Comic Book Review: DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #19: Doom Patrol

Comic Book Review: DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #19: Doom Patrol edited by Karen Berger

The Doom Patrol is one of DC Comics’ more interesting super-teams. First published in My Greatest Adventure #80 (1963), it concerned a group of people who felt isolated from normal humanity, led by a genius in a wheelchair, who nevertheless worked to protect normal humanity. It came out a few months ahead of the X-Men, but there’s no actual evidence Stan Lee had read this book before coming up with his own team. This slim volume contains four early tales of the “world’s strangest heroes.”

My Greatest Adventure had started as a general adventure anthology comic book, with the gimmick that all the stories were told in the first person. After a while, instead of “realistic” adventures, it had become a science fiction adventure comic, but even that wasn’t helping sales. So it was decided to make it a superhero book, as that was the strongest trend at the time. Writers Arnold Drake and Bob Haney collaborated on the first story (Drake going on to be the series’ main writer) and artist Bruno Premiani giving the characters their distinctive appearances.

“The Doom Patrol” begins with a bearded man addressing three people concealed in shadow. He knows that each of them has been dealt a blow by fate and shut themselves away from the world. But he believes that they still have the potential to do great good. He wheels forward, revealing that he himself is wheelchair-bound, but uses his genius intellect to go on adventures using his mind. Then one by one the light falls on the others as their backstories are revealed.

Rita Farr was an Olympic champion swimmer who’d become a Hollywood starlet. Exposure to strange geothermal fumes while on a shoot in Africa gave her the ability to grow immensely large or incredibly tiny. At first, she could not control these powers, and her career and social life were ruined. Now she does have the ability to control them, but still feels like an outcast.

Larry Trainor was a test pilot when a malfunction carried his rocket plane into the radioactive Van Allen belt for hours. The constant irradiation made him disfigured and highly radioactive himself (thus needing to wear special bandages to protect others) but also gave him the ability to project a “negative energy being’ from his body that can fly around and do various tasks. The Negative Man ability is limited though; Larry’s body becomes enfeebled when it’s outside him and if it stays out for more than sixty seconds, he’ll die!

And then there’s Cliff Steele, daredevil and race car designer who had a horrific crash that destroyed most of his body. A brilliant surgeon transplanted his brain into a mechanical body, which worked great. Except that no one wanted to race against a “robot man” and he was shunned from human society. At this point the bearded man reveals that he himself was the brilliant surgeon who performed the operation!

He shows them around his underground nerve centre which has advanced communication system able to alert him to events anywhere in the world. And suddenly, there’s a news report about a time bomb on a nearby pier. The Chief (his callsign) guides the three strangers through using their unique skillsets to disarm the threat. (Cliff carries a camera strapped to his chest so that the Chief can see what’s going on.) This convinces the trio to at least consider his offer to form a team.

We cut to the headquarters of General Immortus, the unfathomably old leader of a worldwide criminal organization and personal enemy of the Chief. He’s somehow managed to bug the Chief’s hideout and watches as that man briefs his team on their first official mission. The Chief’s drones (yes, he invented those in the 1960s) have located a crashed alien spaceship. It’s got a device on board that can turn any material into atomic fuel for the ship’s engine. Great stuff for humanity if the Chief can get hold of it for benevolent purposes, but a horrible hazard if it falls into the wrong hands.

Thus it’s time for our rookie heroes to try to claim the atomic converter despite General Immortus and his troops already having devised ways to counter their powers. General Immortus blows himself and the ship up (he’s fine) and the newspapers dub the heroes the “Doom Patrol.”

“The Brotherhood of Evil” is from Doom Patrol #86, as the book had been swiftly retitled without changing the numbering (a postal regulations thing.) It opens with the three other members of the Doom Patrol performing super-feats to produce birthday presents for the Chief. He’s touched, especially as they’ve managed to randomly pick his actual birthday to do this on. At this point, the Chief was concealing his birth name for…reasons; we wouldn’t find out until later that he was Niles Caulder, during a rematch with General Immortus.

There’s a bit of subplot as Rita sees inside Larry’s room for the first time and notes that it’s metal-lined. Larry anguishes that Rita would reject him if she knew what he looked like under the bandages.

Elsewhere, a military transport train is robbed of two sealed cars. We soon learn that the contents were components of ROG, a giant mecha designed by the Chief for deployment on the moon. The thief turns out to be a Mr. Morden, “a one-man crime wave”, who uses ROG to rampage seemingly randomly. The Doom Patrol gets a tip he’ll be at a dam next, and manage to fight the giant robot and its controller to a draw. It’s the first time the Doom Patrol has not won a fight.

The next day, Mr. Morden visits an exclusive girl’s school in Paris, France, which is a front for the Brotherhood of Evil, the world’s greatest criminal organization after General Immortus apparently died. He is introduced to Madame Rouge, at this point just a skilled actress and spy; the Brain, who is literally a brain in a jar; and Monsieur Mallah, a silverback gorilla that the Brain gave genius-level intellect and speech and who returned the favor by putting him in the jar when the Brain’s original body was destroyed. The crimes committed with ROG were Mr. Morden’s audition for the group, with forcing a draw against the Doom Patrol as his most impressive feat. But that’s not quite good enough, so the Brain assigns Monsieur Mallah to assist him in a rematch.

Notably, Mr. Morden apologizes for his initial poor reaction to Mallah’s appearance, which Mallah graciously accepts.

