DP01-00b Countdown to 1963: 1953 to 1958

[Before I continue the Doom Patrol's Fiftieth Anniversary observance ("celebration" just seems a little out of character for them), I just want to mention that this past weekend I edged past the 10K mark in pageviews. How much of that is due to Asian porn sites trying (unsuccessfully lately!) to embed disguised links in the comments sections, I'm not sure. I'd like to think that if I had been more diligent in posting a little something every few days instead of a multi-page essay every few months then readers might check in habitually instead of when they're weeding out infrequently used bookmarks and we'd have said goodbye to 20K some time ago. The good new is that older pages get viewed nearly as often as the current ones, which was my intention from the outset; I'm creating the blog largely as a personal reference repository and sharing it with whoever can get any practical or aesthetic use out of it. As always, critiques, corrections and additions are all welcome in the comments.]

.....In April of 1963, DC Comics published the first Doom Patrol story. The decade leading up to that point had handed DC one advantage after another over their competitors, leaving them unprepared to deal with, or even recognize, changing tides in the years that would follow.

.....In 1953 their specious lawsuit against Fawcett Publications claiming that Captain Marvel violated Superman's copyright was finally settled after over a decade of litigation back and forth. Not only did they succeed in getting Fawcett to halt publication of their most popular character (and his numerous spin-off characters and titles), but the experience had so embittered Fawcett towards the business that it ceased publishing comics generally, except for titles related to Dennis The Menace. The last issues they published were FAWCETT'S FUNNY ANIMALS #83(01/54), ROCKY LANE WESTERN #55(01/54), LASH LARUE WESTERN #46(01/54) and TEX RITTER WESTERN #20(01/54) [all of which, among other titles, were continued by Charlton] and THE MARVEL FAMILY #89(01/54). Those all would have come out in late 1953, at which time Standard Publications was licensing Dennis The Menace for comics. When Standard went under in 1955, Pines picked up the license. In the meantime, paperback reprints of the newspaper comics were handled by Avon Books, then Pocket Books and finally Crest Books, a division of Fawcett. By the end of 1958, with the newspaper reprints and original comic book stories brought under the same 'roof', Fawcett returned to publishing comics, sort of. They only published Dennis titles (and a single blink-and-you'd-miss-it MARK TRAIL comic, another newspaper strip previously adapted by Standard and then Pines) and they only published in conjunction with Hallden, a company created by Post Syndicate president Robert Hall to handle the Dennis property outside of newspapers ["Hall"+"Den-nis"].

.....The significance of DC halting such a major competitor's operations lies in the character, Captain Marvel, who became the crux of the legal dispute. The Fawcett publishing empire was founded by Wilford Fawcett, who left the army after World War I and launched a humor magazine called CAPTAIN BILLY'S WHIZ BANG. Years later (at the end of 1939) when the company prepared to enter the comics publishing market their prototype was to be called FLASH COMICS, but DC had just released a series by that name while Fawcett's was still in the planning stages. They next considered the name THRILL COMICS, but instead went for a play on the name of the central character of the premiere issue. Captain Marvel, who is secretly Billy Batson, could only appear in WHIZ COMICS. Fawcett's second title? SLAM-BANG COMICS. Captain. Billy. Whiz. Bang. Fawcett had invested a bit of their own company's mythos into the colorful original fantasy characters and titles created for their new comics line and an appeals court ruling simply told the company to stop using them. This was not the first time DC had successfully sued another publisher over copyright infringement but it may have been the first time any comics publisher had scuttled another's identity.

