The Violent Postmodernism Of Animal Man

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:08]Hello and welcome.

[00:00:12]The Grant Morrison run on Animal Man can be broken down into a few composite pieces.

[00:00:17]There's the story of Buddy Baker and his family as they navigate a superhero lifestyle. As Animal Man, Buddy upholds animal rights and he actively protects all creatures, great and small. Then there's the post-modern meta story that weaves through the background and emerges to the forefront late in the series.

[00:00:35]Finally, Animal Man can be seen as a highly unofficial side story to the event from 1985, Crisis on Infinite Earths. It is in part a testimonial to the characters that didn't survive Crisis or had no place in the new status of the DC universe. Of course, Animal Man was one such character until Morrison revived the concept and gave it a more modern interpretation.

[00:00:58]So there's a lot going on.

[00:01:06]Animal man is a postmodern piece of metaphiction. Without getting into all the derivations of those terms, this is what it means in regards to the comic.

[00:01:14]Within the story, the writer becomes part of the work, which is a common trope of postmodernism.

[00:01:20]Morrison would later adapt this technique into something they call a fiction suit. This suit is something they wear so they can pretend to be a character in a fictional setting. This way, they don't reveal they're the writer to the other characters or to the audience. This concept is used frequently in The Invisles.

[00:01:39]Animal Man fits the criteria of metaphiction because it's a story about the story you're reading. Also, as a piece of meta commentary, it's about the state of the DC universe, circa 1990.

[00:01:50]There's one more literary term to add.

[00:01:53]DSX Machina. Animal man is loaded with this element. The character James Highwater is literally a walking talking DSX Machina. His entire purpose is to drive the meta story forward. Okay, so that's something to keep in mind as we move forward.

[00:02:14]Animal man made five appearances in Strange Adventures between 1965 and 1967.

[00:02:21]After those appearances, Animal Man fell into obscurity. He'd emerged as a member of the team the Forgotten Heroes in the early8s.

[00:02:30]While on this team, he met many of the characters such as Dolphin, the Sea Devils, and Rip Hunter that would appear in the modern series. This team of forgotten heroes would take part in Crisis and survived until the very end.

[00:02:43]And that was it. That was Animal Man's entire history before the Morrison series.

[00:02:49]Originally, the comic was pitched as a 4issue limited series. Presumably, a limited series was a way to test whether Morrison could produce the work. At some point, early in the process, Morrison was asked to make the comic an ongoing series. So, the first four issues don't really fit into the narrative that followed. They merely establish Animal Man as a modernized version of an obscure character from the '60s.

[00:03:18]However, like a lot of writers from Britain who followed in the wake of Alan Moore, it was lightly suggested or implied by editorial that Morrison write something with a more flavor. In my opinion, that's what the original four issues read like Morrison doing a Moore style story to get more writing jobs, which isn't to say it's a bad story, not at all. But it's not really a part of the grand design Morrison explores. On its own, it's a fine self-contained foreshue story with a solid introduction to Animal Man. The highlights are buddy maker is a man who can tap into the morphagenetic field. This allows him to assume the power of any nearby animal.

[00:03:55]He can fly like a bird. He can borrow the strength of a rhino and so on. His ability is rich with possibilities.

[00:04:03]At the beginning, Buddy is a bit directionless. He has this incredible power, but he's never committed to being a superhero because he has a family to feed. Basically, he takes odd jobs where his power is useful. Very early he decides to lean into being a superhero who doubles as an advocate for animal rights.

[00:04:21]The premise of Animal Man was to put real people, Buddy Baker and his family into a superhero environment as opposed to putting a superhero in a real environment with real consequences. I know that seems like splitting hairs, but there is a difference.

[00:04:40]This brings us to one of the finest singleisssue comics of all time, Animal Man number five, The Coyote Gospel. This issue reads like a blueprint for the remainder of the series. It's better to say this issue is a summary of the meta story that runs in the background.

[00:04:57]Regardless, it's a shift in direction from the first four issues and a statement of intent. That is, Animal Man will not be a standard superhero comic.

[00:05:06]It will be something quite different yet somehow still quite relatable. I've done a detailed video on Coyote Gospel, so I'm just going to summarize the major points.

[00:05:17]Overall, it's an oblique criticism of the grim and gritty era of comic books.

