Animal Man

When I was a little kid, my dad used to take me to a barber shop to get my hair cut. I always loved going there; I loved the smell of the place, the feel of the leather chairs, and the way the barbers would always treat me like I was older than I really was. They had a little stand there filled with magazines; Playboy on the top shelf, Time and Newsweek and National Geographic on the middle shelf, and comic books on the bottom shelf. I remember that they pretty much always had DC Comics and Disney Comics.

Being between the ages of six and eleven, I knew perfectly well who the DC characters were. I was still watching Super Friends, which spawned one of the coolest action figure series in history (my friend Jason had many of them, and they were awesome), and I loved Adam West as Batman and Christopher Reeve as Superman and Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. But I could never get into the comic books themselves. I always thought they were boring when I was a kid, and it took me a long time to figure out why.

The writers who came into DC Comics in the mid-seventies were fans of the comics who grew up with these characters, and decided it was their duty to "fix" what they saw as continuity errors. It was this kind of obsessive thinking that led to the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and it was this kind of thinking that continues to ruin DC Comics. This was the era of DC Comics from my childhood, and I could never get into it. I was into Marvel Comics instead, which were written more for children to enjoy than aimed directly at longtime fans.

I think, too, that there was too much of a self-conscious press to make comic books for adults in the eighties, especially at DC. Post-Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, a lot of the writers were going into purposely dark, violent territory in an attempt to get adults to take comics "seriously," which I think is a pretty immature attitude. It reminds me of when anime got extremely popular in America in the nineties, and people kept telling me it was so much better than American animation because of the sex and the violence, as though their mere utilization was automatically a sign of maturity. Far from it. Having something mature to say is a sign of maturity. And in the late eighties, when comic book heroes became murderous psychopaths, immaturity was in full swing. Hell, even Marvel got into it by deciding that crazed sociopath the Punisher was a hero.

The problem was, for every Alan Moore or Frank Miller or Neil Gaiman who had a story to tell and something to say about the form, there were hacks who just kept trying to push the envelope for the sake of pushing the envelope and didn't really have anything to say at all. Which is why I didn't really get heavily into DC Comics until I was 17 (with some exceptions; I'd read whatever Frank Miller work there was to find, plus Watchmen, and was regularly glued to the Keith Giffen-J.M. DeMatteis-Kevin Maguire Justice League).

So back at the barbershop, I opted for Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck instead. And I'd still opt for them over a lot of what DC put out in the eighties.

For instance, Animal Man.

After years of being told it was something I needed to read, I sat down with Grant Morrison's Animal Man. And I tried really hard to get through the whole thing. But eventually the stupidity became overwhelming and I opted not to read the second and third collections. All it did was remind me of everything that made DC Comics so stupid in the eighties: the New Wave fashions, the girls in skimpy clothes almost getting raped around every corner, the misery and sadness on full display, the constant angst for the sake of constant angst, the constant questioning of altruistic impulses. It was like a whole exercise in "Let's just see what I can get away with." I don't have time for this. I don't have time for Grant Morrison, really; with the exception of some of his works (I cherish All-Star Superman), I see him as a negative force in DC Comics as it happens, anyway.

And my god, Animal Man is just really, really stupid.