Comic Review: Animal Man

 

Comic Book: Animal Man
Author: Grant Morrison
Issues: 32
Hard Core Scale: 3/4
Normal Scale: 8/10
Publish Date: 1988
About: Animal Man has the unique abilities to attain powers from the animals around him. Not the most useful of super powers, but someone wants him dead and uncanny events begin surrounding him and his family’s life.
Review: What a trip. Those moments where the publisher just throws someone the keys to a small fry and say prove it. Morrison crushes the early contract issues and was kept on. He explore wonders things of the human condition while making great use of an absurd character in an absurd world. Coyote Gospel might be one of the best comic one-shots written period. Sadly, he takes it to the ultimate 4th wall breaking of character meeting author and turns it into a self-rant of the self and animals in the imagination. Also, a tribute to the small and forgotten character’s post OG crisis with one of the earliest mockeries of the second crisis looming. Lovely use of Psycho pirate too. The series continues, but I could not get into it. Morrison wraps up what he intended to do.  

 

                                                        Cover art, Chase Troug, DC.

 

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