Justice League #32 – Review

By: Geoff Johns (story), Doug Mahnke (pencils), Keith Champagne (inks), Andrew Dalhouse (colors)

The Story: Meet the Doom Patrol, superhero support group for the unsightly.

The Review: With the Metal Men, Johns showed off his unique knack for bringing old characters into modern times without losing their original appeal. At the same time, he’s not averse to updating characters with a much sharper twist. He proved that with the reintroduction of the Doom Patrol in Teen Titans, and especially with Niles Caulder’s transformation from altruistic paraplegic to emotional manipulator supreme.

Since it was Johns who made this sea-change in Caulder’s character, I suppose he felt an obligation to keep it in the new DCU. In some respects, it’s an interesting flipside to his genius. While feigning the deepest compassion for the Patrol, he simultaneously reinforces their insecurities: Robotman’s loss of body, the lethal risk of Negative Man’s negative form, Elasti-Girl’s gelatinous composition. It’d be quite ingenious if he went about it with a little more nuance.

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 #21 – Review

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

The Story: Robotman reflects on the many incarnations—literally, it turns out—of the Doom Patrol.

The Review: With cancellation imminent and the last two issues to go, it’s no wonder Giffen wants to take the opportunity to wax nostalgic about the Doom Patrol’s history.  It’s very smart of him to write this retrospective in the penultimate issue rather than the final one.  The Patrol, after all, is not a team of thinkers.  For them, the most fitting way to go out is to go with a bang, which leaves this issue as the calm before the storm.

This issue also acts as a much-needed character piece on Cliff, who’s always been the most centered member and as such the one you have the least handle on.  Rita’s the self-loathing one and Larry’s the smart-alec, but as it turns out, Cliff has more internal conflict than perhaps any of us believed.  His oft-repeated phrase says everything about why he’s the Patrol’s acting leader: “What’s important here?”  Giffen cleverly uses this mantra to analyze Cliff’s loyalty to the team.

Since the Patrol got revamped by Geoff Johns after Infinite Crisis, and even more so under Giffen’s work on this ongoing, the team has steadily lost more and more of their humanity.  Rita went from your usual size-changer to a protoplasmic shapeshifter; there’s no telling what’s underneath Larry’s bandages; and now Cliff reveals he’s almost purely robot—even Cyborg has more organics than that.

Yet despite losing the things that makes them biologically human, the Patrol remains the most human of all the superhero teams because they are also the most fallible.  They have no agenda other than to try to make the best of the lot life has given them, and they suffer constantly from feelings of insecurity and inferiority, especially compared to their more beloved peers.  They’re the X-Men of the DCU—the heroes most likely to be called freaks and criminals.  As Cliff realizes, they need each other because they only have each other; no one else can really relate.

Doom Patrol #20 – Review

By: Keith Giffen (writer), Matthew Clark & Ron Randall (pencillers), Art Thibert & John Livesay (inkers), Scott Clark with Dave Beaty, Jose Luis, Scott McDaniel (guest artists), Guy Major (colorist)

The Story: Wanted—studio space for four (one miniaturized), open access to power grid, appliances included.  Must love freaks.

The Review: With Doom Patrol’s cancellation imminent, it’s worth reflecting on the series’ possibly dooming shortcomings.  Of course, it’s a niche title, with a peculiar cast of characters.  It leans more towards comedy than drama—always risky, as comic book humor tends to be very hit or miss, as D.P. frequently is.  But the title’s biggest weakness is it has always been more interested in its character interaction than actually giving those characters things to do.

This issue serves as a good example: it’s one of the strongest of the series, yet basically involves nothing more than the Patrol looking for a place to crash after getting kicked off their base.  The interest comes from how each member’s particular brand of social awkwardness rubs off on the DCU’s more mainstream characters.  The ultimate unfruitfulness of the team’s efforts serves as a good reminder of how out of place they are in their world, and with readers in general.

You just can’t get a handle on these characters.  They’re ostensibly heroes, but as Beast Boy and Congorilla astutely point out, most of the Patrol’s endeavors to this point have come across more terrorist than heroic.  They’re more a gang of losers who can’t catch a break; most of their misadventures involve them acting out of self-preservation rather than for a good cause.

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.

Doom Patrol #18 – Review

By: Keith Giffen (writer), Matthew Clark and Ron Randall (pencillers), John Livesay (inker), Guy Major (colorist)

The Story: Things just get ickier for the Doom Patrol as the Aristocrats demonstrate the “hobbies” they’ve gained over the last century or two.  Hint: not stamp-collecting.

The Review: One of the flaws of the Star Wars prequel/sequel trilogy is how much time it spends pontificating on intergalactic politics.  It seems a little petty for a disturbance in the force.  The same thing applies to comics.  It’s ambitious of writers to insert some socio-political texture to the superhero world, but they’re not exactly the savviest individuals where world affairs are concerned.  The result, as in the recent string of Star Wars films, is a lot of oversimplified political concepts that never really seem like good motivators for superhero fare.

That’s the stumbling block Keith Giffen ran into last issue as he devoted a good half of it developing Oolong Island’s foreign policy (and bashing on North Korea).  Thankfully, the action this issue leaps into the red-hot zone as Keith Giffen sets aside those political intricacies to focus on giving the Doom Patrol some serious brawling to do.

Fast and furious seems the best pace for these characters to work at.  Their jokes fly better, or at least they seem to.  It’s the Laugh-In effect; before you have time to decide if the punchline is funny or not, you’re already pulled along to the next bit.  The friendly friction among the characters also have more to play with when they’re punching the lights out of immortal sadists than when they stand around ranting over the multitude problems in their lives.  The Patrol don’t do soul-searching very well.  They’re better off facing freaks even worse off than they are, and gleaning perspective out of the experience.

That said, the Aristocrats aren’t the most terrific opponents.  Physically, the ‘Crats have nothing on an energy being, a shapeshifter, and a robot.  They don’t bring much to the table in terms of motivating characters either.  Giffen writes them well, with all their excessive politeness on top of their lust for pain (theirs and others’), but he doesn’t embellish their history very well, nor why exactly they serve “Beloved Leader.”  And because they seem to have few stakes in the story, the stakes for the Patrol are even less.