Doom Patrol #22 – Review

By: Keith Giffen (writer), Ron Randall (penciller), Art Thibert (inker), Guy Major (colorist)

The Story: The Doom Patrol takes back their base, D-Day style!

The Review: Having been ignored, maligned, and mistreated not only in the DCU, but also in the real world of comics readers, it’s fitting the Doom Patrol would use their final issue to make one last, desperate attempt to gain some self-respect.  Getting kicked out of their home and turned into house-crashers (with a reputation for terrorism) overnight stung, and they’re determined to sting back for once.

That said, other than to give them a splashy mission for their last hours in print, the reasons for them retaking Oolong Island aren’t really there.  Up until their forced departure, they spent plenty of issues bemoaning how Oolong had gone to the dogs, the crazies they had to deal with regularly, and the country’s shady political alignment.  Maybe they plan to reform the place on their own terms (and recover their heroic status in so doing), but we’ll never get to see that.

We also haven’t seen enough of how Mr. Somebody (in the body of Veronica Cale)’s handled things in their absence.  I mean, how much worse can an unscrupulous, extradimensional entity run a corrupt island of mad scientists and their illegal experiments anyway?  Even by this issue, Mr. Somebody hasn’t managed to earn the respect of Oolong’s security head yet—it doesn’t look like he’s in any danger of taking over the world any time soon, as he boasts to General Immortus.

Mostly, you get a lot of action in this title’s series finale, though only parts of it offer much excitement: Cliff diving into Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man’s head and pulling a root to short him out is pretty good times).  But by and large, the blandness of the battle reminds you what little firepower the Patrol really has.  If not for Danny the Island’s (a big promotion from his “the Street” days) interference, the Patrol probably would never have pulled this off.

Doom Patrol #19 – Review

By: Keith Giffen (writer), Matthew Clark & Ron Randall (pencillers), Art Thibert & Sean Parsons (inkers), Guy Major (colorist)

The Story: A mercenary group of ne’er-do-wells facing off a team of super-freaks on the beautiful shores of Oolong Island as a volcano explodes?  Can someone say reality show?

The Review: Given the outcast nature of the Doom Patrol, it’s no wonder team-ups are a rarity for them.  On one side, they’re pretty much outmatched in number and power by almost every other team in the DCU—even the Outsiders.  On the other side, their specific dynamic doesn’t mesh well with conventional superheroes.  The Patrol serves best when left to their own devices, and not mixed up with characters that call attention to the small scale of their doings.

The one exception may be the Secret Six, who are nearly as weird and antisocial as their Oolong opponents in this issue.  Besides creator of the Secret Six, Gail Simone, one of the few writers capable of delivering the special chemistry of the Six is probably Giffen.  He doesn’t have the subtlety of Simone, being broader and leaning more toward slapstick, but he gets in a pretty good joke here and there (upon being beset by the Science Squad, Scandal remarks, “I think we’re about to be attacked by the chess club.”).

Still, despite having few dull moments between the two teams’ battle royale, some noticeable flaws keep the story from achieving the quality it should have, given the promising premise.  Being a crossover plot, if you happen to not be a Secret Six reader (though, on that note, why wouldn’t you be—it’s only totally awesome), you’d be hard-pressed to get exactly what’s happening here.

And if you did read the first part of the story, you’ll notice how truncated that story seems in this issue.  After all, S.M.A.S.H., the Six’s current employers, basically come to annex Oolong Island as their own, then end up fleeing with their tails between their legs in the course of four pages.  It just feels like the story never gets to build up before it winds down.  There’s little hope the next issue of Secret Six will continue the story, as the Six aren’t likely to work again with people who abandon them to the mercy of their enemies.