A little less than a year later, the Patrol return to assist Supergirl in her series in the anthology title The Superman Family. Although the stories are, for the most part, the generally pretty undramatic fare of comics in the throes of the Code, I have a soft spot for these kinds of series. These, to me, are comics aimed squarely at kids, and at giving them a fair bit for their hard-earned money. Some of the stories are standalones and some are parts of series. They're all well-rendered, much in the vein of the era, like their stories. One thing I will say for this era of DC is that despite having some lackluster stories, their artists were still top of the line.
The Patrol stumbles into trouble today while on holiday in England. I suppose that's as good a place as any to find them, and let's assume that some strange case took them to the United Kingdom. They don't actually meet up with Supergirl in this issue, though both she and the Patrol face menaces that are affecting local gravity with some pretty catastrophic consequences. I'll likely get sick of writing it, but they act very much like superheroes here, saving people and trying to stop the menace, and there's nothing wrong with that, but usually it's more of a struggle for the Doom Patrol to act like superheroes. More often than not the situations within which they find themselves remind our heroes of just how fragile they really are, which in turn prompts them to adopt more unorthodox thinking. Not so with the New Doom Patrol. They wade in, hands blazing, and blow things up.
(Oh, the Lois Lane story today has the intrepid reporter tracking down a baby trafficking ring and just about beating the leader of it to death. Literally. She has to be pulled off at the last moment. It was pretty intense, and not at all what I was expecting from this series.)
"For all our insecurities, it seems we have some use in this world, after all!"
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