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Mar 10, 2018

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1109: The Doom Patrol #103, May 1966

https://www.comics.org/issue/20020/

For once, the threat is not a weird space alien. Well, sort of. A rocket flight into the upper atmosphere goes terribly wrong when a visiting scientist is exposed to cosmic rays that mutate him into The Meteor Man! Those pesky cosmic rays. Always messing up space flights.

But that's actually an interesting thing to think about. The cosmic rays turn poor Professor Ormsby into a creature of living rock that's on fire. There's two other unfortunate astronauts whose bodies were similarly mutated by cosmic rays, though each got one power instead of possessing both. Perhaps today's comic was a sly dig, or a genuine homage, to the Thing and the Human Torch of the Fantastic Four. Even the cover smacks of early FF covers, the team in combat with (or fleeing from, I suppose) some strange creature. Heck, Rita even has similar powers to Reed Richards.

I wonder if there's a way we could track novelty in superheroes and superhero teams, based on their relative distance from significant superhero developments. For example, the further away a character gets from Superman, the farther afield the character's power set or origin are from the Man of Steel. Or, in the case of the Doom Patrol, measuring their distance from the Fantastic Four (approximately 2 years) means they are very similar to that venerable and important group. Looking at the current incarnation of the Doom Patrol, they're very far from the FF.

Just a thought.

More to come...

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