Animal Man: Spooks

[alicemacher]

From Animal Man #14 (Aug. 1989). Art by Tom Grummett and Steve Montano.



Maxine Baker is playing in her back yard when she spots a silhouetted figure (the same as the one who appeared sporadically in Issues 8 and 9). The figure greets her by name.










Ellen gets a call from Buddy. She asls him whether he was just out back. He wasn't; he's calling from the airport, having just returned from Africa.










Highwater wakes up in a hotel room, remembering fragments of a dream about the implicate order and circles. Then he wonders where the hell he is.

Elsewhere, a man going by "Lennox" calls on a woman at home, offering her literature about the Good News. However, when the woman's daughter comes downstairs, he shoots her through the chest, then shoots the mother through the head. Smiling as though for a job well done, he closes the front door behind him and drives away.

Cliff has two of his friends over and they play with a Ouija board. The planchette spells out Cliff's name, then the numbers "9" and "27."







Meanwhile Ellen, working on a storyboard, finds that the jar of water, which she'd placed beside her chair for cleaning her paintbrush, is suddenly across the table. Spooked by this (and by an unexpected ringing phone, though it's just Buddy's fellow activist Dane), she grabs a kitchen knife and, noticing the wall calendar's oddly flipped to September, beckons to Maxine to come with her somewhere safe. Then Buddy, finally home, enters the room behind her, scaring her yet again.







Buddy does a sweep of the house, inside and out, assuring Ellen there's no intruder around. But that night, as a storm falls, they discuss all the weirdness in their lives lately. From their neighbour Morris having claimed to greet Buddy on the street when he was still in Africa, to Maxine claiming to have seen him earlier that day, to Cliff using a nightlight before bed for the first time in years... they agree something's not right. Then they spot the mysterious man outside the window. Buddy goes to confront him.










Next post: having already covered Issue 15, we skip to the following issue, in which Animal Man and his JLE friends encounter the Time Commander in Paris.

Comments

[kamino_neko]

Ah, now we're heading toward the period when the series was the most Morrison-y, aren't we? (And when they accidentally created the character that would go on to be one of the most ridiculous Suicide Squad deaths...)

[alicemacher]

Which death was that?

[themajesticmoose]

I believe they mean that Morrison or rather the in-comics version of Morrison showed up as a member of the Squad and died in that story

[alicemacher]

Oh yeah. I haven't read that story but I've heard of it.

[kamino_neko]

Yep. The Writer. Reality warper who died due to poor planning - despite having to write out what he* wants to happen, he waited until shit got real before attempting to write an ending that didn't involve getting ripped apart. Conversely, he died due to the sadistic whims of a pair of even more godlike beings from outside the universe - John Ostrander and Kim Yale.

* While Grant is NB and uses 'they', as The Writer is a separate being from them, I'm comfortable continuing to treat him as male, as he was presented at the time. (This will change if someone decides to reintroduce a version The Writer more in keeping with the Earth Prime version, of course.)

[alicemacher]

So the Writer in that story was modelled on Morrison but, unlike the situation in their Animal Man run, wasn't the avatar of Morrison themself? (I ask because there's no inherent reason Ostrander and Yale, as characters, should be more "godlike" in power than Morrison-as-character.)

[tcampbell1000]

There was nothing Morrison-specific about his Suicide Squad appearance, so yes. (I have no idea whether or not this was just a bit of fun on Yale and Ostrander's part, either at Morrison's expense or with his encouragement. Considering how comics fans can get pedantic and determined to make all the pieces fit, I could see DC editorial deciding they needed to kill off this "character" just to close off the metafictional lines of inquiry his presence opened up. Dunno.)

[kamino_neko]

Yeah...on top of what T said, the Writer's own explanation of what happened to him (which never explicitly stated WHICH comic he'd written himself into) basically boiled down to 'I wrote myself into the universe, now I'm part of it', which, given that Morrison is still an active (and living!*) person in this universe, they clearly are not, so he and they stopped being the same being when the script was submitted. Or at least when the issue came out.

* I mean...I assume so, anyway. With their whole 'magic' thing, can we REALLY say they're not some sort of particularly handsome lich or corporeal spirit?

(... Yes, yes we can. Probably.)

[thanekos]

It's a real shame that " Peter Capaldi's bald on the set of The Suicide Squad, so clearly he's playing the Writer " didn't pan out.

[tcampbell1000]

I didn't read Animal Man until years after publication and knew about the fate of the Bakers from Buddy's appearances elsewhere. So this story had zero chance of being a mystery to me. But even so... that speech Buddy gives to Maxine kind of gives the game away, doesn't it? It's not immediately clear whether this version of Buddy is four months or forty years older, but if there's an interpretation of his words that doesn't mean he's from the future and doesn't involve his family becoming the Inanimate Humans, I don't know what it is.

(Alternate-Reality Buddy who's worried things on this world will play out as they did on his? Maybe, but then there's "when I was ten...")

Even the sorta-cryptic "9... 27" has a meaning that's not too difficult to guess (though you'll have to read carefully to find its payoff).

The explanation's only flaw is that it feels too obvious to be correct. Had this been my first exposure to Animal Man, I probably would've been "Yeah, it sure LOOKS LIKE they're goners. Wonder what the writer will do for a twist." Even in the "blood in the gutters" Eighties, where grotesquerie and deconstruction went hand in hand, it was easier to imagine Buddy would avert his family's doom somehow than to think this was foreshadowing of the inevitable. Again, how far can you depart from the heroic narrative before you stop being a hero book at all, or at least one DC would publish as such?

Morrison seems conflicted between testing that proposition and doing their duty ("Maybe I can liven it up with some Oxford quotations"... oh, Grant, just you wait until you can Google all sorts of sayings, some of them even accurately sourced!).

[alicemacher]

Had this been my first exposure to Animal Man, I probably would've been "Yeah, it sure LOOKS LIKE they're goners. Wonder what the writer will do for a twist."

That was pretty much my reaction the first time. And it's probably what Morrison was counting on readers thinking, given how heavy-handed the foreshadowing is, not just with Ghostly Future Buddy and '9 | 27" but also with the introduction of Lennox the assassin and his frequent appearances thereafter.

[silicondream]

Yeah, that's how I see it. This issue stokes the reader's interest in Ellen and the kids by setting up unresolved plotlines with them, and it dumps a truckload of the sort of clues that superheroes are supposed to rely on in order to save the day. We don't just see those clues ourselves, we see that Our Heroes have noticed them too. Of course they'll use them to save themselves. Cliff and the gang will have their thrilling flirtation with the supernatural, solve the mystery, and Cliff will learn some confidence along the way. Ellen will become even more of a Strong Female Character, like Post-Crisis Lois Lane, a well-rounded action mom who's at the top of her profession and can get in a couple of satisfying punches on the villain of the week. And Maxine will just...stay cute and be Protecced, I suppose.

These characters have places to go and things to do! It can't all just end. Especially not at the hands of Lennox, a generic gun-for-hire without interesting powers or martial arts or a cool costume or ambition or internal conflicts or an exciting backstory or anything to make him a proper supervillain. What kind of story would that be?

[bradygirl_12]

9/27? That's my birthday! A momentous day, indeed. ;)