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A review by pdz
Animal Man, Volume 2: Animal vs. Man by Timothy Green II, Travel Foreman, Jeff Lemire, Steve Pugh
4.0
Grant Morrison made me a big fan of Animal Man. Jeff Lemire is continuing on where Morrison started, making Animal Man a weird / horror / violent / mystical comic book experience.
It's been a while since I read the first volume, but I remember liking it a little bit better than this one. Lemire does a great job with moving Buddy and his family through this nightmare of rot, and the art goes well with the story. I found some pages to be a little wordy, but I guess that's somewhat necessary given the abstract nature of Animal Man and his powers. It definitely has a Sandman vibe to it.
What I love about Animal Man and Swamp Thing is that they're not afraid to make their heroes... well... pretty damn disgusting. I think there's an element of that that would be present if we were to actually have these heroes tapping into otherworldly energies. Animal Man gets himself twisted in various ways, and his daughter gets the gross treatment also.
In a way, this is a reversal of typical comic book heroes. Spiderman, for example, goes from being nerdy high school geek (a type meant to be something on the outskirts or "grotesque" in terms of the society around him) to being a superhero with perfect muscles and something that's viewed as valuable to the society around him, as opposed to repulsive.
Animal Man does the opposite. Buddy is kind of a dope, and he's already got a cool job - stunt man. He goes from being this good looking dope to being able to tap into this terrifying force that often forces him to become something repulsive.
Read this book. I wish I could've read Swamp Thing vol. 2 at the same time. I think it's next up in my library queue.
It's been a while since I read the first volume, but I remember liking it a little bit better than this one. Lemire does a great job with moving Buddy and his family through this nightmare of rot, and the art goes well with the story. I found some pages to be a little wordy, but I guess that's somewhat necessary given the abstract nature of Animal Man and his powers. It definitely has a Sandman vibe to it.
What I love about Animal Man and Swamp Thing is that they're not afraid to make their heroes... well... pretty damn disgusting. I think there's an element of that that would be present if we were to actually have these heroes tapping into otherworldly energies. Animal Man gets himself twisted in various ways, and his daughter gets the gross treatment also.
In a way, this is a reversal of typical comic book heroes. Spiderman, for example, goes from being nerdy high school geek (a type meant to be something on the outskirts or "grotesque" in terms of the society around him) to being a superhero with perfect muscles and something that's viewed as valuable to the society around him, as opposed to repulsive.
Animal Man does the opposite. Buddy is kind of a dope, and he's already got a cool job - stunt man. He goes from being this good looking dope to being able to tap into this terrifying force that often forces him to become something repulsive.
Read this book. I wish I could've read Swamp Thing vol. 2 at the same time. I think it's next up in my library queue.