DOOM L O R PAT
collected editions review
The
A R C H I V Eby S Arnold Drake
and Bruno Premia ni
Reading the original Doom Patrol is like watching a marathon of Outer Limits episodes—there’s a robot, a 50-foot woman, a radioactive man with a bandaged face, an immortal mastermind, an intelligent talking gorilla, a far-Eastern mystic, a green-skinned alien conqueror, a snobby jetsetter with a “Mento” helmet, bubbling lava monsters, a repugnant sea beast, an animal-vegetable-mineral menace, and even an evil brain in a jar!
The Doom Patrol Archives Volume 1: My Greatest Adventure/ Doom Patrol #80–89 DC Comics • 2002 Hardcover • 226 pages color • $49.95 US Volume 2: Doom Patrol #90–97 DC Comics • 2003 Hardcover • 218 pages color • $49.95 USA
I loved The Outer Limits (1963–65) during my wee years, and followed it in reruns for years after that, but DC’s Doom Patrol just didn’t register on my radar. I wasn’t alone. Grade-schoolers like me were suckered in by flashier funnybooks like Batman, Superman, and upstart Marvel Comics’ hyperbolic offerings, but most of us ignored the Doom Patrol throughout its five-year run, perhaps discovering the oddball team during its 1977 Showcase revival, or in the early 1980s in the pages of The New Teen Titans. The Doom Patrol, now the subject of two DC Comics Archives editions (presumably with more to follow), commanded a loyal, but small, cult audience during its original run. Much has been written about the coincidental timing of the debuts of DC’s tragic team of societal outcasts—Robotman (Cliff Steele, a former daredevil whose body was destroyed in an accident, his brain being encased in a robotic form), Elasti-Girl (a babelicious starlet named Rita Farr who could grow or shrink), Negative Man (Larry Trainor, a living mummy from whom an electromagnetic super-being could burst forth), and their wheelchair-bound, big-brain leader, Niles Caulder, aka the Chief—and Marvel’s similarly themed X-Men, who first appeared three months after the DP (another famous DC/Marvel “who came first?” fluke, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing, is the subject of next issue’s “Greatest Stories
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