The Animal Man series showcased several traits on which Grant Morrison's career would be built. First is the renovation of archive characters from the Silver Age age and before, taking them seriously in modern stories. B'wana Beast is an obvious example. In issue #10, Morrison resurrects the goofy aliens from Strange Adventures #184 (Animal Man's second outing) and shows them watching both of his first two adventures (#180 and #184 from 1965) and commenting how different dialogue and characterization were back then.

Then:




and Now:




Then there's Morrison's fascination with speculative physics as a supposed basis for his preoccupation with the notion that fiction is simply reality on a different level. He quotes David Bohm's musings about the universes' "implicate order" for not the last time...



He runs into the Mad Hatter, who was similarly fascinated with Bohm's "implicate order" in Morrison's Arkham Asylum graphic novel around this same time.





Proudwater's wide-eyed over-the-shoulder reaction shot from this issue will be repeated several issues from now, when Buddy Baker gains the ability to see comic book readers.



Then there's the whole sequence in which Psycho-Pirate discusses Crisis on Infinite Earths and shows Proudwater a crumpled page from an old Strange Adventures. This is Morrison not just drawing ideas from the past, but interacting with them in a way in which the story's impact depends on the reader's familiarity with the old comics. He will do this more and more as the years pass. Also, Psycho-Pirate's self-inflicted insomnia was a biographical detail from Morrison's own life; he stayed awake to the point of delirium in order to write Arkham Asylum in a dazed state, which may partly explain how disjointed it is.





And just to put a cherry on top of the "meta," Morrison makes his own biography the flip side of this trans-dimensional message in a bottle.



This was pretty trippy stuff for late 90s mainstream comics, looking for superhero comics to be "about something" more than guys in tights punching each other.