Animal Man: Crisis

[alicemacher]

From Animal Man 23 (May 1990).

In Arkham, Roger Hayden the Psycho-Pirate, having at last let the pre-Crisis contents of his mind spill out, has calmed down considerably. He also finds his old costume and Medusa Mask, which gives him the power to manipulate others' emotions. After warning the readers that he can still see them watching him, and that they won't get away with it much longer, he leaves his now-opened cell. Walking the halls, he uses the mask on the Scarecrow, making him happy and content to stay put in his cell despite Hayden having just insulted him. Then he comes across Ultraman, Power Ring and a large number of other characters who'd been erased from continuity after the Crisis.







The Yellow Aliens bring James Highwater to Arkham, explaining that they need him to help prevent the impending threat to reality, as worlds that were no more have started returning. The asylum, seen from outside, illustrates their point as its various architectural designs, which DC artists have given it over the years, morph into each other. To James's question, "What about Animal Man?", the aliens reply that he's currently beyond their reach.

Buddy is, of course, still trapped sometime in the late sixties, and in his despair. The Phantom Stranger, who can see and hear him just fine, offers a compassionate ear and introduces him to the Immortal Man (whom Buddy already will have met in the future) and Jason Blood. This is one of those times when the three deathless men meet up just to chat. Immortal Man, currently in hippie mode, asks Buddy whether Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey turn out to be right about humankind evolving into super-beings. "No. We didn't evolve. We just got worse," says Buddy. "Everything just got worse."










In the present, Hayden enthusiastically greets the characters who continue to pour out of his mind.







The characters/character variants in the top three panels are in fact Morrison's original creations. The Love Syndicate of Dreamworld trio would later reappear, together or singly, in stories by Morrison and others. Uberman, given his affiliation with "Axis Amerika", seems to be Morrison's AU version of the New Earth villain Ubermensch who was affiliated with a team by that name. Sargon the Sorcerer and this second version of Aquagirl (Tula) were of course created well before Morrison's time.

Anyway. Psycho-Pirate's pep talk is cut short when he realizes he's beginning to go translucent and feels "funny... a little strange." He explains to the astonished onlookers that the experience is "taking a lot out of me."










Back once again in the present, one of the Yellow Aliens goes to Buddy's home to look for him, while Hayden is distressed to find, within his brain, a world gone horribly wrong when Overman, a superhero created by a U.S. government experiment, contracts an STI which turns him into a giggling, drooling mass murderer. In addition to killing everyone in his path, including his former super-colleagues, he gets his hands on a Doomsday bomb with which he intends to wipe out the entire world. After concentrating hard, Psycho-Pirate thinks he's managed to prevent Overman and his bomb from getting out of his head. He's prevented no such thing.

Also in Arkham, the alien remaining behind shows Highwater the epicentre of the threat to reality: the various returned characters from expired worlds, while Hayden shows them the same thing Buddy saw in his peyote vision: the readers' faces staring down at them from another world, keeping them in their "cages." He's referring to the comic panel borders, which Ultraman now discovers.










"It's okay," says Animal Man with confidence. "I'm here."


Next: Animal Man takes on Overman, with help from callbacks to Issues 6 and 7, while Highwater figures out who he and everyone else in the room really are... and makes a hard decision for the sake of reality.

Comments

[lordultimus]

Considering Geoff Johns' reinterpretation of Power Ring as a coward literally powered by fear (as the opposite of fearless Hal Jordan), it's rather ironic that he's portrayed here as the one warning Ultraman not to punch through the boundaries of panels.

[bruinsfan]

Jason Blood is certainly an odd choice to have waxing philosophical about death as an end to torture. In his experience it'd usually be just the beginning.

[scorntx]

Like that bit in Good Omens.
"ALL YOU CAN HOPE FOR IS THE MERCY OF HELL."
"Yeah?"
"JUST OUR LITTLE JOKE."

[tcampbell1000]

Earlier in this run, someone mentioned that suicide cropped up a lot in Morrison's work. From my vantage point, an obviously related but more persistent theme is depression, particularly situational depression rather than the chemical kind, which the hero or heroes must defeat before overcoming any final, redemptive challenge. It happens here, it happens in Invisibles, it happens in X-Men's psychic landscapes, it happens with the Justice League vs. Mageddon.

The renditions of the guest stars in Buddy's sequence are amazing (Jason Blood has never been so compelling since), but the least assuming of them is the one who steals the show. Immortal Man's argument is all the more powerful because it comes from someone who's had untold lifetimes to get tired of existence. Yet because of his force of will and perspective on all humanity, he has never done so. Having more time than anyone else, that's an accident of birth, but using that time the way he apparently does, well, that's a kind of philosophical heroism. His speech hits us just the way it's supposed to, and even manages to loop the animal-rights thread back into the weave.

The connection between this comic's two arcs is pretty subtle by superhero standards, and I'm not ashamed to admit I didn't consciously recognize it at first. Both Buddy and Hayden are trapped in the past, figuratively and literally, surrounding themselves with reminders of what's lost. But Buddy, however painful it may be, has confronted the facts: his family is dead and will remain dead. Hayden has gone the other way, into full-bore denial, and he will continue to live in a world of fantasies for as long as it's sustainable (which wouldn't be long, in any scenario). Again, Morrison's picking up where the last page of Crisis left off: "You see, I like to remember the past because those were better times than now. I mean, I'd rather live in the past than today, wouldn't you?"

Aside from that emotional consistency, there's not much about Psycho-Pirate's plans that has anything to do with his prior history. The figures he resurrects are, verifiably or presumably, Crisis casualties (except Sargon, who's close enough). But despite his own participation in the Crisis, Hayden never interacted with them in life or even was in a position to observe their deaths-- there are deaths he was around to see, like Supergirl's and Barry Allen's, but nope. Nor does anyone from his birthworld of Earth-2, friend or foe, rate a mention.

Bottom line, Morrison isn't really interested. Psycho-Pirate's emotion-manipulating powers come up more than I remembered, but compared to the well-rendered immortals at lunch, he's practically a cipher. He has no guilt over aiding the Anti-Monitor, no continued ambitions of "a world to rule," no memories of his own life prior to the padded cell. For the purposes of the text, he's an addled, ascended fanboy scheming to beat up the readers for daring to turn their backs on Ultraman, Aquagirl, and a cosmos of infinite earths that might've had a Sunshine Superman in it. Maybe the reason he's fading out is that Morrison's already done away with the sense of him as a person with a past. All he has left is the narrative purpose he serves, and that only for a little while longer.

[alicemacher]

Morrison took a similar approach with the Time Commander in Issue 16. While John Starr, as skjam noted in a comment to that post, had a prior DCU history as a more conventional "actually villainous villain," his appearances in Animal Man completely disregard that. Instead, he's portrayed as a well-intentioned but seriously delusional dreamer. And, much like Hayden in the current arc, Starr's undoing is his insistence on living in the past.

For all people talk of Morrison's loving fascination with the Silver Age, Grant does recognize that nostalgia has its limits, and in the end we all have to keep moving forward, in the comic-book medium and in life generally.

[themajesticmoose]

Jason Blood: Death is not interested in your friendship

Death of the Endless: He's just mad I won't accept his Facebook request

[mrwalker]

Y'know, this reminds me...the Arrowverse totally dropped that teaser of Psycho-Pirate being a player in their Crisis on Infinite Earths.