We’re seeing even more omnibus announcements roll out from DC Comics in anticipation of their 2027 January to June catalog arriving at the end of this week. Their second omnibus announcement for 2027 shows off DC’s renewed commitment to finishing omnibus lines, as this book pulls us within a single collected edition of completing a famous Vertigo title that only had its most famous run collected for a long time: Animal Man by Jamie Delano and Steve Pugh Omnibus!
When his ongoing series began in 1988, Animal Man was a deeply obscure Silver Age DC hero with just a handful of appearances to his name. That included being a member of a group literally called “The Forgotten Heroes” who popped up in Superman to remind him (and readers) that they still existed.
Animal Man (1988) launched before Vertigo was an imprint at DC comics. However, Vertigo energy had already been established by the long-running Swamp Thing and was being echoed in other titles launching that year – which included both The Sandman (1988) and Hellblazer (1988)!
The launch of Animal Man (1988) was helmed by Grant Morrison and… the rest is history. Morrison echoed a touch of Alan Moore’s deconstruction from Miracleman, blending it with social commentary on the environment and the natural world and building up to the most famous self-insert in all of comics.
And then the run kept running! by Peter Milligan and then Tom Veitch & Steve Dillon penned the next two years of the title, from Animal Man (1988) #27-50, which we received in omnibus just a few months ago. Now, we’re getting the next sequential book in that omnibus line with the Animal Man by Jamie Delano and Steve Pugh Omnibus.
The solicited contents of Animal Man by Jamie Delano and Steve Pugh Omnibus are:
Animal Man (1988) #51-79 & Annual 1; Swamp Thing (1985) Annual 7, a story from Vertigo Jam (1993) #1, and pages from The Children’s Crusade (1993) #1-2.
What’s left to collect? Just a brief run of issues by Jerry Prosser in Animal Man (1988) #80-89. Many of us thought DC would add those issues to this book, since they included the brief Milligan run in the Veitch/Dillon book. Alas, in this instance DC’s draconian creator-based mapping strikes again, which will force them to try to market that less-known end-run as its own deluxe oversize hardcover.
Learn more about Animal Man, his publishing history, and his collected editions in my Animal Man Collecting Guide and Reading Order.
Did you have Animal Man by Jamie Delano and Steve Pugh Omnibus on your DC Omnibus 2027 Fantasy Draft ballot? I had a suspicion that DC would continue to keep up an annual pace to wrap up this line, so I had this in the bottom half of my predictions.
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