In doing some catchup on DC Comics events (somehow they seem less mundane than Marvel's) I find myself enjoying a D list character such as Animal Man for the first time since Grant Morrison's arguably classic run. Wile not as meta fiction as Morrison's Lemire honors much of the work done by those who came before wile crafting his original take on Animal Man. I mean lets face it. Buddy Baker is a character that only could have been created during one of two time periods in American comics. Either the 1940s when everything was thrown against the wall to see what stuck, or the 1960s boom when every company was seeking to cash in on the Batman television show craze (see concepts such as Jigsaw and Super Green Beret as examples). So how do you make a man who mimics the abilities of the animals near him interesting?Start with making him a big time player. Buddy's role in the overall scheme of life is smaller than his daughter's Maxine's, and this is again emphasized in the first installment of his part in the Rotworld sage. While tossing aside some of the elemental avatar aspects of the DCU created by John Ostrander, Lemire builds on it by giving some back story to the Red, the Green and the Rot. Despite moving this title, Constantine (aka Hellblazer) and Swamp Thing from Vertigo back into the DCU this is a story that would have withstood the Vertigo test quite well I think. I went into this without knowing a single thing about Animal Man. Yes, I accidentally checked out the second one before the first one again. So with those two things going against it, I wasn't too excited to read this graphic novel. Boy was I wrong. I really enjoyed this graphic novel for a number of reasons, the first being that I loved that Buddy Baker is a family man and that the main struggle within this novel is him fighting for his family's safety. I loved learning more about the red, the green, and the rot. Also being a big fan of alien abduction stories, I smiled so much when they went over how Animal Man became Animal Man and what the red did so it would make sense in his mind. It was a full story without reading the other one's, but now I'm excited to find out what happened before and after this one.
What do You think about Animal Man, Tome 2 : Contre-Nature (2013)?
Read in individual issues,it wasn't really much better than the first half of the storyline.
—Livi195
Loved the history of Animal Man, the rebirthing, the art, the new avatar, everything really.
—ericm
Wurde mir glaube ich noch besser gefallen wenn es nicht Teil des DC Universums wäre
—Bookeater
