The Last Days of Animal Man – Issue #2

By Lon S. Cohen

Spoiler Warning: In this series of posts on “The Last Days of Animal Man” limited series comic book, there will be periodical spoilers. If you haven’t read the series and intend to, please be advised that I will discuss plot points and surprises.

This is an ongoing review of the series in six parts. Read part 1.

So we open this issue with Animal Man falling out of the sky contemplating his own demise. Like many of us in this situation (facing death, not losing a super power) his thoughts turn to his family first, his wife and children and regret. If you’re going to write in a deus ex machina, then having it take the form of a Green Lantern who’s a giant whale will make most of us forget that little trick. This Green Lantern (it’s unclear if it’s Earth’s resident Green Lantern or some intergalactic patrolman passing by) saves Animal Man’s life and rids him of his a problem terrorizing him since issue one, a super villain with terrorist proclivities named Bloodrage. The little encounter is a great way for writer Gerry Conway to do his thing, namely making this super hero seem more like a normal guy. His reaction to being saved and the revelation by The Green Lantern that he is loosing his powers is anger, lashing out to the one who saved him. Lashing out at a hard truth. Of course he’s not a total dolt and the Green Lantern’s passivity shows Buddy Baker what a jerk he’s being to this animal-like alien.

Except for a side trip to explain the back story of the villain Mirror Master’s daughter as Prismatik - someone I assume who will be Animal Man’s main antagonist throughout the rest of the series - the entire book’s theme is Baker’s struggle with loosing his power and how he’s able to discover one clue to what’s been happening. I won’t spoil that minor point but when it does happen you get a sense of understanding about both Baker and the character inside the comic and out. What I mean is, the series seems to be addressing parts of Animal Man’s origin, regressing backwards in a way, which I hope will continue.

I do like the banter between the hero and his new villain. Also Animal Man’s thoughts behind his action are well written, feeling true to form for his current situation. He explains once that despite having no powers he teased Prismatik because he was angry and felt it was unfair what was happening to him. A little masochism can go a long way. In this case it helps him clear his head and figure out what’s wrong with his powers. By the last panel, Animal Man’s animal nature comes out while putting down his foe until some major forces show up to stay his hand, in the form of a selection of Justice League and Teen Titan members.

One thing I have to remember is that this series takes place ten years or so in the future so things may be different than they are now. The whale Green Lantern seems to be earth’s protector at the time and the heroes that show up in the last panel may all be part of the Justice League together now or some other group. Future issues will probably hash those details out. I really like the subtle hints of the future that this series throws at us. But more so I like how Conway is constructing his old character, building him up as real as possible for what I fear may be some sort of revelation and ultimately unfortunate ending. Again, it is called “The Last Days of Animal Man.” I like that Conway is getting to play with Animal Man’s character in this story arc – one he helped popularize and redefine twenty years ago. No one really has the knowledge and insight into a character like its creator or one who redefined that character to its modern incarnation. I also liked that the cover announces that Green Lantern is a guest star but the image is of a giant whale, like it’s normal that Green Lantern is a whale in the sky.

On Twitter I was speaking with a fellow comics reader after posting the previous article’s link. He pointed out that Conway had left comics writing to write for television and only recently cam back to comics, a fact I didn’t know. Digging deeper, I found out that Conway was the co-creator of one of my favorite comics characters in one of my favorite comic lines of the 1980s: Firestorm. After Teen Titans and All Star Squadron, Firestorm was probably my third favorite all time title. No wonder. Quirky, second tier characters and good characterization are all traits that Conway brings in full force to his books. I haven’t kept up with Firestorm since I was a kid except to in some of the titles he’s guest starred in but I know the character has changed quite a bit since teenaged Ronnie Raymond and Professor Martin Stein inhabited the nuclear man.

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The Last Days of Animal Man – Issue #1

By Lon S. Cohen

Spoiler Warning: In this series of posts on “The Last Days of Animal Man” limited series comic book, there will be periodical spoilers. If you haven’t read the series and intend to, please be advised that I will discuss plot points and surprises.

