Tuesday 6 June 2017

The Last Days of Animal Man


Gerry Conway, Chris Batista & Dave Meikis
The Last Days of Animal Man (2010)

It looked good in the shop: Brian Bolland covers making knowing reference to Grant Morrison's thoroughly mental run on the book, pleasantly clean lines from Batista and Meikis, and the intriguing possibility of a popular character shoved through the narrative mangle as happens in most of the best caped stuff - Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Mark Grunewald's Captain America handed his P45 and so on...

What we have here is Buddy Baker losing his powers, which translates as a comic book having a mid-life crisis, but one written quite definitively for an audience with a reading age of about twelve. So we also have super-types fighting whilst talking, angry villains swearing vengeance and doing that face you do when you're trying to push out the first turd to take its leave of your bottom in five or six days, and we have a sense of humour which makes your average episode of Friends look like Jerry Sadowitz, and all adding up to a load of horseshit about the importance of family and being yourself. I suppose it might seem unfair, my taking such issue with something so obviously aimed at younger readers, but on the other hand I've read plenty of stuff aimed at kids which managed to do its job just fine without expecting me to make allowances; so balls. The Last Days of Animal Man isn't the worst comic book I've ever read, but it almost makes those bloody awful Jerry Prosser issues seem mysterious and alluring.

Most positive reviews I've seen of this thing seem to focus on the guest appearance of a Green Lantern who is actually a whale, which is a nice idea, but no substitute for being able to tell a story, or at least a story other than the same fucking one wheeled out for every film in which Michael J. Fox ever appeared.

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