Animal Man #19
11/26/2010

My fellow Initiates were always captivated by the artifacts of history or the objets d’art. I returned, again and again, to the comic book that I found in the room. It was nothing like the children’s stories I stole from my brothers when I was a kid. The paper, the colors, the sheer amount of white space alone was almost overwhelming. And the story! Coming across Animal Man #19 as someone who’d never read a comic more ambitious than Green Lantern & Green Arrow #85...it felt like a new medium. I mean, I’d read Flash of Two Worlds, I saw the cover of Flash #163. I thought I knew trippy. This was something else.

I was a Marvel kid before I joined P.S.! I was a fiendish X-Men fan — still am. I read every Black Panther book I could get my hands on, and I was even into Luke Cage when those comics were first coming out. There was nothing like that at DC. DC had… what? Tyroc? Black Lightning? But Animal Man #19, despite its hints at the mystic nativism that poisons Grant Morrison’s genius, was wild enough to convince me to trade in Psylocke for Phantom Stranger. And it touched that feeling, that indefinable feeling that the world is a lie specifically designed to screw you over. Every black kid in the seventies knows that feeling. Of course it found its way into the room.

I read Animal Man #19 about 20 times in 1973 and another 40 in 1984. By then I knew that I only had six years to wait until it came out for real, and I was starting to see how we would get there. It was hard to keep quiet about it and preserve the magic for my friends outside of P.S. who’d never seen it before.

In the spring of 1985, barely six months after I’d approached Animal Man #19 for the second time, I picked up the first issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and it was like I really could see into the future. I finally saw the white space, the oblivion that was so captivating in Animal Man. Nothingness had never been so bright and exciting. I knew from AM that the DC multiverse would expand to swallow me up in 1990. I didn’t understand how thoroughly the DC multiverse would first cannibalize itself. Almost 50 years after Superman’s first appearance, and superhero comics had somehow become one of the most ambitious collaborative storytelling efforts in memory. Over 50 years and millions of pages, though, a story-world can get pretty unmanageable. DC and Marvel were both faced with the problem of how to handle the continuity conflicts and narrative missteps that had been accumulating since 1939.

Marvel has pretty much taken a company policy to let the junk build up and break down into mulch. They’re not worried so much about managing each and every backstory and piece of lore. How many mutants are there? A minority. How do people love the superpowered Avengers but hate the X-Men? Who knows, man. How long has Spider-Man been 19? Since 1962, gosh darn it, and that’s the way it’s going to stay! It’s a glorious muddle that refuses to take itself too seriously.

DC has always been somewhat compulsive about managing its junk. Flash of Two Worlds, the story that kicked off the DC multiverse, the driving mechanic of the DC story-world, was an outrageously complicated solution to a relatively simple problem. The problem was that DC has two characters who have gone as “the Flash” and honestly, it wasn’t a problem at all. All of the Jay Garrick Flash stories were implied to be actual comic books that the new Flash, Barry Allen, had read and loved as a kid. Instead of running with their strange and clever solution to their Flash problem, the team on Flash of Two Worlds (Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino, editor Julius Schwartz) decided to instead create an entire parallel universe which opened the door to an infinite multiverse.

The world of DC comics is composed of an infinite number of universes—a multiverse—and it is relatively easy for alternate versions of popular heroes and heroes from other story continuities (the Crime Syndicate of America, Shazam and the Marvel family, the Justice Society of America) to “cross over” into the mainstream continuity. A lot of Earths can materialize between 1961 and 1984. By the time Crisis #1 came out, there were dozens of worlds in play as DC created new Earths to accommodate trademarks they’d acquired (notably Fawcett Comics, who created the Marvel Family, and Quality Comics, who came up with Plastic Man) and experiment with stories that wouldn’t fit within DC’s main story/brand.

DC made the best story decision that it possibly could have by parasitizing the flaws of its own medium. Every mistake and change in reality became a point of narrative excitement. Other people dismiss their strategy as an overly complicated exercise in crossover selling, but I see it for what it really is: a little touch of inspiration and magic... that just so happens to be really good for sales.

Eventually, though, the playful insanity of DC’s proliferating meta-narrative became a burden rather than a useful solution. New readers were confused and intimidated by the many versions of every character and the enormous amount of prior knowledge that was required to understand any given issue. Crisis created a story big enough to engulf and destroy all of the excessive and confusing canon of the DC multiverse.

To crudely sum up Crisis on Infinite Earths: the embodiment of malevolent nothingness itself, the Anti-Monitor, and his antimatter universe, attempted to consume and destroy the multiverse and pretty much succeeded. By the time the Anti-Monitor’s reign of terror has ended, there’s only one earth left: New Earth.

But even the worlds that died cast a shadow over “New Earth.” DC can never quite commit itself to maintaining a single universe, especially since the process of reconciling the backlog of multiverse (known as a “Crisis-level event,” of which there are surprisingly many) continuity had proven so creatively and economically successful.

Post-Crisis writers had a chance for a fresh start. Almost every character got a major overhaul to their origin. Wonder Woman’s wins “Most Improved” for her reboot, after her disastrous and jumbled run in the seventies. This is also the moment where Lex Luthor transitions from mad scientist to calculating eighties business guy.

Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man was part of this reboot push. However, instead of using the New Earth continuity exclusively as a chance to take a character in new and more modern direction, Morrison also decided to explore what Crisis might have felt like to a character whose entire reality had shifted from one moment to the next. Finally I got Animal Man in context! Buddy Baker, who derives his powers from nearby animals, is a former Z-list superhero and family man who’s brought back into the superhero game as an everyman navigating a series of increasingly bizarre and esoteric adventures that delve deep into the DC dumpster of forgotten characters (also he becomes a radical animal rights activist).

The first time I read Animal Man #19 I thought it was some kind of unicorn, a bizarre and unsustainable experiment that would be rejected and forgotten by the world outside the room. But now, ten years later, I know that the crazy experiment has in many ways become one of the core concepts of an enormous multiverse. A multiverse which now includes our own! If the room, the parasite itself, shows us a way of thinking about an escape of the oppression of consensus reality, is not Animal Man #19 a door into a different world? A world, indeed, where humans are cruel and capricious gods manipulating our creations for our own amusement. Maybe this isn’t a door to the parasite or a door that we want to open at all, but if we can find one door, we can find another.