I have to admit, before picking up the first issue of this mini series, I really didn’t know anything about Animal Man. He was a secondary character in the DC Universe in my mind and I had never come across him in any of the adventures I’d ever read in all my years, or at least any that stuck out in my mind.

A Little Behind The Scenes History.

According to Wikipedia, Animal Man’s first appearance was in Strange Adventures #180 in 1965, in a story written by Dave Wood and drawn by Carmine Infantino and George Roussos. He was a very minor character until the late 1980s when Grant Morrison revived him eventually penning an Animal Man title from 1988 and 1990. Animal Man was aligned with animal rights causes in the book. Morrison also experimented with story telling in this book, sometimes breaking the “fourth wall” of reality for the character. Other authors continued to write the series until it ended some time later in 1995.

Animal Man plays a part in the universal story arcs involving many if not all of the DCU characters of Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis , the weekly series 52, Countdown to Final Crisis and Blackest Night.

Origin of Animal Man.

Like all things in the DC Universe, there is a Pre-Crisis and Post Crisis version of the story. With Animal Man, his origins are almost identical in both. The crux of it is that Buddy Baker encounters a crashed spaceship that gives him with his ability to tap into the morphogenetic field of energy created by all living creatures. While doing so, he can gain the powers and abilities (but not the physical form) of any animal in the universe, including aliens.

Buddy Baker is just a regular guy in the DCU. He’s a father of two kids and husband. In his day job he works as a stunt coordinator for movies and he lives in San Diego. He has some normal problems like paying the bills, fighting with his wife and kids, a personal mission to advocate for animals (no surprise there) and a desire to make his name known in the superhero world.

The Last Days of Animal Man – Issue #1.

Like I said, I had not really heard of Animal Man much before this. I read most of the DCU changing titles listed above but his character didn’t stick with me. So why did I start to read a mini series based on what was a third-rate DCU character I only knew in passing? Because I’m a sucker for a well-told story about a minor character. Don’t get me wrong, I love a comics universe shaking story as much as the next guy, but give me a well written, well drawn, personal story and I’m yours.

I’ll also admit I can get burned this way, wasting money on a story that’s pretty blasé. I’m happy to say that the first issue of the series was terrific. It combined some of the best elements I find in a comic book. There’s plenty of great panels to look at, there’s lots of good dialogue and the story line looks to be a major shift in this character’s life. Granted, the title is “Last Days of Animal Man” do I’m expecting something big for Buddy Baker, but the way they launched this one was spot on.

It’s hard to balance great visuals with a good story and dialogue that doesn’t intrude too much into the panels and also keeps my interest. I hated reading plays in high school. They made us read Death of a Salesman, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and I was bored. A good comic book is like a play on paper but with the biggest difference being you get to see the visuals in the dialogue, along with some ass kicking. This titled has real depth and drama so far. Perhaps that’s thanks to Grant Morrison who had done a lot of work with the character in the late 1980s making it easy for the current team of writers to jump off. Still, it’s hard to balance the mundane life of a super hero’s alter ego and the big action of that same hero in conflict with a villain all the while telling a cohesive story and writer Gerry Conway gets it right. The art, by Chris Batista & Dave Meikis, is also a nice balance between words and visuals.

Animal Man is losing his powers. At crucial times his connection to the morphological energy field becomes cut off. His ability to reach out beyond earth’s animals into space is also limited. Obviously this is affecting his abilities as a super hero but it also intrudes on his professional and personal life as well. The story takes place in a near future so it doesn’t affect any of the ongoing DCU story lines.

I’ve collected all 6 issues in the series and have just completed the first issue. I generally do collect a few issues in a title or an entire short series before reading it because from month to month you can lose the thread of a story and I like to read them straight through.

Issue #2, which I already cracked open features a visit by a whale-like alien Green Lantern. Looks to be interesting. Judging from the first in the series, I expect it to be just as good. I’ll check in when I read it for an update.