.....In 1954 the notorious Senate hearings on the purported influence of comic books on juvenile delinquency were held and despite the fact no federal legislation resulted (and previous state regulations had already been overturned), the news coverage had cemented in the minds of the then less-media-savvy public that comic books-- not the specific comic books cited in the hearings, but comic books generally-- were dangerous, harmful and sinister in ways and for reasons that weren't necessary to explain or understand. Sales shrank, made worse by national inflation in the post war economy (the Korean War ended in 1953 and the Allied occupation of West Germany was only then winding down, ending in 1955). DC suffered from that along with all the other publishers. In the fall of 1954, DC's 40-page comics were reduced to the 32-page standard that dominated the industry for the rest of the century. But it was smaller publishers operating with much slimmer margins who were wiped out entirely. Between the end of the Senate hearings in June and the formation of the Comics Magazine Association Of America in September three notable ones (Fiction House, Star Publications and Comic Media) shipped their final issues. An even smaller one (Youthful) went under between the April and June hearings. By the end of October the CMAA published the final version of their new Comics Code, or at least final until its first revision in 1971. To reassure the public that their comics adhered to some kind of moral standards, members would carry the white "postage stamp" motif seal of approval. An earlier, similar organization (the ACMP, with fewer participants) had used a "star badge" motif seal, but it didn't have a consistent color, often having the same color as the background of the comic cover on which it appeared, making it difficult to notice. The more prominent CMAA stamp seemed to have had the opposite effect from its intention. Perhaps by calling attention to the idea that a comic book's content might be something to be concerned about, it was more effective at raising doubts about quality than assuaging them. Over the next two years the code-compliant publishers Quality, Lev Gleason, Ace, Mainline (a year-old Simon-Kirby venture), Toby, Orbit (which had to have been in financial trouble to begin with; only the final issue of LOVE DIARY carried the stamp), Avon, Trojan, Master, Story, Key, Premier, Sterling and Argo all ceased publishing comics and most ceased to exist at all. EC Comics famously tried to comply until it became obvious that racism was poisoning the judgement of the CMAA's appointed authority overseeing the process. MAD converted from color comic to B&W magazine, but of the rest of the line only PANIC and PIRACY joined EC's New Dierection. All other publishers adopted the Code's stamp on issues cover dated January to May 1955, depending on the publisher and frequency of the title. EC's New Direction books started with the June-July issues. Given the success of MAD it made sense, by the end of the summer, to begin supplanting the color comics with a line of B&W Picto-Fiction magazines. The New Direction lasted six more months under the code and Picto-Fiction was over by the spring of 1956. The last remnant of former DC editor and All-American founder M.C. Gaines' ambitious Educational Comics, financed by repeated printings of PICTURE STORIES FROM THE BIBLE, a title he began while still at DC, was his son Bill's MAD MAGAZINE. Perhaps one other impact the publisher had was that the CMAA did not renew its Authority's director, the former Judge Charles Murphy, after those two years. They opted instead for Mrs. Guy Percy Trulock, who they retained for a decade. She adhered adamantly to the letter of the code-- but to no other unspoken objectives. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but the bleeding staunched somewhat.

.....Now it would be easy to assume that DC would be thrilled about the loss of all that competition, but in business on that scale nothing is that simple. Losing one large competitor like Fawcett is one thing, but when that much of the industry disappears so quickly it begins to threaten the infrastructure on which everyone operates. DC was owned by a partnership who had common members in the ownership of the distributor Independent News. The greater volume of magazines and comics a distributor moves, the more thinly it can spread its operating costs. Lighter trucks still have to drive the same routes and burn the same gas as full trucks. The biggest distributor of comics, the American News Company, was also the nation's biggest newsstand distributor, period. They could adjust. After Independent News, the third most significant player was probably Martin Goodman's Atlas, which was both a comics publisher and a distribution company. Aside from his own books, most of the comics publishers Goodman distributed were smaller outfits who couldn't afford being given low priority by the big two and, frankly, were nervous about their mob connections. When they began to disappear, Atlas' distribution operations began to cost more to conduct than their profit was worth. In 1957 he sold off his paperback company, Lion, to Penguin's New American Library and decided to take his comics to American News to distribute. Unbeknownst to Goodman, American News had fallen under federal scrutiny (for reasons unrelated to comics) and would liquidate its assets around June. Its real estate had been converted to other purposes, so there was no possibility of venture capital setting up a new business in its place. The only game in town became Independent News. Goodman considered getting out of the comics business and ordered his editor-in-chief, Stan Lee, to stop cutting checks by the end of the week. Lee doesn't like discussing that period, but he has described himself and receptionist Flo Steinberg feverishly scrambling to call every artist with an outstanding assignment to turn in whatever they had, finished or not. Ultimately, Goodman accepted a contract from Independent limiting them to shipping only eight comics from Atlas a month. They fulfilled that by publishing sixteen titles bi-monthly. (At the time they had about 66, mostly bi-monthly.) Unofficially, Goodman removed the name "Atlas" from the covers. In fact, apart from the tiny "IND." in capital, block letters and the 10¢ price, those early 1957-1960 pre-Marvel comics don't have any trade dress identifying their publisher. Also unofficially, this new, nameless continuation of Atlas was not to contain any super-heroes. Since the inception of the new Comics Code, DC had launched about a dozen new titles, plus four more acquired from the defunct Quality. While some had already come and gone (FRONTIER FIGHTERS, IT'S GAME TIME, and THE LEGENDS OF DANIEL BOONE) there was one that managed to circumvent the troublesome lag time between shipping a book and getting sales/returns figures back. Often by the time you find out that a book is selling badly, you've already shipped the next two or three issues. But SHOWCASE began by running a different feature in each issue for the first five issues. If an issue sold well, that feature would return or get its own title. If it did poorly, it didn't matter; it was already gone. Of the first five, only one did well: the fourth issue (09-10/56), with a revamped version of the Flash. At the time of the agreement with Goodman, the management at DC were still waiting for the sales results on the sixth and seventh issues, the debut of the Challengers of the Unknown. While Goodman would expect legal retaliation for copying specific characters, he didn't know why anyone would use extralegal methods to discourage one particular genre and at that point he didn't care. Atlas had tried to revive its 1940's super-heroes in 1954 and failed. Only SUB-MARINER COMICS lasted more than a year. With only eight slots per month he was in no hurry to try again so soon when there was so much other ground he could cover.

