Maxine Baker (Prime Earth)

When she was just four years old, Maxine had wanted her family to get a pet very badly, but her father had refused, given his own sensitivity to animals. While her father was preoccupied with other things, though, she used her budding ability to control flesh to animate the corpses of several former neighbourhood pets.^[1] She explained that she had heard the animals calling to her from a place called The Red. Buddy had himself been called to go to the Red via a strange tattoo-like manifestation on his chest, which Maxine assured him would go away when he did enter the Red. Worried that his daughter's power seemed to exceed his own, Buddy followed her into the Red.^[2]

There, the pair encountered the Totems of the Parliament of Limbs, whom Maxine had met in her dreams a great many times before. The Totems explained that it was Maxine who was meant to be Avatar of the Red from the beginning, and Buddy was merely meant to protect her and train her until she was ready to lead in the fight against the threat of The Rot. Not long after learning this, the Hunters Three infiltrated the Red and attacked Buddy.^[3] The Totems urged Maxine to use her powers to save him, and though she did, he was gravely injured. Using her powers again, she was able to heal him. The Totems revealed that the Hunters Three were former avatars who were corrupted by the Rot. They hoped to corrupt Maxine as well, and use her to spread the Rot. As such, it was all the more important that Buddy protect her. To aid him in this, the Totems offered one of their own - Ignatius - to take on the form of a simple house cat named Socks, and protect Maxine as such. In Socks, Maxine finally had a pet.^[4]

Maxine, Buddy and Socks returned to her grandmother Mary's farm in Sacramento to rendezvous with her mother, though Socks was wary that the Hunters Three might be setting a trap for Maxine there. When he learned that his wife and son were in danger, Buddy left Maxine with her grandmother, and went after them. Intent on helping her father, she sent an impulse through the ground to all living things in the area. All of the animals she summoned rushed to Buddy's rescue, but when they are one of the Hunters, they too became infected with the Rot. In doing so, the Rot found its way into the Red, and Maxine was responsible. Only the Swamp Thing would be able to help them then^[5], so they travelled cross-country to find him.^[6]

Animal vs. Man

En route to Louisiana, Buddy had a vision of a possible future in which he failed to protect Maxine as he was supposed to. In that future, he was long gone, and Maxine - though much older - was infected by the rot while attempting to stop it.^[7] When he woke from his dream, he discovered that the family's trailer was surrounded by creatures of The Rot, and Maxine believed she could stop them. When she tried, though, they tore her to pieces. Fortunately, she had discovered the ability to shift from body to body, and escaped death. Her powers were exceeding even Socks' expectations. Feeling responsible, Buddy decided to take on the Rot by himself, for Maxine's sake. When he did, though, he himself was overtaken by the Rot, leaving Maxine with no protector.^[8]

Extinction is Forever

Ellen and her family continued eastward to find the Swamp Thing without Buddy. When Maxine realized that her father was shunted out of his body and into the Red, she demanded to be allowed to go and get him, but her mother refused. The Hunters Three, meanwhile, had assumed control of Buddy's body, and hoped to lure Maxine into the Rot with it to corrupt her.^[9] Soon, Maxine and her family encountered John Constantine, who revealed that his friend Madame Xanadu had seen a vision of the future in which all that remained of uncorrupted human life was Maxine and Ellen - all because Ellen refused to accept her daughter's destiny. In the Red, meanwhile, Buddy managed with some difficulty, to convince the Totems to give him another chance to protect his daughter - if only because there was no time to find a replacement.^[10]

In their desperation to connect with the Swamp Thing, Ellen, Mary and Maxine drove off without realizing that they'd forgot Cliff at the hotel. Unfortunately, Socks could already sense that the Rot had got to him. Maxine was impotent to help, but it wasn't long before her father returned.^[11] When he managed to collect Cliff, the boy was infected already, and fading fast, but finding the Swamp Thing took precedent, so the whole family rushed into the swamp to find him. When they did, he and Abby Arcane were standing over a portal into The Rot, which Buddy believed that he and Swamp Thing needed to enter to defeat the Rot once and for all. In doing so, though, they abandoned Maxine to face the Rot in the here and now without them.^[12]

