I came upon this today. It is Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings talking about Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man. Pretty neat stuff.

In 1988, when Animal Man had barely been seen in decades, he was reinvented by Glaswegian comic book writer Grant Morrison in his own series. Animal Man was now an easy-going suburban dad, trying to make a living as a full-time superhero. An encounter with B’wana Beast (another embarrassingly named 1960s relic) radicalized his politics, and Animal Man became the first vegetarian, PETA-member superhero. A reasonably clever take on the character, I thought. Then things got weird.

I consider Rapid City to be metafiction, but every once in a while I am hit with just how meta some fiction can get. Rapid City is, in many ways, a story about its own production, but I don’t ever expect the characters to actually address the audience.
Maybe I should re-label it psuedo-meta. Meta-meta?

This is the script for the fourth issue of my superhero comic book, Rapid City.

Read and discuss it here.

Panel 2 Closer on them as they talk.

KINETIC

What do you do if nothing happens?

MONKEY

Nothing.

Panel 3 Close enough to show just them, not much of the surrounding. It is clear, though, that they are navigating very uneven footing.

KINETIC

I mean, what if you are out doing this…and just NOTHING happens. What do you do?

MONKEY

I know. And I am telling you. If nothing happens you just do nothing.

In this issue, Kinetic commits himself to living the superhero life that he has been striving for.