Once upon a time, Animal Man was a forgotten character and one that appeared to be destined for purgatory forever. That is, until Grant Morrison showed up and proved to DC, like Alan Moore did with Swamp Thing, that minor and forgotten characters can return in revolutionary stories. Animal Man (vol 1) 1-26 remains one of my favourite runs of all time for its excellent characters, game-changing one-offs, creatively limitless ongoing plots, along with a unique streak that makes Animal Man one of a kind. So, what happened? With Morrison’s exit after over two years on the title, Peter Milligan’s six-part story from issues 27-32 were quickly influenced by the wacky storytelling of Morrison. But it was far from amazing. If you measure Animal Man by the quality of its stories and characters, then the title continued to decline from there. Tom Veitch’s run from issues 33-50 had promise in some areas, but the more they complicated the stories and the further they went away from what they were created for, the worse the title became. Overall, Veitch’s run is mediocre and frustratingly dull. So, where next? How about a step backwards to the successful and lovable, yet entirely unpredictable method of storytelling that Morrison proved could work in his own run? Yes? Oh, the title changed from DC to Vertigo. Oh, the writer is Jamie Delano of Hellblazer and other happy stories. Oh, when will they learn…
Animal Man (vol 1) 51-56 was published from September 1992 to February 1993. The story, Flesh and Blood, was written by Jamie Delano with art by Steve Pugh and
Russell Braun. I’ve read the story in the Animal Man Volume Six: Flesh and Blood trade paperback.
First of all, some background. Ever since Veitch began his run in Animal Man (vol 1) 33, Animal Man has been exploring the M-Field, a mystical plane which mentally links him to other animals. But, after many embarrassing and reputation-destroying events, his family slowly leave him to head to Ellen’s mother’s farm. This is where things fall apart as you lose the great neighbourhood characters who appeared in the Morrison run and they are replaced by a miserable and humourless old bag. By the end however, Buddy is reunited with Ellen and Maxine, but Cliff is still out there, now being looked after by his sadistic uncle. Oh, and Maxine has a pet dinosaur named Winky. Anyway, in the happy fashion of Vertigo stories, it begins with Cliff and his Uncle Dudley watching a dog being run down by a car. Dudley is obsessed with death, and he uses pretty much every moment to bring it up and teach Cliff a lesson with it. Meanwhile, in another state, Buddy is spending his time with Ellen just relaxing and not worrying that his son has been missing for several weeks. Reluctantly, he decides it’s time to look for him. First of all, what happened to the characters? Since when did Cliff become a fan of violence and murder and since when has Buddy become this neglectful father. The problem is that these characters weren’t like this in the last issue or before. Just making a title Vertigo doesn’t make it an excuse to radically change the characters immediately. Anyway, the next morning Buddy decides to head out for San Francisco to find Cliff as Animal Man. He searches Dudley’s workplace and learns that he is going on a trip “with his boy”. To cut a long and tedious introduction short, Animal Man senses Cliff late at night on the road. Suddenly, Dudley (with Cliff in the back of his truck) ploughs into Animal Man on the road and brutally murders him. Animal Man is dead. It’s clear that Jamie Delano wants to make his story into a Moore-like run, particularly with a start that completely changes the character and to be honest, if you measure a cliff-hanger by shock and impact, this one rates very highly. It’s just a shame it all goes down-hill from here. The morning after, just as Maxine prepares to welcome Cliff home, Ellen learns of her husband’s death, and she tearfully heads to San Francisco to see the body. Elsewhere, Dudley kills a man who notices Animal Man’s arm wedged in his truck. But, more importantly, Animal Man himself has travelled mentally to The Red, a strange crimson limbo of sorts, which… I don’t know. Essentially, it’s like The Green in Moore’s Swamp Thing. It’s effectively the source of all power for Animal Man (and other animal-powered beings), which he transverses as a zombie, while somehow his decaying body in the real world moves and frightens Ellen upon her identification of him. Did this really happen or is this one of those dream sequences. Either way, it’s an important event that is rarely mentioned again. I mean, somebody from the dead coming back should be remembered, but here it’s treated like a common event.
