Graphic Novel Review: ANIMAN is a funny, offbeat gem

Animan

Cartoonist: Anouk Ricard
Translator: Montana Kane
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Publication Date: March 2026

After winning the 2025 Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, Anouk Ricard’s Animan gets an English translation this month from the novelist, Montana Kane. It’s a svelte graphic novel, clocking in at 72 pages, although it’s so densely-paneled and packed with jokes that it reads much longer. And while it may take some readers a few pages to access the offbeat sense of humor that drives this one forward, it’s well-worth giving Animan a shot.

It’s also likely that it won’t take most readers much time at all to get into this one. The name is evocative of superhero comics, as anything in the medium that ends with ‘-man’ is fated to be, and it is to some extent a sendup of the genre, albeit wispy one. The titular Animan has powers, although they aren’t all that super. He can turn into any animal, but he doesn’t use it to turn into strong apes or lions to smite his foes the way similar characters in comics have done for years.

Instead, Animan is far more likely to become a bug, or a frog, or a dog for a quick second to ask his own dog a question. Making the superhero parody just a bit more apt, is that Animan has an arch-enemy (with whom he was once friends), and at one point in these pages, he solves a murder mystery. But that’s really where the recognizable superhero stuff stops.

In fact, I actually felt like Animan takes careful pains to be a sort of anti-super comic. Whereas superhero comics generally serve as sort of wish fulfillment power fantasy, there is nothing really enviable about Animan’s life. His powers don’t seem fun, or even all that useful–I mean, at one point he has a conversation with maggots as they devour a corpse. And the rest of his life isn’t all that great either. He goes to work, he’s married to a frog, and he doesn’t really get much credit for anything he does. 

And that’s actually all for the best. The book sort of uses powers and its name to tip in advance how cheeky the entire affair is, how odd. More than a simple parody, Animan is moreso a smart comic with an idiosyncratic sense of whimsy and humor, poking lightly at familiar comics tropes as it does very much its own clever thing.

The structure of the book is also interesting. It starts off reading like a series of comic strips, not really threaded together into a larger narrative. But as the book progresses that starts to change, and it moves slowly toward a bigger story arc with a payoff and finale. It’s fun in that way. And I also enjoyed the book’s resistance toward trying to be about more than its jokes. There’s no theme or lesson to Animan. Instead, nearly everything in it is dedicated toward moving the reader toward the next joke, the next oddity, the next teasing bit of character and story.

Animan is out this month via Drawn & Quarterly

Read more great reviews from The Beat!