Animal Man: Time in a Bottle

[alicemacher]

From Animal Man #22 (Apr. 1990). Art by Paris Cullins and Steve Montano.



Buddy, determined to travel back in time and save his family, visits John Starr, the Time Commander. However, Starr can't do anything for him, his hourglass broken along with what's left of his spirit. "I can't even help myself," he says. So Buddy has his JL colleague Booster Gold take him to see the Time Masters. Rip Hunter is initially reluctant to lend out one of their machines, as they're expensive and time travel isn't for the "untrained." Bonnie Baxter thinks Buddy should at least have the chance to explain.







In fact, Hunter and Animal Man did once know each other as members of the Forgotten Heroes, but seem to have forgotten this due to the big ball of wibbly wobbly Crisis wisis. (On the other hand, as for his other fellow Forgotten Heroes, we've seen Buddy and Dane Dorrance do remember each other, and in the next issue we'll see time-travelling Buddy recognizes Immortal Man retroactively, though not vice versa.)









The comic in Hayden's hands is Flash #123 (Sept. 1961), famous for the story "Flash of Two Worlds!", which introduced the notion of multiple Earths to the DCU.

Back home, Buddy straps the time machine to his back and activates it. He ends up outside the house, just after Ellen had undone the Mirror Master's turning her husband into a human looking-glass as a parting shot (Issue 8).







Buddy spends the next few days trying to improve his tangibility so he can communicate with his family. But he has limited success: sometimes others can see him, vaguely, but they can never hear him. Nonetheless, he keeps trying, so we get repeats of scenes from Issue 14, this time from Buddy's perspective. He tearfully reaches out to Maxine, but she can't hear him. With great effort, he moves Ellen's glass of water to get her attention, but is invisible and inaudible to her.







Next, he writes the date in the condensation on the front-door glass, while thinking, "Funny. The mystery is finally solved and the mystery is me," and encounters his own past self.







The time machine, still separated from him, pulls him further into the past. Sure enough his ten-year-old self, riding a bicycle, sees him appear in the road, then disappear just as suddenly. The boy swerves and falls off, cutting his arm. (Hence the scar he had there until he regrew the arm in Issue 3.)













Ultraman was the evil Superman counterpart of Earth-3. He's among the many characters -- some actual pre-Crisis ones, some newly created by Morrison -- who'll indeed come back in the next issue, while back in the sixties, Buddy gets a fresh perspective on life from some men who've seen rather a lot of it.

Comments

[lordultimus]

"How can you see me? Who are you?"

"I'm Judas Iscariot, judged alongside Pandora and the Question at the Rock of Eternity by the Circle of Eternity, the first seven wizards who harnessed magic on Earth, to be punished as the Trinity of Sin."

"Really?"

"Nah, I was foolin'. I wanted to see if you would buy that."

[alicemacher]

I see what you did there. :-)

[themajesticmoose]

Morrison: No that would be just too ridiculous

Also given his all consuming love of timey wimey-ness I wonder if this issue with its reveal that all of the foreshadowing of what happened two issues ago was actually Buddy travelling back in time to warn his past self about what for him had already happened was ever in the comics collection of a younger Steven Moffatt

[deathcrist2000]

Given Moffat repeatedly spurned Morrison’s efforts to write for Doctor Who on the grounds that the Scot never wrote for television, that seems a bit dubious. That, and The Return of Doctor Mysterio suggests a lack of comic book familiarity.

[themajesticmoose]

"I don't want to hear any more about continuity or dead people or any of that stuff"

Words often said to Geoff Johns by people talking with him

[scorntx]

Minor fact: Bonnie Baxter was later fridged so Rip Hunter could feel bad about it, according to Booster Gold vol 2.
(I'm not absolutely sure if this Rip Hunter is the same as that Rip Hunter or what. Damn Johns and his retcons.)

There's something odd about her appearing in a minor role in a story about a hero trying to use time-travel to save his loved ones from pointless, angst-inducing death and not succeeding.