.....With American News gone Independent picked up one of their biggest clients, PLAYBOY, which didn't hurt revenues. Over the next year Magazine Enterprises, St. John and Ajax-Farrell stopped publishing comics, although Fawcett returned via Hallden, as mentioned above. All these publishers were carrying the Comics Code stamp. Curiously, the only publisher remaining who still consistently outsold DC was Dell, who was one of a tiny minority who didn't carry it. Apparently their reliance on familiar characters licensed from other media outweighed the recognition factor of the comics-specific stamp. The same was true of Gilberton, publisher of CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED, and other minor players such as Parents Magazine Press and various religious publishers. By the end of 1958 those in compliance were DC, Atlas/Marvel, Hallden, Charlton, Archie, Harvey, Prize, American Comics Group and the soon to collapse Al Fago company. [If readers know of any other publishers in 1959 using the code stamp, please mention them in the comments.] Ten years after Fago went under the rest were still publishing except Prize and ACG, both of which were absorbed by DC.

.....In the next post, the other, considerably less eventful half of the decade that led to the Doom Patrol. DC did relatively well under the Comics Code. Their first new title to carry the stamp was a period adventure anthology called THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, which did okay for itself. And what was the last new title before the code? What was that last shred of the bad old days that publishers had to pretend they were ashamed of to ward off federal, McCarthy-era censorship which the Constitution should have protected them from? What title printed exactly one single issue without the stamp before adding it on the second issue? It was called MY GREATEST ADVENTURE.

DP02-08 Beast Boy and Mal Duncan Part 5

.....We've reached 1971. Beast Boy and the Doom Patrol will remain unseen for six years (Gar reappears in Part 6). Mal Duncan has been asked to join a covert, government sponsored civic works program run by Mr. Jupiter, only to learn that he has become the only member of the Teen Titans without a super power. The team that created him has left the book and been replaced by industry veterans Murray Boltinoff (editor), Bob Haney (writer) and George Tuska (pencils). Also at this time only Robin and Kid Flash appear in back up features in titles for the characters from whom they were derived (Robin regularly in Batman and Kid Flash sporadically in Flash).

.....In the previous two years, the Teen Titans' roster had doubled from five (Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Wonder Girl and alternate Speedy) to ten (Hawk and Dove, Lilith, Mal and Gnarrk). With only ten issues left in the original run only Hawk and Dove leave until the revival a few years later. The other eight would appear in combinations of four to six both in the main title and guest appearances, such as the Brave And The Bold issue that closed Part 4. This juggling of the cast may keep everyone visible but it also makes it difficult to plan continuing stories. The choice of returning Bob Haney to scripts made this approach a more workable option, given his predilection for short, self-contained stories. That talent was what made him a longtime favorite on The Brave And The Bold, where the cast is (a) always small and (b) changes every issue. Unfortunately, the irregularity of the cast coupled with a bi-monthly schedule made character development next to impossible. And of course, regardless of which characters actually star in any given issue, portraits of Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl and Speedy appear on the cover in the margin along the spine.

