Reading Through 2021 69: Animal Man: The Hunt Volume 1, by Jeff Lemire and Travel Foreman

Animal Man: The Hunt Volume 1, by Jeff Lemire and Travel Foreman

2012

Last year, if someone had told me that not only was I going to read two New 52 comic collections this year, but that I would also pay for them, I would have told them they were liars.

Somehow, after reading the not very good Justice League United, I was convinced to give Mr. Lemire another chance, that his Animal Man run was good. I had actually read the first two issues at the time, before I realized just how horrendously misguided the entirety of the New 52 concept was and washed my hands of it all. And those issues were alright, I just hated what was going on overall with DC and didn't want to touch any of it. I hated Geoff Johns' writing, I hated Jim Lee's art, I hated editor Bob "I fired Claremont on X-Men so Jim Lee could quit the book two weeks later and then ran the franchise into the ground" Harris who was shepherding numerous projects. I was a long absentee reader who was checking back in, and saw that they were producing some atrocious comics. I felt stupid that I thought they might put out decent product. So I stopped looking at all DC, regardless of the creator. 

This year is the first year I've looked at anything they've published over the past decade, and the stuff I've enjoyed seems good in spite of the company, not because of it.

Anyway, this is about Animal Man, not how poorly managed DC is. But there might be a pinch of that anyway.

There are some potent images in the book

I loved Morrison's Animal Man, I liked Delano's, but I haven't read a new Animal Man comic since the year started with a one. It's no longer Vertigo, because Constantine was in a movie or something and intellectual properties need to be easily exploited. And because this is the New 52, it should be friendly to new readers.

It's reader friendly, as far as continuity goes. Animal Man Buddy Baker is a married family man, acting to pay the bills, but hasn't given up his tights. Immediately weird stuff starts happening at home, as he starts bleeding out his eyes and his four year old daughter starts reanimating the corpses of animals. They go off to meet the representatives of the Red, while representatives of the Rot attack his wife and son. Animal Man then comes back and saves them, and they have a quest to fight the Rot. That's five issues, and there's a sixth which is a movie which Buddy Baker starred in.

What is the Red, the Rot, and what about the Green?

The Rot

One thing that has changed since I read the first issue in 2012 is that I've read all of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, and his concept of the Green. The foundation of Lemire's Animal Man is the mythology of that proto-Vertigo book from the mid-80s. Having read that, I instantly understood what was going on in the book a whole lot better. The book name drops Swamp Thing a little and by the end of the first trade is headed to a crossover with the New 52 version of that book, which Lemire was also writing. 

Knowing about the Green makes this book a whole lot more interesting, but it's not so much that this book was so interesting, but that I liked the Alan Moore stuff so much and it was interesting to see it be elaborated on.  Moore's Green was a sort of cosmic field of plant consciousness. Lemire elaborates on that with the Red, the animal counterpart to that. It annihilates the old concept of Animal Man and how he got powers from aliens, but I'm not that attached to him as a character, so it was fine.

I think she's supposed to be four

This was way better than Lemire's Justice League United, a low bar to cross. But it's actually good. Lemire and Foreman try to bring some horror to Animal Man. I wasn't fully satisfied by it for reasons I'll get into at the end, but for a mainstream monthly book, it's way more compelling than most. Foreman has a unique style, using realism in places that contrast how grotesque it is in other places. 

Lots of open flesh in the Red

The sixth issue story has a guest artist, John Paul Leon, who is tonally very different than Foreman, but has very nice grounded art in the style of David Mazzuchelli or David Aja. In it, Buddy plays a washed up superhero, so I suppose it is meant to be a parallel to the main story, but I didn't think too much about any deeper reading.

It's got a bit of the vibe of the movie Super

I enjoyed the book overall, but there wasn't much of a story in the six issues. There was an introduction to a concept, and a fight and then it ended. Basically, in six issues, it had the amount of content that used to be in the first issue or two of something, and barely that. On top of that, it was leading into a crossover with Swamp Thing, so it was basically asking you to read two books for one story. I know decompressed storytelling was the trend of the day, but I want more density in a single book, or I want it to be packaged in longer intervals; put a dozen issues in a collection instead of six, and hopefully something of consequence has happened by the end.

What was in there was compelling, so when I put down the book I looked online at either trades or the omnibus. The trades are out of print and overpriced, and the omnibus was a lot more expensive than I was interested in spending on a storyline I wasn't that enamored with. If you can't produce a fat, reasonably priced collection of a single story, why would a normal person read it? The Big Two have decided that if you want older stories in print, you have to pay through the nose for deluxe editions, as they figure the only people really interested in reading them that way are over forty and have the cash to shell out for them. Otherwise, get some digital subscription. So I'm left holding a trade paperback that amounts to chapter one of a story. Maybe it is a great story, but I won't read it.