Speaking of which, remember when Animal Man lost an arm in Animal Man (vol 1) 1-4? Why can’t he do something similar here. I guess it might be because the truck killed him on-impact, but still. I can’t believe I’m trying to rationalise this mess. But, upon Ellen fainting, Buddy is reborn using the Red as a gnat in her eyelashes. Again, no explanation for this, or at least one that makes any logical sense. I miss the days when comics were understandable. Part Three begins with Ellen dissing off her dead husband and thinking about how she will cope instead of her young children. But she comes to accept her husband’s death after telling his ashes that the mortuary staff are trying to sue her because what may or may not have happened previously. This is a common Vertigo tactic and a very common Delano tactic. Lines that included a character being sued, insulted, or in some legal battles are just there to make the story slightly grimmer than it already is. When I read this run, there were countless throwaway lines like this, and they honestly annoyed me. Why does everything have to be so grim. Of course, I think dark events in comics can be good in telling an exciting story. But when the story is already grim-enough, then what’s the point. I don’t know about you, but I read comics as a form of escapism. It’s good old fun and even when the stories are dark, they can be engaging and entertaining. Some of my favourite stories are quite grim. I don’t know if I’m old fashioned, but that's the view I take and not for a second did I have fun reading this story with each page coated in perpetual grimness. Anyway, apologies about that rant. As Ellen pours Buddy’s ashes into the river, she cries and the gnat falls into the water, only for it to be caught in a Hydra. Essentially, in an attempt to catch Ellen’s attention and return to life, Buddy uses the Red as his consciousness is transported from each organism. Meanwhile, Cliff catches fish with Dudley and learns how to kill and eat them, before making another obligatory speech about the necessities of death. How has Cliff not run away yet. He clearly doesn’t like this guy, but he makes no attempt to escape or phone home, even if Dudley is feeding him this message that his parents don’t love him anymore. Back at the miserable farm, Ellen becomes concerned about Maxine, who spends most of her time searching the farm and nearby rivers searching for her father. You see, because Maxine is deep within the Red like Buddy, she knows that her father is still alive and out there. She manages to find Buddy as a dragonfly, only for him to be eaten by a bat. The long journey continues. Keeping in the spirits of Dudley’s obsession with murdering, he and Cliff arrive at a canyon full of skulls which featured in one of Dudley’s sadistic movies he showed to Cliff. Meanwhile, and slightly more (continued)
interestingly, Maxine rages at her grandmother for nearly a killing the bat that was her father. Although the bat escapes, it is soon eaten and killed by a cat, which Buddy’s consciousness then calls home. As the blood-covered cat, Buddy tries to get Ellen’s attention when she sleeps, but he instead only frightens and angers her. I don’t know what he thought was going to happen there. But then, Buddy finds Winky in his pen and leaves the cat’s body and enters the extinct creature’s body as Buddy inside panics about whether he will ever be reunited with his family again. So far, for the majority of the story, nothing has really happened. Ever since he was reincarnated as a gnat, the following two parts were just explanations of how he advances from one animal to another. It’s not exactly gripping. The penultimate part, or chapter as pretentious Vertigo books would call it, begins with another pointless death-centred scene featuring Cliff and Dudley, while Ellen begins to fight against her mother’s belief that Dudley is a nice guy from her own experiences with him as a child (in which she jokingly promised her first-born child to him). Meanwhile, Maxine searches the nearby forest for Winky, who nearby finds a cave and hides inside. At the same time, Dudley presents Cliff with the nearby caves. As expected, it’s full of skulls and human remains after those trapped inside the cave had to eat each other to survive. But, very candidly, Dudley confirms that he killed some of them who were once his friends, before leaving Cliff in the darkness of the cavern. Meanwhile, back in the marginally saner land, Buddy, using the Red, places himself in an embryo of sorts. Then, Maxine finds Winky in the cave, dying, before discovering that her pet dinosaur was actually a female and that it laid an egg. To the surprise of Ellen and her mother, there is
