DP02-02 Showcase #95(10-11/77)[b]

.....[This is a supplement to the review that appears in the previous post.]

.....I once worked in the periodicals department of a college library (which should come as no surprise to anybody who has read the earliest posts on this blog). This was in the days of card catalogues and ID's with photos rather than barcodes. In addition to the racks of current magazines and newspapers, we had an archive in the basement with microfilm and bound volumes. One night I was retrieving bound volumes of Life and other photo-oriented titles from the fifties for a faculty member from the drama department. Even then I considered myself a student of pop culture in addition to my 'legitimate' studies, so when he seemed frustrated after flipping through page after page of what must have been his fifth volume, I asked if there was anything I could help him find. He explained that he was staging a production of the musical "Grease" and wanted to find full-length body shots of the sort of clothing called for in the script. He was surprised that after searching through issue after issue of a magazine that is justifiably considered the leading visual document of America in that era he couldn't find a single example of a duck-tailed, leather-jacketed street tough. I knew immediately what the problem was, but explaining anything to a baby-boomer, especially their own history, is always a particularly delicate matter. I can't remember my exact words, of course, but I said something like, "Finding poodle skirts shouldn't be too hard, but I doubt you're going to find anything that looks like Fonzie in there. Things like 'Grease' and the band Sha-Na-Na are products of the 1960's. Just like 'Happy Days' is a product of the 1970's and 'Porky's' is a product of the 1980's. None of these things are historically accurate. Everything you see is how someone wishes things were. There were really guys running around in their older brother's or uncle's service gear back in the 1950's, but they weren't anybody's heroes. They would have been considered the nation's losers and criminals back then. Nobody looked up to them. Certainly not the editors of Life. They would have thought the magazine's space would be better devoted to something indicative of America. And at the time, those guys in the leather jackets were not considered to be a part of their own country."

.....Well, not surprisingly, he wasn't happy with my explanation. He kept looking through a few more volumes and eventually left empty-handed. He didn't really want authentic period costumes, after all. He wanted to reinforce his preconceived beliefs and passed over mountains of genuine research into the period because none of it did just that. The old magazines weren't the real cause of his frustrations; his own self-importance was. He should have been able to realize that if the things he was looking for weren't in the magazines then that did not necessarily prove that they hadn't existed, but it did necessarily prove that there was a reason for them not being there. He didn't want to hear that, so he kept wasting valuable time looking for something that wasn't there while his production's deadlines got closer. And just what does this have to do with the Doom Patrol? Glad you asked.

.....The popular narrative is that the 1960's was a time of political protest and civil rights activism, mostly because that's what shows up in the news film footage. Conveniently forgotten is the fact that 'news' is not a word used to describe everyday mundane events. Most people did not initially oppose the Viet Nam "police action", they became opposed to it when reality did not meet their expectations. When the conflicts started it was still squarely in the middle of the cold war and aggressive communist expansions had already occurred elsewhere; if authorities said there had been another one, most people didn't have a reason to doubt it. Opposition swelled as young men came home with dramatically different accounts of events (or not at all, for many families).

.....Likewise, the 1970's are remembered as freewheeling and frivolous, despite starting out with the Kent State shootings and ending with the Iranian hostage situation. In between we lost a congressman in Jonestown, saw athletes murdered at the Olympics, Manson Family members shooting at Ford, some guy trying to crash a plane into Nixon, gas lines, MOVE, the Baader-Meinhoff, Nazis in Skokie, the murders of Moscone and Milk, the Son of Sam, the Three Mile Island and Love Canal incidents and a much younger Donald Rumsfeld actually trying to start nuclear war with the USSR by telling some real whoppers about the capabilities of their subs.