[00:05:22]This was a time where realism trumped the fun adventures of people with outrageous abilities. For some, such as Morrison, the entertainment value of these works was questionable. It came off as cheap or salacious melodrama that appealed to a dark part of the human mind. So, in part, Animal Man questions and challenges the readers need to witness suffering and to find it entertaining.

[00:05:45]This is underscored by Crafty being pieced back together after getting run over. It's brutal and uncomfortable to read the process of Crafty healing or to read the details of what occurs when he's sustaining injury. This is not fun.

[00:06:00]It's not entertaining.

[00:06:02]This is an example of what occurs when you add realism to the genre. It stops being escapism and it becomes a dark, horrific mirror reflecting ugliness and brutality. That's the point Morrison is driving at with that scene and really the series in general. Reality when applied to superheroes is pretty damn awful.

[00:06:23]We are repeatedly hit over the head with messianic imagery indicating Crafty as a character who will suffer and die for the sins of the reader. This imagery tries to misdirect us from the fact that the baton, the responsibility Crafty carried from one reality to another, is literally passed to Animal Man. It will be his burden to continue this journey, traveling from comic book reality into yet another reality.

[00:06:48]as a blueprint or statement of intent.

[00:06:50]The Coyote Gospel is a great introduction to a series that would challenge the reader to question their definition of entertainment and the effect that cheap melodramatics have on the lives of two-dimensional characters.

[00:07:06]Issues six and seven were tie-ins to an event called Invasion. During that event, the invading aliens released a bomb that messed up the abilities of many superheroes. Animal man being one of the affected people. Yes, issue 7 vaguely references the fifth issue of Watchmen. Both stories are about old villains with cancer meeting their end.

[00:07:27]Anyway, the eighth issue is where the series picks up again. It opens on a computer screen with a quote from Albert Einstein. Actually, the Einstein quote is a paraphrased version of something close to what Einstein wrote. For the record, the actual quote is, "Quantum theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the old one's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that he does not play dice." Unquote. It's something commonly misqued and misinterpreted.

[00:07:56]Going with the implications of the popular version of that quote, Morrison is stating they are god of that pulp universe, and they do play with chaos.

[00:08:04]After all, they are a self-proclaimed chaos magician.

[00:08:08]Honestly, this is youthful bluster and misdirection from Morrison. They may add what looks like chaos from Buddy's perspective, but the series does have a concise plot. It's not randomness or unpredictability.

[00:08:20]At the same time, it is Morrison taking accountability for everything that happens next because they are God in this fictional machine. Buddy's activism brings him to the attention of a corporation who warned him to step down and know his place. Mirror Master is sent to harass Buddy and deliver that message. James Highwater is also introduced. I'm going to look at Highwaters's appearances a little later.

[00:08:46]Issue 9 is where Buddy starts to deal with his messed up powers. This arc will end in issue 12 with a highly refined origin for Animal Man. The aliens that gave Animal Man his powers have woken up. They discovered there's a glitch in his origin due to the events of Crisis.

[00:09:02]This is affecting his powers. It also affects Ellen briefly. These aliens destroy and rebuild Buddy to update his origin to incorporate contemporary changes.

[00:09:13]These aliens either have a level of self-awareness that they exist in a comic or they are Morrison assuming that role to clean up continuity.

[00:09:20]They also know that comic book reality is in danger.

[00:09:24]Personally, I lean towards vague self-awareness. They are instruments of Morrison. After all, their involvement is limited to the needs of the plot.

[00:09:32]They don't have divine power like Morrison.

[00:09:35]Here we enter a period of singleisssue stories. This mainly heightens the concern of the corporation who previously threatened animal man. Issue 13 establishes a new beast and critiques Apartheid rather heavily. Issue 14 heavily foreshadows issue 22 and the terrible events that are about to enter Buddy's life.

[00:09:56]The next issue is a look at the brutal tradition of dolphin hunting. The following issue is a little adventure with Justice League Europe. It also foreshadows that manipulating time never works out for the time traveler.

[00:10:09]By the end, Buddy and Ellen are in a very good place. Life is turning out to be rather wonderful. This setup of the Baker dynamic is very well done. It's about as organic and natural as any actual relationship.

[00:10:22]That's why this lovely, beautiful scene is going to really hurt in a few months time.

