Young Animal (DC Comics)

Young Animal (trademarked as DC's Young Animal) is an inactive imprint of DC Comics founded in 2016.^[2] It was developed in collaboration with Gerard Way, an American musician and comic book writer, author of the Eisner Award-winning The Umbrella Academy. Its main focus is to relaunch characters and settings from the DC Universe in stories for mature readers, done with a more experimental approach than DC's primary line of superhero comics. The line is overseen by Vertigo group editor Jamie S. Rich and executive editor Mark Doyle.^[3] The line was placed on indefinite hold in August 2018, although Way has indicated it will return.^[4]

Gerard Way has said that a shared theme of the Young Animal comics is "relationships between parents and children."^[5] Other themes he has cited are alienation, fame, change ("self-actualization and becoming something else"),^[5] as well as bullying, teenagers and drug use (in Shade, the Changing Girl), and eventually "a lot of personal stuff for me in Doom Patrol that deals with mature themes".^[5]

Titles

• Shade, the Changing Girl – by Cecil Castellucci and Marley Zarcone^[6] – is based on the earlier Vertigo series Shade, the Changing Man. It is about an alien who is obsessed with a discontinued line of missions to Earth using a "Madness Cloak". She takes and uses it, and becomes stuck on Earth, waking up in the body of a girl, a high school bully who had been in a coma after nearly drowning in a lake.
• Mother Panic – by Jody Houser and Tommy Lee Edwards^[7] – is about Violet Paige, a temperate girl that no one suspects to be keeping gigantic secrets from everyone, who seeks revenge onto her privileged peers. Although the main character is original to this series, rather than an existing DC property, it is not creator-owned.^[8]
• Doom Patrol – by Gerard Way and Nick Derington^[9] – is another series from DC featuring "freak" heroes. The protagonist is Casey Brinke, an EMT who can only remember impossible things from her childhood. She is introduced into Dannyland, a seemingly impossible place that has the answers to her past and her future.
• Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye – by Jon Rivera, Gerard Way, and Michael Avon Oeming^[10] – is a revival of DC's underground explorer Cave Carson. Twelve years after retirement, he joins his daughter Chloe in adventures, stealing his old digging machine and setting forth on a wacky adventure involving cults, mushrooms, and Superman.
• Bug: The Adventures of Forager – miniseries by Lee Allred, Michael Allred, and Laura Allred^[11] – is based on the 1970s Jack-Kirby-created character Forager.
• Eternity Girl – miniseries by writer Magdalene Visaggio and artist Sonny Liew ^[12] – began as a result of the Milk Wars crossover event. It involves a former super-spy named Caroline Sharp who possesses the power of eternal life. Themes of depression and existentialism were explored throughout the 6-issue series.^[13]

References

External links

• Young Animal at the Grand Comics Database
• Young Animal at the Comic Book DB