Question re Morrison's Animal Man

Spoilers for those who haven't read Morrison's entire run on Animal Man:


My possibly dumb question - I just finished this series and wonder maybe if I missed something. Near the end Buddy catches up with they guy who killed his family and gets ready to pay him back. He has already fried the guy, and clearly his animal powers are enough even if Buddy just wants to be cruel, but then he pulls out a Freddy Krueger Junior glove with razors or knives on the fingers. The next panel makes it pretty clear that he has used the glove to do not nice things to the now deceased bad guy. So, does the glove have any significance? It seems sort of random so I'm wondering if I am missing something?

I got (and enjoyed) the switch to the black "Punisher" outfit and cutting off the hair but the glove bit (obviously) went over my head.

I'm only recently back into comics and no expert but I have to say I was a little underwhelmed with how this series ended. The "Animal Man goes dark" angle seems shoehorned in when up to that point the story had been focused more on the meta exploration of a guy who is slowly realizing that he is a comic book character.

If Morrison wanted commentary on the Miller-izing of comics, he would've been better off introducing a Punisher or Wolverine-type character into the mix instead of killing off Buddy's family. If they guy's entire family is dead and he no longer cares about this mystery of whether he is living a life or just having one drawn for him, then as a reader I also tend to lose interest in the question.

And I was really surprised that "Dark Buddy" turned out to be the shape that had been haunting his family earlier in the series. I always assumed that it was supposed to be the original, 1960s-ish Animal Man who had been written out via continuity and wanted his life back. I think that would've been a better fit given the entire "Coyote Gospel" direction of the first 2/3 of the series.

When Morrison himself shows up near the end and admits that he doesn't know how to finish the series, I knew what he meant.

Duh. I was just expecting (and I suppose more interested in reading) an exploration of what it would mean to Buddy when HE was finally confronted with proof that he was a figment of someone's imagination. I was looking for something deeper, that tells me what Morrison thinks about life instead of just what he thinks about comics.

Like, what would you do if you were confronted with the FACT that every shred of your life was plotted out by someone else? You love your wife, but only because "He" says so. You don't eat meat, but only because "He" says so. Does Buddy accept that? Go crazy? Ignore it? I don't know how to write that and it was more interesting to me when Morrison tried. The peyote button sequence and the final meeting of Morrison and Animal Man go over some of that, but it ends up being obscured (for Buddy and therefore to some extent for me as the reader) by Buddy's grief and loss.

I guess I'm not as interested in "it's trite and callous take a 'classic' character and give him a huge gun and make him angst-y" because that is such a one-sided argument.

Fair point. If I had read them back then the stories might have had more of an impact than they do today.

For me the dead family stuff got in the way of those themes (what it means to be fictional, continuity) too. The story literally splits in two near the end of the run; worlds are unspooling at Arkham while Animal Punisher is off dispatching bad guys and one of the "aliens" actually has to go get Animal Man and drag him back to the Psycho Pirate/continuity piece of the story so that Morrison can wrap things up.

This all makes it sound like I hated it, and I didn't at all, but it wasn't what I expected and the wrap up wasn't as elegant as the setup. And I think that is due to the distracting vengeance angle.