Rotworld

Having unexpectedly spent an entire year within The Rot, Buddy Baker emerged on Earth to learn that the Rot had overtaken the majority of the planet in his absence - except for a small pocket of The Red called the Red Kingdom and another called the Green Kingdom for The Green. He learned with horror that his decision to abandon his family to face the Rot left his daughter, the real Avatar of the Red unprotected. She was not yet strong enough to stop what was to come, and fell to Arcane's rotlings.

Not long after Buddy disappeared, Ellen begged Maxine to use her power to seek out her brother Cliff, even though she sensed that the Rot was with him. Upon discovering him, he soon passed the Rot's infection to Ellen, leaving only her aging mother Mary and Socks to protect Maxine.^[13] Mary was soon infected as well, and Maxine and her cat were forced to flee. Without Buddy or the Swamp Thing to keep the Rot in check, Maxine was the world's only hope, and as a little girl, her best bet would be to find help from someone else - and certainly not her family. Making her way to a nearby town, Maxine encountered the boy William Arcane whom she befriended.^[14]

Socks warned that Arcane was setting a trap for her, but Maxine insisted on believing his story that he had reformed since his encounter with the Swamp Thing. He told her that he could use his abilities to remove the Rot's corruption from people, claiming that he had, in fact, already done this for her family. When she followed him to their apparent location, however, she discovered that he had betrayed her, and the remaining two of the Hunters Three were waiting there for her.^[15] The offered a deal, claiming that if she would give herself up to the Rot, they would let her family go. Socks warned her against taking the deal, earning himself an unwanted place in the Rot as well. When Maxine agreed, the hunters freed her family, and they begged her not to go through with the deal. She disregarded their warnings, caring only for their safety, and allowed one of the hunters to infect her, sealing the planet's fate.^[16]

By the time Buddy had raised an army with the Swamp Thing and marched to face Anton Arcane, one year later, he began to sense Maxine's presence in Arcane's castle and hoped she was still alive. When she emerged, he learned that she had become one of the Hunters Three, and was now his enemy.^[17] In his rage at how she had been manipulated, Buddy ripped her head from her body.^[18]

After defeating Arcane, Buddy was sent back to the present with the help of the Parliament of Decay, arriving just in time to stop Maxine from giving herself to the Hunters. Ellen forbade Maxine from helping her father fight off the rotlings, requiring Socks to warn her that Maxine is key to the existence of all life on the planet, and the fate of that life rested on her being able to pursue that destiny. Having used the Red to return the dead tissue of the Rot to life in Socks, Maxine learned that she could do the same to the rotlings and the Hunters. Though she used that power to return the Hunters to human form, she could not prevent William Arcane from murdering her brother.^[19]

Splinter Species

After the funeral, Maxine was made to accept that Cliff was really dead, and she couldn't simply bring him back. What was worse was that the loss took a toll on her parents' marriage, and they separated.^[20] Moved to her grandmother's farm in Sacramento, Maxine and Socks determined to enter the Red after bed time and petition the Totems for permission to search for Cliff. Despite having expelled her father from the Red, the Totems agreed to let her search the Red for Cliff with the help of Socks and Shepherd.^[21]

In the Red, Maxine learned that she could not simply make another Cliff using the raw materials for human bodies. Instead, she would have to find his soul before it passed on, otherwise, it would simply be a body resembling Cliff's, with nothing inside it.^[22] Eventually, she and her friends encountered a cave where souls of the dead are remade into new life, hoping that they would reach Cliff's before he became something other than her brother. Unfortunately, their search was distracted then by the realization that Brother Blood had murdered the Totems in her absence.^[23]