[00:10:28]In issue 17, Animal Man crosses a moral line when helping animal right activists. He decides it's time to re-evaluate his path. He's not a fan of violence and causing harm to innocents.

[00:10:40]Here's where James Highwater enters his life.

[00:10:48]As established in his first appearance, James Highwaters totem animal is the eagle. While First Nations mythology varies depending on the region, the eagle generally represents a messenger from the creator. So right away, Highwater is aware he has a specific purpose given to him by God. He will deliver a message to Animal Man.

[00:11:10]While Highwaters's journey won't echo that of Crafties, he does deliver a clear version of Crafty's message to Animal Man. More accurately, he helps Buddy get to a state where he can hear God's message as directly as possible.

[00:11:22]Of course, that god is the writer Grant Morrison.

[00:11:26]Highwater is very aware that he seems to travel instantaneously to locations that are familiar, even though he knows he's never been there before. Again, this is Morrison making Highwater know he's within a story. Reading a quote from Alice in Wonderland and then encountering the Madhatter at Arkham is another contrivance meant to tell Highwater everything is a story because all of these connections are too convenient to be a coincidence. Here we go from one deviation into another. On the final page of Crisis, Psychopirate has been committed to Arkham. In a dialogue aimed directly at the reader, Pirate states he remembers everything.

[00:12:03]He remembers the multiverse and all the stories that were erased from continuity.

[00:12:08]Like Morrison, Pirate prefers the older stories and the fun they represented.

[00:12:13]But the real world of the reader has moved on. A new era has begun and those stories needed to be shelved permanently.

[00:12:22]An interesting detail is repeatedly seeing the Flash issue 123.

[00:12:28]This issue, the Flash of Two Worlds, was a pivotal story in DC history. It established there was a multiverse and it tried to reconcile the Golden Age Flash with the Silver Age version. As a result, other stories that conflicted with contemporary DC continuity were set in their own universe, which led to numerous versions of Earth. So, in the end, this one story from 1961 accidentally set into motion everything that would lead to crisis in 1985.

[00:12:57]Now, back to the original story.

[00:13:00]Morrison continues to manipulate High Water's journey until he arrives at Animal Man's home.

[00:13:07]Over the next two issues, High Water and Buddy take psychedelic drugs to commune with God. Morrison, wearing the suit of his totem, Foxy, interacts directly with Animal Man. They let him know there's a second crisis event coming soon.

[00:13:24]Furthermore, like every character that looks directly off panel, Buddy sees the reader. Morrison is trying hard to give Buddy awareness of who and what he is.

[00:13:34]He's being prepared for the end.

[00:13:36]There's a fair amount to pick at with those two issues, like for example, the whale being Leviathan, who symbolizes chaos, and Buddy being displaced from comic book reality. But it all serves the purpose of Morrison doing their best to keep the reader and the characters engaged with this attempt to get reality and comic book reality to a common ground. It's a theatrical version of the final issue.

[00:14:00]Buddy returns home to the traumatizing scene of his family murdered. It's brutal and shocking and in my opinion one of the crulest things any writer has ever done to a character. Objectively, Morrison set it up perfectly and the effect it has cannot be overstated.

[00:14:16]In his despair, but he goes after the people responsible for destroying everything he loved. As he discovers, revenge doesn't fill the hole in his life. So, he decides to travel back in time to fix everything.

[00:14:30]Unfortunately, the device he uses to time travel is defective, but he has to watch the terrible events happen once again, utterly powerless to stop the inevitable from happening. He spirals backwards in time, even meeting himself as a child. The Phantom Stranger helps release him from this time trap, and Animal Man begins the final segment of his journey home. The psychopirate is ironically losing his coherence.

[00:14:56]All the characters that didn't survive crisis start to emerge from his mind. In fact, like in Crisis, Pirate directly addresses the reader with a threat.

[00:15:06]Reality itself is breaking down to the point where these obscure characters can see the reader. This decoherence allows Animal Man to slip through comic book reality and bring the violent melodramatics to an end.

[00:15:18]High Water, aware of the story they're within, assumes the role of psychopirate, who fades from existence, presumably to join the other forgotten heroes and villains.

[00:15:28]The aliens who created Animal Man return him home. Although, as we'll soon discover, his home is in purgatory.

