Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
Coughlan, D., and A. Mahmutović
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 2015 Annual Meeting
Grant Morrison’s Animot Man
University of Washington, Seattle
International Refereed Conference
2015
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Optional Fields
26-MAR-15
29-MAR-15
 The comic book writer Grant Morrison has addressed the question of the animal repeatedly throughout his career, most notably in The Filth, WE3, and the earlier series which is the focus of this paper, Animal Man. Given that comic’s clear engagement with the theme of animal rights, it is odd, as Marc Singer notes, that critics have largely analysed it only as metafiction. This paper seeks to readdress this, with particular reference to Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am and David Herman’s work on the representation of animal experience in graphic narratives. It might be expected that Animal Man would provide an example of “how the representation of what it is like for (nonhuman) characters to experience events is shaped by medium-specific properties of graphic narratives” (Herman), but Morrison and artist Chas Truog seem unwilling or unable to exploit the multimodality of comic narratives to deliver an exploration of animals’ worlds. Instead, it emerges, it is exactly Morrison’s use of metafiction which provides his most profound insights into animal experience and animal suffering, because the path which leads to Animal Man’s discovery that he is a comic book character also renders him powerless, and deprives him, like the animal, of speech, an experience of death, mourning, technics, laughter, and crying. This paper concludes, therefore, that Morrison’s series dramatises what living is for animals and humans, and exemplifies what Derrida describes as the radical “possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower” as Animal Man becomes Animot Man.