1. Teen Titans #34 (07-08/71) Robin, Wonder Girl, Speedy, Lilith and Mal appear. The last 15¢ issue.
2. [No Mal] Robin appears in the landmark Batman #232 (06/71). Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams, who have been working on Green Lantern/Green Arrow for about a year, begin a truly killer residence. It is also the last 15¢ issue. After this first story (and #237) Robin kept to his Mike Friedrich back-up feature, with the next arc being #234 (08/71)- 236 (11/71).
3. [No Mal] Justice League Of America #91 (08/71)- #92 (09/71) This annual cross-over between the JLA and JSA has a long overdue chat between Robin and the adult Robin of Earth-2. The Unofficial Guide to the DC Universe (link on the left margin) places this story after the last of the Mike Friedrich-scripted Robin stories in Batman. Friedrich scripted this story as well and introduces the teen Earth-1 Robin by saying that he was responding to a report overheard in the story from Batman #234, above. There is no such scene anywhere in the three-parter, so the DCUGuide chronology may not be off after all. Although there's no Mal here, this story is still worth mentioning because it introduces a costume change. When Earth-1 Robin's costume is shredded while on Earth-2, his adult counterpart offers him one "fashioned by a costume-maker I know-- Neal Adams!". This is the original version of the costume eventually worn in the late 70's.
4. World's Finest Comics #205 (09/71) Mort Weisinger's departure dropped several titles into Julius Schwartz' lap, including this one. In his two years as editor, #198 (11/70)- #214 (10-11/72), Schwartz tried to shake up the tired Superman/Batman formula by pairing Superman with other characters (as Kashdan and Boltinoff used Batman in The Brave And The Bold). With Steve Skeates scripting, he uses the five teammates who appeared in all five of the Teen Titans issues he scripted: Lilith, Mal, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl and Speedy. Mal even makes the cover... drawn by Neal Adams!
5. [No Mal] At about this time Speedy (as Roy Harper) is the focus of the famous anti-heroin story in Green Lantern/Green Arrow # 85 (08-09/71)- #86 (10/11/71), but because the events of that story are not reflected in Teen Titans they are generally assumed to take place after the title is cancelled.
6. Teen Titans #35 (09-10/71)- #36(11-12/71) The "Bigger and Better" format is adapted. The standard format of 32 interior pages ('guts') is expanded by 50% for 25¢ for all DC comics for one year. (The only exceptions are oddities, such as digests, magazines and specials with 64 or more pages.) While some issues carry blurbs announcing "48 pages" and later ones announcing "52 big pages, don't take less", they are all the same page count. The later ones merely count the covers as four pages. The only two issues I've mentioned so far here not in this format are the ones I've noted were 15¢. The additional pages were usually filled with some combination of original back-up features (often giving a solo story to a supporting character) and random reprints. In this case, Mal gets a solo story. While Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Speedy and Lilith go to Italy with Mr. Jupiter for the two-parter in the lead stories, the same creative team gives us "A TITAN IS BORN", a seven page Mal story in #35. In it, he remains in the states and faces The Gargoyle, an extradimensional menace that has escaped from the limbo in which Robin imprisoned him in issue #14 (03-04/68). That issue, the Mal short here and the final issue of the revival, #53 (02/78), form the basis of the Secret Origins Annual #3 (1989). Plotted and written by George Pérez, the 66-page story reveals that The Antithesis was the force behind the Gargoyle's attacks on the Teen Titans and that, in the post-Crisis continuity, he took the opportunity while Mal was knocked unconscious to enter a program into the computers in Mr. Jupiter's facility. The program included the means to breach dimensions and was planted in the hope that it would be discovered, tested and eventually used by someone who would accidentally breach The Antithesis' prison. About two years later (in continuity; five years in publishing) Karen Beecher built a sonic tool/weapon called the Gabriel's Horn using the Teen Titan's computer's so that Mal would have more resources during the team's battles. The Antithesis program was one of those incorporated into the design of the horn, meaning that the Titans' Lair was using Mr. Jupiter's equipment until the revival in 1976. In those actual issues, the pre-Crisis continuity had it that Mal was given a shofar, not a mechanical device, by the angel Gabriel as a reward for defeating Azrael, the Angel of Death in combat in issue #45 (12/76). (More on that in Part 6.) #36 has the first chapter of Lilith's origin story and a three page fragment of an Aqualad story that was probably intended for the recently cancelled Aquaman title since it was written by Skeates, drawn by Aparo and edited by Giordano. Two pages of an Aquaman story (with a different artist) had already appeared in Super DC Giant #S-26 (07-08/71), buried amid Aquaman reprints.
7. [No Mal] Flash #211 (12/71) Wally has a back-up feature.
8. [No Mal] Batman #237 (12/71) Robin appears in the lead feature.
9. Teen Titans #37 (01-02/72) Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Speedy, Lilith and Mal get in the middle of a foreign war and fight the Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse. The only back-up is a reprint.
