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Animal Man (1988-1995) Vol. 1

Animal Man (1988-1995) Vol. 1

byGrant Morrison
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CB Review
4.0 out of 5 starsMorrison Finding His Stride, Animal Man Not So Much
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 27, 2019
Grant Morrison can be somewhat polarizing, and I don't think all his works are created equal. However, to me, his run on Animal Man is one of his best (second maybe to Doom Patrol). You can almost see his metatextual/reality-focused style developing over the run as he finds his stride. And this first volume in particular has some great self-contained issues, like "The Coyote Gospel" and "The Death of the Red Mask," that tell interesting stories that will stick with you.

The problem, though, is that while this is good Morrison, it's just okay Animal Man. Buddy is ostensibly the focus of the series, but many times he seems secondary to whatever writing device, new character, or other experimental idea Morrison wants to test out. Which is a pity, because there are glimpses of real heart and character in Buddy, but they don't get as much focus as they do in say, Lemire's New 52 Animal Man run. While Animal Man does have an arc, involving issues with his powers, and working to join the Justice League, they feel like more of a chore for Morrison to address until he can jump back into the next weird story idea he wants to tinker with. All in all, it's still a great run I recommend to DC/Vertigo fans, but I think people really come to this for the Morrison, not the Animal Man.
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Alex Phillips
3.0 out of 5 starsA Brief Review for Oceanside Public Library Graphic Novel Book Club: Animal Man
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 5, 2019
I bought this for a graphic novel book club for adults, the subject was on One Author & Three Books [Grant Morrison & Animal Man]. It was an interesting book to read. Before Grant Morrison became well known for All-Star Superman, Batman, and Multiversity, Morrison took DC Comics by storm with this 3rd-rate superhero (and his work on Doom Patrol, both of which are his first works in America) and made him unique comic book readers in the early 1990s.
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CB Review
4.0 out of 5 stars Morrison Finding His Stride, Animal Man Not So Much
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 27, 2019
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Grant Morrison can be somewhat polarizing, and I don't think all his works are created equal. However, to me, his run on Animal Man is one of his best (second maybe to Doom Patrol). You can almost see his metatextual/reality-focused style developing over the run as he finds his stride. And this first volume in particular has some great self-contained issues, like "The Coyote Gospel" and "The Death of the Red Mask," that tell interesting stories that will stick with you.

The problem, though, is that while this is good Morrison, it's just okay Animal Man. Buddy is ostensibly the focus of the series, but many times he seems secondary to whatever writing device, new character, or other experimental idea Morrison wants to test out. Which is a pity, because there are glimpses of real heart and character in Buddy, but they don't get as much focus as they do in say, Lemire's New 52 Animal Man run. While Animal Man does have an arc, involving issues with his powers, and working to join the Justice League, they feel like more of a chore for Morrison to address until he can jump back into the next weird story idea he wants to tinker with. All in all, it's still a great run I recommend to DC/Vertigo fans, but I think people really come to this for the Morrison, not the Animal Man.
4 people found this helpful
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James B.
4.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious work by Grant Morrison
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 18, 2016
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Vertigo comics has put out some incredibly fun and critically acclaimed comics over the years, and some of the earliest were the ones that were part of the 'Bergerverse'. These were series that began in the main DC continuity with Batman, Superman and the like but were eventually shifted away because they dealt in themes too mature for young readers. Animal man is one such comic, putting it in company with the like of Swamp Thing, Sandman and Hellblazer. So how does it stack up?

Animal man seems to occupy a middle ground between standard comic book fare and the aboved 'mature'. series. While Swamp Thing and Sandman shifted away from traditional superheroics very quickly, Animal Man remains a fairly traditional hero, but with some twists. Notably, he has a family who knows he has powers, he needs the JL salary to help pay bills, and he wears a jacket over his skin tight costume so he has some pockets. The emphasis of the story is on playing with these conventions, rather than completely subverting them.

The main selling point of the story is the humor. Morrison does a great job of making these stories funny without turning the characters into jokes. Character development is done well too. The one flaw of the series might be the connection to the rest of the DC universe. Quite a few DC players come into this, and it might be a small challenge to follow if you don't already know who they are.

