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.

Swamp Thing #5 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Yanick Paquette (artist), Nathan Fairbairn (colorist)

The Story: People really need to take those “Save the Amazon” slogans more seriously.

The Review: In my review of Animal Man #3, I talked about our instinctive fear of the unknown.  I think that’s why we tend to be on the lookout for clichés and signs of the predictable in horror movies; it’s a coping mechanism to limit the fear that comes from surprises.  A canny horror writer knows the only way to make his story work is to trick the audience into thinking they have a grasp on what’s going on, only to pull the rug from under them when least expected.

Case in point: last issue led you to believe that although a confrontation between Alec and Abby with William Arcane was inevitable, they still had some time on the road before that happened.  You have no reason to think otherwise as this issue gets going, as you see the odd couple stocking up on supplies for their presumed journey ahead.  And then little Billy himself appears right outside the abandoned storefront, riding on a herd of undead cattle and hogs.  Without fanfare or blinking an eye, he attacks.  Talk about your sudden twists.

The nice part of this unexpected attack is that it puts both Abby and Alec through a kind of trial by fire, forcing them to think and act fast, and allowing us to see what they’re made of.  Despite her edgier haircut, leather jacket, and guns, Abby’s not exactly an Amazon, and she attempts to reason with her brother rather than attacking him directly.  As you can see, she gets nowhere, proving that whether Billy’s possessed or truly deranged, it’ll take a lot more than well-intentioned words to move him.

Probably the most critical development of the issue is when Alec manages to exert his power over the Green and dispatch Billy’s Rot-driven minions with admirable finesse.  In fact, he disarms the boy so easily that you begin to wonder if perhaps he was right all along and he doesn’t need to become a monster to work as an avatar for the Green.  Still, a herd of ravenous beef and pork is, as we well know, only the tip of a titanic, undead iceberg.

Swamp Thing #4 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Marco Rudy (artist), Sean Parsons & Michel Lacombe (inkers), David Baron (colorist)

The Story: Swamp Dinosaurs versus Zombie Dinosaurs.  For real.

The Review: Honestly, once Snyder and Jeff Lemire made the connections between the Red and the Green, they were a conceptual hop, skip, and a jump away from developing a force for the non-living.  The Rot may be fairly intuitive as an idea, but its development both here and in Animal Man has been insidiously slow and steady, much as you’d expect any rot to be.  From the shock reactions it produced in the debut, the Rot has become ever more disturbing and darker.

Last time, we saw Billy put his rather nefarious powers to very effective, if gruesome, effect.  But watching a person choke on their own lung would be little more than a gross visual without context, and Snyder’s morbidly poetic explanation of Billy’s abilities leave you with a bit of a bitter taste in your mouth: “Everyone has a little death inside them.  A rotten tooth.  Dead skin cells, shattered veins…  Whatever death is in you, he can make it bloom.”

The real question is how much of this is really Billy’s doing.  Initially, he projected a sad, preyed-upon air, which only turned twisted after giving in to the insistent voices he heard in his head.  Seeing him ask for a vanilla milkshake here (only to wreak bloody havoc after the cook mistakes his order for chocolate) makes you think somewhere, Billy’s personality still exists.  So is he taking a back seat to inflicting this horror, or does he have his hand firmly on the wheel?

Most likely, Billy may have no control in all this.  The Green considers Abigail’s succumbing to the Rot as all but inevitable, even though she’s putting all her effort into making sure that never happens.  But Abby herself hinted that when push comes to shove, she may be unable to resist the fate that awaits her, which means a very ugly confrontation for Alec should he insist on sticking with her.  Right now he may think of her as “the closest thing I have to home,” but she won’t seem so homey once she pulls the same shenanigans as her brother on Alec.

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.