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alicemacher2020-12-22 01:44 pmEntry tags:
- char: animal man/buddy baker,
- char: booster gold/michael jon carter,
- char: martian manhunter/j'onn j'onzz,
- char: metamorpho/element man/rex mason,
- char: psycho-pirate/roger hayden,
- char: vixen/mari jiwe mccabe,
- creator: chas troug,
- creator: doug hazelwood,
- creator: grant morrison,
- publisher: dc comics,
- title: animal man,
- trigger warning: suicide/self harm
Animal Man: The Last Enemy
[This is] where the revenge narrative kicks in. So does [Animal Man], in Hollywood action-hero fashion, grab the nearest weapons and go on a rampage until he kills the man responsible? Does he pull a Hamlet and contemplate the best course of action while pondering the mysteries of existence? Does he, like the Punisher, become a psychopathic vigilante with a cool shirt? Does he act like I would and cry and curl up into a fetal position for a few days? Or does he seek redemption?
All of the above.
-- Timothy Callahan, Grant Morrison: The Early Years (Sequart, 2012), 100
Warning for self-harm and contemplated suicide (thus my once again not posting the cover as a preview).
( 'It doesn't make any sense. Death never makes sense.' )
alicemacher2020-12-20 07:36 pmAnimal Man: At Play in the Fields of the Lord / A New Science of Life
The third act, so to speak, of Morrison's run begins with the famous "metafictional peyote trip" two-parter. (Note that Morrison wrote this before they began exploring psychedelic drugs in real life.)
( 'What if God's reality [...] what if it's so bad that he had to imagine us to help make his life bearable?' )
alicemacher2020-12-17 08:30 pmAnimal Man: Consequences
Warning for graphic depiction of cruelty to animals. (Thus my not posting the issue cover as a preview this time.)
( 'Everything is connected. Certain events have certain consequences.' )
alicemacher2020-12-04 03:07 pmAnimal Man: Secret Origins
This issue should not be confused with Morrison's Animal Man story in the actual Secret Origins series.
Warning for gore.
( 'You are nothing. A minor character. Old-fashioned and melodramatic. Best forgotten.' )
alicemacher2020-11-12 08:02 pmAnimal Man: Birds of Prey
"At least as important, and closely intertwined [...] with [the] metafictional concerns [in Animal Man], is Morrison's interest in fractal geometry and holographic scale. Issue 6 [...] introduces this new element and points to one of the series' chief organizing patterns. [...] Rokara Soh, an "art martyr" from [...] Thanagar, has created a doomsday weapon that operates on fractal principles. [...] [A]t certain points, the fractal generates identical shapes at increasingly smaller scales. Animal Man follows a similar structure, in which even the most apparently self-contained stories often feature a plot or detail that reflects the themes or structure of the series of the whole."
--Marc Singer, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 57-58
( 'You're just assuming that a rat's life is somehow less important than a human life. Who's to say that's true?' )
alicemacher2020-11-10 06:09 pmAnimal Man: The Coyote Gospel
"Initially, ANIMAL MAN was conceived as a four-issue miniseries [...] however, I was asked to continue the series into a regular monthly comic book [...] Having no desire to produce yet another grittily realistic exploration of what it is to be superhuman and/or an urban vigilante with emotional problems, I cast desperately around for a new direction. What I finally came up with was 'The Coyote Gospel,' which became the template for the further development of the series [...] Hilariously enough, during [its] writing [...] I was utterly convinced that what I was writing was absolute unreadable gibberish and that it would hammer the final nail into the coffin of my fledgling career as a writer of American super-hero comics. The success and popularity of the story took me entirely by surprise and encouraged me to go on to produce the entirely unreadable gibberish which has since become my stock-in-trade."
--Grant Morrison, Introduction to Animal Man TPB vol. 1, 1991
Warning for gore.
( 'I will bear any punishment that will bring peace to the world.' )