Still, this was a very promising start to an old classic.
3 people found this helpful
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C. Derick Varn
4.0 out of 5 stars Good--at times great--but not as mind-blowing as I remembered as a teen
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 11, 2015
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This is good, and one can see all the promise of Grant Morrison in his "mature" take on Animal Man, but is not as good as I remembered reading it in my teens. Almost twenty-years later, some strong issues like "Coyote Gospel" particularly stand out and the inclusion of the banalities of Buddy's life are interesting (as is his less-banal but pedestrian family life), but it doesn't hit the same cord that it once did. Morrison's strengths do show here: meta-textuality, flashes of occult references, increasingly strange conspiratorial backstories, and a much more mythic view of function of super-heroes. In many ways, he is a foil to Alan Moore, instead of deconstructing the Superhero to show its darker, imperialist (and even fascistic) undertones, Morrison is deconstructing them to show that they are necessary archetypes and that can co-exist with real world concerns. That said, sometimes it does not seem to work here, and sometimes Animal Man is too meta and the storylines in the first issues seemed rushed and are only made more coherent by Morrison in later issues in his run. That said, Coyote Gospel alone is worth the price of the graphic novel here.
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Max Whitwell
4.0 out of 5 stars Just My Opinion
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 3, 2014
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The book itself was in fine condition, no damage as far as my amateur eye could tell. The story itself was quite good, though not the immaculately crafted tale that some people make it out to be. Perhaps I'm being unduly harsh, Animal Man is a great read, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's looking for something of a blend between the esoteric Vertigo books and the main stream DC Universe. And who knows, maybe it'll be up to five stars for the other two volumes of the story.
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An Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Great book!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 27, 2013
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Grant Morrison finds a way to give Animal Man some true depth of character and doesn't rely so heavily on the juxtaposition of story elements simply for confusion's sake. Which is so often his calling card. Overall, great story. Wonderful insight into a character who seems so accidentally critical to the updated 52 story lines. Worth the read.
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Bob Wayne
4.0 out of 5 stars Read Whole Run... It Gets Better With Each Episode
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 27, 2009
Verified Purchase
I bought the entire run at Amazon, and I suggest you do the same, 'cause stories are very conected, but read the other two volumes also because they're simply better. Fun and original... Like Grant always is.
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Tom Knapp
VINE VOICE
4.0 out of 5 stars Animal powers, activate!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 13, 2014
I really liked Animal Man back when Grant Morrison took a third-rung hero out of the DC basement, brushed him off and made him someone worth reading about. I stuck with the series, even as it became progressively weirder and weirder, until its eventual cancellation. I'll be honest -- by the end, I wasn't enjoying it as much as I had been at the beginning.

The Animal Man book, which collects issues 1-9 of the Morrison series, reminds me why I enjoyed the title so much. It also provides a bit of foreshadowing of things to come.

Animal Man is Buddy Baker, a suburban husband and father of two who gained "animal powers" when an alien spaceship blew up in his face. That means he can temporarily absorb the natural abilities of anything in his immediate vicinity, from the tracking nose of a bloodhound to the proportionate strength of a spider. That could make him a formidable character under the right circumstances, and with the right writer at the helm.

Morrison did a lot that was right with this series. Instead of giving us a hero who was a strange visitor from another planet, a billionaire playboy with endless resources at his disposal or a figure from mythology, he gives us a regular guy down the street. His wife is a sweetheart but can be a bit of a nag. His kids can be annoying. He has trouble paying the bills. So he decides to brush off his old costume and go back into heroing in a big way, hoping to be accepted into the Justice League and be a success. And to some extent, he achieves that goal, if only for a short time.

His first case involves the B'wana Beast, an African superhuman who can fuse animals together (sometimes resulting in a powerful ally, other times creating a real big mess). Buddy also confronts a wily, seemingly immortal coyote, a Thanagarian warrior, a suicidal supervillain and a Scottish superpowered hitman.

The tales are fresh and funny in the way Morrison blends Buddy's superheroing with his home life and the way he portrays Buddy's first awkward steps at trying to be a hero. Sometimes I think he overestimates Buddy's powers, however -- I'm not sure the rudimentary regenerative abilities of an earthworm would allow him to regrow the complex musculature and nerve structure of a human arm.

