Animal Man #24 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Rafael Albuquerque (art), Dave McCaig (colors)

The Story: You’re always at the top of the Totem pole if you’re the only one left.

The Review: Having recently pointed out Wonder Woman as one of the original New 52 titles to maintain the energy it started out with, I now draw your attention to this series as one that has failed to do so.  The Rotworld arc, instead of being the supernatural Big Event it promised to be, ended up sapping the title of much of its momentum and even its spirit.  What’s left is a husk of a title, trudging along in a desperate attempt to regain its footing.

The blame doesn’t lie entirely with one ill-conceived arc, however.  Reading through the last few issues makes it clear that Lemire has lost the clarity of his vision for this title, which makes it even harder for him to course-correct any missteps taken during Rotworld.  Even worse, this issue seems doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past since Lemire borrows some very familiar elements from prior storylines to build the plot.

Animal Man Annual #2 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Travel Foreman (art), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: Can we call child protective services on reckless superhero endangerment?

The Review: Lemire made the interesting choice when he started this title of dropping us into Animal Man’s life after his prime as a pure superhero.  By the second issue, Buddy had already realized his role as the shirtless agent of the Red, and we never did get to see what life pre-Rot was like.  We ignored this point because of the pressing nature of the story at the time, but now that Buddy has picked up his costume again, you wonder how he started out in this biz.

It seems Lemire had the same thought in mind, as here, despairing from the loss of his family, Buddy flashes back to happier times, when his powers were still new (he tells Ellen that he and Cliff spent the last night surfing the web for ideas of new animal powers he can channel).  At this point, he’s only just made a name for himself down in San Diego, fighting one of your typically punny villanis (“Biowulf”) with the late Detective Krenshaw and a team of cops by his side.  Even in these early years of the superhero age, Animal Man ranks among the D-list of masked marvels, but he seems quite content and thrilled to be part of it all anyway.

Animal Man #21 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh & Francis Portela (art), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: Animal Man may need some backup from PETA on this.

The Review: Before I joined WCBR, there was a Justice League mini called Cry for Justice.  I don’t remember the experience of reading it, but it’s a safe bet that I glanced through the first couple issues, retched, and never looked at it again.  That didn’t mean I could remain completely ignorant of the events within the series, outrageously grim as they were.  This included the death of Lian Harper, Red Arrow/Arsenal’s daughter, and his subsequent quest for vengeance.

At the time, it struck me as odd that a person would lose his child and immediately start planning his revenge, perhaps after allowing himself a panel or two of teeth-gnashing tears.  I know I’m more given to schmaltz than most, but it occurred to me that if I lost one of my kids, there’d be a long period of me just lying in a dark room, curled in a fetal position.  The avenging part would have to wait, at least until I could summon the energy to put clothes on.

Animal Man #19 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh (art), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: Buddy pisses off the higher-ups and loses guest access to the Red.

The Review: While both Lemire and Scott Snyder transitioned from their Vertigo projects to mainstream ones at around the same time, it’s increasingly clear that Snyder has become one of the major architects of the DCU, while Lemire has been relegated to the position of a respected demigod within the publisher’s creative pantheon.  Even that position has grown shaky as of late, with declining quality in both Justice League Dark and even his pet title, Animal Man.

After the dismaying downhill spiral on Rotworld, it’s time for both Lemire and his hero to regroup and find their way back to what made this series so compelling in the first place.  Sadly, one of those things seems to have gotten wrecked for a while to come: the Baker family dynamic.  The death of Cliff has clearly driven a wedge between Ellen and Buddy that feels impossible to dislodge, yet this also introduces a new, compelling conflict of its own.

Animal Man #18 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh (art), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: And this is why you never teach your children to be heroes.

The Review: I’ve always seen Swamp Thing and Animal Man as two loving but competitive brothers.  While their bond with each other is undeniable, you can always tell each secretly wants to be seen as the better, cooler, smarter brother to the rest of the world.  The friendly rivalry between the two series has ebbed and flowed in terms of who comes out the superior.  One will win your favor for a few months, then the other will overtake for the next few months.

Lately, however, Lemire’s title has fallen behind its sibling in a way that makes me wonder if it’ll catch up again.  Though it and Swamp Thing have shared an arc and told similar stories of heroism, somehow Animal Man just feels weaker across the board, even when neither title is particularly strong.  Scott Snyder has simply made wiser writing choices and executed them with more integrity than Lemire has.

