12 (June 1989).







Soon, a whole mob of Animal Men overwhelms Hamed Ali and Tabu. While Tabu's occupied with killing the clones, Buddy and Vixen escape. He explains that despite the attempt to isolate him from all animal life, he was able to grab the self-replicating ability of the bacteria in Ali's body. (Yeah... as with Animal Man's manipulation of white blood cells in Issue 4, Morrison is cheating just a tad; bacteria are found in animals, but aren't themselves animals. That said, Vixen gets in a good burn in this next scan.)







As he flies her away from Ali's troops on the surface, Buddy exults in how easily his powers come to him now. They notice a strange light emanating from the pit where Ali's men had been digging and touch down to investigate. Ignoring Vixen's misgivings, Buddy heads down into the pit itself. There he sees, within a bubble, his older, crew-cutted pre-Crisis counterpart and is confused. Then one of the Yellow Aliens happily greets him.

Meanwhile, some of the troops close in on Vixen and, having no alternative, she jumps into the pit. She's shocked to find Animal Man speaking amicably with the alien and reminds him that "those things," in the form of ghost-beasts, attacked them, and before that, they killed the man who encountered her at the airport. The alien explains the beasts were mere "memoryforms, plucked from the template" and so was the man; he was an "incidental character" with neither name nor background.

Vixen's continuing suspicion notwithstanding, the alien bids Animal Man follow him urgently, just as Hamed Ali and Tabu catch up with them. Ali orders Tabu to kill Vixen while he deals with the aliens. However, although Tabu manages twice to deep-slash Vixen with her clawed gauntlet, to the latter's surprise the wounds heal instantly both times. So Vixen launches into a brutal beatdown.
















The alien assures Buddy he succeeded in repairing the continuum, then is shot through the head by Hamed Ali. However, the bullet has no effect and the alien smiles while closing up the wound. "We are agents of the power that brings your world into being," the alien says. "How can you hope to have power over us?"










This was a fun arc, the first multiparter since Issues 1 through 4. It's an effective balance of action with metafictional plot foreshadowing and associated fourth-wall play, such as the secret-origin "variations on a theme" (my favourite was the "You heard my hollow capsule face" bit) and the villain's demise via reversed pencilling. I also liked the interplay between Buddy and the similarly-powered Vixen, as well as how her understandable vengefulness in attacking Tabu turns to mercy as she realizes it's no longer remotely a fair fight and can only end in her foe's death if continued.

The only thing that didn't work for me was the "temptation of Buddy" scene in the previous issue. As tcampbell1000 said, that could've developed in fascinating ways, if there had been the least bit of follow-up. (And it wouldn't have required Buddy ever giving in and cheating on Ellen.) Instead, it was dropped permanently as soon as the action sequences resumed. This prompts the question of why, other than simple padding, it was included in the first place. (And that's why I didn't post that scene.)

To conclude on a positive note, I did find intriguing the moral "otherness" of the Yellow Aliens. In contrast to their original role in Strange Adventures as garden-variety villainous invaders, here their end goal -- saving reality itself -- is unquestionably noble but some of their means are, shall we say, debatable. No wonder the arc concludes with Buddy's hesistant "...I... I think the good guys won." An effective use of what TV Tropes and others have called blue and orange morality (in contrast to "black and white" or "grey and grey," etc.).

Next: two non-sequential but similar issues in one post. I'll explain the reason for that, in said post.

Comments

[lordultimus]

If this came out today, they'd probably call Hamed Ali "deeply problematic".

[themajesticmoose]

I genuinely love how the villain is killed off because the writer goes "You are a weird racist stereotype who should not be brought back"

[tcampbell1000]

I think it's more like, "You are a dull character," which is not quite the same. Morrison, especially at this stage, seemed to feel like the weirder, the better.

Maybe the blue-and-orange morality of the aliens (good point there, Alice) works best in contrast with a guy who's pretty much just stone evil or, er, "black." And his ending does presumably say something about Buddy, whom the aliens similarly dissolved a couple of issues prior. Unlike Ali, Buddy was reconstituted, because Yolky and Hokey clearly have some kind of stake in his existence.

