Panels of Awesome!

Animal Man is one of my favourite characters. I like his personality a lot – a happy-go-lucky-type kind of guy and the fact that his ability to go beyond the Fourth Wall makes him even more interesting to learn about. In this trade paperback, the writer, Grant Morrison uses that Fourth Wall, along with Animal Man to make for an interesting story. Morrison asks us if Animal Man has life, as Animal Man was created before Morrison and will most definitely live on after him. It’s not that Animal Man lives, but the rather the thing that keeps him alive – which is the readers – that makes this an interesting read.

Morrison uses this idea to make an abstract story, one that perhaps wouldn’t be suited for every reader. It’s not exactly the easiest idea to understand in this story. Rather than Animal Man being the main star, the adventure revolves more around the people he meets and what ideas the readers and Animal Man himself can discover. Even Morrison himself appears in the comic, which allows the readers to think the comic as a “real life” situation, rather than just a plain comic story, putting much more meaning into it. The connection between us readers and the “real life” situation is what creates this comic.

This is actually the third part in the Deus Ex Machina series, and even though it is the third part, it’s not really an issue to solve the past questions from the two previous trade paperbacks. That also makes it hard to understand why someone like Animal Man would know about why and how he was created. I mean, why not the Spectre? He is practically a god in the DC Universe, so why shouldn’t he know any more than Animal Man? Even though there is no actual ending to this, leaving some strange questions to be answered, it really is still worth the read and not your average comic book story.

Animal Man: Deus Ex Machine, Book Three is a great book, if people are willing to read beyond the story itself, that allows for some satisfactory reading and collecting.