Notes on the Cover by Brian Bolland.

The cover of the first issue is very cool because it’s a play on the first issue of the Grant Morrison series. Issue #1 of that late 1980s series shows an introductory pose of Animal Man running at the viewer surrounded by various animals. In the “Last Days” cover, Animal Man and all the animals are in a similar pose but they’re skeletons. A foreshadowing? Or just an inventive Easter Egg for astute fans by the cover artist, Brian Bolland? Either way it’s really creative. Bravo to Bolland who did the covers of both the original series and the “Last Days” cover. It just shows how a talented cover artist can make something very interesting out of the mundane.

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Sparks Of Inspiration

I've been recapturing some of my long lost artistic spirit, you might say spurred by a somewhat unusual source of inspiration.

When I was in college my fellow art students and I were obsessed with a pretty famous art supply store called Pearl Paint. It was not so much that it had superior products or better prices but it had an enormous selection (this was before the days of Michael's, A.C. Moore and other giant Wal-Mart-like craft stores.) There was one sort of close to my school (SUNY Farmingdale) and my friends and I would take frequent "road trips" there, which usually started with a side trip to lunch first and then possibly an afternoon of beer and music in the back parking lot of school where we'd call for a collective canceling of class.

I've always had fascination with art supply stores, possibly because of all those tubes of unused paint, perfect pastel sticks and reams of white, white paper in pads. It was the possibility of creation, the beginning of a project with dreams and expectations of the finished project.

A few years ago I guess Pearl paint decided to leverage some of their fame to compete with the bigger craft shopping centers and they opened a few more stores. Previously to my knowledge there were only two locations. There was one in Nassau County and one on Canal Street in New York City. One store opened by my house and being that I had long since abandoned my art, I sadly never stepped foot in the place.

I’ve always been an artist. Ever since I was a kid I drew all the way through college. I took all the requisite art courses, art history, etc. In college I took a trip to New Mexico with my family and we stayed at Ghost Ranch, known as the place where Georgia O’Keefe painted some of her famous flower paintings. I found the desert an inspirational place and I long to return someday. It was there that I took a weeklong class in pastel painting and it was then I found my medium. We made pastels from scratch with a mortar and pestle and I felt a deep connection to the natural world through my painting with chalk pastels. There was no brush, no other instruments used except for your own hands and fingers. I loved the visceral connection to my creation through my skin. I felt a really personal connection to everything I painted as if it were a true extension of myself through my own hands.

But instead of majoring in fine art in college, I chose advertising art and later graphic design. I tried to keep up my pastel painting for years but left it behind after marrying and starting my family.

It had been about more than ten years since I even held a piece of pastel. One day I decided it was time again to do some art. Maybe it was because of my kids’ own art projects or a need to recapture something that I had lost of myself in there tumultuous times both economically and politically. I don’t know. Somehow I wanted to have something again that felt real and soulful.

So a few weeks ago I walked into that Pearl Paint near my home for the first time to discover that it was closing its doors. They were selling everything at 50% off. I grabbed some simple supplies for my kids and myself. We went home and I had so much fun painting with them that I returned the next weekend to get some more, only this time they were selling everything for 75% off. I bought about $300 worth of supplies for about seventy-five bucks. Included in my purchase were a bunch of pastels and paper.

On a side note, I was going to a friend’s daughter’s birthday party the next day with my kids and I decided to load her up with art supplies for her present. In there I included a small set of pastels for her. I was overjoyed when my wife got a call the next day from our friend saying that her daughter was delighted to find the pastels in her gift bag.

“I know what these are,” she had exclaimed. “They’re pastels.”

It seems that she had just learned all about using pastels in art class in school and was really excited to get her own set. She went on to instruct her little brother all about pastels and how careful he had to be using them.

This serendipitous event gave me a little more confidence in my path, like a little sign from the universe that this was a really good thing and others recognized it as well.