[00:15:35]The aliens leave while quoting Prospero, the protagonist of Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest.

[00:15:41]Notably, like Morrison, Prospero is a magician, and these aliens are agents of Morrison. But the relevant point is that once the play is ended, Prospero pleads with the audience for applause and to let him go free. It serves as asking the audience for forgiveness for the indulgence of the prior melodramatic story.

[00:16:00]Through the Aliens, Morrison is acknowledging the psychopirate subplot was a touch indulgent, and they hope the audience can forgive them for the metaphysical and metatextual deviation that subplot represents.

[00:16:12]After all, a straightforward story just got really weird, and it's about to get weirder and even more indulgent.

[00:16:20]The Prospero quote will be typed out by the monkey at the beginning of issue 25.

[00:16:25]Notably, that same monkey expires after writing the script for that issue. His brief purpose as a Morrison insert is complete, although he will be an obscure clue, so to speak. As Animal Man looks for the real Grant Morrison, Animal Man begins a journey through purgatory, trying to locate the city of information.

[00:16:44]Ironically, the city is the home he originally started from, which indicates just how pointless this effort has been.

[00:16:51]In essence, Animal Man has gone nowhere and accomplished nothing. This is what Morrison had to admit in the final issue. They failed. They failed to have a meaningful point and they had to rely on cheap theatrics to keep an audience engaged.

[00:17:06]There are no revelations. There's just a story. A story with a disappointing end that concludes on one final act of kindness. It is effective and ironic.

[00:17:16]Although I'm not positive the irony was intentional. Just like Marv Wolfman did with Crisis, Morrison ends on the same result. Like the DC universe in 1985, Animal Man is reset. So the following writers have the ability to write future stories unencumbered by the past.

[00:17:38]There's one element that is obliquely illustrated. That would be the implicate order of reality. It's an important background element, but it's not critical to understanding the overall series. It's simply a layer and a bit of texture to feed the theme and engage the strange brain parts. However, I need to check that box just to be a touch more complete. Naturally, this leads to the question, what is implicate order? Well, like postmodernism, it's probably best to simplify it and summarize it as it pertains to the comic. In very basic terms, the implicate order is what we see and experience. It's our everyday life and the world we interact with.

[00:18:18]Then there's the hidden level of complex subatomic behavior that creates reality and maintains its coherency. That would be the explicate order. Together, both create this thing called life.

[00:18:30]The implicate order of comic book reality is the comic itself and the pages within it. The explicate order is everyone in the credits box, not to mention all the people and machinery necessary to print and then distribute the comic. Within the comic book, the characters are unaware of all the forces that go into creating their reality.

[00:18:49]Much like we're not consciously aware of gravity or the billions of photons that create sunlight.

[00:18:54]One could also suggest that reading the comic is part of the process, but that's an entirely different discussion.

[00:19:01]Comic book characters don't know their experience is restricted to something we call a panel. Furthermore, that panel is a two-dimensional representation of their reality on the surface of a three-dimensional plane. That plane is what we call a comic book page.

[00:19:17]Yes, that's a lot of pretentious naval gazing, but it is relevant. In less fancy terms, Morrison is exposing Buddy to the mechanisms of his world in order to elevate him to a new level of awareness.

[00:19:29]Depending on how existential you want to get, Morrison was either partially successful or they mostly failed, but it was a good experiment nonetheless.

[00:19:43]Animal Man is a contextually perfect platform for a creator to pursue an animal rights agenda. I mean, it only makes sense that a character who deres his power from animals would be an advocate for animals themselves. Without them, he is powerless. But that would be a cynical and inaccurate take on the character's motivation. He's actually motivated by empathy and a desire to have a positive effect on the world.

[00:20:07]Unfortunately, Morrison gets a tad preachy during these segments, and the antagonists that challenge Animal Man are one tiny step away from being generic straw men. Morrison went so far as to admit this in the final issue. So, I'm not calling them out on it. I'm just acknowledging what they already admitted.

[00:20:24]There's also a secondary agenda, and that's to be a memorial for all the obscure, mainly forgotten heroes that no longer have a place in the DC universe.

[00:20:33]It's a nostalgic look at the fiction we don't know what to do with anymore because it just doesn't fit anywhere in current times.

