The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1108: The Doom Patrol #102, March 1966

I may love the Doom Patrol, but sometimes even their adventures are a bit lame. This one was all about Multi-Man resurrecting some ancient sea-dwelling soldiers and attempting to...take over the world, I guess. It also features fricking Mento, whom I hate. Rita Farr is a lovely character in this series, always the peacemaker, but never afraid to put herself in the way of danger. But in a few issues, when Mento somehow convinces her to marry him, the character falls apart for me. The issues of the series that feature Mento are amongst my least favourite. There's just no reason to have him as part of the series, as far as I'm concerned.

Can you tell I don't like Mento?

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1107: Challengers of the Unknown #48, March 1966

Sorry for the break in "season 2" of The Doom Patrol. (I've actually decided I'm going to read a chunk of the series once a year - the breakdown has it as a nine-year process to read up to what is current now!) One of the dearest people I know came for a visit, and I wanted to spend as much time as possible with him. Hence, some fill-in posts.

But when we last left our intrepid heroes, they'd discovered that someone had killed the Challengers of the Unknown, and ran to their rescue, or revenge. Well, of course, it turns out the Challs were not dead, merely very close to death, thanks to the machinations of the Challenger-Haters (a terrible, terrible, but nicely explanatory villain team name if ever there was one).

I don't know a lot about DC in this era, but I can't imagine that these kinds of crossovers were frequent. More so, that the crossover should last more than one issue - today's story concludes in tomorrow's comic. Even at the top of the cover we're told that this is a "Fantastic First!" And while it may have been a ploy to stifle flagging sales, it's also a moment that is fundamental in the creation of the shared narrative universe that both teams inhabit. Yes, the Justice League cement in their title the idea of a shared world. But it's important for us to see the lower-rank heroes also interacting, also participating in the building of their world. Neither team has the cachet of the JLA, but in some ways their existence down in the dirtier parts of the DCU gives us a better idea of what kind of a world this is.

Apparently one that is attacked by a new alien threat literally 5 or 6 times every month. But let's not dwell on that.

Tomorrow the DP (and now I'm wondering about the New Universe title D.P.7, about a collection of freaks who become heroes) and the Challengers hit the ground running after Multi-Man and his cohorts. Will Cliff and Rocky bicker? Will Rita try to calm everyone down? Find out next time!

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 135: Challengers of the Unknown #6, August 1991

I'm not particularly familiar with the Challengers of the Unknown. They've always struck me as more testosterone inflected version of the Fantastic Four. Kirby's creation of the two teams seems to vaguely support that. This series is interesting, though, as it is refashioning the Challengers' history, taking them out of the explorers of strange phenomena paradigm that they've been in since the 50s, and seemingly placing them more definitively within a superheroic universe.

Of course, that's what I get from reading a single issue three quarters of the way through a series. So I could be completely wrong, but I don't think so.

The Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale team has been quite a critical darling since their early work (of which this is a good example), though I occasionally find that I don't really like Tim Sale's art. I'm not entirely certain why, and I think perhaps it comes down to that ephemeral notion of taste. It's just not to my taste is all. Loeb's writing is not bad, kind of middle of the road superhero storytelling, though I've really appreciated his work on television series that I've watched. He does manage to bring his comic book sensibility to those shows, which works nicely for serialized, and often fantasy-based, television shows.

That's all for today. See you tomorrow.