Missed It by That Much
Faced with the choice of almost everything you’d want, what would you choose? It’s the sort of question that abounds in bad science fiction shows and one-shot comic stories – you know, with titles like “The Man Who Had Everything”. The trouble with having everything is that you’ve only got one you with which to enjoy it. Only one mouth to drink with, only two eyes to read with, only one – well you get the picture. For me the abundance is reading and I’m doing so much of it that I’ll have to engage some staff any moment now (‘Farquarson, read and precis Proust’s ‘A La Recherche du Temps Perdue’ for me and let me know if I enjoyed it’ . ‘At once sir’.).
Every time I pick up a free comic, I’m painfully aware that I could have chosen others. About two weeks ago I could have chosen a little book with sexy demons and Mafiosi in it by Garth Ennis. I could have picked up any of the phone book sized Cerebus collections, an archive of the Justice League of America, about eighty different Japanese comic collections or even the Claire Bretecher collections that my ex-pat sister left here. Instead I chose Doom Patrol and I’m feeling a bit like the bloke who loses his bet with the devil in the old Twilight Zone shows.
I picked up a hardback collection of Doom Patrol’s early stories, partly because I heard about them while wasting time on the web site of a bloke who used to write and draw them and who had arguments about ‘core concepts’. Partly I liked the name. I was avoiding Neil Gaiman yet again (one of my major hobbies is avoiding reading anything by someone who gets Tori Amos to write his introductions).
Early Doom Patrol resembles the X-Men in some respects, something the editors of the DC archive collection make much of. Both stories are about a super-group commanded by a wheelchair-bound professor. Both fought a Brotherhood of Evil at some point. Both prided themselves on how strange their heroes were. Both were cancelled after about three years in the 1960s and were brought back later. Both – no there isn’t any more and frankly the assembly of ‘both’s there was reaching a bit. Any moment now, I thought to myself, the editor is going to mention the astonishing coincidence that both comics used paper.
Doom Patrol try hard to look cool.
The differences, on the other hand are fairly damning. The X-Men have a reason for being together. They’re all mutants and are all feared by normal people. They’re different to their fellow super heroes that way. Fear of persecution is very important to the X-Men; they get some reflected holocaust glory for being a bit like the Jews, they get to fight bigots and quarrel about wether to beat racism with niceness or to just annihilate the racists. The X-Men do not get a homeland in the Middle East, although there are so many of them now what with all the spin-offs that they would probably find Syria a bit snug.
The Doom Patrol are held together by being strange. That’s not much of a bond. I’m strange in many ways but haven’t joined a super-group and don’t need someone in a wheelchair to organise my life. They’re strange. All super heroes are strange in one way or another. The Doom Patrol’s strangenesses are peculiar to each member. One of them, an allegedly beautiful actress can grow tall or small. Since she can control this ability and is reasonable looking, it’s not much of a motivation for hiding from the world.
Cliff is a brain stuck in a really wonky robot body. I can see that this would be awkward. He’s bitter because he can’t resume his life as a ‘daredevil’ without being people saying unkind things about his super robot body. I feel his pain and if I were ‘robot man’ I’d go and have a word with the people who designed Iron Man el pronto and get them to rustle up a more stylish body.
The other member of the team is ‘negative man’ who has to wear bandages all the time because he’s radioactive. He has a black guy inside him. Wait a minute, let me put that differently. If he likes he can collapse and ‘Negative man’, who is a black outline without any features, can hurtle out of his body at the speed of light and do all sorts of useful stuff. The catch is that Negative man has to be back in his body in 60 seconds time or he dies. I don’t know how they established the 60 second limit without killing the guy, but he’s pretty certain about it. The time limit leads to a lot of suspense – either Negative Man procrastinates on the way home (banner headline “get out of that Library Negative Man or Larry will Die!!!) or some fiend invents a way of trapping negative man (this happens quite a bit). So he’s all resentful at being stuck in bandages and close to death all the time.
I can see why Robotman and Negative Man feel apart from the common crowd, but not why they need to spend time with each other. They banter a bit, calling each other ‘tin man’ and ‘mummy’ respectively. Banter sounds odd from people who have no real reason to be together at all. Like the whole group, they have been placed together, rather than belonging together.
Oh and there’s ‘the chief’ who hangs around in his wheelchair sending the Doom Patrol off on missions. He feels bad about being in a wheelchair. I don’t mean to diminish his suffering, but there are heaps of people in wheelchairs. They play basketball, cycle, ski and do all sorts of stuff. The Chief, as the rest of them call him, has turned his back on a huge fellowship of the wheelchair bound in order to help the world out with the Doom Patrol, which is very altruistic of him, but his strangeness isn’t all that special.
The enemies each team face are another difference. The X-Men usually face other mutants, who’ve taken the ‘fight the power’ option. So there’s a reason for it all. They can fight and have arguments about acceptance, toleration, the establishment….honestly, if you’re one of the few comics people who’s never read X-Men, it’s more fun than that makes it sound. In Doom Patrol, the villains come out of the ‘villain of the week’ drawer. There’s General Immortus, whose talent is to have lived for a long time, being wrinkled and escaping certain death. He reminds me of my Prime Minister.
Immortus proves he’s evil by spoiling the plot on the front cover.
There’s animal/mineral/vegetable man who changes into a lot of things and is crap beyond belief. There’s the Brotherhood of Evil, who are led by a brain in a vat. In philosophy class I used to speculate about brains in vats. Now, thanks to comics, I know that they can see and talk like real people and are often evil. For no good reason.
Doom Patrol reminds me of my nieces’ latest term of abuse, ‘random’. Things that happen in bad fiction are random, just more convoluted forms of those childish stories that consist of colourful events connected by the words ‘and then’. Even Doom Patrol’s name is random; a reporter calls them that, for no particular reason and the Chief says ‘Hey, we’re called Doom Patrol! Do you like it?’.
Another major difference between Doom Patrol and X-Men is that when X-Men came back, it became one of the biggest things in comics and spawned three movies and countless spin-offs. When Doom Patrol came back – well, it never really took off. Seems to have scraped along from re-launch to re-launch.
I’d come up with some profound reason for this, something connected to the over arching theory of Good Comics, but that way madness lies. The original Doom Patrol seems to be an example of smashing the rocks together and not making fire and I don’t think it’s anything more profound than that. Never mind. Next time, I’ll go for the sexy demon stories.
