Animal Man (1988-1995) Vol. 7: Red Plague

Magic run! wonderful characteres (little Maxine at the top), smart dialogues, great situations with the People and their feelings as the most important. MASTERPIECE

This "writing" is just awful. What's ironic is a series that started out delving into animal rights, devolved into a series that has shown more animal deaths than any series I can think of. Jamie Delano was part of the "British Invasion" that came over with Alan Moore. For every one good story they produced, they also provided ten crap stories. It seems like these non-sensible stories were written by someone always on pot or worse, or writing down crazy fever-dreams. I could right down my dreams and they would make more sense than this drivel. This was the seed infecting DC Comics that has spread into the current cancer infecting DC Comics. Looking at the other reviews, it's apparent that the fanboys fall all over themselves for it. So brave. So stunning. Some nut at DC allowed him to write issues #51-79, of which this volume reprints #64-79 and Annual #1. He left it in such a mess that the final issues of #80-89 by Jerry Prosser have not been reprinted. They are just as bad.

This last run is an extended arc, and one where all the characters really shine, and yet Delano's Vertigo run remains one of the most frustrating arcs for Animal Man. Re-reading all of Animal Man, including Lemire's 52 runs, I struck by how colossally uneven the entire series is despite its ambitions. Delano's morality in environmentalism and the animal world is far, far more nuanced than Morrisons. Delano points out--in both comic and serious ways--that the animal world is much more bloody itself and while environmentalism and Gaia are important, the Red is almost a parody of this at points. While I am not certain of this, Morrison seems to have been a fairly optimistic and in grounds with progressive politics portion of Generation X, and while Delano may not have been a political conservative or reactionary at the time, Delano has a deeper cynicism about these conceptions. Furthermore, the meta-fictive elements of Morrison and Mulligan are abandoned for cosmic satire and reflections on complicatedness of family life, particularly when the human elements of the family are given to more direct and literally bestial sexuality of the animal world.Delano's explorations of Eileen and Buddy's dealing with Maxine's death (a theme Lemire would rehash more successfully in the new 52), Delano also introduces Annie's connection to life-web and her animalistic relationship with Buddy, Eileen's diligence into radical separatist lesbianism as Buddy leaves her and his human form to lead a church, and the satire of Cliff's band and definitely damaged Maxine's speaking for the more humane end of Buddy's new religion.The soap opera is paired with the utter madness of the new religion--again, a theme used to quite a different effect by Jeff Lemire in the new 52 reboot--is interesting, but it meanders and then abruptly ends. While the comic still had another year in Vertigo run apparently, Annie's relationship with Eileen in light of the ultimate fate of Buddy at the ends of a government-planted female Judas seems to end the plot outright.Delano's strengths and weaknesses really show up here: Delano fleshed out the family and a cast of supporting characters in ways that no one else, including Morrison, really did until the first two volumes of Jeff Lemire's reboot. Yet Delano dissolves those dynamics carelessly and Buddy Baker is so inhuman by the time he does it that only Eileen feels any weight to the situation. Neither Maxine or Baker are human, Annie is primal and had relationships with Buddy and Eileen almost instantly forgives her in a hot tub bath. Cliff's post-traumatic stress and obsession with the death moves from having serious thematic and characterization weight to being a grimdark punchline. His relationship with Annie's daughter seems like a side-note. Delano did more to build up a convincing family dynamic in the characters and proceeds to just ignore it.While Animal Man has always been warped--Delano makes it a completely different book, one almost directly opposed to the dynamics set up by Morrison in the early run. Only in the early issues of the new 52 would someone try to reconcile all these threads into some kind of convincing whole again. The madness of his finale ending moves this far beyond a conventional superhero book, but also thematically it is unclear if Delano is commenting on environmentalism approvingly or mocking or both. The government conspiracies are completely under-developed, and yet despite these huge problems, the book is actually mesmerizing.Steve Pugh's art is more consistent here--his characters have more consistent face-work, and his figure work has a variety of human body types. However, occasionally filler work by Simpson, Braun and Snejbjerg are sometimes quite distracting. The colors are top-notch as they were for the entire Delano/Pugh run. Thank Tatjana Woods for that excellent work.In the end, I like Morrison's run better although it did establish a lot of Morrison now well-overused tropes. Furthermore, I disagree with many who say that Delano fleshed out Baker's character. Indeed, Buddy Baker is handled with more personal depth by most of the other authors in the all his runs, but what Delano does do masterfully was get Animal Man's family and supporting cast down consistently. Eileen is not just a foil for Buddy's desires, Maxine and Cliff have definitive personalities, the metaphysis introduced by Veitsch are fleshed out and given real weight, and Annie and her daughter, as well as Eileen's mother and the characters of the Vermont town, are more than props. In truth, Morrison never really did this as his obsessions with dynamics of the different kinds of superhero stories and his love of metafiction ruled that out. Delano's characterizations of everyone around Baker hold, and it feels like a world that has gone mad. Yet Delano ultimately can't seem to make it all cohere and what he is actually saying about the nature of Animal Man seems still pretty muddled by the end. Highest of highest but some of the most confusing of the lows.

The series really goes off its rails in this volume. Buddy meets these sasquatch type creatures and gains the ability to physically morph into the animal he's channeling. Eventually he permanently morphs into this bird creature and decides to start a religion. At this point the series really devolves into nonsense. His cult migrates across country to the "promised land" where the series ends. By this point his family has fallen apart and no one seems to care. His family structure was the glue that held the series together. Once Delano moves away from this, the series no longer interested me. What made Buddy great was that he was a family man struggling to be both a super hero and raise a family. A poor ending to an enthralling series.

:)