Animal Man #1

"Warning from the Red" 
The Hunt, Part One
written by Jeff Lemire
pencils by Travel Foreman
inks by Travel Foreman and Dan Green

He may be one of the more unfortunately named superheroes, but Buddy Baker is easily one of the most likeable.  Former Hollywood stuntman turned superhero turned animal rights activist, now playing a fictionalized version of a superhero like himself in an indie drama by Ryan Daranovsky (a thinly veiled fictional equivalent of Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky), Buddy is above all a husband and father.  And his home life is given depth and credibility in Lemire's deft pen.

In a stroke of bleak foreshadowing, Buddy's first emergency for a while as Animal Man is a man violently distraught by the death of his daughter to cancer, who's taken over the children's ward at the hospital demanding that his dead daughter be returned to him.  It's a crisis that strikes Baker close to home.  He readily acknowledges that it's his family—wife Ellen, son Cliff (who's rocking a mullet in 2011), and daughter Maxine—that grounds him and allows him to wander professionally as he has.  Unlike all the millionaire playboys and rich scientists that end up superheroes, Baker's life is very modest.  Baker succeeds in disarming the hysterical father, but it seems something strange is happening with his body.  He's been feeling the life force very strongly lately, a close powerful connection to the animal kingdom, and in the midst of his superheroics, his eyes begin bleeding profusely though the doctor can find no sores or wounds.

He returns home, leaving his boots outside like his wife asked, slips into bed, and drifts into some unnerving dreams.  His young daughter Maxine, dressed in her own Animal Man costume, and her stuffed dog—in his dream, a towering behemoth with unimaginably long fur—lead him into a river of blood, running from three hunters, enemies of the red in pursuit of Buddy and Maxine.  His wife, though not shown, is apparently in great danger, and his son Cliff holds his innards in his hands.  Alarmed, Buddy wakes up, drawn to the backyard by the calls of his wife and son.  Maxine, it seems, denied a puppy of her own, has resurrected the partially decayed bodies of local dead pets.

Lemire's start on his Animal Man run is stellar, and his vision, both gruesome and beautifully anatomical, is perfectly paired with Foreman.  Buddy's family life, a rarity in superhero comics, is one of his defining characteristics, and it has just the right balance of familiarity and danger.  The threat, the three looming hunters, is frightening, but far less so than the strange burgeoning abilities of young Maxine, innocent and yet the early signs suggest very powerful.  As disorienting and foreboding Baker's dream, it's nothing compared to waking to his daughter playing with reanimated animal corpses in the backyard.

[November 2011]