[alicemacher]

I can't say I'm the least bit surprised. I recently took a look at the first couple issues of the 1990 Time Masters series, and the sexism in the introduction of Bonnie in #1 is considerable.

To be specific: Bonnie starts out as research assistant to a prof she's having an affair with. Her debut panel is her entering his office in a bustier and stockings and saying "Hello, sailor." Then the prof tells her the board of regents knows all about the two of them because students have been complaining about her taking advantage. As a result, not only does he dump her but also fires her, because the university will let him stay on if she goes.

Because of course in the unequal power dynamic that is a male professor/female research assistant affair, it's obviously all the woman's fault. Honestly, this was worse even than Harley Quinn originally being a poor student who only got her degree by schtupping her advisor.

[tcampbell1000]

Holy SMOKES.

[tcampbell1000]

In the pre-Crisis Superman stories that Morrison no doubt grew up with, time travel worked very similarly to the way it ends up working here. Those stories had two big rules. One, if you go back to a time where an earlier you already exists, then you turn into a ghost, invisible, inaudible, intangible, unable to affect the world around you. And two, even if you go to a time where you did exist, the past can't be changed: whatever you do, what's happened has happened. There were exceptions to these rules in special circumstances, but they were rare.

These limits on Superman's time-travel abilities helped give the stories contrast. Silver Age Superman was by default nearly omnipotent, but often thrust into situations where he was nearly powerless. The irony! Behold a demigod humbled!

Morrison, understanding that post-Crisis time travel isn't quite so rule-bound, still engineers the pre-Crisis rules by making sure the time machine Animal Man "borrows" is a bit janky ("It took a knock, that's all... it's fine").

The resulting sequence certainly ties up the loose ends neatly, and there's something about the futility of Buddy's efforts that feels like real-life mourning. Sometimes we can almost remember our much-missed loved ones into being alive again, almost see them, almost touch them.

But I can only get so engaged with a plot every beat of which I can see coming really easily (except the last one, of course, which teases a much more interesting next issue). Gonna see Maxine in the yard, check, gonna do the Ouija board thing with Cliff, check, gonna spook Ellen, check, gonna spook himself and write some Lost-style numbers on the door, check, gonna have some encounter with his ten-year-old self, check. The scar reference was a surprise, but that's about it.

And the irony of a superhero made helpless before immutable time is kind of dulled because Buddy almost always feels helpless: if it's not his powers going haywire or the rules of reality changing around him, it's some moral or emotional conflict making him unsure what to do or where to go, compounded with the fact that he doesn't even like to fight. So this one doesn't really work for me. I respect what it's trying to do, but not every experiment yields an enjoyable result.

However, Morrison does make great use of the guest stars here, especially Booster Gold. Booster is notorious for using both time travel and his superhero identity to get rich and famous. He's not a complete fraud: he's always done the job and sometimes put his life between danger and the innocent, and he's straightened up further in recent years. But his time-travel morals at this stage were more flexible than any other hero's. If he's yelling "What kind of superhero are you?" at your retreating backside, that might be a sign you're headed down the wrong path.

[alicemacher]

I like Booster's armour-piercing (well, attempted armour-piercing) comment too, for the reason you mention.

As for the predictability of Buddy's attempt to warn his family and past self, I hear you. I still think his emotional arc over the issue's course packs quite a punch. Here Buddy, after finding that brutal vengeance left him feeling as empty as before, has latched onto something, however ill-considered, to give him hope, a reason to go on.

And we see that hope, that drive, chipped away at bit by bit, until psychologically he's back where he started. Physically, without a consistently coherent body, he's now worse off: even suicide isn't an option for him if he can't reliably manipulate anything around himself to do the deed. Predictable outward course of the plot or no, when reaching this part of the story I've found myself crying for Buddy.

Fortunately, his demiurge-writer isn't SO cruel as to leave him with no connection to anyone at all; thus the Stranger's appearance here, and the transformative conversaton that takes place next issue, alongside Psycho-Pirate's Psychedelic Pre-Crisis Phantasmagoria.