Evolve or Die

Soon, the rogue Totem who had manipulated Brother Blood to this point warned that while Maxine and Buddy remained alive, they would never have full control over the Red, and Maxine became a target.^[24] They took refuge from him within a cave which led beyond the Red. Maxine worried that she could not leave the Red without giving up hope on finding Cliff. Sadly, Socks had to admit that hope of that was likely gone entirely - especially if she could not evade Brother Blood. Meanwhile, Shepherd and the rest of Maxine's friends from the Red did their best to defend her, only to see Shepherd skewered before Maxine's very eyes.^[25]

Receiving a last-ditch message from Shepherd, Buddy located Maxine in the Red. Bolstered by Shepherd's sacrifice, Maxine used the powers of animals to knock Brother Blood aside long enough to heal Shepherd with her own abilities. Annoyed, Brother Blood reached out and pulled Ellen into the Red as a hostage, to force Maxine to give up her power to him. Buddy arrived in time to prevent her from doing so, and knocked Blood to the ground long enough for Shepherd and his companions to surround him and capture him. With her family saved, Maxine had to live with the fact that her brother was gone, with the hope that her father would remain with she and her mother.^[26]

Buddy returned home to his wife and daughter on the condition that Socks and Shepherd - who would replace the murdered Totems - would allow Maxine to give up her role as Avatar of the Red to him. They agreed, and Maxine came to accept that her brother was in a better place, and that he did not need to be brought back from death.^[27] She and her family took a vacation on the Rio Celeste in Costa Rica which was disturbed when her father sensed an ancient creature lurking under the waters in which they swam, which he was later forced to kill while the slept to protect them.^[28] Without her brother, Baker felt isolated and was bullied at school, problems she shared with her school counselor but kept from her parents and teachers. On the night before Halloween, she projected the image of undead animals to scare off a group of bullies and befriended their victim, a boy named Bobbie, who she went trick-or-treating with the following night, once again protecting him from bullies.^[29]

Central City

The Bakers relocated to Central City, where Maxine quickly befriended another redheaded girl named Irey West, unaware that Irey was also the daughter of a superhero and had powers of her own. Maxine invited Irey to come to her house on a school night, and when Irey's mom refused Irey snuck out.^[30] They were kidnapped by a metahuman child trafficking ring but Irey's brother Jai followed them to the kidnapper's hideout and freed them. Irey claimed her "speed" wasn't working and shot lighting from her fingertip into Jai, who suddenly became super-strong and invincible and easily fought off the kidnappers.^[31]

Jai had a vision of their father in trouble and Irey was able to teleport the three of them to Gemworld, where Maxine learned that the West's dad was The Flash. The kids rescued Wally and Maxine revealed that her father was Animal Man. She helped the Wests defeat Eclipso.^[32] With Eclipso defeated, the Wests and Maxine safely returned to Earth 0 and Wally took Maxine home.^[33]

With a costume and the superhero identity of "Animal Girl," she fought a group of gorillas led by Monsieur Mallah alongside her father during the Dark Crisis, using the strength of an octopus in the local zoo. They were joined by the Flash Family, who made plans for a vegetarian barbecue between the Bakers and the Wests, while Maxine promised to meet up with Irey later to discuss her superhero name.^[34] At the barbecue, the Bakers—and all other attendees save the speedsters—were frozen in time^[35] by an attack on the Earth by the Fraction. The Flash Family foiled the invasion, freeing their friends and allowing the barbecue to continue.^[36]

Maxine made plans to patrol with the West twins to the chagrin of their babysitter Wallace West, only to be abducted through time to the Palace of Eternity by the child-like mobster Knives Maroney using an object known as the Eternity Mind. Maroney had banded together with a group of villains to put an end to the Superkids, a team of young heroes to which Baker and the Wests would eventually belong, before they could form. They were saved by the arrival of the Super Sons of an alternate Earth, also future members of the Superkids, allowing them to escape with the Eternity Mind deeper into the palace, in which Animal Girl could feel every animal to have ever lived through the morphogenetic field. To rescue Wallace West, who, as Kid Flash, had tracked down the West twins only to be captured by Maroney's villains, Baker and the Superkids overwhelmed Maroney by summoning a large number of animals with the Eternity Mind. With Kid Flash free, the Superkids used the artifact to send the villains to prison and themselves back to their own times.^[37]

