Animal Man #2

"Maps"
The Hunt, Part Two
written by Jeff Lemire
art by Travel Foreman

If you were an adolescent boy and your younger sister had just resurrected several animal skeletons and carcasses as household pets, what would you do?  Film it on your camera phone, obviously!  If you were a young girl and you'd just reanimated a cat skeleton, what would you do?  Name her Mrs. Pickles and feed her milk because she's thirsty, clearly!  Life in the Baker house is as gloriously horrific and humorous as it could be.  Maxine's pouty displeasure at being unable to feed her cat on the kitchen counter and Cliff's skipping glee at being tasked with re-covering the newly upturned graves of the neighborhood animals like so many golf divots are ample evidence.

Meanwhile, in the eye of the ever-expanding crazy storm, after another bleeding-from-the-eyes episode, Buddy now has a full vascular structure mysteriously tattooed to his torso, arms and face.  If this weren't unnerving enough, his daughter Maxine, the reviver of former pets, seems to be able to read it like a map.  On top of that, she's able to manipulate the flesh of her bullying neighbor who catches Cliff trying to fix a hole in his yard, changing his arm into a bird foot.  And her powers are wondrous and profoundly frightening to her father, who must be dependent on her to navigate their way into the Red.

One of Baker's finest qualities, as a man but especially as a father, is his easy willingness to listen to his children and to take them seriously.  He and Ellen treat their children as people, people with independent opinions, ideas, and talents which they acknowledge and value.  They parent but they do not patronize.  It may be a quip to help settle his justifiably upset wife, but when Ellen remarks that he can't talk to the cops covered as he is in weird tattoos, Buddy replies, "But Cliff says they're badass" (Animal Man #2: 9).  More importantly, he recognizes the particular understanding Maxine seems to have about his current state, and he's willing to trust her intuition to help solve the weirdness.

And it seems three villains have arrived via grotesquely bloated hippopotamuses in the San Diego Zoo.  They are flesh-eaters, devouring the zoo workers after their arrival and assuming their shape.  These are perhaps the "they" Maxine continues to refer to, but one thing is certain: they mean to intercept both her and her father before they get too strong.

[December 2011]