[00:20:40]These characters are sad anacronisms that are tied to a very specific innocent ideal. They symbolize creativity that ignored boring reality and the limitations of being too real.

[00:20:52]Animal man, who was rescued from obscurity, represents an era of comic book history when crazy ideas were tried out and explored.

[00:20:59]In many ways, these characters created their own reality with its own internal logic. They were a step to the side into a dimension where just about anything was possible. Their world was on the other side of the mirror. Different, but similar. It was bright, colorful, and appealing to anyone who enjoyed a little time to escape the world around them.

[00:21:21]Much like animals, these forgotten heroes are an example of how life and creativity manifests itself in a beautiful variety of ways.

[00:21:30]As far as I can tell, James Highwater becoming psychopirate was not a change adopted by DC. In fact, after Animal Man, Highwater quietly disappears, and the original psychopirate returned in his place. There's no explanation for the disappearance or an acknowledgement the character existed anywhere outside the Morrison run.

[00:21:55]Despite all the esoteric elements I've spent the majority of this video looking at, the great thing about Animal Man is it works without knowing these details.

[00:22:03]That is its strength and why it endures 30 years later. It's relatable on just about every level. In part, I think this is due to the simplified artwork of Chaz Truhog, which I mean is a compliment, not as faint praise. True captures exactly the visuals that are necessary to communicate what's going on in the subtext of Morrison's script. At a casual glance, it looks simplistic and early on maybe a bit cartoonish, but overall the artwork perfectly serves the story being told. It probably wouldn't work as well if everything was hyper realistic with detailed background elements to distract the eye. One can focus on what's being expressed and the intended meaning.

[00:22:44]Animal man is a great example of Morrison writing for a mainstream audience and pulling it off without getting too indulgent.

[00:22:51]The Invisles, for example, is an underground comic that requires a lot of arcane knowledge to get what they're driving at. It also somewhat relies on the existential dread of the millennium coming to an end. So, it's a piece of work somewhat locked in its own time period and aimed at a very specific audience of misfits.

[00:23:09]However, Animal Man is the best of both worlds. If one misses bits of subtext and the elements that support certain scenes, the series still holds together very well until the end. Even then, when Animal Man goes on his journey through purgatory and meets Morrison, it may be symbolic and metaphorical, but it's not oblique. It's pretty easy to understand, even if one might be missing the subtleties.

[00:23:32]In the end, despite the ending itself being quiet, it's not disappointing.

[00:23:37]That's because the series explored the theme of exploitation as entertainment and the effect it has on the characters we read about.

[00:23:52]Thank you for watching. Well, that's it.

[00:23:55]That's all I have to say about Animal Man. Okay, so that's not true. There are bits where I could have babbled on for a lot longer, but I think I hit all the major points and said all that really needed to be said. Yeah, I kind of breezed past the part where Morrison and Animal Man chat. To me, that's a pretty straightforward scene and self-explanatory. It was all the bits leading up to it that needed to be mentioned. Sure, there may be finer details to talk about or slightly different interpretations to explore.

[00:24:24]That's what art is when it's good. It's something that opens a conversation.

[00:24:29]It's not about who's right and who's wrong or who can talk the loudest, be the most pretentious, and argue the fastest. It's about talking or debating the engaging bits. Conclusions are not always the intended end result. That's art, baby.

[00:24:44]If you've made it this deep into the video, maybe consider supporting Strange Brain Parts on Patreon, just like the fine people you see on screen now. I greatly appreciate that ongoing support and the opportunity to continue making videos. Don't forget to like, comment, subscribe, and all that stuff. I'd appreciate that, too. No gesture is too small. Thank you for your time. Extra special thanks to Art Conway, Brian Deon, Chapel Pluto, Connor Gallas, Constant Disappointment Records, Corey Drew, Cult Classic, Doug Eberly, Edward Clayton, Andrew, Francis Da Cruz, Greenman, Jeff Nicholson, John Gaunt, John Nyuks, John Woolham, Lucio Gonzalez, Matt Marino, Michael Shelton, Odin Ashcrooft, Phil Sean, Plutocray, Russell Bull, Scott Smith, Chad Miller, Sicken, and Tom Granis. You are all justified and ancient.

[00:25:51]And my ending is despair, unless I be relieved by prayer, which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes with pardon be, let your indulgence set me free.