Baker got a job at a pet store,^[38] began keeping a diary with Irey, and developed a crush on Jai. One day at school when he failed to return from the principal's office, Baker used her powers to make the class gerbil dance, giving his twin a distraction to cover her search for him.^[39] Faking stomach sickness to hide her actions from Irey, Baker arranged a date with Jai, which was interrupted by the speedster Godspeed, who had been transformed into a human-hornet hybrid by one of Beast Boy's Star Conqueror spores. While West fought with Godspeed, Baker took on the speed of a cheetah to keep up, only for the mutant to sting them with a cardiac suppressant neurotoxin. Baker resisted its effects with the metabolism of a honey badger and used its claws to fight back, while West restarted his own heart with Speed Force lightning and temporarily dispatched Godspeed with a supersonic clap. They were then discovered by Irey, who recruited them for her plan to deal with the animal mutations. Examining a spore extracted from the twins' great-aunt Iris West, Animal Girl found that she could control their effects. She encouraged the Flash Family and their allies to allow themselves to be taken over by the spores, and transformed them into a swarm of bees directed by their queen, the elder Iris West. By vibrating, the swarm overheated Godspeed and other victims of mutation, forcing the spores out of their bodies and reversing their transformations.^[38]

Powers and Abilities

Powers

Avatar of The Red: Maxine is the Avatar of the Red, a cosmic energy field that connects that connects all animal life via the "Life Web". Maxine's connection to the Red allows her to connect to the universe's morphogenetic field, providing her unlimited access to all animals in the universe regardless of origin, making her one of the most powerful beings to ever exist.^[2]^[27]
- Animal Control: Maxine has the ability to mentally interact with, and control animals.^[23] Her control over animals can reach a fundamental level, allowing her to control the life cycle of living creatures, such that she can purify Rot from living things.
  - Resurrection: Maxine can also use her power to resurrect dead animals.^[23]
- Animal Empathy: She has the ability to mentally sense, detect and communicate with animals.^[23]
- Animal Mimicry: Maxine can mimic any abilities of any animal. She does this by either focusing on a specific animal near her, or by sending her consciousness into The Red to draw power from an animal via the Life Web.^[23]^[27] Maxine is even capable of forcibly causing people's body parts to morph into animal parts.^[2]
  - Energy Construct Creation: Maxine can create constructs in the shape of the animals whose abilities she is using.^[34]
- Biokinesis: Maxine's connection to The Red allows her to manipulate flesh at will.^[4]
  - Healing: Maxine is capable of healing the injuries of others by manipulating their flesh on a molecular level.^[2]
- Reincarnation: During an instance where her mortal body was moments from being fatally wounded, Maxine projected her consciousness into the Red and linked with a nearby animal willing to give its body to her. Maxine's consciousness took over the animal's body, and she willed herself back into human form.^[40]
- Accelerated Healing: Maxine can use the energy of the Red to rapidly heal herself from her physical injuries at an incredible rate.
- Clairvoyance^[23]
- Oneiromancy: Maxine's connection to The Red has allowed her to communicate with the Parliament of Limbs and travel to The Red in her dreams.^[3]
  - Dimensional Travel^[3]

Abilities

Deception^[30]

Notes

Maxine Baker was created by Grant Morrison and Chas Truog, first appearing in Animal Man #1. However, in the Prime Earth continuity, Maxine Baker first appeared as part of the New 52 DC Universe in Animal Man (Volume 2) #1 by Jeff Lemire, Travel Foreman, and Dan Green.

Trivia

Maxine's best friend is Irey West.^[30]
She has a crush on Jai West.^[38]

Maxine Baker (Prime Earth)

Contents

History

The Hunt