Also, far too much of the action takes place off of the page. When Buddy goes off to join the other DC heroes to fight a large-scale alien invastion, the action occurs in a crossover book. When Buddy is given membership in Justice League Europe, that happens in a crossover book. When a strange phenomenon mixes up Buddy's powers, it happens in a crossover book. Likewise, this volume is peppered with panels foreshadowing things to come in Morrison's series, but which occur long after the nine issues collected here.

by Tom Knapp, the Rambles.NET guy
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Astro Ash
4.0 out of 5 stars Believable superhero.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 15, 2021
I started with Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol and fell in love with his understanding of a relatable superhero. Animal Man (Buddy Baker) doesn't always win and he struggles to balance family life and a lack luster career being a superhero. The stories issues here are amazing and thought provoking without feeling pretentious.
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Richard De Angelis
4.0 out of 5 stars Loyal Subject of the Animal Kingdom
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 22, 2001
In 1988, Scottish writer Grant Morrison revived a forgotten Sixties superhero for DC Comics with the help of artists Chas Truog and Doug Hazlewood. After a bizarre encounter in the woods (while hunting, ironically), former movie stunt man Buddy Baker found himself able to duplicate the abilities of any animal species through a psychic link with the "morphogenetic field" that serves as a template for all life on Earth. Working under the absurd sounding professional name, Animal Man, as his comeback series opened, the intimate rapport he shared with other creatures lead him to make a radical departure from accepted codes of superheroic conduct: he became an outspoken animal rights activist. In addition to going vegetarian, when not clashing with the occasional supervillain, Animal Man also took direct-and illegal-action to defend his fellow beings from human greed and cruelty.

While it deals with all sorts of unpleasant issues, what kept this series grounded was Morrison's characterization of Buddy Baker. He was always portrayed as a human being first and a superhero second. Animal Man's constant struggle to find a balance between his convictions and his responsibilities to the world as a "metahuman" provided the sense of emotional involvement that compelled readers to follow his every adventure.

Swooping out of the sky like an eagle, he snatched a cornered fox from a pack of trained hounds, spoiling the bloodsport of a band of British hunters. Swimming like a fish, he saved dolphins from being hacked to death by local villagers on the shores of the Faroe Islands (in reality, the victims of this annual slaughter are hundreds of pilot whales). Bursting through a laboratory wall like a rampaging elephant, he freed monkeys whose eyes had been sewn shut as part of a sensory deprivation experiment (back in the real world, an identically mutilated monkey named "Britches" was rescued by the Animal Liberation Front). Unfortunately, these dissident feats of daring finally came to an end when Grant Morrison departed from the series with issue 26, taking Animal Man's commitment to social change with him.

Demonstrating the untapped potential for instruction inherent in the much-maligned art form of "comics," Morrison's treatment of subjects like vivisection, hunting and vegetarianism was both intelligent and thought-provoking. Judging from the sometimes heated discussions that took place in the series' letter column, his work did a great deal to show readers that the belief in humankind's "superiority" over the rest of the animal kingdom is both dangerous and illogical. Most importantly, he offered solutions to show concerned people that you don't have to be a superhero to make a difference.

In addition to this trade paperback, which collects issues 1-9 of the series, a second volume, 
Animal Man: Origin of the Species  contains issues 10-17, and the final volume of Grant's work on this series,  Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina , collects issues 18-26.
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J. Thadeus Toad
4.0 out of 5 stars Morrison Nudges The Super Hero Again
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 14, 2004
The first issues of Animal Man were written with the intent of trying to sell the character as a solo series to modern readers. Grant Morrison wrote these issues as one stand alone adventure, in case the book did not get the green light for a longer run. His take on the whole confusion of life that comes with being a superhero is not unique, but it is well handled. Buddy Baker played an important role in saving the world in The Crisis event. Then he sort of put his costume away, unsure how to capitalize on his heroism. He has paid $800 for a uniform that his wife, Ellen, points out has hung unused in the closet. Life is complicated when you want to be a super powered being. You have the whole cash flow thing as well. It helps if your wife is a succesful illustrator. Buddy is frozen with ennui, unsure of himself. Then comes an epiphany to him. There is a world of pain out there when man and animal interact. Somehow, as a hero, he has to help level the playing field. His first case involves the creation of some horrifying genetic mutations and murder. A gorilla used in AIDS research has been stolen, and Animal Man answers the call for help. Of course, the poor beast is revealed to have been the victim of germ warfare experimentation. A figure from the jungles has come to America to free his beloved simian from barbaric captivity . That figure turns out to be Bwana Beast, the protector of the jungles of Africa. The story is at times fantastic, at times horrific, but always engaging and challenging. Grant Morrison has set the stage for far more fantastic and thrilling adventures to come in the subsequent collections of this series.
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