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Grant Morrison didn’t mind that another writer killed off their comic book alter ego - just how they died
The analog of Grant Morrison in the DC Universe from their Animal Man run met an untimely demise in John Ostrander, Kim Yale, and Geof Isherwood's Suicide Squad
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It's not every day that a writer like Grant Morrison creates their comic book counterpart in the pages of DC Comics, only to see them drafted onto the Suicide Squad, and then wiped out by a nasty case of writer's block.
No, I'm not pulling your leg. In 1991, there was an in-universe Grant Morrison analog floating around the DC Universe, thanks to Morrison and Chaz Truog's iconic run on Animal Man that began in 1988. Towards the end of their Animal Man run, the fauna-powered superhero got meta and crossed an existential boundary where he met the person who decided everything that had happened to him thus far: The Writer. Modeled after Morrison at the time (meaning, not yet bald), The Writer showed Animal Man the computer where his story was being written, and the rest is history - history that Suicide Squad writers John Ostrander and Kim Yale played with in 1991's Suicide Squad #58.
In their newsletter, Morrison opened up about bringing a "variant" of The Writer back in their Batman/Deadpool story, as well as the demise of The Writer back in 1991. "If I was offended at all by the death of the Writer in Suicide Squad #58, what irked me most was the fact that he died because he had a sudden case of ’writer’s block’! Beastiamorphs, I could buy – people like Circe probably did exist not so long ago in ancient Greece – but ‘writer’s block’ was an affront to my sensibilities," Morrison began.
"As I’ve often said, ‘writer’s block’ is an indulgence a working pulp writer on monthly deadlines cannot even consider! We can’t afford writer’s block, which is really just another name for the tendency towards prevarication familiar to most creative people when they have both time and money to spare."
So there you have it. Fortunately, for the version of The Writer that reappeared in Batman/Deadpool #1, they had a bit of plot armor this time around.
Need more? Here's our picks for the best DC Comics stories of all time.
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