Animal Man #16 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh (art), Timothy Green II (pencils), Joseph Silver (inks), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: This time, the Green Lanterns are really going green.

The Review: I generally don’t approve of internet speculation about the whys and wherefores of publishing or writing decisions, but I do love trying to predict what’s coming up next in a story.  With the former, my belief is unless you have a firsthand account of the business, you really have no basis for your theories.  With the latter, your basis is the story itself, as well as the vast ocean of comic book continuity that serves, in legal terms, as both evidence and precedent.

So I was mightily impressed by Ghost of Mars’ theory on my last review of Animal Man that the Lantern trapped beneath Metropolis was Driq of Criq.  For one, I just had to give props for Ghost’s knowledge of the Green Lantern mythos, and for another, considering Driq’s undead nature, it made a lot of sense for the story.  In fact, I could’ve been fairly disappointed by another choice of Lantern, had Lemire not used an even better one.

Animal Man #14 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh (art), Timothy Green II (pencils), Joseph Silver (inks), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: And just when your ruined world can’t get any worse, enter an evil sorcerer.

The Review: I’ll let you in on a little secret: I actually dislike reviewing issues that are mostly fighting sequences—actively dread them, really.  Unless the superpowers involved are fairly spectacular and innovative, I find it very hard to say anything about them.  They tend to reveal more about the artist’s strengths than the writers, and they rarely do much to inform the story, unless of course the characters engage in some awkward exposition in the middle of it all.

And I’ve already made plain my general dissatisfaction with the Rot horde as enemies.  As mindless, one-note creatures, they serve as nothing more than pure cannon fodder, stuff for our heroes to mow down indiscriminately.  Even the Rot-infestees don’t seem all that different from the normal type of Rotling, except for the fact that they wear clothes.  Since they pose so little challenge, it doesn’t take that much effort from Buddy and his gang to slaughter them, and leaving little for me to comment about on the issue’s first act.

Animal Man #13 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh (art), Timothy Green II (pencils), Joseph Silver (inks), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: Buddy discovers his world can cross its overpopulation problems off the list.

The Review: One complaint everyone pretty much has about Events from either of the publishers, one I join wholeheartedly on, is how many titles they end up invading.  Sometimes—who am I kidding?—almost all the time, there’s no actual reason to squeeze them into the plot.  But you can’t deny that there’s no better way to give a storyline an epic, important feel.  When one title has a world-spanning conflict no other title notices, why should you do any different?

Such is the rock and hard place we have in Rotworld.  I’m rather charmed that Lemire and Scott Snyder continue to claim that this dystopia their stars have entered is anything more than an alternate reality, as if there’s even a chance none of this grimness will reverse course after several issues.  Can we truly believe that once this arc ends, we’ll have other heroes sitting around, reminiscing about the time Hawkman turned into a deformed, flesh-eating zombie?

Animal Man #0 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh (art), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: And now you know why Animal Man never channels the powers of a chicken.

The Review: Considering the popularity of this series, you can’t deny Lemire has done a good job making its star accessible to people who’ve never heard of him in their lives (read: most people).  That said, it’s always been obvious that longtime fans, particularly those of the Morrison era of Animal Man, had an “in” on the character the rest of us do not.  In that sense, these #0 issues can handily even the field between old and new readers.

Here we see Lemire integrating both old continuity and the new mythology he’s laid down, and the effect seems very unified and sensible.  Like Action Comics #0, you don’t see much in this issue that previous ones haven’t alluded to already, but Lemire clarifies some of the reasons behind certain changes and developments.  You get a sense of that these past events tie into the current “Rotworld” arc, but only in the vaguest terms.

Animal Man #12 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire & Scott Snyder (story), Steve Pugh (art), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: Animal Man and Swamp Thing do their best Starsky and Hutch impression.

The Review: And so it begins.  Hokey and overused, yes, I know, but the line seems apropos here, considering we are talking about an event long in the works and which every fan of DC’s “Dark” line of books has been looking forward to for months.  We have here two of the biggest hotshots in the wake of the new DCU working together on two of the biggest figures of DC’s counter-mainstream culture—for a mainstream book.  That is also popular, of all things.

