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.