YMMV / Animal Man

• Anvilicious: Grant Morrison's stories frequently conveyed the author's environmentalism, such as by encouraging the reader to embrace vegetarianism and by raising the argument that scientific progress isn't enough to justify the cruel experiments many animals are subjected to. In the final issue, Morrison themself acknowledges that their scripts may have been too "preachy", as they jokingly compares the comic book to a monthly pamphlet on animal rights.
• Complete Monster: President Eagleton, from issues #27-32 of the 1988 series, is the leader of the United States in Earth-Twenty-Seven, the Alternate Universe Buddy Baker is marooned in. A chameleonic sociopath who outright brags at how good at faking honesty he is, Eagleton enlists Buddy to help apprehend the Angel siblings, three child telepaths who are interfering with his re-election campaign. Once the Angels are tracked down, Eagleton breaks his promise not to harm them and reveals he intends to dissect them alive to learn how to implant their abilities in US soldiers. Though Buddy kills Eagleton, he is too late to save the children, only being able to help them die in peace.
• Crosses the Line Twice: What does one of the Evil Poachers say after shooting an inocent deer? ''Oh man, what have I done? I just shot Bambi! Uncle Walt's going to kill me".
• Growing the Beard: The earlier issues certainly aren't bad, but they're pretty boiler-plate and unadventurous. Morrison considers "The Coyote Gospel" to be the point where the series actually started coming into its own, delving into the themes of metafiction, higher powers, and idealism-versus-realism that would go on to define the rest of their run.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When reading the endorsement of PETA in the final issue of Morrison's run, one must remember that back in the '80s they weren't quite the organization they are now. Especially since organizations like PETA as it is today are exactly the kind of group the comic would've vilified or mocked.
  • The yellow aliens warn Animal Man, "Terrible times are coming. Be strong. Be careful." Are they referring to the trauma he'll experience in Morrison's run, or events like Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, Identity Crisis (2004), Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis?
  • Morrison's run ends with their Author Avatar undoing the deaths of Buddy's family as a final favor before departing to leave the series in the hands of a different writer and acknowledging that the writer to succeed them will likely throw what they've done out the window at the first opportunity. In the New 52 series by Jeff Lemire, Buddy's son Cliff dies again, but this time his death stuck and wasn't even undone by DC Rebirth in spite of the primary purpose of the Rebirth intiative being to restore the DC Universe to how it was prior to the Flashpoint event that led to the New 52 reboot.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • Pretty much everyone in Limbo eventually returned in some form or another, including Mr. Freeze, the Space Canine Patrol Agents, The Green Team, Quicksilver/Max Mercury, and the Love Syndicate. Heck, even Merryman and the Inferior Five returned briefly as part of Final Crisis.
  • During the "Second Crisis", Psycho-Pirate says "they're all coming back. All of them. And things will be like they used to be." Convergence prevented the multiverse from being wiped out by the Crisis in the first place.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the second issue, Buddy runs into a teenager named "Jaime" who carries around an autograph book filled with the signatures of every superhero he's ever gotten a chance to meet. When he tries to get Buddy's autograph, he opens the book, exposing a page that reads "To my good friend Jaime - The Blue Beetle". That issue came out about 18 years before a teenager named Jaime Reyes officially became the third Blue Beetle.
  • A Superman analogue in a world where every superhero was created by experiments going insane and killing everyone? Yeah, Psycho-Pirate, that does seem like the kind of thing only a nihilistic, messed-up weirdo would write.
  • Tom Veitch's run features a Corrupted Character Copy of The Punisher called the Penalizer and was largely illustrated by Steve Dillon. Years later, Dillon would do the artwork for the actual Punisher comics, most notably ones written by Garth Ennis.
  • At the end of Grant Morrison's run, their Author Avatar acknowledges that whoever will write the comic afterwards may disregard what they've established and gives Buddy eating meat as an example. Sure enough, Peter Milligan would be the next writer to take over and his run had Buddy bite into a horse's neck due to becoming more feral under the influence of the life-web, plus subsequent runs in the Vertigo era frequently disregarded Buddy's vegetarianism by having him openly consume animal meat whenever he became more detached from his humanity. In addition, much of the Vertigo run (that is, the majority of the portions of the comic that weren't written by Grant Morrison) was eventually rendered Canon Discontinuity after Buddy and his family were reinstated to the main DCU.
  • The alternate future miniseries The Last Days of Animal Man features an unnamed African-American version of The Flash, years before the New 52 introduced the first African-American Kid Flash Ace West (who was initially intended as the New 52 canon's equivalent to Wally West before DC Rebirth restored the original Wally West to continuity and retconned Wally's New 52 counterpart as being the original Wally's younger cousin).
• It Was His Sled: Animal Man meeting Grant Morrison is one of those scenes that, despite happening at the very end of the Morrison run, is so well-known that it's often the first thing people learn about it.
• Memetic Mutation: The literal monkey on a typewriter from Morrison's penultimate issue has seen use as a reaction image shorthand for "What the fuck am I reading?"
• My Real Daddy: Guess who. Even this page barely mentions Tom Veitch, Jeff Lemire or Peter Milligan, who also wrote Animal Man, and his earliest appearances are obscure.
• The Woobie: Buddy. He endures so much at the hands of his writer.

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