So excitement definitely feels deserved in this situation.  That said, the meeting between our two heroes doesn’t have quite the punch it did in Swamp Thing #11.  Buddy finds it necessary to brief his new partner on everything that’s happened to him in the last ten issues, which might be handy for readers hopping aboard the Animal Man hayride for the first time, but a dull exercise for us longtime fans.

Animal Man #11 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Alberto Ponticelli (pencils), Wayne Faucher (inks), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: I’m not sure you want a makeover from two yellow Coneheads in leotards.

The Review: To be perfectly frank, Animal Man has been in desperate need of a major upgrade in power set for a while.  Lemire made that clear every time he had Buddy face off against the Rot, only to quickly find himself overwhelmed, outmuscled, and just downright ineffective.  Granted, he’ll probably never be capable of his daughter’s feats, but you’d think at such a critical time, he should have more options than channeling the strength of a gorilla, or whatever.

So when the Totems offered to give Buddy a newer, better body last issue, it was about time.  At first glance, however, we don’t see any radical changes.  He certainly doesn’t look any different, though he says he feels “stronger…more pure…”  The Royal Tailors give him “limited species-shifting abilities,” and we see a bit of that here, as he transmogrifies in and out of several half-man, half-animal forms, similar to his bolstered powers in the Red.  But it’s not totally clear how this mere shapeshifting ability is more beneficial than his normal channeling powers.

Animal Man #10 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh (art), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: They may be shady people in a podunk motel, but it’s not what you think!

The Review: Ten, fifteen, or maybe twenty years in the future, I predict Lemire will be a renowned writer, famous for his revitalization of Animal Man, just as Grant Morrison is now for the same thing.  Just like Morrison, Lemire is pushing the boundaries of where our star character can go, only instead of driving Buddy Baker out to the furthest reaches of space, Lemire dives deeper inward into Buddy’s inner mythology.

The Green has always had a fairly rich lore, with its Parliament of Trees and avatars and prophecies, and Lemire has made it his goal to give the same kind of richness to the Red, which now not only has its own venerable council in the Totems, but also a whole landscape of “geographical” features, a warrior class of agents patrolling it all as a national guard against the Rot, and even a castle headquarters, the literal heart of the Red.

Animal Man #9 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh (art), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: The Bone Orchard, huh?  Sounds like just the place to build a vacation condo.

The Review: Besides the craft of his storytelling, another reason why Lemire is so appealing as a writer is his obvious enthusiasm for what he writes.  The guy just loves his comics, as he proves in the opening page of this issue by inserting a neat little tribute to another great Animal Man writer, Grant Morrison:  “Then the dream got really strange…I met my maker…He was this skinny, intense, Scottish guy who claimed I was just a character that he wrote in a comic book.”

So far, Lemire hasn’t shown the sheer weirdness and conceptual abstraction that made Morrison’s Animal Man so distinctive, but Lemire has offered some memorable fantasy all his own.  Each time we visit the Red, it appears a little more alien, yet eerily familiar, a place where everything you recognize gets turned inside out—often quite literally.  If you didn’t know better, you’d imagine this is what the Rot looks like: a plain of blood, bones, and flesh.

Animal Man #8 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Steve Pugh (artist), Travel Foreman (penciller), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: Let this issue be a wake-up call to permissive, indulgent parents everywhere.

The Review: This may sound a tad hypocritical coming from someone who loves Young Justice so much, but I find the concept of kids getting caught up in the increasingly violent world of superheroics, frankly, rather disturbing.  Much as the Fantastic Four’s Franklin and Valeria try to emphasize the cuteness of the idea, I think that in any real life scenario, we’d get a result more along the lines of what happened to Red Arrow’s daughter in James Robinson’s Cry for Justice.

If you never considered this troubling problem before, you’ll almost certainly start thinking about it after this issue.  Maxine’s childlike confidence and legendary status may have lulled you into thinking nothing can really touch her, but here we see, in graphic fashion, that at the end of the day, she’s still a little kid with vulnerable flesh.  Lemire may like his warm, corny father-son moments, but he’ll let a four-year-old girl get mercilessly ravened by various animals when the story demands it.  The moment is an immediate punch in your gut, telling you once and for all that this series is not messing around with this horror stuff.