.....Comics became commensurately political in their topics and perspectives. What was vague in the 1960's (J.J. Jameson hiring Joe Robertson, the Justice League dealing with pollution) becomes specific in the 1970's. There's the famous "Hard Travelin' Heroes" issues of Green Lantern/Green Arrow and the anti-drug issues of Amazing Spider-Man. Man-Thing battled an industrialist actually named "F.A. Schist", while Swamp Thing forever stumbled across monsters resulting from secret government experiments. The Nelson Rockefeller of Counter-Earth lusted after the Serpent Crown while back on Marvel Earth Howard the Duck ran for president. Killraven, Kamandi and OMAC all used the perspective of the future to satirize the present. Captain America confronted his 1950's counterpart and found the Secret Empire beneath the White House. And Henry Kissinger was everywhere, palling around with both Dr. Doom (in Super-Villain Team-Up) and the Challengers Of The Unknown (in Super-Team Family).

.....As mentioned in the previous post, Billboard's singles chart was getting extremely sluggish in terms of turnover. Titles hovered around, but for the most part you saw largely the same songs in a different order from week to week. And bear in mind that this was at a time when the music industry was releasing about ten times the product to retail locations that they release now. Considering what was available, there should have been a wide variety of material in the charts. Preventing that from happening was the business model adopted by the music industry since the mid-1960's. It was much simpler in the 1940's and 1950's. Then, if you wanted people to buy your record, you made sure that they heard it on the radio. You made sure they heard it on the radio by paying off the programmer or the disc jockey. Problems arose when racist power brokers and politicians engineered the persecution of rock disc jockey Alan Freed (who was responsible for many white teenagers listening and dancing to black musicians). Freed was repeatedly arrested on frivolous charges and eventually blackballed out of any lucrative market, the final damning accusation being that pay-offs in the radio business were all his idea and largely his practice alone. And the world became safe for Ray Conniff. The practice of 'payola' didn't stop, of course, just as it was never really as universal as its practitioners believed it to be. It changed names, became more clandestine. A large corporation would buy both a record label and a network. 'Payola' was now your paycheck. The smaller labels could no longer play after the rules (and the scale) were changed.

.....Predictably, with the entry by larger players into the market it was only a matter of time before IBM-style efficiency principles were applied. The two ways to make profit were to make more (which the consumer ultimately controls) or spend less (which you control). Since spending money is unavoidable, the IBM method was to minimize waste, or ideally to eliminate it completely. At smaller labels it had been historically difficult to quantify what was waste and what wasn't. You often wore many hats in a small company and didn't have time to sit down and parse numbers; by the time you did the information would no longer be relevant. Public tastes change, acts split up or move on, venues for promotion open and close... and having a fistful of numbers told you nothing about who your competition was this week. The new post-war, space race, best-and-brightest business models required stability and predictability. This was attempted through the consolidation of ownership of both manufacturers and venues (meaning retail, radio and live performance). It also meant simplification of formats, standardized price points and a cookie-cutter approach to radio programming. By the time the Doom Patrol were revived in Showcase #94 (08-09/77), it was already becoming accepted practice for radio stations to subscribe to satellite programming, hiring a modicum of local DJ's to prerecord local station I.D.'s, sponsorship and news to be inserted at the proper times during the feed, initially by anonymous engineers and eventually by full automation. Stations could operate this way for years without local listeners being aware that their local station was identical to 'local' stations in hundreds of towns across the country. Regional accents began homogenizing. The term 'regional hit' became an anachronism. The unintended side effect of this was that it became increasingly difficult to find new talent that had already proven themselves as commercially viable in a smaller market because the industry had worked so hard to absorb the smaller markets, destroying their identity in the process. "New" artists in the 1970's were usually old artists from established groups doing solo albums. The Beatles formed a label (Apple) and split up, becoming four acts releasing records instead of one. The Moody Blues form a label (Threshhold) and don't split up-- but they all issue solo albums anyway. Kiss doesn't form a label or split up-- but they release four solo albums simultaneously. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young all came from established groups in the 1960's, all did solo albums and recorded in varying combinations. We also saw a return of teen idols not seen since before the Beatles, with an unusual twist. Andy Gibb, Shaun Cassidy, and Jimmy Osmond were famous mostly for being the younger brothers of proven artists, just as Debbie Boone was the daughter of one. Whereas the appeal of their Kennedy-era counterparts (Fabian, Frankie Avalon, etc.) was to be something fresh and new that young girls could claim as their own while their aunts were listening to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, the 1970's teen idols were the more easily digested versions of whatever their older sisters listened to last year. For the first time since World War II, American youth culture was becoming increasingly conservative. The most famous venue at the time was Studio 54, and that was unquestionably because of its policy of exclusivity, the polar opposite of the Woodstock era. Even the drugs were becoming less social: marijuana could be passed around and one was often advised never to take LSD without someone remaining sober to talk you through it; cocaine was commonly snorted from a mirror and generally made the users paranoid and egomaniacal. Finally, look at the popular magazines of the 20th century as we head towards the 1980's:

• NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC- Founded in 1888
• READER'S DIGEST- Founded in 1922
• TIME- Founded in 1923
• NEWSWEEK- Founded in 1933
• LIFE- Reconfigured in 1936 (predecessor dates to 1800's), suspended in 1972

.....Notice how, before the war, America's favorite magazines were named for the biggest, broadest, most general topics. The first of this group to cease regular publication and lapse into occasional specials was LIFE. Look at what replaced LIFE:

• PEOPLE- began in 1974; People are a part of life, sure, but only the part that we're already familiar with.
• US WEEKLY- began in 1977; "Us" are also people, but that doesn't even include all people. It doesn't even include most people. How could we get any more narrow minded and provincial--
• SELF- began in 1979; ...ah, yes.

.....You can blame the late 70's comics crash on many things: rising prices, shrinking page counts, video games gobbling quarters, the return of science fiction to the movie theaters, the Blizzard of '78 and more. However, even if there had been no such crash (or 'Implosion' to DC fans) The Doom Patrol would have had a hard time of it. Freaky and quirky were not good selling points. When Russia and China were assembling tanks on each other's borders, you couldn't even rely on cold-war stereotypes of communists conspiring to undo the West. (Doonesbury's infamous Uncle Duke, Gary Trudeau's stand-in for Hunter S. Thompson, had been appointed ambassador to China before that nerve-wracking event, making it a windfall of sorts for the comic. In one strip a panicky Duke calls the US State Department from his office in China, screaming "You idiots had better do something quick, or this country could be overrun with communists! Hello?") People were clamoring for comfort, familiarity and reliability. Yet, contrary to the popular myth that Hollywood is a bastion of liberalism trying to brainwash a generally conservative public, network television in the late 1970's was like a fountain of very right-wing shows that the public simply refused to watch: "Hizzoner", "Grandpa Goes To Washington", "Salvage 1" and others lost out in the ratings to increasingly creaky Norman Lear and MTM shows. Ironically, this demonstrates the distinction between 'conservative' and the political right that network news would spend the next decade aggressively blurring. People continued to turn to the familiar and the comfortable, i.e., they were conservative in the true, dictionary sense of the word. It was the instinct to exploit that tendency that led to the success of supermarkets, department stores and McDonald's, which necessarily led to the elimination of small family owned businesses, variety, inconsistency and individualism. A comic book like Doom Patrol that asks the readers to root for a group scarred by life and unsure of each other didn't really stand a chance in that atmosphere.

.....In the next post, I review the last issue of the arc. The post following that look at contemporary comics from that time just as this supplement post looked at other contemporary media. Hopefully that won't take a month to finish. Sorry for the wait.

DP02- 01 Showcase #94(08-09/77) [c]

.....[continued from part b]



.....Every so often in their lives people happen across a tidbit of information that is simply intriguing in its own right-- not world -changing, but intriguing. Then, realizing that it is intriguing because it seems odd or unusual and unlikely to be widely known, it then occurs to them to somehow work this tidbit of information into their next casual conversation so that they might seem more clever merely by knowing it. It is only after doing so that they learn that they appear much less clever for having thought that a tidbit of information unrelated to any other topic had any place in a casual conversation.

.....So, the next time you're attending a formal, black-tie dinner engagement and someone mentions the 1977 Doom Patrol revival in Showcase be sure to mention...


.....All three issues of Showcase were "Vol. 16" in the indicia, although the title didn't indicate volume numbers when it was discontinued in 1970. That was a practice that DC adopted starting with 1972 cover dates and discontinued as of the 1984 cover dates. Unlike the more common usage of volume numbers in comics, to distinguish between one or more title with the same name, during these twelve years (01/72-12/83) the volume numbers designated the year of publication. The original run of Showcase , for instance, was 1956 to 1970 inclusive, or 15 years. By ignoring the years of nonpublication the revival becomes volume 16 in 1977 and volume 17 in 1978.

.....All three issues were 32 pages of 'guts' plus slick paper covers, the standard format since the fifties. They had 35 cent cover prices, 17 pages of story and were approved by the Comics Code Authority. The bar code numbers were 0-70989-30676-[xx], where the 'xx' matched the cover month (i.e., 09, 11 and 01).


.....The three story titles are: "The Doom Patrol Lives Forever!" (J-4743) in #94, [untitled] (J-4858) in #95 and "Defection!" (J-4937) in #96.

.....All three issues had covers by Jim Aparo (C-500, C-545 and C-582), who had no other connection to the feature. Also having no connection to the feature are the announced art team! During 1976 to 1981 DC ran a one-page editorial feature called "Daily Planet" with a different 'issue' for every week of releases. There would be some popular feature (Bob Rozakis' "Answer Man" column, a word puzzle or a Fred Hembeck comic strip) but most of the space was devoted to a brief list of the current week's releases and brief 'articles' about the next week's. Volume 77, Issue 21 (for the week of May 23,1977) had the headline, "DOOM PATROL LIVES!" and uses a differently cropped (wider) example of the cover art for an article on Showcase #94. Sounds good, but after that things are a little ...off. To begin with, the dateline for the article is "DC, New York". The three panels with Matt Cable do take place "on the outskirts of Washington, D.C." but they're hardly worth mentioning. Also, the story takes place primarily in Midway City, known to be in the midwest (probably Michigan) and not New York. The other, even more confusing possibility is that it mentions the publisher as a location (which is in New York). The second minor goof is the over-simplified plot summary, that Robotman "has rounded up three new heroes to replace the comrades he lost years ago". In the actual story Robotman discovers the already assembled group and is skeptical about them using the name "Doom Patrol". The third goof is much more serious. It correctly identifies Kupperberg as the writer, but says, "Ed Davis and Joe Rubinstein will be handling the art chores". I don't know where they were handling them, but it wasn't in Showcase #94. About three months earlier they both worked on a ten-page story for DC Super Stars #14(05-06/77), "The Secret Origin Of Two-Face-- Double Take!" (J-4579), also edited by Paul Levitz (thank you, GCD!) but I can't find anything to suggest that they worked together with any regularity. The whole arc was pencilled by Joe Staton. In fact, Staton went on to do the next three issue arc (Power Girl) and the double-length story in the 100th issue as well.

.....All three issues have a text page feature called "Critic's Corner"-- that's singular possesive, as in 'the corner of one critic'. It's intended as a letters' page and eventually becomes one in issue #96 (L-797) with Paul Levitz responding to the letters. While they're waiting for the mail to come in they run a brief history of Showcase (L-704) by Levitz in #94 and biographies of Paul Kupperberg and Joe Staton (L-750), also by Levitz, in #95. Also in #95, they forego the Daily Planet page and run a 'Publishorial' by Jenette Kahn and complete the page with "DC Profiles#19: Julius Schwartz".

.....There were several hundred words about historical context and the hell that was the seventies that have been wiped out and replaced with what you've read above. I've been editing it into something more coherent and less rant-y that would make a nice supplement to the review for #95 ( as in, #95[a]= review, #95[b]= editorial, unlike the [a], [b] and [c] format used for this issue). What I will leave you with is the revelation that prompted it:

.....One of my other hobbies is recorded music. One thing it has in common with comics is that 1955 was a year in which both industries established self-imposed standards. Comics had the CCA. Music had Billboard Magazine's Top (and later Hot) 100 singles chart. Using a secret formula as closely guarded as Coca-Cola's, they sought to create the huckster's equivalent of The Unified Field Theory. This new chart would determine the commercial success of a song by taking into account the relative influence of sales figures from outlets previously considered largely unrelated to each other: singles sales, jukebox plays, cover version royalties, radio airplay, sheet music sales, etc. These all had separate charts for years, some having several from competing publications all claiming superior expertise and more accurate sources. Shortly after Billboard introduced its new chart, they were quickly forgotten. Looking through old charts frequently challenges what many people think they know about American pop music. I found something that didn't surprise me much at all. If you look at the two decades that precede the Doom Patrol revival you'll see that the first (1957-1966) saw 213 songs reach Number One. The second (1967-1976) had 233, suggesting slightly more turnover. Once you look further into the charts, at the total number of weeks each top hit had a chart presence, from debut to peak to fall, you see an alarming intransigence. I started out looking up the top ten songs on the public's mind when Showcase #94 shipped. I chose the week preceding its announced date, the 'week of' and the two following. The top song, Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke", remained #1 the weeks before, during and after shipping. [Coincidently(?) when Grant Morrison tried to flesh out the characters' lives outside the team he gave Cliff an affection for old jazz records; the Sir Duke to whom Wonder is referring is Duke Ellington.] For any song to spend a month at #1 means little; later that year Debbie Boone stayed at #1 for 10 weeks. But the week after shipping, the #2 song dropped to the #10 position and the songs that had been #'s 3-10-- every one, in order-- rose one spot each exactly, maintaining their relative positions. In case you're wondering, it's common for three or four songs to move in a cluster, yes, but for the entire top ten to stay almost exactly in place? That's very unusual... and very, very bad. It hints at cultural fascism, a reluctance to consider new things at best and an inability to tolerate challenges at worst. Needless to say, this might have been the worst possible time to reintroduce the Doom Patrol, or many of the other cult favorites being given features immediately before the DC Implosion. In fact, by the end of 1979 both Marvel and DC had eliminated most of the titles they began since 1975 but relatively few of the ones that were already being published as of 1972.

.....My plans for the next few posts are:

1. #95 [a] = the review of Showcase #95
2. #95 [b] = more on the contemporary music scene
3. #96 [a] = the review of Showcase #96
4. #96 [b] = discerning hints towards plans for the group from letters and editorial content at the time
5. Super-Team Family #16 = a primer on the DC Implosion with links to more detailed resources, to explain why this issue never existed; I'll be adding some of my own info about Marvel's own mass cancellations the following year
6. Supergirl Part 1 = without the original issues to draw on for the next story I'm going to leave a plot summary paraphrasing other sources, which I'll link to and/or cite; this was the story intended for STF but instead was reworked into a three-part serial for Superman Family
7. The next three posts will be place holders for the issues of Superman Family mentioned above, in the hopes of finding inexpensive copies I can review individually later.

.....On the outside chance that the above wasn't enough minituae for one sitting, you can find related information about this arc by using the internal search 'mini-Google' box in the upper left-hand corner of this page. Enter "DP02-AA" for a synopsis of the entire revival period or "DP07-AA" for a synopsis of the much later John Byrne Period, which begins with a possible explanation for Robotman's design overhaul at this time. Enjoy, and feel free to comment on your own recollections of this period, if any.

Defining the Periods

(Much of this entry previously appeared in an essay on my Livejournal page entitled "Doom Patrol/Towards A More Precise Outline" on September 1st, 2009 in a slightly different form.)



This entry will attempt to redress the lack of a detailed comparative critical study of the Doom Patrol comics' history in electronic format. The first act in the serious study of any subject is the definition of terms. We'll start with the general and move toward the specific in future entries. I should state up front that I have no intention of getting so specific that I violate intellectual property claims. This blog should leave more the impression of a movie review-- a review of about 200 short films released over five decades.

The first step would be to list the nine distinct periods of the group's history and the dates that they were initially published. (Note that in some cases, specifically the Morrison and Byrne periods, the cover dates of the last issues are actually a few months into the following years.) This framework has been designed to work in the long term; although the nomenclature refers to 'the canon', that is those comic books actually titled "Doom Patrol", I already have methods planned to account for guest appearances in other titles, reprinted stories, retroactive stories and (with a little work down the line) promotional and licensing paraphernalia. And now, let's meet our contestants:

1. The Original Series - (1963-1968) / plus miscellaneous reprints
2. Gypsy Period 1 - (1977- 1985)
3. Kupperberg Period - (1986- 1988)
4. Morrison Period - (1989-1992)
5. Pollack Period - (1993-1994)/ plus Wilderness Years (1995-2000)
6. Arcudi Period - (2001-2003)
7. Byrne Period - (2004-2005)
8. Gypsy Period 2 - (2006-2009)
9. Giffen Period - (2009- present)

Succesive entries will give detailed descriptions of each of these periods in order. Next entry in two days.

Secret Origin of the LGC:Doom Patrol Blog

(An earlier version of this entry appeared previously on my Livejournal page on August 30th, 2009.)

With the current revival of the Doom Patrol by Keith Giffen and Matt Clark looming a few months ago (it has since begun publishing), I went looking for an online fansite devoted to the team. I had prior been able to find fanatically detailed sites for Challengers of the Unknown, Swamp Thing and others. It seemed like a natural for someone to attempt the same for the Doom Patrol: the outsider vibe generally leads to a lack of extensive coverage on the publisher's site of all but the most recent appearances; they'd been around long enough for intergenerational appeal; until about five years ago they rarely made appearances outside of their own title(s), simplifying the research a little; and their adventures were sufficiently bizarre that it seemed plausible that people would seek out the opinions of others as to what exactly we had all been reading. I was expecting something po
sted by someone in their forties back in 2001, something that would point out apparent conflicts of continuity between stories and speculated on possible explanations. Something with four-year-old comment strings piping in about storylines resolved in other titles and decrying the lack of trade paperbacks to bring complete stories together. All I found was a site seemingly put together as a college project before the Byrne stories and never completed, as well as the excellent blog found at the following link:
mygreatestadventure80.blogspot.com/

I've enjoyed the above blog immensely and would recommend it to any comics fan but especially those curious about the current series. It seems to have been started by someone to fill precisely the void I just described with the bonus of viewing the team as a living, ongoing concern and not simply the nostalgia trip I was expecting. One thing that did strike me as odd though is that not only the writer but many of the commentors (beside myself) have mentioned that they were unfamiliar with the issues written by Grant Morrison. Not all, but many. Sure, a few said they were confused by them and one said he simply didn't like them (opinions I don't share but certainly understand). It was my recollection (and I admit that I could be waaa-ay off on this) is that theMorrison isues were very good sellers, as 'Mature Reader' titles go. He certainly wrote more issues than any other author, more in fact than the entire original run of the book back in the sixties, more than the previous two volumes of this decade combined. You just don't stay that long if you're selling poorly. An editor may gamble on an experiment and consider a poor selling issue to be the just cost of gauging the readership's tastes, but nobody experiments for four years. Also, his entire run is available in color paperbacks while even the original 1960's stories are available only in pricey hardcover archives that don't exactly scream "mass marketing" (and yes, the first half of those stories are now also compiled in an inexpensive black & white paperback but that was only recently released). Most of the group's 40+ year history has never made it to color paperback ever but the issues most likely printed in the largest quantity have, yet the persons most devoted to the group, who will not only seek out a blog devoted to it but make the effort to let the blogger know that his work is read and appreciated, those are the persons who haven't read the Morrison issues? That's like Chris Rock's old joke about the Spice Girls. "The Spice Girls are like crack," he told the audience at an MTV awards show, "everybody says they don't like 'em, but somebody's buying an awful lot of it."

Since I do enjoy getting updates and breezy commentary on mga80, I neither want to leaden it with lists of facts and statistics or burden the blogger with requests for coverage of the past. I also am wary of recommending to fellow fans to rely too much on the DC wikia, since I found a few factual errors and numerous omissions and ran into too many walls trying to report them. Let this then be the background companion both the mga80 and the new series, a reference appendix built one brick at a time

The next entry should outline the nine phases of the Doom Patrol that I've defined for clarifying research; starting with that each subsequent entry should detail the stories encompassed by each phase and lay down an itinerary for the blog through next spring. See you in two days.

LGC/Mission Statement

The LGC is the Layman's Guide to Criticism, a concept I conceived in college in the 1980's. I developed a love for art films at a time when home video was in its infancy and repertory movie theaters were more common. Researching the films so that you could spend your budgeted time on those that spoke most to you meant books, catalogues, magazines, and (on rare occasions) newspaper archives as sources of information. Some of this was presented as dry data-heavy documentation and some was art criticism but nearly all added pieces to the overall picture. That picture was always more valuable than the sum value of its parts. However, when you veer from the factoid, nuts-and-bolts type coverage to the more subjective analysis it becomes more difficult to distinguish the self-indulgent bleating from the insightful perspective-- especially if you haven't seen the film being discussed. I would increasingly find reviews of movies I knew very well and learned to respect the writers who noticed what I missed, to the extent that they could change my opinion on the movie, pro or con. I also learned to tell when a critic wrote their review by skimming the press release and making up something to meet a deadline without actually watching the movie.
What I hadn't anticipated was how difficult this would make conversations with noncineastes, that is, most other people in the world. While it's true that most people watch movies at some time or another it's also true that most people don't study and disect them. They want a good story but won't go searching for the story behind it. Their idea of a review is a five-star system. (The best rebuke of this system came at the end of a MST3K episode. After watching a typically inept production one of the robots pointed out that a well known, mass-marketed movie critic gave the movie three stars in his paperback guide and proceeded to list all the critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated films also given three stars by the same critic. Without bad-mouthing either the movie or the critic, and in the space of a few minutes, he demonstrated that the star ratings system only pretends to give you information when in fact it tells you nothing to distinguish one movie from any other, even when they are markedly different. All it really tells you is, "This is a movie", which you already knew. Not bad for a puppet.)
Having realized that I had taught myself a foreign language as regards discussing movies with people I decided to enumerate my choices of paths:

1. Stop talking about movies with most people. (Nope)
2. Pretend that I don't know what I've learned. (Nope)
3. Be condescending to people who don't know what I've learned. (Nope)
4. Share what I've learned (oh, sure that sounds innocuous enough, even constructive and positive-- "I assure you sahib, these bricks are made of the finest of intentions...")

Wouldn't it be great if there were a manual you could hand people that would explain to them in straightforward language exactly why the local paper's movie critic never seems to like all their favorite "Ernest" movies? Why movies aren't really 'good' or 'bad' per se, but good or bad for a given audience or for a given time period? Why mentioning or depicting a topic is not the same thing as endorsing it? (Well, maybe you can't teach common sense, but still, we'll never know if we don't try.)

Great indeed, but no manual, no finite work, can ever convey understanding that broadly. I had to read dozens and dozens of articles before I began to see that there even was a language and approach required to understand all of what I was reading. Having read a hundred or more, rereading the first of them became a different experience. My learning was interactive; it necessarily changed me and those changes in turn colored the way I experienced the same materials. The Layman's Guide to Criticism (LGC) can only exist in installments and now, over 25 years later, technology has caught up to and overtaken my theories. The blog format not only pares out minute examinations but can be accessed (using labels/tags) as tailored to the needs of the reader.

One addendum specific to this particular blog: The Doom Patrol is a comic book that features a team of super-heroes and more so than most falls precariously close to a Rorschach test. The premise was that the characters be different than conventional heroes and succeeded despite or because of their differences. In different decades and under different creators and editors the group has fluctuated both in membership and general tone. The story-telling approaches have occasionally presented unique problems to conventional data-bases and so this blog seeks to kill two birds with one stone: provide an organized (and as comprehensive as possible) analysis of each appearance and argue for or against their significance to the whole.

More in two days.