I showed the cover of this issue to my son to prove to him that the original Doom Patrol's villains were every bit as strange as the Morrisonian ones he enjoys so much. What I didn't realize, as it's been so very long since I've read this run, is that Mr. 103, our villain, actually does transform into that magnet, complete with his head sticking out the top. I actually thought it was a more symbolic cover.
The lead story today was sort of middling, involving the Chief ending the Doom Patrol because he is imminently going to die, but he doesn't tell the others so that they'll keep on being the Doom Patrol? For a really smart guy, Caulder's logic is highly flawed sometimes. And, of course, if I read it from the perspective of Morrison's take on the character, he's also shady as fuck literally all the time. While all of this is going on, our shape-shifting element villain turns up. There's some neat little science factoids dropped, but it's a pretty straightforward tale.
The back-up, "60 Sinister Seconds," is much neater. A story that charts the single minute that Negative Man can be outside of Larry's body as he zips around the world trying to prevent a Third World War. There's was one panel that really stood out for me:
It's really a pretty epic panel, but what I really love about it is that it has a peculiar aesthetic about it that makes it impossible to place with regard to an era of Doom Patrol. This looks like it could have come out of Richard Case's take on the team, Erik Larsen's, John Byrne's. This could be any of the incarnations of the negative spirit, perhaps with the exception of the current one. Appropriate, then, that it's a picture of a hero holding together an important conversation - that's kind of what these comics do, isn't it?
More to come...
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