You don’t even have the comfort of feeling better when Maxine saves herself from bodily death, since it requires her to jump through some grisly body-snatching and body-disposing hoops to get it done.  Rather than charm you, her toothy smile and peppy, “It didn’t hurt at all.  It kind of felt good,” simply gives you the willies.  The only thing separating her on the creepy factor from the Children of the Corn is her obvious love and loyalty to her family, but her reckless and naïve behavior means we can’t count on those qualities alone to mean she won’t doom them all.

Animal Man #7 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Steve Pugh & Travel Foreman (artists), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: No rest stops on this family trip—we’re on the lam from killer beasts, remember?

The Review: Practically every superhero comic on the stands bears some kind of peril within.  When our heroes are fighting to save their cities or fellow man, they’re also fighting to save themselves.  Theirs is a high-stakes business, where failure often means the loss of their lives.  What makes the danger in Animal Man feel so much more potent and real is the fact that Buddy’s not the only one at risk here; it’s his whole family that is being threatened.

More than anything else, the constant risk to the Bakers maintains the series’ choking tension.  It gives the Rot not one, but several targets to lurk after, so any time a Baker goes off anywhere on his or her own, your wariness increases for their sake.  When Buddy leaves Cliff to his own devices in this nowhere, desert town, everything takes on an ever-so-slightly sinister aspect, as if you expect at any moment some stranger’s good-natured smile will burst out with fangs and seize the boy in his grip.  No doubt this paranoia got instilled into you by the Hunters’ body-snatching tricks from previous issues.

Besides the multitude of physical dangers in play, perhaps there are even greater ones closing in on the Bakers’ spiritual well-being.  The tension within the family grows more intense with each harrowing episode.  Ellen’s mom finally airs her feelings about the whole situation, and while telling her daughter that Buddy “was trouble from the moment you first started dating” seems a bit unfair, she has a point.  Lemire has crafted a bit of a double-edged sword in creating such a strong family unit for this series, because it does make you think how insane it is to even attempt to do your superhero thing if you have loved ones to fear for.

Yet Buddy seems oblivious to the problems eating away at his own family.  You can’t deny that he’s tops in the “cool dad” department (“Cliff, we gotta go…that was the Justice League, they need us!”), but when it comes to the more deeply-rooted issues, he’s a bit too lax.  It’s not just that he dismissively asks, “What’s her problem?” when Ellen’s mom storms out.  By this point, Buddy’s had two dreams of impending doom, and while he reacts with appropriate dismay at the evil portents for Maxine, he doesn’t quite seem as attuned to the equally dark signs for Cliff.  Remember Cliff’s spilt guts in #1?  Doesn’t it seem foreboding that here, in Buddy’s vision of the “future,” you see a grown-up Maxine, a geriatric yet spry Buddy and Ellen, yet no Cliff?

Animal Man #6 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), John Paul Leon & Travel Foreman (artists), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: Well, Buddy, you’re giving Clooney a run for his money on that Oscar, I’ll say that.

The Review: I have a screenwriter friend who’s a big buff for the canon of artistic cinema—loves everything Stanley Kubrick, big Criterion collector, all that good stuff.  Because I’m a lit nerd, I tend to view movies with a pretentious sniff, but under his influence, I’ve grown to see film as the potential art form it is—Twilight movies and unceasing Alvin and the Chipmunks sequels be damned.  And anyway, as a comics reader, I can’t exactly stay on a high horse.

I will say, however, that the bulk of movies tend to be more formulaic, predictable, and given to cliché than almost any other medium, even the decent ones.  Three pages into “Tights,” the last (?) movie Buddy starred in before his run-in with the Rot, you already know the angsty place the plot is heading long before Chas (Buddy’s “character”) lands himself in the hospital with an estranged wife and crying kid beside him, begging him to stop his vigilantism before it’s too late.  The premise of “Tights” also comes a bit too late in the “superhero down on his luck”-type story.

The beauty of art, though, is that no matter how much it follows formula, it can still be affecting and powerful depending on its execution.  And Lemire sure knows how to execute.  He’s not the type to insert this kind of thing into an issue just as a fun gimmick.  What “Tights” really does is give you a character study on Buddy himself through the guise of his film counterpart.  The last five issues have been so chock-full of action and plot elements that we haven’t really gotten a chance to know our hero as a person, so this sequence comes as a quiet, welcome break.

