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 #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 #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 #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 #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.”