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10/23/2003: comic rec: Animal Man
The Animal Man run of Grant Morrison (pencils mostly by Chas Truog and others, inks by Doug Hazlewood and others) is easily the most meta superhero comic I've ever read. It's one of the most meta comics I've ever read, superhero genre or not. I can come up with very few that are even more meta-textual about the readers reading a comic and the rules that govern that universe on the page (though obviously not in quite the same way), like those by Marc-Antoine Mathieu, but then he could do narrative stuff, like holes cut into the pages for time anomalies, pop-up spirals etc, that is not possible in a regular comic book that stays bound to the page.
I've seen recs for Animal Man as an exceptional and innovative work long before I started reading superhero comics, but I never gave it a try. However with hindsight I'm happy I've only read it now that I have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the DC universe, and know about the general events of the Crisis. I don't think I'd have enjoyed it as much if I hadn't been familiar with the DC multiverse collapse into one universe and that whole retcon. Even now, having neither read Crisis on Infinite Earths itself (yet) nor any familiarity with pre-Crisis DCU, I feel like I probably missed a lot.
I was constantly bewildered at the bizarre leaps, and how the story turned more and more meta, until it culminated in Animal Man meeting Grant Morrison, but I was bewildered in a good way, if that makes sense.
