Collects issues ten through seventeen of Animal Man, plus issue thirty-nine of Secret Origins
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artists: Chas Truog, Doug Hazlewood, Tom Grummett, Steve Montano, Mark McKenna
Publisher: DC/Titan Books (ISBN 1-84023-469-5)
Well, it only took ten years between volumes one and two of Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man to be collected, come back in 2012 for the concluding volume...
If you've never read any of Morrison's work on Animal Man then this is actually a great place to start, maybe even more so than the first volume, mainly because the first chapter in this book is a melding together of issue ten of the regular series, and the Secret Origins special, and forms quite a comprehensive introduction to the characters, and a good overview of what Buddy Baker aka Animal Man is all about.
Older readers would just want to skip through it, but that would be making a huge mistake as there's a fantastic declaration of the writer's intent on pages 35 through to 37. Couple these pages with the denouement to the Africa story on page 97 (flick through the book in your local comics shop or bookstore, and check out how the baddy is dispatched on that page - if it doesn't make you want to buy the book to find out just what the hell is going on, then there's no hope for you!), and almost the whole of Chapter 14 and you get the sense, even if you haven't read this stuff before, that something extremely strange and unique in comics history is happening...and you'd be right.
And no, I'm not going to tell you what it is - if you don't know, you should be picking up this book (and volume one), sitting down, and reading them in one go...and be left gagging for the third volume for the final explanation...
So, what happens in this book that I can tell you about? Buddy Baker is Animal Man, his powers allow him to "reach" out into some sort of spirit world and adopt the powers of any animal within reach, and then adapt them for his own purposes. Throughout this book he learns more and more about how these can be exploited, even realising that "animal" is rather a misnomer, anything living can be replicated...down to the replication power of bacteria. He's a man with a conscience, feels that if he doesn't speak up for the plight of animals on the earth, then no-one will; so he gets involved in breaking up fox hunts, in breaking up animal cruelty in Africa, in preventing dolphin hunts at sea.
As time goes on, weird things happen all around him, mysterious figures from his past reappear without (apparent) explanation - and when the explanation does come (in volume three), you'll get a huge kick out of it.
These stories of Morrisons are far more reader-friendly than the stuff in his contemporaneous Doom Patrol work, probably the height of what he achieved for very many years - in some ways, taken as a whole, it's still the best thing he's ever written.
Totally, whole-heartedly, unreservedly, recommended.
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