10. [No Mal] The Brave And The Bold #100 (02-03/72) Robin guests with Green Lantern and Green Arrow. This must take place mid way through the O'Neil and Adams GL/GA stories, although that title was one issue from cancellation when this came out.
11. Teen Titans #38 (03-04/72) Robin, Wonder Girl, Lilith and Mal. In what must rank among the creepiest of plot ideas, Mr. Jupiter and Lilith plot to induce hallucinations in the other three members to force them to confront their fears. Mal's, for the record, is agoraphobia (a fear of open spaces), curiously not a problem when he and Kid Flash were trapped in prehistory in #'s 32-33 or on a battlefield in the previous issue. In Wonder Girl's hallucination she calls herself Donna Drake and goes undercover in male drag. The back-ups include the second chapter of Lilith's origin and some reprints. Mal's on the cover.
12. [No Mal] Batman #239 (02/72)- #242 (06/72) Robin back-up features. Kid Flash (#241) and Lilith (#241-242) guest star in this four part story. After this, the JLA/JSA story with both Robins (mentioned above) is presumed to take place.
13. Teen Titans #39 (05-06/72) Gnarrk returns. Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Speedy, Lilith and Mal take him on an assignment to the southwest. Bizarrely, Wonder Girl is called "Donna Drake", the name she used in her dream in #38. Thankfully, that mistake doesn't need to be explained, since this self contained story would be stricken from continuity by the events in New Titans #56 (07/89), which repositions Gnarrk's first appearance between the end of this series' revival and the beginning of New Teen Titans.
14. The Brave And The Bold #102 (06-07/72) Another Haney script teaming Batman with Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Speedy and Mal. The back-up reprint is the Robot-man story spliced together from two different Doom Patrol back-up stories. (see the post DP01-AR1 Original Period reprints)
15. [No Mal] Flash #216 (06/72) The last Skeates back-up feature for Wally. This is also the last "Bigger and Better" format comic on this list. After this DC's standard format reverts to 32pp of 'guts', but at the new price of 20¢.
16. Teen Titans #40 (07-08/72) Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Speedy, Mal and guest star Aqualad. Art Saaf takes over the pencils from George Tuska. Saaf was an industry veteran from the early 1940's who had been doing romance and war comics for DC since the late 60's. He continues until the end of the original run with Cardy continuing to ink. Mal technically appears on the cover, but farthest in the background and possibly only because the Titans are all in chains.
17. [No Mal] Batman #244 (09/72) Elliot S![sic] Maggin takes over scripting the Robin back-ups. DCUGuide gives an odd order to Robin's appearances in the latter half of 1972: After this, Teen Titans #41(main story), then Batman #243(main story), #245(back-up), Teen Titans #42 and Batman #246(main story).
18. Teen Titans #41 (09-10/72) Robin, Wonder Girl, Speedy and Mal only. Mal plays a pivotal role in yet another supernatural story, but only due to his resemblance to a pre-Civil War slave. If that weren't bad enough, he still doesn't get on the cover despite being central to the plot and despite the fact that Kid Flash (who does not appear in this story or the back-up) is both on the left margin as usual and in the scene from the story depicted on the cover. The back-up story is the third chapter in Lilith's origin.
19. [No Mal] Batman #243 (08/72) with Robin in the main story and #245 (10/72) with Robin solo in the back-up feature.
20. [No Mal] Justice League Of America #100 (08/72)- 102 (10/72) This year's JLA/JSA Crisis reintroduces the Golden Age Seven Soldiers of Victory, including the Earth-2 Roy Harper. This story may have been three years in the making. The SSoV were the subject of one of the last of DC's old Fact Files in, among other places, Binky's Buddies #4(07-08/69) and reprinted in DC Special #5 (10-12/69). They were also part of four pages of new pin-ups and text in the otherwise all-reprint Justice League Of America #76 (11-12/69). This Roy Harper/Speedy is no relation to the Earth-1 Roy.
21. Teen Titans #42 (11-12/72) Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Speedy, Lilith and Mal. All the Teen Titans, including Mal, make the cover. They're tiny and with their backs to the reader, but they're all there. This is Mal's last appearance for a while.
22. [No Mal] Batman #246 (12/72) Robin appears in the main story.
23. [No Mal] Teen Titans #43 (01-02/73) Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Speedy and Lilith. The events of this story are cited in the Secret Origins Annual #3(1989) by Dick (by then Nightwing) as the reasons for the Teen Titans splitting and Mal's absence as the reason he maintained the Titan's Lair until the series resumed. Dick's reasoning was that Mal was the only one not disillusioned when they failed to prevent an old man from killing a supernatural being masquerading as his dead grandson. The members disagreed as to whether all life, even unnatural ones, required their protection. The fourth chapter of Lilith's origin story is the back-up feature. All four parts take place before her first appearance in issue #25.
24. At this point the O'Neil and Adams GL/GA stories with Roy take place.

