Animal Man was a well-received series loved by many fans for Foreman's art, and surprisingly Foreman announced on the Comic Book Resource forums that he chose to leave Animal Man and was neither asked nor forced to leave.
"I just want to chime in briefly, because everyone here has been so supportive of the book and because there's so much behind the scenes stuff that goes on with these books..." Foremen begins. "I read a lot of comics and I too get confused about whats going on in some books and ultimately feel like we're getting a raw deal sometimes.
The change on Animal Man boils down to the reason I was on the book to begin with, which was that I needed to take on a job after my mother died (to deal with the financial end of someone being sick for a while and then passing) and Animal Man was the only thing DC was going to let me do. Which in any other time frame would have been perfect.
But really the context of me dealing with the death of my mom and drawing the kind of content in Animal Man just burned me out sooner than I thought.
I had hoped to stay on the book until at least the spring so that the artist I wanted to replace me was free from his commitments, but I would have ultimately just dragged the book down if I did, because it was becoming harder and harder to concentrate on the work.
Steve was bending over backwards on his fill-ins to keep the book on schedule so you have to keep that in consideration. Really, he won't skip a beat once he's doing the book full time. Thanks, everyone."
The new regular artist Pugh, who worked on the original Animal Man series, was praised by writer Jeff Lemire who said he was looking forward to working with him. Pugh will fill-in for Foreman starting with Animal Man #7 in March but will become the ongoing artist in May beginning with Animal Man #9. For now, we can only admire Foreman's preliminary sketches on Birds of Prey, seen below.
