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 #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.