I first saw an ad for the Elephantmen series on the back of a single issue comic book while I was doing some shelving for Fantagraphics Books. I was immediately drawn into the picture of the elephant-headed man in a leather jacket and boots. It felt very noir-meets-animorphs to me, and I made a mental note to check out the series.
Months passed and I forgot about the ad I saw until March when I attended Seattle’s Emerald City Comic Con. While walking through the many booths I saw a large poster with the familiar Elephantmen characters on it and made my way over. There I purchased the thick, heavy first volume of the series and had it signed by the writer and letterer, Richard Starkings.
I’ve only now gotten around to reading it, and I have to say it’s a little mediocre, due largely to the fact that it’s a compilation of single issue comics and not an originally designed graphic novel. It jumps a lot between characters (which can be expected when introducing the main characters) and does a bit of development on their origin story which is interesting. My main criticism is that it doesn’t do enough to start a current story arc, although it could be easily argued that only so much can be done in this amount of space.
What we get from this first volume is that the Elephantmen (particularly a hippo-headed Hip Flask, an elephant-headed Ebony Hide, and a rhino-headed Obadiah Horn) were created by a mad scientist type in Africa through genetic experiments forced into kidnapped women’s uteri. Trained from birth to be “the perfect soldiers” (an overly familiar story concept) they are brutal and strong and eventually escape with the help of the U.S. government. After their escape, they are helped to assimilate into society, but obviously many humans aren’t too keen on that. Not all humans are afraid of the elephantmen, though. One little girl becomes quite fond of Ebony after one meeting, and the world is enraged when a human woman becomes engaged to Obadiah Horn.
I love the art style, and I like the idea of animal-human hybrids. I’m sure the present-day story arc takes off in the second volume, but for some reason I just don’t feel invested enough in these characters to buy the next volume to see what happens to them (and at $20 a volume, with a total of 3 volumes available, one must be pretty invested).
I’m not necessarily calling it quits on this series, but I can say I won’t be rushing out to by the next one, either. I’ll give it a little time before deciding on whether to continue with this series.
Bent Shelf Book Reviews 