Just as good as the first book, with a few real gems. The middle volume of Animal Man is mostly focused on Buddy’s activism, and includes several hints for what’s to come in the final nine issues. As always, the storytelling is strong and Morrison’s love of DC history and comics in general remains a pleasure.Aliens/Hamed Ali (10-12). If you know anything about Morrison’s Animal Man, it’s all the fourth wall breaking. There were suggestions in the first volume, but this is where the story gets ex...

Starting to get darker and a little more intriguing. I really like the way that Grant Morrison sort of, kind of breaks the fourth wall but at the same time keeps it within the confines of the story and its own characters. It's really strange, as per typical Grant Morrison writing, but it is highly enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed the Dolphin issue, because it reminded me so much of the documentary The Cove. Basically, Morrison was onto certain social and moral issues in the 90's that weren't ev...

So I reread this yesterday and I'm looking through it again today and I'm already having the same feeling of "did I read this? What is it exactly?" Like, sometimes I record things on GR just to prove to myself that I have indeed read relatively unmemorable books.In this volume, the BIG IDEA behind Animal Man -- in narrative terms, the evolution of his character into a being that is able to understand the nature of his reality as a comic book character -- begins to take shape. But it's sort of a

I've been enjoying these old, eighties style Animal Man graphic novels. Campy, serious, funny, bizarre. Love the Baker's eighties living room. I think I grew up with that furniture.There are so many things going on. I'm pretty confused but there's enough of a cohesive story line that I can follow along well enough. There were origin stories about the aliens, stories about Africa, about dolphin killing, about animal test subjects. Moments where Buddy says "I can't do this anymore. I can't be Anim...

Grant Morrison’s second Animal Man book doesn’t improve on the lacklustre first volume being equally dull. There’s no overarching storyline to this series, it’s just a collection of random, uninteresting adventures Buddy Baker goes on. Besides continuing to explore his powers and pursuing his animal rights activism, some aliens are watching him for reasons, he has team-ups with obscure heroines Vixen and Dolphin, there’s a new B’Wana Beast, and he fights some villainous cheeseball called Time Co...

I did like the first volume of Morrison's Animal Man, but volume two blows it out of the water. I've expressed before my normal mix of annoyance and admiration that Morrison usually leaves me with, but this time it really does come together.Much of the book is taken up with Buddy's political activism, mostly expressed through animal rights causes. (There's an issue dealing with apartheid, too.) Maybe in some other books, with some other heroes, this would feel belabored, false to what the book i...

The first volume was better. Furthermore, the best part of this volume was already collected in the repackaged deluxe edition.

Whenever I read the synopsis of this book, it got me salivating. Unfortunately, it is not very easy to find, but my master bookhunter wife got hold of a copy and I started with big expectations...and got very disappointed. Maybe it has nothing to do with its contents; I think that my mind had enough of 80s/90s Vertigo deconstructivist stuff and cannot take any more. Another thing is I kinda wrote a story of myself in my mind over years about a superhero who becomes aware of its own fictional exi...

I think I had read half of this current book when I stopped buying these Animal Man stories because they were published in Brazil inside a small pocket thing called "formatinho" that contained several of the DC character's monthly American comics and I may have stopped buying it or seems more likely that it had been canceled. These issues were diminished versions of the original ones and the coloring was made here using local colorists who would spend less ink and time and thus making cheaper to...

The first volume of this was pretty easy to follow for something written by Grant Morrison. This volume is a bit more weirder and more Morrisony. It's not quite as weird as Doom Patrol, but there's some individual stories that feel like they should fit together but they don't. Got a feeling the third volume is going to be even weirder....

I’ll confess this is about where the series starts to get a little… existential. Here’s where we get into the whole “aliens gave me powers” story for Buddy, and Morrison starts making hints that the fourth wall is not really a concern to him anymore. On that note, this trade was the reason I started buying Morrison’s Animal Man. This is the one where Vixen shows up.Say what you want about Morrison (and trust me, I do) the man has an excellent grip on the Baker family, and he’s one of the few wri...

Leave it to Morrison to take a D-list character and make the reader care about him. Certainly more 'meta' than volume 1, this book is a quick read that manages to touch on hot-button issues such as animal rights, environmentalism, and (the no-longer-current) apartheid, without being preachy or boring. And what about those mullets, eh? I'm curious about where all this is going, and am looking forward to volume 3.

This was alright...why was this a Vertigo book? I prefer the New 52 Animal Man. This was just okay..

More philosophical play from Grant Morrison. This volume definitely shows a marked interest in political activism: anti-animal testing, anti-whaling, vegetarianism, and even anti-superhero violence. In one story, images of violence being committed against dolphins prefigure with stunning accuracy the documentary footage captured in The Cove.Most interesting to me, however were the storylines involving a mysterious "red man" who challenges the very foundations of reality for the characters he int...

Grant Morrison lays on the couch of his therapist, Dr. Philip K. Dick, and they discuss, among other things, Morrison's writing for the Animal Man series.GM: Are you really a psychiatrist?PKD: That’s what the certificate on the wall says.GM: Yeah, I’m looking at it and under your name is typed “insert name here” and I think it’s from Miskatonic University?PKD: Go Squids! But let’s talk about you …GM: Em, OK, but that bright pink light is making me uncomfortable.PKD: Animal Man, tell me about you...

Interesting concepts Morrison plays with here of having the original incarnation of Animal Man run into his modern version, and how the 2 co-existing is destroying reality. That story very cool, some of the others, not so much. Still, one great idea is worth sifting through a few ho-hum ones.

If I'm going to be honest, some of the issues in this volume are just okay. Not great, just hmmm. On the other hand, a few story tidbits are just plain awesome and speak loud and clear about what Animal Man COULD be. I mean, seriously, he's not just about animals. He regrew an arm in the first volume by taking on the power of an earthworm. In this one, he took on the powers of bacteria. That was particularly WILD. And let's not forget his origin/origin/origin story and what it all means about co...

Morrison's plots start paying off and building on each other. A more consistent volume than the Volume One, where Coyote Gospel particularly stood out but the other stories felt rushed. The political commentary in the context of South Africa is interesting, the plots involving the overlay of the original Animal Man with his more modern 1980s counter-part and the alien intervention to fix the problem is also particularly interesting. Animal Man's concerns for animal rights causes becomes more pro...

I didn't like this as much as the first volume, but it's still worth reading.I know that a lot of DC continuity got re-written post-Crisis, but it normally happened off-panel, i.e. we were just given the new history as a fait accompli. This comic is unusual by showing the update in progress, so it reminded me of what Alan Moore did with Supreme. Self-insertion is generally a warning sign (e.g. in fanfic), and it's a bad habit that Clive Cussler picked up in his later novels. However, inserting h...

The middle of Grant Morrison's Animal Run is very much a middle, as it does a lot of ominous foreshadowing with regards to the metafictional narrative, starting with a lot of cheeky post-Crisis continuity commentary (which is very Morrison) and ending with what appears to be Chekhov's Hightower finally going off. But he also brings back various characters from the first volume, to my surprise, and tells individual tales of Animal Man-as-superhero. Buddy Baker is gung ho for animal rights, and th...