Animal Man ran from 1988 to 1990 (issues #1–26), published by DC Comics, and it was the work that established Grant Morrison as a major voice in comics — and, more broadly, as one of the most original writers working in any medium.
Buddy Baker is Animal Man, a minor DC superhero with the ability to borrow the powers of nearby animals. Morrison took this unpromising premise and transformed it into something extraordinary: a story about animal rights, about the ethics of violence, about the relationship between fiction and reality, and about the nature of authorship itself. Buddy becomes a vegetarian and an animal-rights activist; he encounters the cruelty of factory farming and vivisection; he discovers that his own universe is fictional — that he is a character in a comic book, subject to the whims of an author who controls his suffering.
The run culminates in issue #26, “Deus Ex Machina,” in which Buddy Baker meets Grant Morrison — drawn as Morrison actually looked, sitting at his desk in Glasgow — and demands to know why his family was killed. Morrison cannot give a satisfying answer, because the answer is that Buddy’s suffering served the story’s dramatic needs, and that admission — that fictional characters suffer because authors make them suffer, and that this suffering is both real (within the fiction) and arbitrary (from outside it) — is the most honest statement about the nature of storytelling in comics.
Collecting Animal Man
First issue (DC Comics, September 1988): Key issue, Morrison’s first major work.
Market values:
- Animal Man #1, NM condition: $30–$80
- Complete run #1–26: $150–$400
- Trade paperback collections (3 volumes): $15–$25 each
- Deluxe hardcover editions: $30–$50 each