something within the egg. We’re nearly at the end and I’m still struggling to wonder what the point of this story is. Obviously, Buddy has placed himself in the egg using the illegible logic of the Red. It doesn’t make sense, and I have to accept that as I’d just be wasting time trying to even attempt to think about it. But still, what is the purpose of the story? It might be to reunite Cliff with the rest of the family, but since his and the rest of the family’s character has radically changed beyond recognition, then this story may as well feature a group of characters I’ve never seen before. This just isn’t Animal Man, and it doesn’t have what made Morrison’s run great. Regardless, the egg hatches and inside is a freakishly furry mutant-like creature that looks like the devil. Buddy Baker has returned, and, with the exception of Maxine, everybody is terrified of him. Even Ellen won’t give him the time of day. The huge visual change of Buddy is just further evidence of how much the character has changed beyond recognition. It doesn’t resemble anything that Animal Man should be and Ellen coming close to abandoning him isn’t something that the characters would do. Meanwhile, Cliff awakens in the cave to find that he’s been tied up by Dudley, now in his full-psycho mode. It becomes too much for Cliff and he swears that his father will come for him. It’s only minutes later that Buddy arrives as the winged beast he now is. Using his strong powers of smell, he locates Cliff in the cave, and rescues him just as he and Dudley fall into a powerful river that only leads deeper into the dangerous cave. Dudley isn’t so lucky. It’s a shame that an obnoxious character like Dudley dies in the most boring way. You would have thought, particularly in a Vertigo style, that Animal Man would just tear him apart limb from limb. I guess the editor thought that preserving the dullness of the story was integral. For the conclusion, Buddy believes that his marriage is nearing its end because the likelihood of returning to normal appears to be slim. That is, until Maxine gives her father some of his fingers which Cliff collected from Dudley when he was killed earlier in the story. I don’t know why he would casually carry them around, but good thing he did because using them, Animal Man manages to use the Red to transform back into Buddy Baker, human-form. Or at least that’s how I think he turns back to the story. It’s not really clear, unless you can understand the overly edgy writing style of Jamie Delano which might as well be in Latin. With that, Buddy returns to normal and his relationship with Ellen returns to normal. Oh yeah, the issue does end with one of Cliff’s badly drawn comic books about violently killing animals, but because it adds absolutely nothing to the story, I think it’s best to leave it there. If only Jamie Delano did too as, rather miserably, this is the best the run gets. And this is utterly terrible. The reason I loved Animal Man was because of its characters and stories. It could be very dark, but it always felt like a bit of fun, and it never felt like any other title. Under Delano, the stories certainly are dark, but there’s a complete void when it comes to enjoying the stories. While reading it, you are experiencing a torture session just as much as the characters are. And when it comes to uniqueness, Delano is clearly influenced with Moore’s Swamp Thing, which is fair enough. But he is using his own writing style from his Hellblazer issues to tell Animal Man, a completely different title. I’ve read some of his Hellblazer stories, and that miserable and dark mood is still a problem, but it reflects the type of title which Hellblazer is. That just doesn’t work with Animal Man. All that Flesh and Blood does is lay a cable on the characters who Morrison made dear to our hearts and ruin one of the best titles that DC had in the late 1980s. Of course, Delano isn’t solely responsible, as Milligan and Veitch are just as guilty. But Delano’s era is the final nail in the coffin for Animal Man and unfortunately for us, this is only my first review of the run. There’s another three to go and I’d like to say that they get better, but they don’t. I only hope I can make them slightly more tolerable…
As opposed to the writing, Animal Man has never been a title which has had great artists to be honest. Chaz Truog was somewhat bland, but certainly not terrible, while Steve Dillon gives everything a miserable and grey appearance. Unfortunately, Steve Pugh is more of the same, but probably to the next level. It’s still grim and grey, but also very scratchy and completely unsuitable for a title like Animal Man. Some of the art is completely appalling, particularly when it comes to facial reactions. Even the storytelling I find to be very basic and not very interesting. But at least I have an opinion on him. I’d never heard of Russell Braun and even now, I don’t know who he is or what his art is like. But I can’t remember a huge shift in the art style at all so he must have been just as good as Pugh then…
VERDICT
Overall, Animal Man: Flesh and Blood is a story that sums up why Animal Man, once a title standing tall in the large array of DC titles, fell to the very bottom. Delano makes his mark on the title by completely changing the characters, the mood of the title and pretty much everything else. I’ve said all I’ve needed to about this story. I guess his death at the end of Animal Man (vol 1) 51 is great for the shock value of it, but since it leads to a critically underwhelming story that is nothing but disappointing, dull, and infuriatingly grim, it isn’t much of a positive. Whatever happened to these characters we once loved and the stories that once made the title memorable and unique? Once upon a time, Animal Man used to be good, but all that was such a long time ago…
Story: 1.5/10
Art: 3/10
Next Week: Animal Man: Tooth and Claw (Animal Man (vol 1) 57-63). Written by Jamie Delano with art by Steve Pugh, Graham Higgins, John Higgins, Russell Braun, and Tom Sutton.
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