.....That's it for Part 5. Part 6 will be entirely about the revival, although I may precede that with an appendix on the intervening presence of the Teen Titans, individually or in reprint form. As always, if there's any omissions or outright mistakes please use the comment area. With all those numbers there could be some typos in there, you never know. Also, if you've read any of these stories recently and can cite reasons why the chronology or continuity should be otherwise, that's helpful, too, but with the tendency at this time to rely on self-contained stories that's less likely.

DP02-06 Beast Boy and Mal Duncan Part 3

[Apologies for the delay, but this had to be rewritten a few times. Big chunks that were extracted from this, mostly to make it manageable to edit and read but also for the sake of maintaining coherence, have been distilled into a much more practical 'reading list' for a future post. Likewise, the Part 4 post about Mal has been rewritten into a similar list of appearances so that the more ambitious essay I wanted to write will be easier to understand (and shorter).]

.....Putting aside the encapsulations typical of the Who's Who and Secret Files publications DC has done at different times (for now), Garfield Logan's origin story explaining how he turned green and gained the ability to change into animals at will has also been retold several times within the comics he's graced. I've found detailed origin stories in the following issues:

1. Doom Patrol #100 (12/65) "The Fantastic Origin Of Beast-Boy"(8pp) and "The Origin Of Beast-Boy Part 2"(8pp). In the main story, Gar's legal guardian, Galtry, refers to him as "Craig" throughout. At no point elsewhere in the story does anybody else refer to him by any name, except for Doom Patrol members calling him "Beast-Boy", hyphen included. Bizarrely, in the four page origin flashback his parents Mark and Marie (no last name) call him "son", "boy" and even "the child" but never give him a name. In the previous issue (his first appearance) he was called merely "Gar" exactly once and by a female classmate. In the following issue he's called Gar by both Galtry and the DP. The misnaming in this story is therefore commonly dismissed as a clerical error or (if a writer is in a mood to tie up loose ends) explained as evidence of how unconcerned Galtry is about Gar's welfare, that he doesn't even bother to get his name right and Gar has given up on correcting him. For the record, he gets the last name Logan in issue #102 (03/66).
2. Doom Patrol #112 (06/67) "Waif Of The Wilderness"(10pp). The first installment of four back-up features explaining how Gar came to be under Galtry's supervision. At first glance it looks as though much of the four page flashback from #100 was reformatted with some new panels added, but in reality the story was newly redrawn with those same scenes (complete with paraphrased dialogue) integrated into an expanded story. Both versions were drawn by Bruno Premiani and written by Arnold Drake. An important detail added was the location of Mark Logan's research lab: Upper Lamumba. Because he healed and befriended the local King Tawaba, Gar was adopted by Tawaba when the Logan's died and is legally a prince of Upper Lamumba.
3. Doom Patrol #113 (08/67) "The Diamonds Of Destiny"(8pp). Crooks Kurt and Stokes arrive in the village to loot the tribe's diamonds from an underground cavern. A struggle with Gar leaves the boy unconscious and the cavern caving in. Unable to take the diamonds in time, the crooks kidnap the boy.
4. Doom Patrol #114 (09/67) "The Kid Who Was King Of Crooks" (8pp). Kurt and Stokes teach toddler Gar to steal gold and diamonds in Johannesburg. Bored, Gar decides to play a joke on them and hides the loot while they're out of the apartment. The joke backfires when each return separately and suspect the other of cutting out with the goods. When they find each other a shootout leaves both of them dead; Gar has lost his third 'family'.
5. Doom Patrol #115 (11/67) "General Beast Boy-- Of The Ape Brigade!" (8pp). Now on his own, Gar is kidnapped while in the form of a gorilla by neo-Nazis rounding up gorillas and brainwashing them into becoming an army. Gar changes shape before the processing takes place, observes the scheme and helps the yet unprocessed gorillas overthrow the Nazis. At that point Galtry finally catches up with Gar's trail. Galtry was aware of Gar's inheritance and needed to have physical custody of the boy to secure power of attorney (and the access to the money that goes with it).
6. The New Teen Titans #10 (08/81) On page 5, Gar (now called Changeling) narrates a truncated version of his pre-Titans life to relatively new teammate Cyborg (Victor Stone). It correctly recalls the name of the disease sakutia responsible for his father resorting to the drastic experiment that saved his life by inducing the animal transformations that we know as Gar's super power. That incident and his parents' deaths (from Doom Patrol #100) are mentioned but the details of the backup stories (in #112 to 115) are omitted. I'd concede they're unessential for a one page sequence, but Galtry isn't mentioned at all and he claims that when his parents died "I was about ten at the time" and "a year later, I was found by Niles Caulder". Given his behavior and speech in his first appearance, it sounds about right that he would be eleven or twelve years old at the time. The problem is that he was obviously much younger when his parents died, both in the first version (#100) and expanded version (#112). Also, he sought out the Doom Patrol and repeatedly begged to go on missions with them in his early appearances. Caulder didn't 'find him', and initially balked at having Gar join them. At the end of this issue Gar receives a potentially lethal attack from Deathstroke, prompting Wonder Girl to take him to Paradise Island in the hopes that the Purple Ray could save his life. When he emerges from a coma in The New Teen Titans #13 (11/81) his powers have expanded to include changing into extinct and mythological creatures, not just animals he has seen. In a way, that parallels his origin story which an emergency medical procedure results in a super power.
