Animal Man and stuff

I try to be introspect about my first comic book artist jobs.

I illustrated “Animal Man” for DC Comics in the early 90’s. I did the last eleven issues. Being part of the last art team on a comic book doesn’t give you a lot of value when you start applying for more work on new books. I had been the penciler on Animal Man. He was a quirky character. I never really had a good understanding about what he was about. He had some kind of telepathy with all animals and they usually did his bidding. I never knew why they would listen to some guy out of the blue that managed to talk to them.

The writer, David Quinn, seemed to be a really nice, smart, and interesting guy. The one time we briefly spoke all I remember was he was encouraging and happy to be here, which I appreciated since I was kind of new to doing comics. He decided to explain why animals could hear him and cooperate with him by turning him in to some kind of shaman.

I never really reflected on my time doing Animal Man. This is a first. I was never interviewed about it after all this time. I’ve actually met a few of the three people who read the book and from what I can tell, only read the more popular team that had it before us. I thought we did some groundbreaking stuff for that time. I thought we did a very good job of incorporating virtual reality into a story. Animal Man(AM) had become a cult leader and met up with some “tech-hippies” for lack of a better word. They gave him a pill, dropped a VR helmet on him and whoosh we were in a new dimension.

The VR world fit well in the story. David sent me reference which no writer had ever done. I read some of a book about Inner Earth and he gave me copies of nervous systems and other medical journal stuff. I had to do a lot of extra stuff besides finding reference. I liked it. Doing the research was my adventure.

Why am I thinking about Animal Man after all these years? I really can’t say. I must think about Animal Man a few times a year since it ended in ‘95(?) It does help that I have been doing work for the last few years for and with some of the editors and writers from when we were all at Vertigo Comics. I was recently on a panel at Big Apple Con here in NYC arranged by Stuart the writer/editor I’ve worked with the most at Ahoy Comics these past few years. Stuart told the throng, the crowd, the small group of about eight people who attended it that Ahoy was “Vertigo with a sense of humor” when he responded to a question about what the company was about.

Cheers.