Morden, ROG and Mallah attempt to steal the Statue of Liberty. The Doom Patrol figured this might happen, and are able to smash ROG and defeat the villains. However, the Brotherhood members are able to divert the heroes with a fake bomb and escape…for now. (Without ROG, Mr. Morden is deemed unnecessary by the Brotherhood of Evil and expelled, he won’t reappear for decades.)

“Mento–the Man Who Split the Doom Patrol” jumps ahead to Doom Patrol #91. The Doom Patrol are dealing with yet another bomb, but this time their usual methods aren’t working. Suddenly, a costumed man with a stupid-looking helmet appears. He announces himself as Mento, and uses telekinesis to hurl the bomb away into the sky.

Impressive, but Mento isn’t here to join the Doom Patrol. He’s really here to hook up with Rita Farr. Under that goofy helmet, Mento is Steve Dayton, multimillionaire, financier, inventor, very handsome and professor of research psychology as well as in top physical condition. Many women would consider him a great catch…until they actually talked to him.

Unfortunately, the fact that he’s better than everyone else is a little too central to his thinking, so he acts like he’s better than everyone else. He’s also extremely rude to and about Rita’s friends in the Doom Patrol. Steve is technically correct that Rita can pass for a normal and very attractive human being and doesn’t have to hang out with “freaks.” But him pointing that out is a mark against him.

Rita feels comfortable in the Doom Patrol, where she’s the “mom friend” who keeps Cliff and Larry from letting their bickering tempers get out of hand, and makes sure the Chief remembers to take care of his human needs. And Steve’s a blowhard, so she’s not very inclined to accept his proposal.

The next day, red, yellow and blue “plastic men” start falling from the sky. The red ones can superheat, the yellow ones fly, and the blue ones are even stronger than they look. The Chief identifies them as “androids”, a form of artificial life. While the fantastic powers of the Doom Patrol are able to easily smash individual plastic men, more and more keep falling from the sky. Just as our heroes are exhausted by the sheer force of numbers, the plastic men abruptly stop arriving.

The Chief has figured out that the androids are coming from a flying city some 25 miles above the surface of the earth. But so has Mento, who decides to handle the problem solo using one of his own experimental aircraft.

Mento meets the master of the plastic men, Garguax. Garguax is a chunky, green-skinned alien, described as a “distillation of evil”, from a planet with much more advanced technology than Earth. He’s been banned from there, so came to our planet to test weaponry that will be used to conquer his own place. Mento’s powers prove useless against Garguax, and he’s put in a prison chamber to be tortured into cooperating with the invader.

By the time the Doom Patrol arrives in the Chief’s experimental craft, Mento is working with Garguax, though this lasts under a minute before Negative Man knocks him out. Rita thinks Mento wasn’t willingly working with the alien, so drags him along as the Doom Patrol navigates the various deathtraps in the flying city. Eventually Mento recovers and helps destroy the plastic men manufacturing device and exploding the city. (Garguax is fine, he had an escape craft, though we don’t see it here.)

Rita parts on better terms with Steve, though it will be several more humble pie incidents before he has enough character development to call their relationship love.

“The Enemy Within the Doom Patrol” skips back to Doom Patrol #90. After a clash with the Brotherhood of Evil not seen in this volume, Madame Rouge had been captured and turned over to the police. At the beginning of this story, “a crafty lawyer had her freed on a technicality” but since she was in America illegally, she still got deported. On her way out, Rouge gave a newspaper interview where she personally insulted each of the public Doom Patrol members.

Rita goes to a zoo to pet lions so she can cool down.

We return to that Parisian girls’ school, where the students express faith in their teacher. Which she immediately betrays by meeting with the Brain and Mallah in the secret area of the school. The geniuses have come up with an experimental ray for Madame Rouge to be exposed to. Three seconds the first time.

The results are impressive. Madam Rouge is now a shapeshifter, able to stretch and compress her body at will, and even change her facial features to look like anyone she can picture.

This sets off a plotline in which Madame Rouge disguises herself as the members of the Doom Patrol to lead them into traps to kill them. It never quite works, in one case because Madame Rouge subconsciously identifies with the person she’s trying to kill and can’t pull the trigger, and once because she calls Rita “Elasti-Girl”, which none of her friends would ever do.

Rita gets ticked off and throws Madame Rouge too far away to capture. The villainess returns to the Brotherhood of Evil and the Brain promises to correct the flaws in the ray.

The issue ends with a cover gallery and a cutaway diagram of Robotman’s internal construction.

The Doom Patrol was unique for a number of reasons, including their first series ending with the (apparent) death of the four core members. By the time this digest came out, a second Doom Patrol team had been assembled, but they were not popular (being more like a normal superhero team) and were mostly used in crossovers. It wasn’t until the Grant Morrison run, which really leaned into the weirdness aspect that the group became really hot.

Comparisons to the X-Men are obvious (both fought an Evil Brotherhood), but they also contrast. The X-Men stories had fairly heavy prejudice themes (particularly akin to racism), while the difficulties the Doom Patrol faced because of their various disabilities were somewhat played down in favor of exciting adventures, and their opponents tended towards the freakish.

I like the Bruno Premiani art; the character designs are good, and I especially like the faces of General Immortus and unbandaged Larry Trainor in his style. One oddity–Rita wears a tiny miniskirt as Elasti-Girl, and the art is almost always careful not to give us an upskirt shot when she’s giant. The one time it absolutely cannot be avoided there’s a convenient cloud of smoke obscuring the area.

All of these stories have been reprinted elsewhere in more complete collections, so while nifty, this item is only for the Doom Patrol completists looking for rarities.