7. Tales Of The New Teen Titans [LS] #3 (08/82) [no title] In this four-issue mini-series, Gar and the three new characters created for the 1980 New Teen Titans series each get a spotlight issue featuring their origin. The framing sequence that links the series has original members Dick, Wally and Donna camping in the Grand Canyon with Gar, Vic, Koriand'r and Raven as a bonding experience. It takes place between issues #20 and 21 of the regular series. This is now the fourth formal retelling of Gar's origin that I could find, and in each case Gar is narrating them. In Doom Patrol #100 he told the story to the DP; in #'s 112-115 he told the story directly to the readers (and a dictation machine); in The New Teen Titans #10 he told the story to Vic and here he tells it to the rest of the team. With 25 pages to work with all the salient details of the previous versions are included: Upper Lamumba; sakutia; becoming a mongoose to save his mother from a black mamba; his parents dying in a waterfall; King Tawaba; Kurt and Stokes (unnamed here but described) and finally Galtry. This version adds the detail of him being eight years old when Galtry found him, meaning that he couldn't have been ten when his parents died. It then mentions his girlfriend Jillian Jackson, who had appeared briefly in Doom Patrol #99 and 108 before her role expanded in #118, just before the end of the series. This is so that, after a two-page spread depicting the DP and Titans West (from 1977), Wolfman and Pérez can fill in the gap between the cancellation of Gar's TV series, "Space Trek 2022", and the formation of the NTT with a new story in which Galtry kidnaps Jillian disguised in the armor of an old DP villain, Arsenal, demanding a ransom. Gar defeats him, but Jillian is unsettled by the violence in his life and their relationship temporarily ends. For what it's worth, Mal and Karen appear in the two-page spread.
8. Tales Of The Teen Titans #55 (07/85) On page 7 Gar narrates his life story yet again, this time to himself. This time the events are described in generalities, not specific names: "taken to Africa"[not Upper Lamumba]; contracted "some damned tropical disease"[not sakutia]; "adopted by an African King"[not Tawaba]; "kidnapped by criminals"[not Kurt and Stokes]; and "a thief became my guardian"[not Galtry]. It hasn't escaped me that Marv Wolfman has at this point done not only one full issue devoted to Gar but two pages like this that dutifully check off each of the few solo stories he's had in a twenty year career with one exception: the Nazi plot to brainwash gorillas into forming an army. Too silly? For a company that's made talking gorillas its own meme, brainwashed gorillas can't be that much of a stretch, can it?
9. Legends Of The DC Universe 80-Page Giant #2 (01/00) Gar once again ruminates on his origin story for two pages of "Passenger 15B", a 10 page lead in to the four-issue mini series Beast Boy, also by Ben Raab and Geoff Johns. It really functions more as a hasty introduction to the character. It does add odd details I couldn't recall seeing elsewhere, for example: "I'd always wanted to be a superhero. Ever since I saw The Flash in Central City." I don't know if that is meant to be a call-back to some post-Crisis event, but I haven't found any stories with flashbacks to the time between Galtry taking custody of Gar in Africa and keeping him a virtual prisoner in the States until Gar finds the Doom Patrol. Seeing The Flash on TV is more plausible, but seeing him in action in Central City before becoming a costumed hero himself seems improbable. In fact, during the Legends LS Gar and Wally are the only active Titans. Wally has only been wearing the red Barry Allen costume for a few months since Crisis and is agonizing over whether he's made the right decision. At no point does Gar ever mention that Barry was his inspiration for being a hero. Gar passing up an opportunity to comfort a grieving friend is unlikely; Gar passing up an opportunity to talk about himself is inconceivable. I'm reluctant to believe this little bit of trivia until I see some kind of flashback or period story corroborating it. The first issue of the LS explains the source of his powers again (on page 13), but it falls short of being even a capsule origin story. The LS also introduces Matt Logan (Gar's previously unmentioned cousin) and Gemini (Madame Rouge's previously unmentioned daughter).
10. Teen Titans #13 (09/04)- #15 (11/04) "Beast Boys And Girls", the story that lent its name to the paperback containing these three issues and the four issue mini-series mentioned above but for some reason omitted the "Passenger 15B" lead-in story. Here some major liberties are taken with the origin, adding Dr. Samuel Register to the Logans' tiny Upper Lamumba lab. He even replaces Mark Logan in a panel redrawn from the 60's stories. In this version the Logans are doing research funded by a grant, but in the original Mark raised the money by selling patents before he even went to Africa. According to the story, Register went on to become a S.T.A.R. Labs abnormal disease specialist obsessed with duplicating the accident and treatment that gave Gar his powers. While working with mutations of the sakutia virus he became infected gained the same animal-based shape-shifting powers, but turned purple rather than green.

