Showcase Presents Doom Patrol 2

collects The Doom Patrol 102-121.

The best line in this goes to Elasti-Girl, when being warned to stay out of a dangerous fight: “I’m not just a girl! I’m a full-time DP’er!” Ah, the good old days, when that was an innocent line. Or maybe the term was current then, and Arnold Drake was putting in a private joke.

The team is more or less an attempt to do what Marvel did with the Fantastic Four (it’s all too easy to parallel the characters), but making it weirder, ending up more like the X-Men (who I believe debuted after the DP): the team are freaks and misfits, and the villains are weirdoes. Sadly the writing is generally duller than it needs to be to fit that, silly as it often is – this may be emphasised by Grant Morrison’s genuinely bizarre later version. Arnold Drake also makes too little of the team’s strangeness: there is no Ben Grimm agonising here, no serious pain, minimal interaction with ordinary people, just some occasional grumbling and some Thing/Torch style friction between Robot Man and Negative Man. Drake was never a very exciting writer, but he does at least give us a striking, surprising and genuinely unusual ending, when the book was cancelled.

I rather like Bruno Premiani: he was a pretty clumsy layout artist, regularly choosing the wrong ‘camera position’ in terms of angle, distance and crop, but in an endearingly awkward way, and while his figurework was weak and often rather vague, he was a fluent and very tidy inker, especially terrific on hair (the Chief’s beard and Monsieur Mallah, the intelligent gorilla, offer great opportunities for that). I do wish he didn’t draw a face over the bandages on Negative Man’s face, though – that barely seems to be trying.

It’s an interesting oddity in DC’s generally much straighter line of superheroes (the weird ones, like this or Metamorpho or Metal Men, always stayed very much in the minor leagues), but I think I now consider it not too much more than an intriguing and mildly endearing small-time curiosity rather than a comic that genuinely offered very much in the way of entertainment and excitement.