Newsarama - Grant Morrison on Animal Man

Originally published at www.newsarama.com, 7th June 2001

Magic, fiction suits, and putting Buddy through hell…

Grant Morrison on Animal Man

Call it some mismatched timing.

Or that we just like talking to Grant Morrison about his work.

Anyway - while comments from Morrison about Animal Man would've fit in perfectly with the retrospective we did of his run a little while ago, the writer wasn't available at the time. Since then, he found a few minutes to spare for some nosy questions about a series he wrote 12 or so years ago, and dropped us some thoughts on the series that began to establish him as a unique voice in comics.

If you haven't read the earlier piece, you may want to click here. Fair warning though - there are a few spoilers in here, such as the ultimate twist at the ending of Morrison's run, as well as some other info. Safe to say, if not knowing what happened in a series before you read it is important, just back away. But - if you want to hear Morrison talk about some of his wilder ideas, keep reading…

NRMA: To begin with, how did Animal Man grow from a miniseries of four issues to an ongoing? Did your plot for the first four issues just blow away DC?

GM: I think so. I was as surprised as anyone when I got the call to continue the series after four. I'd only planned for four comics and had written them in a style I thought would appeal to the pro-British editors. To tell the truth, I was pretty dry of Animal Man ideas after the mini-series and had no desire to continue in that vein. I knew I couldn't add anything to the 'superheroes in the real world' current that was already showing its age by that time and had to rethink in order to wrench Animal Man in a different direction.

NRMA From the outset of having the series approved, did you know you were going to write yourself into the book?

GM: To help escape from the prevailing 'grim and gritty' 'realist' trend which I'd grown to loathe with all my heart, I turned back to the more psychedelic experimental stuff I'd loved in 60s comic, particularly those written by John Broome. I was also reading Brendan McCarthy comics and absorbing surrealist and dada influences. I was a practicing magician with the conviction that by studying living, breathing homunculus worlds created on 2-d paper surfaces I might come to a better understanding of higher dimensional intelligent space and its relationship to our own 3-d reality. Go figure.

There was the also the influence of the post-modern or magic realist writers popular in the 80s; I was reading a lot of Borges, Calvino, and others, and watching Dennis Potter plays where the writer was always consumed in his own creation. I loved how this very fashionable notion had a comic book antecedent in those stories where the Flash met Julius Schwartz in the DC offices or where writer Cary Bates traveled to Earth 1 and became a villain with 'plotting power'. That whole concept seemed to me to be a logical and fertile area of development beyond what Miller and Moore were doing at the time. I resolved to make my own niche in a decidedly anti-realist territory.

NRAMA: What was the first reaction from editorial when it became clear where you were headed - backing away slowly while laughing nervously, or fully embracing the idea?

GM: They began to back away on a speeding bullet. Karen [Berger] couldn't see how I could make it work without being campy but Art, I remember was convinced after a few pep talks. As the series progressed it was obvious how natural it could all be made to seem. It's still one of my favorite scenes when Buddy turns round and looks out of the page directly into the reader's eyes and says 'I can see you...'

NRMA: Together with Doom Patrol, Animal Man was the first place you really began to infect the American audience with your ideas that you've been developing since. Espouse a little on what you hit with Animal Man, if you could - we create the fiction, and therefore it exists - somewhere. Getting there is the trick, right?

GM: I have a million obscure and pseudo-technical explanations for my theories about fictional events and their relation to 'real life' events but the basic idea can be understood as a kind of sympathetic magic or voodoo doll extension.

As Animal Man progressed, I moved away from miserabilist heroes in their grainy, rainy 'real' world (that looked like no real world outside my window) and instead twisted my head into thinking not what would it be like for superheroes to live in the real world but what would it be like for a real person to live in a superhero world - an actual comic continuum, a universe drawn on paper, as thin as the ink surface but as rich and deep and involving as a 50 year-deep, shared, living universe could be.

Once I'd worked out the cosmology I decided to start playing with it a little more seriously. I wondered if I could make a comic so close to real life that by writing an event or person into the comic I could make the event occur or the person appear in my own life or in the lives of others around me. I experimented with the Flex Mentallo comic then got serious with The Invisibles, which changed my life and rewrote the world around me.

Suffice to say that Animal Man was an early attempt to descend into the real DC universe. I figured that if I put myself into a comic, it could be considered an actual voyage into the 2-d comic book reality, wearing a suit to make myself look like on e of them - a drawing. Exploring the place a little, I found that I could talk to characters; influence lives (even lives of famous characters who'd existed in this little paper universe long before I was born, like Superman for instance) and affect the structure of the 'continuity'. After Animal Man, I realized that I didn't have to enter that world looking like myself but that I could go in wearing different 'fiction suits' as I came to call them. A fiction suit being simply any character we create as a disguise to allow us to wander around in the 2-d four-color continuity cosmos without freaking out the natives the way I did Buddy Baker.

NRMA: While you did freak out Buddy a little, he really was your voice in those days - the outsider commenting on the sheer ridiculousness of the spandex crowd and where the industry stood at the time, right?

GM: Buddy was definitely my American voice at that time, as Zenith was my British persona. I'd just come into the US comics industry and was surrounded by famous and not-so-famous characters I'd once only read about. Like me, Buddy was trying to make his mark and learning a little about what was really important in the process.

NRMA: In the latter part of your run, you took a serious poke at Crisis on Infinite Earths. Were the seeds that eventually became Hypertime planted here - you'd been looking for a way to undo what had been done since Animal Man days?

GM: Crisis was a great 'event' series and made a lot of sense at the time but I felt that any comic universe which denied itself the story possibilities of parallel realities and alternate superheroes was a poor universe indeed. From the moment I started working at DC I began to lay plans to swallow up the Crisis in a larger, wilder more creatively exciting paper cosmology.

Hypertime as it became known in 1998 is already present as a full-blown concept in Animal Man comics from 1987. I just had to wait until I get hold of a bigger-selling book like JLA before I could make it stick. Hypertime actually includes the Crisis and every other revision but since very few people have ever quite grasped the theory and the story potential of Hypertime it may have to wait until I decide to do something for DC again.

NRMA: Even after all the years and stories in between, any Animal Man stories stand out as gems from the run?

GM: There are a few of them I love - "The Coyote Gospel" still stands and I'm very fond of "Clockwork Crimes of the Time Commander" in #16 along with "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" in #19, and "Deus Ex Machina," my final issue.

NRMA: What was the fan reaction that you heard during the run?

GM: In those wonderful pre-message board days, fan reaction was confined to a few magazines which came out a month or so after the story. People seemed to like Animal Man. The book did well throughout my run and beyond. I think Buddy Baker's humanity and humor and his humble, questing nature touched a lot of readers in ways that 'cooler' characters miss.

NRMA: Do you ever have nostalgia for Buddy and company, or was that something you had a chance with, and got out of your system, completely?

GM: I have nostalgic memories of all the characters I've written intensely but nostalgia is nostalgia and tomorrow is now.

NRMA: One final sidenote - what was your reaction to appearing in Suicide Squad, as "The Writer" only to be killed off in issue #58?

GM: I think it probably served me right after everything I'd put Buddy Baker through. I just come back from the dead, stronger and stranger, like everyone else in comics.

- Matt Brady