Retro Review

Because the reprint trade paperbacks bear the Vertigo label, people forget that Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man started before the Vertigo imprint was created. It was considered a mainstream DC comic book, with not even a hint of a “For Mature Readers” label on the cover. It was released without a Comics Code seal of approval because of its content, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t on the shelves with all the other hero books. I wonder what other kids in 1988 thought of the comic: I know I didn’t enjoy it at the time.

The Animal Man stories disturbed me. The portrayals of human cruelty to animals were unflinching, without even the safety net of the perpetrators being super-villains: whether scientists engaged in animal experimentation or drunken hunters, it was regular people doing the deed. Even when there were super-hero battles, they were complicated - a dying villain wanting to go out with a bang, for example. The rest of the work - the metafictional examination of the writer as God, and the exploration of the fragility of the human psyche - was beyond me at the time: Uncanny X-Men and The Avengers were more my speed.

Now, as an adult, I appreciate Grant Morrison’s Animal Man as a brilliant, innovative creation. It is one of the best things he has ever written, and the 5th issue, The Coyote Gospel, is the issue that really launched it into new territory. 20 years ago, I read it once and got rid of it; now I re-read it regularly in the trade paperback reprint, kicking myself that I don’t have the original issue anymore.

In his introduction to the trade paperback, Morrison details the origin of this issue. The series was originally commissioned as a 4-issue mini-series, and when the decision was made to turn it into an ongoing series, he needed to find a way to continue it. He didn’t have any interest in doing “yet another grittily realistic exploration of what it is to be superhuman”, so he tried something new and radically different. He didn’t know if it would work, but it enjoyed great success, which allowed him to continue the book in his chosen direction, creating something wonderful.

The Coyote Gospel upset me as a kid. It’s a disturbing story on many levels. It takes something from our childhoods and makes it all too real, detailing in explicit detail the reality of something that we are used to seeing as funny. It seeds the idea of a writer having the power to do great or terrible things to his characters, and explores the way we trap ourselves in our own fates. As with The Watchmen or Stray Toasters, I had to mature to the point of understanding the message and content. Nothing about it is adult in the conventional sense of the word as applied to movies and comics, but it is mature, and a brilliant piece of work from an author who was new to US comics.

Economical with its words, and viscerally graphic with its images, The Coyote Gospel delivers with every page. Animal Man #5, from DC Comics, by Grant Morrison, Chris Truog and Doug Hazlewood. A+

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