Retro Review

Animal Man, aka Buddy Baker, may be one of DC’s most underused characters. He had his own brilliant series, launched in 1988 and running through to the mid-90s, but since then, he’s only been a rare guest star: he had a supposedly major role that amounted to very little in 52 and a big part in Countdown to Adventure, and basically a cameo in a recent issue of Justice League of America. It really is a shame, as he is probably one of their best characters, and he and his supporting cast deserve better, as in a-book-of-their-own better.

Here are my six reasons why Animal Man is a great character, and probably one of DC’s best.

1. His family are great supporting characters. There’s plenty of potential for storylines with all three of them because they are characters in their own right, having been well defined by Grant Morrison and Jamie Delano during their runs on the Animal Man series. His neighbors are an added bonus.

2. He has an interesting set of powers, and while they are shared by another character, the Vixen, it’s been shown that there’s enough room for both of them in the DC Universe, and enough differences in the ways they operate.

3. He has a great attitude, with a lot of positivity, but also a lot of realism. He tries hard to do what he believes in, and to be the best he can, but be can get scared and confused by the world his powers have thrust him into. Everything about him shows a guy who’s trying to make the world a better place. He’s not driven by revenge or power or a dark past, but by his beliefs.

4. He’s not the best, the strongest, the fastest or the smartest; he’s not an alien, an orphan, a king, an ambassador or a billionaire; he’s an everyman, and one of the closest things DC has to a Spider-man character who could be any one of us. Sure, he’s a vegetarian and an animal rights activist, which not everyone is, but more importantly, he’s human and flawed, and that’s appealing in a main character. We don’t all want to read about paragons all the time.

5. He fits easily into non-conventional stories, as proven in his series. He doesn’t have to fight the same people every year, because he doesn’t have a set gallery of super-villains or a limited area of operation or a narrow mission. His story-telling engine is truly adaptable.

6. His name is great. Animal Man. It’s so simple, so descriptive, and so much what an ordinary guy who doesn’t really get the super-hero world. The costume with the jacket “so I can carry stuff and so it’s not so embarrassing being in a skin-tight suit” fits with it perfectly.

What’s DC waiting for? The guy is unique, and deserves his own book again. Give him a new series already!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS