The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1561: The Superman Family #193, Jan.-Feb.1979

Supergirl and the Doom Patrol finally meet! After the villains are defeated, and the chaos subsides. Supergirl says thanks, and lets them get back to their vacation. All in all, not the Patrol's finest hour.

A while back, I read the issue that follows this one, an issue that finishes up a number of the storylines I've read in the last few days. I'm going to have to read it again, I think, just to get a bit of closure. The Doom Patrol are absent from comics for a couple of years after this adventure, and it's a very different version that we'll see next. But that can wait til tomorrow.

If you're looking for a stereotypical DC comic of this era, Superman Family is pretty much it. It's kind of a last gasp of these versions of the characters, as the Crisis looms in the not too distant future. Superboy's Smallville backstory is never quite this naive ever again, nor Krypto's inner dialogue so wry. Lois loses a bit of her independence in losing her own feature. So, despite what I've called their unremarkability, their naivety is charming enough that I'd recommend giving them a go.

"I'd hoped my little absence wouldn't undermine our splendid relationship!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1560: The Superman Family #192, Nov.-Dec.1978

I think the thing about these stories is that they are, for the most part, unremarkable. It's not that they're not good stories - they're wonderful, silly, weird stories, just not remarkable ones. I get the sense that writers and artists were starting to really feel the stifling shadow of the Comics Code at this point, especially those creators who had come up through a more revolutionary culture than the generation before. You can see this in the pushing at the boundaries in some of the stories, most interestingly the Krypto feature. The Dog of Steel is involved in some inner city gang trouble, but it all turns out okay. Perhaps that's the problem - everything turns out okay in these stories. There never really seems to be too much on the line.

That aside, the Doom Patrol feature in this issue, and last, is odd. It's touted as a team-up with Supergirl, but the two haven't even come close to meeting. And the Doom Patrol's part of the story seems fairly straightforward, and really could have featured any superteam. I think that if you're going to have a guest star, you have to respect the version of the genre that star comes from. I'm prepping a post that is the first article I ever had published, and it thinks about how we can reconcile a satiric or parodic comic like Doom Patrol, Ambush Bug, or Hitman, with the more serious fare of the Batman books, for example. I explain it through inflection theory, which very quickly would mean that if the Patrol are guesting in Supergirl's feature, there should be some specific reason it's the Patrol. Just as if she were guesting in their book, there would have to be some reason it was her.

I'll try to get the article up soonish.

"Gosh, Supergirl---you're even better than the Bionic Woman!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1559: The Superman Family #191, Sept.-Oct. 1978

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!"