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Today, we look at the downside of writing yourself into a DC comic book, as we see what happened after Grant Morrison was written into an issue of Animal Man and ultimately found themselves going on a deadly mission for the Suicide Squad!
In Meta-Messages, I explore the context behind (using reader danjack’s term) “meta-messages.” A meta-message is where a comic book creator comments on/references the work of another comic book/comic book creator (or sometimes even themselves) in their comic. Each time around, I’ll give you the context behind one such “meta-message.”
One of the most acclaimed examples of a comic book writer breaking the Fourth Wall occurred in Grant Morrison’s iconic run on Animal Man, working mostly with artists Chas Truog and Doug Hazlewood (although Mark Farmer inked Truog on the specific issue where Morrison meets Buddy Baker, Animal Man).
Pretty much the entire run of Morrison’s Animal Man (as an ongoing series, at least) was playing with the idea of Buddy Baker, Animal Man, being a character in a comic book. You know, in a sense that he KNOWS that he is a character in a comic book – well, not at first, but over time it dawns on him. It all leads to the final issue of Morrison’s run (which came out in the Summer of 1990), as Animal Man literally meets Morrison and the two spend the entire issue talking. Morrison, of course, is only introduced as “The Writer”…
and they have the ability to control Buddy’s world with what they write on a computer…
What’s particularly fascinating about the issue is how Morrison eschews the opportunity to portray themselves as some sort of infallible, brilliant writer. Instead, Morrison goes out of his way to show the OTHER side of the tale. Heck, Morrison spends much of the issue criticizing their own work. Morrison mocks the frequent political commentary that they put into the pages of Animal Man, as well as taking to task both the pointless murder of Buddy’s family as well as Morrison’s inability to think of interesting villains for Animal Man to face, amusingly introducing two new over-the-top villains who pummel Animal Man as Morrison waxes poetic about thanking people (as this was Morrison’s final issue on the series). It concludes with a hilariously ironic nod to PETA…
Morrison discusses the death of their cat and how it helped to inspire them to do things in the pages of Animal Man, things to make their cat’s death “mean” something. In the end, though, as Morrison and Animal Man part ways, Morrison reunited Buddy with his family (after we see Morrison’s cat also is alive in the DC Universe), as we see Morison write it all down as the issue ends…
It’s a truly iconic comic book story, but the amusing thing, of course, is that Morrrison, having now written themselves into a DC comic book, is now part of the DC Universe, which means that ANOTHE writer could now pick up the character and run with it and that’s just what John Ostrander did in the pages of the Suicide Squad as “The Writer” makes a shocking return a little more than a year later.
As I wrote about last week in a different column, Suicide Squad #58 (by John Ostrander, Kim Yale, Geof Isherwood and Robert Campanella) was a tie-in with the Wonder Woman-centric crossover, War of the Gods, where Black Adam wanted to attack Circe at her Amazon stronghold, but he needed cannon fodder to distract Circe’s soldiers while he makes his attack, so he goes to visit Amanda Waller and demands the use of the Suicide Squad in his mission.
Waller agrees, but putting together that much cannon fodder on a moment’s notice results in a truly bizarre mixture of characters, including, of course, The Writer!
We then get a sequence where The Writer explains their superpowers to a pretty disinterested Firehawk (The Writer’s computer is now a handheld for active service)…
The team then goes off on their doomed mission and there’s a brilliant shot of the collected members of this super-sized Suicide Squad team (while members of the Suicide Squad had obviously died over the years, it was really only in these major attacks that multiple members of the team were killed off, and clearly, knowing that he would have to kill off some characters, Ostrander chose some characters whose plot needed to be closed off, like Karma of the old Doom Patrol, and also some goofy characters, like Ostrander’s take on The Writer)), including The Writer just running alongside these other characters. It’s quite the sight…
Once the Squad arrives on the island and just starts engaging with Circe’s Amazonian soldiers (and the werebeasts that she also had protecting her), we get to see The Writer in action and we discover that The Writer can basically cause anything that they want to happen to happen, so they quickly cut through the soldiers by coming up with creative ways for the bad guys to be killed off, but the problem comes from the fact that what do you do when you can’t think of another creative way to get rid of a bad guy? Well, as we see here, Writer’s Block for The Writer is a fatal problem…
What a weird idea by John Ostrander and Kim Yale, but really, it was a fun follow-up to the ideas that Morrison introduced in Animal Man about the shape of the DC Universe and how everyone who has ever appeared in a story WAS fair game for a new story. Good stuff.
Thanks to my pal Alan, who pointed out that I had not actually written this up as a Meta-Messages before (I did it as a Comic Book Legends Revealed MANY years ago, but never as a Meta-Messages).
If anyone else has a suggestion for a future Meta-Messages, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com
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