[Guest reviewer Zach King writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]

“I’ve been a Forager fanatic for most of my life, ever since finding the comic in the waiting room of our childhood guitar teacher, James Ray. I squeezed Bug into my New Gods entry in my issue of DC Solo, along with Orion, Lightray and Mister Miracle. And when Lee and I were coming up with proposals for Gerard Way and Jamie S. Rich after an invite to play in the Young Animal playground, I just kept throwing Bug in every single one of them.” — Michael Allred

I’m too close to the material to recognize the broader reputation of Young Animal. I was all-in for this initiative, a pop-up imprint at DC circa 2016. Doom Patrol and Far Sector certainly resonated, and we see Mother Panic turn up every now and again to remind us of that moment in comics history when Gerard Way and some of his friends just got weird with DC’s back catalog. I’ll resist the urge to sound the call for a Young Animal Compendium or two (who am I kidding? Of course I want these books!), because what I really want to do is talk about Michael Allred.

With his wife Laura on colors and brother Lee on co-writing duties, Allred joined the Young Animal imprint with Bug! The Adventures of Forager, a surprising tribute to Jack Kirby on the 100th anniversary of the King’s birth. It’s surprising for a whole host of reasons — that it was “hidden,” more or less, in the Young Animal line; that it includes so many Kirby creations all in one place; and that a Fourth World retrospective should star Bug, of all gods. But if the Allreds want to do a Bug book, the universe is generally inclined to nod in the affirmative.

The surprises truly begin on page one. While most Young Animal books took a sideways approach to mainline continuity, Bug begins with a shout-out to Cosmic Odyssey, with Allred invoking Mike Mignola with a reminder that Xanshi wasn’t the only casualty of that encounter with Darkseid.¹ In no time at all, though, our Bug is reborn, playing dominoes with a little girl and her talking teddy bear before falling headlong into a trippy tour de force through some of Kirby’s less-remembered creations. The art is crisp and mod, even if the story is, frankly, nonsense.

I’ll pause right here and say that that was always the charm of Young Animal to me, even if some of my other friends quickly lost patience with it. Young Animal was a mood, a vibe, an energy, even if I usually lost the plot month after month. But the art was invariably stalwart, leading to each book feeling a bit like a rock song played in a foreign language. One could always feel what was happening, even if you didn’t understand it. In that way, perhaps Kirby’s Fourth World is a perfect setting for a Young Animal book — heady and philosophical, fueled by momentum and the weight of the cosmos. (Or, to anchor it a little closer to home, Bug! is not unlike John Byrne’s Fourth World, which looked great but never quite said much.)

Having read this book just after Batman: The Brave and the Bold, I was familiar with the team-up mentality that governs Forager’s journey through the shards of reality. But I was also reminded of Danger Street, in which Tom King and Jorge Fornés mash together all the disparate stars of 1st Issue Special simply because they happened to appear in the same anthology title. Similarly, each chapter of Bug! finds our Forager on adventures with the Sandman (Garrett Sanford), the Losers, Atlas, the Manhunters, and OMAC before making his way back to the Fourth World. In astonishing shows of research, the Allreds enroll the robot Deadman from Forever People and Blue Beetle Dan Garrett, under the unspoken premise that Charles Nicholas was a pseudonymous credit that might have belonged to Jack Kirby.²

If it all feels like inside baseball, it is. If the text of the comic feels like a philosophy lecture, maybe it’s that, too; when Forager meets the stonemason who might well be the living embodiment of the Source, we’re treated to bromides like “Those who would most degrade the hand to exalt the mind are the ones most often to trap themselves in the final barrier.” For those of us willing to puzzle through the prose, however, the Allreds are trying to make sense of the fact that, in Kirby’s lore, there are actually two Source Walls — the big one at the edge of the universe, yes, but also the smaller one where the hand of the Source writes in tongues of fire. You can rock out to the music, folks, or you can pore over the lyrics.

If you’re here for the music, Allred is playing most of the better B-sides in this love letter to Jack Kirby with a typical Allred verve. His panel designs are fascinating, with Forager often careening around the page like the Silver Surfer (another Allred gem), and Laura Allred’s colors are vibrant when they need to be, yet hallucinatory when you’re not expecting it. I’m thinking in particular of the opening chapter, when Forager and Sandman roam through an abandoned dreamscape with Brute and Glob in tow. The dream takes place in a dreary mausoleum of a mansion, with the psychedelic colors of our protagonists heightening the surreality of the story. At times, the colors pop so much that the book almost reads like a 3D comic that somehow doesn’t need glasses.

By the end of this temporal road trip, it does all tie together, with the Allreds making some sense out of the long continuity behind the Fourth World. There’s an emotional climax to accompany the philosophical one, too. Its final page promise, in which Forager is reunited with his friends on New Genesis, is a poignant counterpoint to Mister Miracle by Tom King and Mitch Gerads, which posited such a reunion as impossible. There’s room in Kirby’s legacy for both, but as Bug! shows us, there’s room for so much in Kirby’s wake.

Bug! The Adventures of Forager also shares a kinship with Allred’s most famous creation: Frank Einstein, alias Madman! Like the Forager, Madman floats through a universe he doesn’t fully understand, reckoning with his place in it and what it all means, but the one constant is Allred’s fantastic artwork and a vibe that must have inspired the Young Animal crew. (Put another way, Madman might be to the Beatles or David Bowie what Young Animal was to My Chemical Romance.) With a line of omnibus collections having debuted in paperback in June 2025, our gracious host made room for me to review the six hardcover collections of the Madmaniverse Library. Check out those reviews for more ginchiness, folks!