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“Animorphs: The Invasion”

By | November 4th, 2020
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My name is Jake. I could tell you stuff like my last name, or where I live, but that’s not relevant right now. What’s relevant is that in 1996 I started reading this amazing science fiction book series. It was about a team of teenage superheroes battling an alien invasion. The kids had the ability to turn into animals. For over 60 books, they went on seriously gonzo adventures, fighting a horrifying war against an intergalactic force of body snatchers while getting ready for basketball tryouts and college applications. The series was Animorphs and for years I have been wringing my hands shouting up to the heavens, “In a world of gritty reboots, why have I gone so long without new Animorphs media!?” Well now, my question has been answered, in the form of a graphic novel from Chris Grine.

Sometimes weird things happen to people. Ask Jake. He could tell you about the night he and his friends saw a strange light in the sky that seemed to be heading right for them. That was the night five normal kids learned that humanity is under a silent attack — and were given the power to fight back.

Now Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias, and Marco can transform into some of the most dangerous creatures on Earth. And they must use that power to outsmart an evil greater than anything the world has ever seen. . . .

If you’re not a millennial born between 1986 and 1992, it’s possible you don’t know what the big deal about this series was. The story is pretty, cool and that’s definitely part of it. Animorphs was written by K.A. Applegate, who is now acknowledged to be Katherine Applegate, her husband Michael Grant, and a support team of about a dozen ghost writers. They put out a book a month from 1996 to 2001 and in that time got a pretty lame toy line, and a pretty notorious season of a TV show on Nickelodeon. Then, years of nothing. There was an attempt to re-publish the novels in 2011 without all the 90s references that were so rampant in the originals, but that fizzled. This graphic novel is the first new Animorphs thing in almost 10 years.

But that doesn’t explain the inherent appeal in Animorphs. Maybe it’s trite to call it, “a children’s series that doesn’t talk down to its audience,” but that is absolutely true. Because while Animorphs is a very high concept, pulpy sci-fi superhero space opera yarn, it is a story taken very seriously by its authors. By the end of the massive series, the kids are veterans of a bloody war, and carry with them all the trauma of that conflict. More than any other series, it managed fun and oftentimes funny adventures with the kind of serious meditations on power we expect from a Game of Thrones. Oh, and sometimes the descriptions of violence were so visceral, descriptive language has continued to haunt me for 20 years.

OK though, so the graphic novel. My comic tastes tend towards the US direct market. I read things published by Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, IDW, Oni, maybe some smaller publishers… but I don’t normally read the most popular kind of published comics, those put out by Scholastic. Those tend to have a style that verges towards broad and cartoony. I would have told you that wouldn’t have fit well for this series. But having read it, I was wrong. Chris Grine understands exactly what his artwork looks like and perhaps more importantly, he knows exactly what tone an “Animorphs” story should take. So he does a few interesting things that re-contextualize the story for a reader like me.

The first is how young the characters look. Jake, Marco, Rachel, Cassie, and Tobias don’t look like 25-year-olds playing 16-year-olds; they look 13. This simple choice does so much heavy lifting. There are lots of stories about kids in danger but rarely do you feel their youth so acutely. In a live action adaptation, we would never put child actors through what these characters go through. But looking back, that was the appeal. I was seeing kids my own age go through this war and it was empowering. Now I see it and its terrifying. But extremely effective.

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Chris Grine is an illustrator of greeting cards and also an Eisner nominated cartoonist. His figures tend towards the very simplistic, closer to a newspaper strip than a Big Two superhero book. His characters are a bit more complicated than Charlie Brown, but only a bit. But as with the great comic strips, Grine manages to infuse his characters with a ton of expression. I especially love the way he draws Cassie. He captures the complexity of her inner life clearly on the page. She’s embarrassed and socially awkward, but fundamentally brave. In every panel, you can see the face of someone who lives with a lot of fear and is constantly working to overcome it. That’s great cartooning!

An “Animoprhs” comic is also going to have to include a lot of images that have lived in my imagination for decades and it is here that Grine’s simple style again does more with less. Take for example, one of the many alien races the Animorphs encounter. We’ve seen a lot of illustrations of Andalites, but Grine also has to draw the Hork Bajir and Taxxons. On top of that he’s drawing the ships, technology, and hidden bases that make up this world. With more detail, he would have run into the problem of going against how readers might have imagined these things. But he never overdoes it, just providing enough detail to let your mind fill in the rest. And that’s a power of comics as a storytelling medium: knowing when to back up enough to let imagination do the heavy lifting. It’s the magic that happens between the panels. Grine understands this.

Then there’s the morphing. The rules to turning into animals in Animorphs are very specific. You have to ‘acquire’ the DNA of the creature you want to transform into via skin-to-skin contact. Morphing heals you of any wound, returning your body to a “clean” default state. Some morphers are considered estreen, and watching them transform is an art. For most, morphing is a horrible series of popping bones and melting flesh. This horror is another place where Grine’s child-friendly art accomplishes a lot. You get the grossness of the transformation (complete with all the cracks and snaps you could want) but there’s something absurd about the process. It doesn’t cross the line into comedy, but people/animal hybrids are, well, funny looking.

When considering stories about kids, I often try to figure out the target audience. Because there are stories for kids and there are stories about kids. Stranger Things is about kids, but not really for kids. The early volumes of “Young Avengers” were written to be read by young people, the Kieron Gillen + Jaime McKelvie “Young Avengers” was written for people nostalgic about childhood. This “Animorphs” comic is the rare story that lands right in the middle. It presents a scary war story in a way that can be appreciated by kids, without ever talking down to them. But it also is the revival of a 90s property, taking place in the 90s. That’s inherently nostalgic. By capturing what was strong about kids media in the 90s and today, “Animorphs” is the kind of comic you can give to a kid, and then read and feel like a kid yourself.


Jaina Hill

Jaina is from New York. She currently lives in Ohio. Ask her, and she'll swear she's one of those people who loves both Star Wars and Star Trek equally. Say hi to her on twitter @Rambling_Moose!

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