Does "Animate Dead" need a corpse or skeleton?

[PochiPooom]

We are having a big discution abut this.

Traditions arcane
Cast Three Actions
material, somatic, verbal
Range 30 feet
Duration sustained up to 1 minute

Your magic dredges up a corpse or skeleton and fills it with necromantic life, and you force the dead to fight at your command. You summon a common creature that has the undead trait and whose level is –1; this creature gains the summoned trait. Heightening the spell increases the maximum level of creature you can summon.

[HammerJack]

No, it works like a generic summon spell.

[Nik Gervae]

Yep, just like any other creature is summoned from "wherever they live" to your location, your corpse or skeleton is dredged up from "some graveyard or battlefield" and summoned to your location.

Now if we could get an undead equivalent to an animal companion, necromancers would be all set! That just screams for a special dedication, and it would be dead easy (heh) to base it on Beastmaster with just a different entry feat and stats for a zombie or skeleton companion to begin with....

[Sedoriku]

Oooohhh, necromancer or blight based druid subclass anyone?