Animal Man resurfaces: DC’s most powerful character debuted 36 years ago

Animal Man #26, the final issue of Grant Morrison’s run on DC’s Animal Man in 1990, introduced The Writer 36 years ago. It’s also the comic people still point to when they want a case for the most powerful character in DC.

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This was well before multiverse crossovers became routine. Morrison closes the run by having Buddy Baker meet a fictionalized Grant Morrison and realize that his suffering, his identity, and even his choices have been decided from somewhere outside the page.

That puts The Writer in a different class from Darkseid, the Anti-Monitor, or even Doctor Manhattan. Those characters still exist inside the fiction. The Writer stands outside it and changes the rules through narrative power.

As the deus ex machina ending to Morrison’s landmark 1988 to 1990 run, the issue turns into a reckoning over suffering and authorship. Morrison’s stand-in is the force behind Buddy’s vegetarianism, his jacket, and, most brutally, the murder of his family, even if The Writer is framed less as Buddy Baker’s literal creator across all of DC history and more as a demiurge presiding over that two-year stretch.

If you want one of the sharpest postmodern stories DC has published, Animal Man #26 is well worth picking up.

And that final encounter still makes the pen feel like the ultimate weapon in DC Comics. The idea didn’t end there, either. Its legacy later extends to The Writer’s writer’s-block death in Suicide Squad #58 and Buddy Baker’s return in DC’s New 52.

You can read Animal Man #26 in the widely reprinted Animal Man collections and in other DC editions.