BHOC: DOOM PATROL #101

When I was a kid, my grandparents would come to our house practically every Saturday. They lived just about an hour away and were close with my mother, so they’d make the drive and arrive, donuts in hand, for whatever the family wound up doing that weekend day. You could make our family dog at the time go absolutely crazy excited just by saying “Grandma’s coming!” to him, a fact that we kids abused on more than one occasion. My grandparents never really understood my obsession with comic books–my grandmother famously said on more than one occasion, “Why do you need so many books?” But every once in a while, I was able to talk them into taking me on an outing to a comic shop. And that’s how we found ourselves one Saturday visiting Ed’s Coins and Stamps in the Sun-Vet Mall, which I had discovered carried boxes of back issue comic books towards the rear of the store.

The last time I’d visited Ed’s, I had discovered that they had an extensive collection of DOOM PATROL back issues. I hadn’t yet come across any copies of DOOM PATROL anywhere else, and I was in love with the team from their appearances in SUPER-TEAM FAMILY and their revival in SHOWCASE. The last time I’d been in Ed’s, I had picked up DOOM PATROL #100, reckoning that as an anniversary issue it would be something special. It really wasn’t, but I did enjoy it. So on this outing, I decided to continue forward from that point and picked up DOOM PATROL #101.

DOOM PATROL was an attempt by writer Arnold Drake to channel some of what he saw happening at rival Marvel Comics into the DC line. Drake was one of the few up at DC who really understood what Stan Lee and his contemporaries were doing. So the Doom Patrol was made up of self-styled “freaks” who carried with them a chunk of self-loathing and a prickly attitude that caused them to bicker and fight like a Marvel team. The strip still had most of the sensibilities of a DC series of the era, but especially at the outset, its focus on characterization and interpersonal relationships made it a lot more interesting than the typical DC release of its era.

A quickie pause here for the Patrol Postscripts letters page, which ran in the front half of the book between the two chapters of the lead story. Editor Murray Boltinoff enjoyed running snippets of letters that he got from fans, in that way representing (or misrepresenting in certain circumstances) more of their opinions every issue than most other editors. This particular letters page notes a recent visit to the DC offices by Dr. Jerry Bails, the godfather of comic book fandom.

Unfortunately, by the time this particular issue was coming out, two things had happened that changed the look and feel of the DC books at the time. The first is that DC began to reduce the size of its original artwork after Murphy Anderson discovered that the smaller page size would allow for four pages to be shot at once on the printing beds of the time, a tremendous savings. A lot of DC artists had a tough time adapting to the smaller size, including DOOM PATROL’s Bruno Premiani. This caused him to start building pages in a non-grid format that often caused editor Murray Boltinoff to have to add “arrows of shame” to the pages to guide the readers in the correct reading order, as he had to on these past two pages. It also looks to me like Bruno was attempting to channel some of Jack Kirby’s dramatics, possibly at the request of the writer or editor. But his strength was in representational imagery, and he was never entirely comfortable exaggerating for dramatic effect in the manner of Kirby.

The second thing that changed DC at this time was the impending premiere of the BATMAN television series. In its wake, the DC books tended to skew their super hero offerings in a more overtly camp direction in emulation of the popular show. In the case of DOOM PATROL, that meant that the pathos was dialed down and the zaniness was ramped up. Keying into that, Drake and Premiani had introduced Beast Boy in the previous issue, a green-skinned kid with a bad attitude who could transform himself into any animal., and who got on the DP’s nerves. Beast Boy was instantly popular, and the strip for a time became more about him than any of the other principle characters.

The lead story in this issue concerned the team investigating strange signals from outer space on a lonely, remote island. There, they encounter and do battle with Kranus, an enormous robot. Each of Kranus’’ disparate parts can operate independently, giving the team a challenge even after they tear Kranus apart. This all turns out to be the work of their recurring nemesis, the Brain, who is guiding Kranus from within the Robot King’s head The Brain of course gets away at the end once Kranus is disposed of. Much more interesting to me was the announcement at the end of the story of a crossover between this title and CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which was also being written by Drake. At the time this would have come out, a story going from one title to a completely different title was still something of a rarity. I resolved myself to try to find both parts of this event the next time I could hoodwink my relatives into taking me to Ed’s.

The back-up serial, which had begun the month before, was about the pre-Doom Patrol adventures of Robotman. A flaw in the transplanting of his brain into his robot body had made him hostile and violent (as though losing every part of himself apart from his brain might not have done that anyway) turning him into a Robot Man-iac that had to be hunted down by the Chief, This was pretty clearly inspired by the success of THE FUGITIVE on television, and didn’t entirely jibe with what had been established in the first DP story. But it was still pretty exciting. In this particular tale, Cliff Steele makes allies of a quartet of fellow outcasts from society, and is able to elude the police and the Chief while he searches for the man who made him into a robot so as to kill him–not yet realizing that the person in the wheelchair who is pursuing him is the same man.