Animal Man #28

This issue begins with a cover that, by all rights, should not be compelling. The balance and layout of the design are ALL pretty bland. Animal Man fighting someone in the main portion with an ally cowering back towards the front of the cover. Yawn. Right? But this cover balances out the boring design with super compelling content, something I RARELY allow to be redeeming qualities. But I mean... this dude with detached body parts and an extra set of facial traits floating in front of his face? The guy fighting Animal Man is made of newspaper clippings who's headlines describe the events occurring on the cover without repeating itself? What. The. Hell. Is going on here? I desperately want to know.

Animal Man continues his bizarre life in his bizarre world and begins the search for answers. He finds some of them in the form of research. Milligan takes a unique approach to an altered history by changing details of historical events, while keeping the general status quo of the world basically the same. Adolf Hitler..... was caught, tried, and hanged at Nuremburg. Still did all his Nazi conquest stuff, but the events of his death were changed. It would be like changing Batman's parents deaths to be, I don't know, knifed outside the supermarket or something. And Martha was wearing a locket instead of a pearl necklace. Is it a big change? Technically yes. Would it effect years of Batman's continuity? Not really. Not that I advocate a change like that, but imagine if world events were changed like that.

But Animal Man doesn't get much time to spend putting the pieces together, because he meets a man who's entire state of being is in broken pieces. Nowhere Man. And Nowhere Man is on the run from two of his old associates; and the three of them remind me a bit too much of The Brotherhood of Dada from Morrison's Doom Patrol run around the same time. I mean, the debut issue of Mr. Nobody was titled 'Nowhere Man.' Obviously these guys don't directly resemble any of the Brotherhood of Dada, but they definitely seem to represent similar Dadaist ideas. Nowhere Man is definitely interesting, though his speech patterns take A LOT of getting used to, and the way The Front Page always has a headline describing the panel he's currently in is neat; but The Nominal Man seems to be cut from bits and pieces of the Brotherhood of Dada, and his only real oral gimmick is referring to everything in terms of abortions. Although his dullness might be part of the point of his character, I don't know. It's weird.

In Conclusion: 3.5/5

While I'm pretty sure I like Nowhere Man, I'm not totally on board with this little side story. I wanted to see more of Animal Man dealing with the 'wrong' world, although Nowhere Man's Burroughs Technique might actually be related to it, since they seem to have related ideas. This issue just doesn't feel as connected to the previous issue, and doesn't advance the 'World is Wrong' plot as much as the whole Nowhere Man plot.