Review: Animal Man #1

What would life as a super hero actually be like? Oddly, it’s a question that most comic books and writers have little interest in answering. Usually, a series will only be really interested in the dramatic and explosive moments in their lives, leaving their day to day curiously underdeveloped.  One thing I particularly like about Marvel’s latest volume of New Avengers is that Brian Michael Bendis has latched on to the idea that The Avengers aren’t so far away from an emergency service like a firefighter crew and takes the time to show the team eating together and playing poker in Avengers mansion, much like the crews do in real life fire stations around the world. It adds context to their bouts of smashing badguys through skyscrapers, which can only be a good thing.

Animal Man #1, too, is a comic delving in to the day to day life of its titular hero.  It makes a refreshing change and, for this reader, a great introduction to a character I’ve never read before. Buddy Baker, thanks to a fantastic script by Jeff Lemire, leaps out of the page, fully realised as a hero, but also as a family man. In fact, the whole Baker family are quickly and effortlessly established in just a couple of pages and already stick in my mind as a great supporting cast that could fill a book with absolutely no super powers in whatsoever. But of  course, this book isn’t called Animal Man for nothing, and  Lemire handles that brilliantly too. There’s a sense that Animal Man is at least semi retired as the book opens, and although we don’t see it, Buddy’s other job as an environmental activist makes perfect sense and raises the question of what other uses super heroes might have for their abilities than fighting crime.
When Animal Man is called in to action, however, Lemire wisely holds the line with the tone and doesn’t go over the top, foregoing any kind of super criminal – instead, he chooses to pitch Animal Man against the tragic case of a man, unable to cope with the death of his daughter, taking a children’s ward of a local hospital hostage.  Though he poses no real threat thanks to Animal Man’s rather nifty power set, he’s disturbing in just the right way to Buddy Baker, family man.

Travel Foreman and Dan Green deserve special mention here for their art contributions to the book. The opening pages of the book are sparse and calm, almost washed out and employ great use of negative space and light. Later pages featuring Animal Man in costume are darker, more chaotic, but the pages that follow, when Buddy returns home to sleep (brilliantly borrowing the sleeping prowess of a cat to do so) present one of the most dramatic and effective tonal shifts in art I’ve ever seen.  In some kind of dream landscape connected to the ‘life web’ that gives Baker his powers, Foreman and Green imagine a twisted environment of grey, twisted foliage and bright red rivers of blood. It’s completely shocking and absolutely riveting. Better still, are the freaky mashups of various animals that are, presumably, some kind of occult adversaries for Animal Man. I’m not sure, exactly, but that’s just another reason (in a book full of them) to read #2.

This is a truly great read: Buddy Baker is perhaps the most effectively realised super hero that I have come across in years. He’s not facing a world destroying threat or saving the world, but he has a family that  instantly feel real and compelling in a way that most books could never achieve. It gives the occult, horror tinged drama of his costumed life a greater sense of peril and already has me totally invested in the outcome of the story. As an entry to the New 52 , it gives a perfect and compelling introduction to a great character. There is simply no way to recommend it enough.