Now, we’ve seen the Baker family in action, so we know the distant father, mother, and son in the movie are at least not true to life (so to speak).  We also know Buddy is a pretty wholesome and well-adjusted guy, compared to the depressed, falling-apart drunk on screen.  There is one thing they share: an addiction to heroism, one they can’t quit even in the face of very real danger.  Red Thunder finds himself incapable of dealing with even the youngest threats of modern society, while Animal Man is poorly equipped to deal with the abstract, overwhelming foe he’s up against.  Red Thunder gets beat up; where will that leave Animal Man, I wonder?

Two significant moments in the issue signal how this movie clip will play into upcoming story.  First is Red Thunder’s admission to his grieved ex-wife and son: “I—I can’t quit…I can’t do anything else.  Without the costume…I’m nothi—”  Whether this bears any reflection to Buddy’s determination to see this horror through, even with the risk to his family, we’ll have to see.  It’s also significant to learn Cliff’s the one watching his dad’s movie this whole time.  We’ve seen in earlier issues how taken he is with his dad being in the hero business, but he just had a scary run-in with the Hunters Three, and witnessed his dad getting beat around.  It may well be he’s having second thoughts about how cool any of this is.

Animal Man #5 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Travel Foreman & Steve Pugh (artists), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: This is one parade of animals I can live without.

The Review: Like anything else, serial fiction has its upsides and downsides.  On the upside, there’s a lot to be said for a story that has enough time on its hands to explore any direction it darn well pleases and develop its characters as far as they can go.  The problem is for a story to go on for that long, the main character has to stick around for a good, long while, which means their survival in any kind of dangerous situation is practically assured.

That makes writing your traditional superhero comics a bit tricky, to say the least.  While the goal is to challenge their powers by placing them in some kind of peril, for the most part, you’re never all that concerned anything drastic will happen to them.  But then, Animal Man is hardly your traditional superhero comic.  From the onset, Lemire has imbued this title with a constant, sweaty tension, allowing danger to lurk on every page.

To begin with, our hero is much lower on the power scale than his League counterparts.  We saw last issue how ineffective, even at its most potent, his skill set is against the Hunters Three, and here, separated from direct contact with the Red, Buddy proves even less effective against just one of the Hunters.  Yet from the looks of things, it doesn’t seem like there are many on Earth who can handle these flesh-feeding terrors, except those with powers over flesh themselves.

Animal Man #4 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Travel Foreman (artist), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: Over the mountains and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go…

The Review: Animal Man’s cult popularity comes less from anything inherently cool about his powers or himself, but more from the way writers have used him for highly experimental, even radical, storytelling.  When you think of Animal Man, you tend not to think of his iconography or mythos, but rather the fact that he once starred in one of Grant Morrison’s delightfully bizarre works.  What you know of him as a character is far less concrete.

Lemire has been filling the gaps in that area since this series started, and done it quite poetically too, though he poaches off Swamp Thing’s continuity for some of it.  You especially can’t help seeing the resemblances in this issue: humans acting as avatars of the Red, returning to the Red once their work is done to become Totems in the “Parliament of Limbs.”  Here, just as in Scott Snyder’s sister title, the Red has found its greatest avatar of all to fight its greatest enemy of all.

We’ve seen hints of how far Maxine’s power can go, particularly in reanimating the corpses of several small animals.  But now we really get a sense of the difference between her, a true avatar of the Red, and Buddy, a mere “agent,” as the Totems called him last issue.  Buddy’s ability to channel the powers of animals makes for some entertaining action, but Maxine wields power over flesh itself, as she shows when she heals her daddy’s wounds, molding his skin like clay.

Animal Man #3 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Travel Foreman (artist), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: It’ll take a hardy stomach not to go vegan after this.

The Review: Horror is a tricky thing to create.  While we all know how unsettling the foreign and bizarre can be, it takes something more to elevate them to concepts that frighten us.  Often, that necessary element comes from mixing the unnatural with the natural, the strange with the familiar.  When we confront a thing we think we understand, we have a measure of control.  When our understanding proves fallible, we become vulnerable, and that’s frightening.

Here, our villains—although the term feels too commonplace to describe the malevolent forces in question—make a game of hiding within hosts, but they do it so carelessly that it offers no comfort to us or to the characters in the issue.  Their human form serves as a mere skin, a poor, shrunken costume that these creatures quickly outgrow, their monstrous limbs squeezing and tearing out of any opening available.  The only possible reaction is to recoil in disgust and terror.

