This is one of those comic book series that I've been hearing about forever. "But have you read Grant Morrison's Animal Man?" For the longest time my answer has been "Nope, nope and nope."
Well, now I've read it and now I know.
It's OK I guess. It didn't blow me away like I was hoping it would. According to the introduction (written by Morrison himself), he was scouted by DC after Alan Moore's uber-successful Watchmen. It was the era of Moore and Gaiman, when DC was looking far and wide for cool new British, "literary" takes on American superhero comics. This push by DC led to a lot of classic comic book series, many of which were released under the Epic imprint at Marvel or the Vertigo imprint at DC.
It was a heady time to be a comic book fan, and I'm proud to say I was right there, in the midst of it, absorbing titles such as Elektra: Assassin, Rick Veitch's The One and Marshal Law. And yes, I loved Watchmen, despite the seemingly endless delays between issues.
Animal Man? I missed it at the time, just as I largely missed Neil Gaiman's run on Sandman. There was a lot of new, exciting stuff happening in comics back then, and some things just didn't capture my imagination, or else they simply got by me. I might have read an issue or two of this comic when it first appeared; I really can't remember.
The Wikipedia entry credits Morrison's run on Animal Man with everything from postmodernism to quantum physics, but really, I wasn't finding it that deep. The series certainly glosses over such things, but I don't know that it always does so in a meaningful way. When you think about how Alan Moore integrated deeper thoughts into the Watchmen narrative, Animal Man comes out poorer by comparison. But maybe Morrison better realized these concepts in the issues found within Book Two. At the time of writing I can't say, though I'd like to think so. He certainly went on to do a ton of great comics, my favorite probably being DC One Million, which gets delightfully bonkers towards the end.
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