FSC: DC COMICS PRESENTS #52

I seem to remember picking up this issue of DC COMICS PRESENTS at some non-traditional outlet that my family had visited rather than one of my regular haunts for new comics. I was reading the book on a semi-regular basis, and even if I hadn’t been, the appearance of the Doom Patrol in this issue would have been enough to garner my interest–I was a big fan of that group going back to when I first encountered the team in the pages of SUPER-TEAM FAMILY in the 1970s. But the real reason why this issue is noteworthy isn’t down to either of the two headliners, but rather the all-new foe that they encountered in this story, who would soon go on to become a noteworthy player in the DC line. I’m speaking, of course, about Ambush Bug.

This story was written by Paul Kupperberg and illustrated by Keith Giffen, working under the oversight of editor Julie Schwartz. Kupperberg had put a bunch of work into reviving the Doom Patrol as a new group of characters after the original team had been killed off in the final issue of the original run, so his involvement here stems directly from that connection. But while he wrote this story, he wasn’t the creator of Ambush Bug. That was, rather, Giffen, who had come up with the characters as an extrapolation of the Lunatik character he had introduced in DEFENDERS some time previous. Giffen described his conception for Ambush Bug as being “Bigs Bunny as a super-villain”, but in this initial appearance, he’s a bit more of a plausible character compared to where he’d go in later appearances. Still, there was something here that caught the fancy of the readership, who demanded to see more of the Bug. Giffen and Schwartz were only too happy to oblige.

The story opens with Superman attempting to prevent the destruction of a power planet in New Jersey that’s been impacted by a strange energy figure. The Man of Steel is able to save the plant, but he can’t quite corral the entity that did the destroying. It’s worth pointing out up front that Giffen very much based his depiction of Superman in this story on the character’s early exploits, having him strike poses that were commonplace in the 1940s such as on the opening splash page and in the last panel on the page above. There was a bit of artifice to this, but it did give the character just a tiny bit of the flavor of the original Joe Shuster version, which was nice. Anyway, Clark Kent gets back to the newsroom in time for the live coverage of the Metropolis Day Parade–just in time to witness a disappearing figure in a green bug costume kill the preening District Attorney before vanishing into thin air.

Clark kicks coverage over to Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen who are on site before rushing off to become Superman. On his way to the parade route, he encounters the strangely-familiar shadowy form once again, and tries to grab it. Bad idea, as he gets his teeth jolted by the thing’s energy. Meanwhile, the parade somehow continues (Giffen not-so-subtly sneaks in parade balloons of Skywise from ELFQUEST, Judge Dredd and a balloon of a Fred Hembeck-style Superman) but the broadcast is interrupted by the malefactor, who introduces himself as Ambush Bug, card-carrying super-villain. He doesn’t seem to have much of a motivation here apart from a desire to be a bad guy, but he can instantly teleport himself away whenever danger is near, and he’s a bit of a pain in the neck.

Meanwhile, Superman awakens from being zapped to find himself confronted by Tempest and Celsius, who introduce themselves as member of the Doom patrol. They tell Superman that the person who knocked him out of the sky was their teammate Negative Woman, who has lost control of her powers and gone rogue. Superman hasn’t heard about any new Doom Patrol, (this despite his cousin Supergirl having shared an adventure or two with them) so he’s dubious–and Ambush Bug takes advantage of the confusion to pop in, address Tempest and Celsius like they’re confederates, and cause Superman to clobber them. Ain’t he a stinker? The Bug has also become aware of the random rampage of Negative Woman, which sets his heart aflutter.

At this point, Robotman shows up–a member of the Doom Patrol that Superman has met before–and he vouches for the newcomers and loops the Man of Steel into the situation with Negative Woman. She had encountered the energy being that had once inhabited Larry Trainor and it had come to reside within her. But now, her body can’t contain it any longer, and the pain is causing her to run wild. So the Patrol and Superman try to contain Negative Woman so that they can help her, but their efforts are thwarted by that pain-in-the-ass Ambush Bug flitting in and out. Eventually, Superman realizes that there’s a network of robot insects flying around that are what Ambush Bug uses to teleport from place to place, and the Man of Steel swiftly collects them up and destroys them. Then it’s only a matter of seconds before Ambush Bug’s teleportational tech fails and he’s clocked by Robotman.

With Ambush Bug down, it’s a simple matter for Superman to capture Negative Woman in a lead-lined container, which leads to a final page epilogue. The point of this story from the Doom Patrol side was to turn the more straightforward Negative Woman into more of a freak like her progenitor, and here we learn that she’s going to have to spend the rest of her life swaddled in similar bandages to contain her radioactive partner. I didn’t love this development, to be honest–I see the merit in it, but I liked Negative Woman as something different from Negative Man rather than as a straight-up knock-off, and this all seemed like a long way to go to duplicate the surface of Larry Trainor’s tragedy without the actual substance of it. Oh, and Ambush Bug nee Irwin Schwab talks pretty much straight to the camera, announcing that he’d be back before you knew it. He was right as it turned out, the character only grew in popularity from here, and would eventually be featured first in a back-up series in ACTION COMICS and thereafter in a series of limited series and specials throughout the 1980s. He was very much the progenitor of more modern day characters such as Deadpool and Harley Quinn.