When he's dealing with the whole metaphysical and metafictional realm Animal Man inhabits and the relationship with the creator and the created, that's all fancy stuff.

What I mean by that is there are parts of 'Animal Man' that are very technically impressive.

I think because it has the human, personal touch that some of his later work maybe didn't have. He sees the world through an absurdist lens, so his comic book writing of course reflects that. Not just comics but everything is ridiculous. Not just comics but the world.The world, yeah. He said, 'Yeah, absolutely.' He takes things seriously and stuff matters to him, but at the end of the day, the whole planet is just 'bloody ridiculous.' Grant believes that everything is just inherently ridiculous, and he confirmed that when I talked to him. If you look at their work side by side you can see that emphasis. One of the things I concluded in the book, which I guess I sort of knew but never actively thought about, was that the main difference between Alan Moore's approach to comic book writing and Grant Morrison's approach is that Alan Moore is an ironist – he's all about the irony underlining everything that happens in comic books and reality – and Grant Morrison is an absurdist. In issue #5 he said, 'Nope, I'm going in a different direction, Alan Moore,' and then he went off and into the metafictional realm. I don't think there was a necessarily an ambition on Grant's part other than to get work at DC.ĭefinitely. I would assume he chose Animal Man simply because Animal Man wasn't being used and he could take a comical and completely absurd in-a-great-Silver-Age-way character and do something that was more serious and had more resonance in the post-modern age, much in the way Alan Moore would take a ridiculous character like Marvelman and update him for the '80s. The B'Wana Beast would come back and it would be this dark and twisted look at animal experimentation. So he came up with the 'Animal Man' pitch, which he pretty clearly based on the Alan Moore-style approach to superheroes, and he only envisioned it being four issues. Even more than breaking new ground in comic books, which he thought 'Arkham Asylum' would do, Grant wanted DC to like his writing. And so he quickly came up with 'Animal Man,' I guess because Animal Man was obscure and he wanted something that would sell he wanted something DC would buy. He says that he had the 'Arkham Asylum' thing well worked out that was his big pitch, and then he realized on the train that he didn't have anything else.

Zenith morrison