Okay, so I didn't manage to find The Infinite Loop #5 or 6 today. I was at a comic store, but there were multiple issues of the new Howard the Duck series, and the last issue of The Surface, finally, so I got those instead.
So today we'll look at the Doom Patrol entry in Mark Waid's little love letter to the 60s, The Silver Age. Looking back over my tag list, it seems odd to me that I've only got one other issue featuring the Doom Patrol in my project thus far. They are, by far, my favourite superhero team, based almost entirely on Grant Morrison's take on the team in the late 80s. It's just that good. But what is quite lovely about having been so enamoured of that run is that I went back and bought ALL of the appearances of the Doom Patrol from their first one in My Greatest Adventure #80 up to, at the time, the final issue of the Vertigo Rachel Pollack-penned #88. They've since had 3 other series, plus a s issue mini-series in the New 52 featuring Robotman. And I think they've shown up as a back-up team in some of the newer DC stuff, but I'll be honest, I'm a little afraid to see what DC have done to my favourite characters.
This issue, though published in the waning days of the 20th century, is actually historically set about 40 years earlier, just as the Doom Patrol were coming into their own. It's set in the second phase of the Doom Patrol - you can tell by the red and white costumes - an era that saw the world's strangest heroes beginning to interact a bit more with the superhero universe around them. Not that they weren't still outcasts, but they were outcasts that were accepted by the less-outcast Justice Leagues and Teen Titans that were poster children for the Silver Age. Tom Peyer manages to capture quite nicely the feel of the dialogue and action of those early comics in this part of the crossover, though the art by Bachan doesn't quite have that Silver Age look to it. It does, however, have that weird, Doom Patrol look to it.
The story itself is sort of mediocre, especially when compared to the truly weird comics within which this story ostensibly takes place. The whole Silver Age crossover is a bit lame, but I think that that lameness is actually intentional. Comics in the 60s, especially DC superhero comics, were a bit lame. Sometimes I think it's how they differentiated themselves from the gritty drama of early Marvel comics. Sometimes I think it's because they'd been neutered by the Comics Code Authority. Regardless, at the time, Doom Patrol was charting weird waters, and I'll forever be grateful to Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani for these characters.
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