This Ellen does very convincingly, though Cliff doesn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the situation (“That was awesome!”).  After all, these creatures are called the Hunters Three, and you don’t earn that title without some serious tracking skills, so no matter where mother and son go, their pursuer won’t be long behind.  Without any apparent super-powers at their disposal, they’ll be at the Hunter’s mercy when he catches up to them, so you have another rich vein of suspense there.

Meanwhile, Buddy has his hands full just dealing with the revelations about his daughter and his true place in the Red’s hierarchy.  For all the abilities he possesses, he is meant to be little more than a bodyguard for the Red’s true avatar.  Even at its strongest, there’s been an inherently limited (and slightly goofy) quality to Buddy’s powers.  It stands to reason that channeling the strength of a lion or gorilla won’t impress the personified abstractions of a “rot.”

Animal Man #2 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Travel Foreman (artist), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: Who went and impregnated the hippos?

The Review: You get to see all kinds of outrageous, fantastical things in comics: space cowboys who sling energy from rings, men who can shrink down to sub-microscopic size and travel between the folds of parallel universes, women who charge into battle wearing nothing more than a glorified one-piece.  Yet families are something of a rarity; Buddy Baker may be the only superhero who’s managed to have something even approaching a normal family dynamic.

Emphasis on “approaching.”  Nobody can integrate superpowers and vigilantism so closely with their home life and have it come out with its normalcy completely intact.  As we saw last issue, Buddy and his fams have adapted astonishingly well to his career.  None of them finds it unusual for the man of the house to hover away to confront a deranged psychotic in the children’s ward of a hospital.  You can imagine it would take something quite dramatic to rattle these people.

Well, that something happens in this very issue, which proves nothing is more unsettling than a wide-eyed little girl with a link to the supernatural.  You’ll be most disturbed by her flippant behavior to what would cause most of her peers (and probably most of us, at that) to shriek and run off as quick as our legs can take us.  Whether it’s the fact that she finds all these animated animal cadavers so cute or that she shows only a vague curiosity at her daddy bleeding out his eyes, you quickly realize lil’ Maxine is one creepy kid.

Big brother Cliff seems strictly enthused by these events (“Let me run and get my phone…I gotta film this!”), but mother Ellen comes very close to having a mild breakdown from the wild cacophony of emotions running through her: ill-hidden horror at her daughter’s newly discovered powers, terror of what will happen if others find out (“Buddy!  This is…this is bad!  They’re going to take her away!”), sullen rage at being left behind while her husband literally flies off with their daughter on a mission to save an abstract idea.

Animal Man #1 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Travel Foreman (artist), Dan Green (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: Sing it with me, everybody—“‘Cause I want to live / like animals…”

The Review: Who would’ve ever predicted that from all of DC’s enormous body of characters, Animal Man would get counted as one of its most famous and acclaimed?  Certainly, he has little inherent appeal in either his powers or background.  A family man who can call on the powers of the animal kingdom certainly has nothing on an alien from a dead planet with the strength of a god.  It just goes to show what inspired writing can do for seemingly unpromising material.

And if any writer can bring the inspiration to make Animal Man a force to behold again, Lemire can.  From the first page, he gets us well acquainted with Buddy Baker’s voice, which is candid, mild, and irresistibly inclusive: “The whole DIY, bootleg thing is a part of who I am…As long as the world still needs Animal Man, he’ll be around.”  Think of a tree-hugging Jimmy Stewart who can also do an uncanny impression of a dog, and you’ll have the right idea

We get to see all these elements in action, in a tense, but ultimately tangential sequence involving a grief-crazed shooter in a children’s cancer ward.  While Buddy obviously prefers the touchy-feely approach, he has no qualm about getting his hands dirty.  As he simultaneously controls the abilities of an elephant, fly, and cheetah, we see good evidence of why, even with a fruitful film career, he’d never give up the superhero biz.  “…it’s just too much fun.”

What with all the DC men who’ve lost their wives to editorial changes, it’s refreshing to see Buddy blessed with a stable, wondrously imperfect family life: the familiar insinuations (“And when does your agent think you’re going to get paid…?”), the harmless squabbles, the small, loving gestures (“I..take on the weight of a bumblebee so I don’t wake the kids.”).  That he gets to experience these things on a daily basis already sets him apart from his more famous peers.