Animal Man by Grant Morrison 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition Book One

Animal Man by Grant Morrison 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition Book One by Grant Morrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When stuntman Buddy Baker came into contact with an alien spacecraft, he became Animal Man, the man with animal powers. Now that he's older with a wife and kids, he's back in the super hero game. Can Animal Man make a go of things this time around?

I've read about half of this book before in single issues and I think I had an Animal Man trade or two back in the day. I nabbed this as part of a sale on Amazon not too long ago. Through the magic of getting older, it was like a whole new reading experience.

This volume contains Animal Man #1-13, plus Secret Origins #39. Grant Morrison does the writing and Chas Truong and Doug Hazelwood handle most of the art, with an assist by Tom Grummett for the Secret Origins issue.

This is an early Grant Morrison work, his first for DC. While Morrison's career in American comics was still in its infancy, all the usual facets of Morrison's style are present: his respect for the past, whacked out ideas, and his willingness to go metatextual at times. It's more accessible than his later work but it's still not a vanilla book.

Animal Man is rebuilt from the ground up in this volume. He's got a wife and kids and is struggling just to be a C-list super hero. Morrison explores the nature of Buddy's powers, as well as the nature of the DC Universe post-Crisis. Morrison digs Bwana Beast out of the dollar bin mothballs and gets some serious mileage out of him. Vixen also gets a co-starring role, though I'm not sure if this is before her membership in the Suicide Squad. There's a lot of humor but not enough to detract from the seriousness of the stories, something that's hard to do.

It's a 1990s book but I still don't want to give too much away. Suffice to say, I've already ordered the next Animal Man anniversary edition.

Animal Man by Grant Morrison 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is a bizarre masterpiece from the mind of a bizarre individual. Five out of five stars.


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