What is that stake, exactly? The easy answer to that question is pride of ownership; they made him a metahuman before and they're not gonna let a little cosmic surf ruin their carefully crafted sand castle. But then the question becomes "why did they make him before?"

We could get cute and say that they're "agents of the power that brings his world into being" and that said power wants to sell a comic book named Animal Man, not a series called The Mellow Yellow Fellows Just Keep Savin' The Universe. But even at this stage of Morrison's career, when they had still inherited a lot of Moore's ambivalence about the superhero genre, they felt strongly that Animal Man's existence in their hands had a point beyond helping pay for their groceries and housing. They'd spell out that point eventually, but another bald alien had hinted at it in the story prior to this one.

[starwolf_oakley]

ASTRO CITY references such problematic villains. There was one called the Mad Maharajah.

[lego_joker]

I'll be honest, when I read these chapters at my local B&N a couple weeks back, I kept thinking this Ali guy was another evil escapee from Gorilla City and we'd be getting a Flash teamup in a few issues. Never realized he was supposed to be B'wana Beast's first (only?) nemesis.

[informationgeek]

For me, I find Hamed Ali's defeat to be the highlight of the entire series. I don't care about the character or really this arc, it was a blur reading it, this simple moment was visually striking and memorable. Just being undrawn and broken down layer by layer artistically as he is wiped away. It's the first time the metafiction of this series worked for me.

[alicemacher]

It's a clever moment for sure. And it's the sort of metafictional trick you could only do in comics or animation. (You could, using CGI, uncreate a character step by step in a live-action show or film. But it wouldn't call attention to the fictional medium itself, since live-action characters, unlike comic-book/strip or animated ones, generally require real, onscreen actors to portray them. That makes for an extra layer of fictionality you can't unmake. Not without committing murder. :-)

[icon_uk]

I'm glad you mentioned animation because it made me think of the old Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck cartoons where pissing off the artist led to Daffy being redrawn into bizarre forms, only for the pan out to show that the animator was Bugs himself.

[silicondream]

She's shocked to find Animal Man speaking amicably with the alien and reminds him that "those things," in the form of ghost-beasts, attacked them, and before that, they killed the man who encountered her at the airport. The alien explains the beasts were mere "memoryforms, plucked from the template" and so was the man; he was an "incidental character" with neither name nor background.

This is another exchange I just love, as an example of fourth-wall jiu-jitsu.

Airport Dude was an incidental character. Like most victims of violence in comic books, he was brought on-panel to demonstrate the seriousness of the current threat, then quickly erased so the reader could move on to the next beat of the story. He's not supposed to matter.

Vixen, of course, can't accept this. She's a superhero, with a hero's character. Everyone, no matter how minor, matters to her. There must be justice for Airport Dude! His life must be honored, his loved ones must be cared for!

...except none of that is going to happen, because the story must go on. Vixen will appear in next month's Justice League issue, dealing with next month's threat, and she's not going to spend sixteen pages processing her grief over a dead Animal Man extra.* Airport Dude will, in fact, be forgotten. Vixen will forget him, even though she's the kind of person who never would forget him. Because he really doesn't matter.

Every superhero has to be mindwiped after each story. The aliens are just making that explicit for once.

*If this was The Invisibles, on the other hand...

[tcampbell1000]

I agree on most of this, but I think that even if you turn off the metafiction, it's not too unrealistic for Vixen to move on. Even real-life heroes can't spend too much time obsessing about all the ones they couldn't help or didn't save: if they did, then soon enough they'd never get anything else done. (Even Spider-Man has to draw the line somewhere.) And Mari neither knows airport dude's name nor knows anyone else who knows it, so it's not like she could inform the family.

The real thrust of her argument here is about the aliens, not the airport dude: their random kill proves that they're bad guys who need to be opposed or at least not trusted. The yellow aliens are like, "Aw, isn't that cute, they think they're people," as if they were you or me watching that sketch where Dot Warner argues that cartoon characters should have the right to vote. And from Vixen's perspective, their response just proves the point, because there's a word or two for thinking other people's reality isn't equivalent to your own. In certain contexts, we call that "psychopathy."

[tripodeca113]

Hamed Ali 1967-1989

There have been worse fates for villain's.