Animal Man: Monkey Puzzles

[alicemacher]

From Animal Man #25 (July 1990).



In a field somewhere, a monkey finishes typing the epilogue to Shakespeare's The Tempest (the Yellow Aliens having quoted from earlier in the play, in the previous issue). Meanwhile, Animal Man gazes at the landscape of weird ruins that's replaced San Diego outside his house. After telling his pets Skipper and T.C. he won't be long, he ventures forth in hopes of learning once and for all who writes his world and is therefore responsible for everyone's suffering. He comes across a fellow, in a jester costume, who introduces himself as Merryman.






Merryman introduces Buddy to the other members of his team, the Inferior Five, bumbling Silver Age heroes from Earth-12. Elsewhere, in the aforementioned field, the monkey collapses from a heart attack in the midst of typing the script for this very issue.







The Inferior Five did go on to appear sporadically in comics after this; most notably, Dumb Bunny was revealed to be the half-sister of Angel from Angel and the Ape. (There's a 2019-2020 Inferior Five mini-series currently on hiatus after four issues. And it is in fact "done serious," except with pretty much entirely new protagonists -- children.)

Buddy, in any case, is more interested in who the creator is who murdered his family. Merrryman suggests he try the City of Formation, but wants to find the monkey first. He complains that while some of the human characters now in Limbo will eventually get out, no one cares about the animal characters.










The Gay Ghost, despite his embarassment over his name due to lingustic shift, did make later, minor appearances in stories set during the Golden Age, thus justifying the use of that name with its original meaning. (The year prior to this comic, he also appeared in Secret Origins vol. 2 #42 [July 1989], but as the Grim Ghost.)

Buddy spends the next five years(!) wandering through Limbo with the monkey, occasionally meeting people. As he reaches snowy territory, he taks pity on a shivering Red Bee (of the Freedom Fighters) and gives him his jacket. Days later, in the midst of a blizzard, he comes across Mr. Freeze, who objects that he shouldn't be there because he was "one of Batman's greatest foes!" (This is the pre-B:TAS version of the character, before Victor Fries and his tragic backstory, so yes, he hadn't made any appearances in quite some time.)







Eventually, Animal Man comes across Nightmaster (later to return as leader of the Shadowpact), who tells him there's no city where Buddy's headed, "just some old house," which he points out. "No," says Buddy as he recognizes it all too well.







Realizing the monkey too is dead, Buddy slumps to the floor in despair. Unable to remember the last time things were normal, he once again laments the undeserved suffering and deaths of so many, and wonders what to do now. Remembering the monkey is clutching a script, he breaks its fingers so he can extract it.







Buddy leaves the house, this time finding himself not in Limbo but a contemporary city. Arriving at a particular house, he finds the door opened to him. "Hi," says the occupant. "I've been waiting for you."







Next: the conclusion, in one of my all-time favourite comic issues regardless of genre.

Comments

[scorntx]

Merryman also had a pretty big role in Final Crisis: Superman Beyond, which was written by... Grant Morrison.
Fancy that.


(Personally, I think Comic Book Limbo is appallingly meta, even for Morrison. But that's just a minor grumble more than anything else.)


Just out of curiosity, who're the two with Ghost? (The ones to the right who aren't Max Mercury).

[cygnia]

The red guy was Jemm, Son of Saturn, I think...

[tcampbell1000]

The one on the left was called Quicksilver when this was published; he'd be reworked into Max Mercury when he started popping up in Mark Waid's Flash.

The third from left is Jemm, Son of Saturn, who had a self-named miniseries and then basically vanished. Morrison would bring him back for a sort of walk-on role in JLA.

The fourth I vaguely recognize, but I'd have to trawl through Who's Who to figure it out. Design looks like Jack Kirby, but that's all I can say right now.

[bruinsfan]

The name Omega the Unknown popped up in my mind upon seeing him, but that's a Marvel character.

[skjam]

The one on the far right is Hercules, specifically the version from Hercules Unbound. (Post-apocalypse Earth, Hercules, a blind boy, and a fashion model wander a devastated Europe.)

[tcampbell1000]

Yep, that's him all right!

[tcampbell1000]

It's easy to confuse this story in the memory with the story that came before it. Both are about comics characters who weren't currently being published. Both argue the only thing those characters can ultimately do is accept the absurdity of their existence, the arbitrariness of what decides their fate, and live out their lives with as much hope and dignity as they can despite that. Both are, TBH, building Jenga towers out of meta, and it's a testament to Morrison's talent that those towers don't collapse under their own weight.

The only real distinctions are that the characters from the last two issues get a bit more of a narrative for themselves instead of this Dantean constancy, and they were killed in the Crisis or Crisis-adjacent events. That latter distinction really doesn't feel like it matters much thirty years on, and I think it was eroding even back then. Why not Ultraman in Limbo and the Red Bee in the asylum? Red Bee proves that being dead isn't an obstacle to being in Limbo. Heck, maybe Ultraman's milling about in the haze here, somewhere.

Morrison seems to have been expecting Buddy to return to "Limbo" himself at some point. Sales were robust enough that the title continued a while after Morrison left, but most of Morrison's exercises with him did not outlast their tenure, and the market in general was only so hungry for thoughtful, big-issue-motivated heroes. We were coming up on the Spawn era, after all. This sort of willingness to love comics companies as they actually are, not as they would like them to be, would serve Morrison well through the rest of their career to the present.

Killing the pets, on top of everything fucking else, is... oof, big oof. I'd say that was too much if I didn't know what was coming next, and I'm still not 100% on it.

...Oh, and yeah, Phil Foglio's Angel and the Ape was very easily the best story to feature the Inferior Five in any substantial way, and it's an interesting follow-up to their scene here. Despite a generally lighthearted tone, it manages to take seemingly the least feminist concept in comics-- "super-strong dimbulb in Hugh Hefnerish costume seeks boyfriend"-- and turn it surprisingly deep, with a believably difficult sister-sister relationship and a few well-timed moments of real darkness. (In fact, it's such a good subplot that it threatens to usurp the title characters' main plot, but you can't have everything.)

(The Inferior Five had also been featured a few years prior to this story, on the very last page of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew: The Oz/Wonderland War, hoping the titular Captain and Crew could return them to Earth-12. Looks like that didn't work out well for anybody.)``

[dcbanacek]

I remember this "Grant" character, he got killed in Suicide Squad due to writer's block. :)