Animal Man #3

"Totems"
The Hunt, Part Three
written by Jeff Lemire
art by Travel Foreman

"We simply gave you a narrative you could more easily comprehend."  (Animal Man #3: 7)

And just like that Lemire retcons Animal Man's creation story.  Using the tropes of his time and place—alien abduction—the Red imbued Baker with the skills necessary to father and protect the real avatar Maxine.  And thus we arrive at a pivotal disagreement between Baker and the totems of the Red:  the employment of a four-year-old in a war to save all life itself.

No doubt Maxine is powerful and intuitively controls life in ways that even Animal Man can not fully conceive.  Her resurrected pets, left at home with Ellen and Cliff, fight to defend Maxine's family when one of the three Hunters arrives at their house to kill them.  Despite being dead, they are not of the Rot.  They are in this sense an aberration among the triumvirate:  Red, Green, and Rot.

There's something monstrous about the Red itself, its avatars, and Buddy's unique talents.  The brand of hybridity it evokes is unsettling if not a little awe-inspiring.  Baker's grotesque deformities as he struggles literally to keep his body together upon entering the Red is matched by the wild and indifferentiable bodies of the avatars.  Pieces are recognizably animal, but to which avatar they belong and where the boundaries are between them are not entirely clear.  Buddy's fight sequence with the Hunters who follow him and Maxine into the Red is generally unimpressive if not for its demonstration of Baker's own monstrosity.  Beautiful as Buddy Baker is in his human form, there's nothing particularly appealing about his gorilla-style body and fighting technique, lacking both his own and the animal's charisma.

Buddy's wife Ellen continues to be one of Animal Man's most easily likable characters.  If her mixed disgust and interest in Cliff's ultra-violent zombie video game Slaughterhouse Valley 6 weren't hilariously familiar, her exasperated self-reflection after having just narrowly escaped a supernatural Rot emissary unable to keep himself in the skin he's stolen off a zookeeper is:  "I can't believe I married a superhero" (13).  And she says it without any of the naïve, romantic notions of star-blinded damsels.

[January 2012]