The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1471: The Doom Patrol #117, February 1968

Niles lets his heart run away with him, and it costs him the Doom Patrol.

It's amazing to me how many times this "team" breaks up or dies over the course of their 4+ year run. And how many enemies Niles makes that come back to wreak havoc on his life. Perhaps we need to see a series called "Young Niles Caulder" - though given the Chief's propensities, perhaps that would be too dark a read.

I'm glad to see that Rita is getting her time to shine in the new television series. As you may well know, we're coming up on the last issue of this initial run, and poor Rita dies at the end of the issue. Ostensibly, all of them die, but Rita is the only one who stays dead, pretty much from 1968 to the early 2000s and John Byrne's reboot of the team. I'm glad she's about in the Young Animal stuff now. Well, I'm assuming she is. We'll see if we get more Young Animal.

Another thing I'm grateful to the show for is for giving Rita a character. She's much less-developed in the original series, but reading her as a haughty, though soft underneath, movie starlet makes so much more sense. Even her marriage to Steve Dayton smacks of the celebrity marriages we see nowadays. Rather than the mother figure of the Doom Patrol, Rita is the occasionally shitty, but very often right, older sister.

One last thing - this is the first time in a long while in the series that the back-up feature has been a stand alone story, separate from the Doom Patrol. "The Man with 100 Wigs" tells the story of a thief who gains the powers of historical persons by wearing facsimiles of their hair.

Oh, and then there's the Native Americans in the story. They charge in, on horseback in the middle of a city, to rescue the team from the Black Vulture and have all the hallmarks of a disgusting racial stereotype. Until Rita speaks broken English to her rescuers, only to have them reply in proper English. It's revealed that the leader of the group is a teacher at Cal Tech. So we have a terrible visual representation, but a relatively nuanced narrative representation. The tribe owes Niles a debt for helping them to keep their land from falling into the hands of the Black Vulture. I wonder if Drake and Premiani did this purposefully - one of the major themes of the Doom Patrol is not judging books, and people, by their covers.

"Man, I pulled a real Custer! I underestimated the Indians!"