So for the past few weeks I’ve been trying to get in at least three days a week of pastel painting and drawing. I’ve really learned for the first time what it was about pastel painting that made it such a transcendent experience for me. Something I could never really put into words. But the fact that my own kids are now inspired to do their own art projects has been one of the best byproducts. They see Dad sitting down to the kitchen table to do some painting and they immediately jump in too; kids need very little to inspire them to creativity.

The spark of my inspiration was in the deep discounts I found at Pearl Paint, allowing me to totally restock my art supplies on my very limited budget. But something I always learned about creating any kind of art (including my writing) is that the inspiration is nothing but a small flit of one moment. It cannot be sustained and it takes commitment and hard work to keep at your creative process over the long term. I try to find fuel to keep inspiring myself, like continually occurring small bursts of energy, in the world around me. In the kids. In nature. In the visceral connection to my work and of course the pride of a finished project.

Anything can provide that initial jumpstart to get you going. You can continue that by capturing the feeling and finding it in many other places along the way. In this way you can keep the fire burning long passed the initial point of inspiration.

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UN opens Biodiversity Year with plea to save world's life-supporting ecosystems

Kicking off the new year with a little press release from the UN on the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity.

1 January 2010 – In a bid to curb the unprecedented loss of the world's species due to human activity – at a rate some experts put at 1,000 times the natural progression – the United Nations is marking 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity, with a slew of events highlighting the vital role the phenomenon plays in maintaining the life support system on Planet Earth.

“Humans are part of nature's rich diversity and have the power to protect or destroy it,” the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which is hosted by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said in summarizing the Year's main message, with its focus on raising awareness to generate public pressure for action by the world's decision makers.

“Biodiversity, the variety of life on Earth, is essential to sustaining the living networks and systems that provide us all with health, wealth, food, fuel and the vital services our lives depend on. Human activity is causing the diversity of life on Earth to be lost at a greatly accelerated rate.

These losses are irreversible, impoverish us all and damage the life support systems we rely on every day. But we can prevent them.

Read the entire UN press release here.

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What Will We Call The Last Decade?

The first decade of the Twenty-First Century is in the bag. We had the pop cultural “-ies” of the 20th Century. (Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, et al.) but is this kind of branding of the decades by the “-ies” over? What are we going to call the last decade? The Aughts? Seriously?

I’ve been thinking about this for more than ten years. It seems just yesterday that it was the last year of The Nineties and we were worrying about Y2K and surfing the web on Lycos or Ask Jeeves. Times have changed. One thing we’ve never really gotten a handle on is what to call this last decade.

On Twitter and Facebook I finally proposed the question. I mean, where else can I get a good feel for what to call this unnamable decade except by crowdsourcing? The results were staggeringly diverse. Some were funny. Some political. Other just clever.

The first response I got on Twitter was from @profnet who asked, “How about The Zilches?” Good one. A contender for the top ten list. @ruthseely chimed in with an interesting term I hadn’t heard yet. “I thought they were called the naughties,” she tweeted. “A term at which I always giggled although I didn't witness much naughtiness.”

“Here is the name for the past decade,” @OneCauseATATime suggested. “Death of Common Sense” Funny, perhaps, depending on which side of the political fence you stand on, but probably not going to make the list by most standards.

Keeping with the political tone, @cpmomcat suggested that the Aughts was actually a good term for the last decade: “The Aughts seems appropriate,” she tweeted. “We aught to have elected Gore or Kerry, we aught to have regulated, etc. I know ought is not spelled with an ‘a’ - but it still works for me.”

A couple of people suggested “the 0’s (ohs not zeros)” which prompted a follow up by @profnet: “I also like the "Uh-Ohs" (play on the Oh-Ohs). :-)”

My Facebook friends were a little more acerbic. A college buddy of mine said: he liked “The ies-less-ies”? A former coworker of mine voted for “The Single Digits.”

No matter what we end up calling this decade my college friend put it best when he said, “Anyone who calls it ‘The Two Thousands’ sounds like a moron!”

Happy New Year!

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