.....The scarcity of post-Crisis origin stories could be attributed to an increased reliance during the late 80's and 90's on text pieces. The Teen Titans Spotlight issue featuring Changeling doesn't give an origin sequence, nor does the 1987 Secret Origins Annual featuring the Doom Patrol or the 1989 Secret Origins Annual featuring the Teen Titans. The ongoing series covered Hawk and Dove, Nightwing, Speedy and even the Titans Tower-- yes, the building they used as a headquarters gets its own origin,-- but not Changeling. Actually, with the 60's stories in B&W Showcase Presents formats and everything before 1985 in Archive format there's little impetus to retell the story yet again. If anything, fans will probably be referred to an online database in the future.

.....ERRATA:

.....If you were to click on the comments section below you'll see that the shout-out for corroboration about the Flash incident in "Passenger 15B" was answered, and much faster than expected. ToB [Tamaran or Bust; now that's a Titans call-back] found a scan on a fan-site devoted to Gar and maintained by Lady Timedramon. I not only followed the link to the scan, I zipped around the rest of the site and it definitely rates a link for "Following History" on the left of this blog. I've recommended ToB's own blog before and it's worth your time to follow her icon to "Histories Of Things To Come" and add yourself to the 'follow' board while you're there.

.....The story in question was from Secret Origins #50 (08/90) "Flash Of Two Worlds" by Grant Morrison and Mike Parobeck, a post-Crisis retelling of the story by the same name from Flash #123 (09/61). The original was the story that first posited the theory that the DC universe was made of alternate, parallel worlds where the Golden Age heroes have aged and in some cases retired. In the earliest appearances of the Barry Allen (or Silver Age) Flash, he's seen reading comic books of the Jay Garrick (Golden Age) Flash's adventures. As Allen grew in visibility, he inevitably caught the attention of people who were aware of the original and prompted demand that the two meet. This became a critical point in the company's direction; they could say "screw continuity, this will be popular" and have Jay show up out of the blue, ignoring the fact that they had established that he was fictional to Barry; they could have said "that horse has left the barn" and ignored the requests; but instead editor Julius Schwartz stood by his life-long dictum, "pseudo-science is always the answer!" and the established science fiction premise of parallel worlds was introduced to comic books with explosive consequences. It's difficult to overestimate the impact this one story has had on pop culture. Not only has the cover been parodied repeatedly (including on Dark Horse Presents and The Overstreet Price Guide) but a copy of the issue was the coveted object of a wager on an episode of the TV series "The Big Bang Theory".

.....In the original version of the story Barry is entertaining children for the Picture News Orphan Fund Group. While vibrating he hits a sympathetic harmonic and is transported to Earth-2. After Crisis OIE, there not only wasn't an Earth-2, but there never was one. A New Earth was created with a synthesized history in place, incorporating parts of various alternate Earths but not the totality of any of them. In the Morrison rewrite, Barry senses the tone while he's vibrating and follows it to the source: Jay's hometown of Keystone City, hidden for years by The Fiddler, The Thinker and The Shade (the same villains from the original story) who keep it out of synch with the rest of the world with a giant vibrating violin. The whole story is told by a young Gar Logan on three-ring binder stationary, drawn in crayon and signed "Garfield Logan age 8". The conceit here is that Gar (pre-sakutia) is on summer vacation while his parents are in Africa and he's in the audience of orphans. There's no indication of whose custody he is in while he's in the States, or why he's with a group of orphans while his parents are still alive. What this story really establishes is that Gar's infection and transformation and all the known events leading up to his meeting the Doom Patrol would have to take place between the ages of eight and ten. This is only plausible if the dialogue in the 60's stories (especially Doom Patrol #'s 112-115) is radically different. However, in the "Beast Boys And Girls" story Gar is only six when he's infected. Where's Jonni DC when you need her?

.....Of course, I can't go without pointing out that a story in which a boy tells his own story using hand-drawn comics is a device Grant Morrison has used several times. At least two examples, Cliff Baker's Kannibal Kid in Animal Man and Wally Sage's Flex Mentallo in Doom Patrol, were published roughly contemporaneously to the story in Secret Origins.

.....[END ERRATA; any further additions or corrections are always welcome in the comments ]

.....Next up, where to find Mal.

DP02-05 Beast Boy and Mal Duncan in Teen Titans Part 2

.....In Part 1 (the previous post, or DP02-04) the history of the Teen Titans during the 1960's, both as a group and as a title, was summarized against a background of changes at DC Comics. In the last three years of the decade ('67-'69) there were as many titles launched as in the first seven ('60-'66), yet when the 1970 cover dates began to ship, most of the titles that had been weeded out during the decade had originated during that decade. There was still a higher rate of retention of titles dating back to the precode era as of 1971than of titles from the previous five years. That's rate, not just absolute number. Teen Titans ranked among the lucky survivors and would be luckier still as even more '12-cent alumni' were cancelled during 1970 and 1971 but only four precode titles were lost, all non-continuity: Secret Hearts, The Adventures of Jerry Lewis, Binky and Girls' Romances . What was Teen Titans doing (or not doing) that kept it alive during this period? Was it as simple as the name recognition of the characters? As byzantine as office politics? I think that it may have been that while some other second string DC titles underwent radical changes to grasp at straws of relevancy, Teen Titans managed to at least remain relevant to its readership. We're all aware of what they say about 20/20 hindsight, of how easy it is to ridicule failed experiments from the vantage point of those who've learned better from the results. Yet so much of this period seems to come from a file stamped "What were they thinking?".

.....Turning the Blackhawks into super-heroes, the Metal Men into humans or the Challengers into ghost-hunters wasn't likely to appeal to their hard-core fan base, those reliable numbers who remained after the sales figures shrank. Obviously those changes were intended to bring in new readership. How that was supposed to happen and why anyone expected that hypothetical new audience in the bush to be larger than the bird DC had in its hand isn't nearly so obvious. What did work was the subtler alterations to Teen Titans, Green Lantern, and Justice League Of America. Rather than change the characters substantially these titles gave them topical situations. They seemed to be finally learning from Stan Lee what Arnold Drake had figured out long ago: ask what a real person would do when faced with these fantastical circumstances. Also, recognize that there are very real circumstances all around us that present formidable challenges to decent people everyday. These stories are at least as interesting as whatever Captain Cold wants to steal this month.

.....Thus was introduced Mal Duncan.

.....By the end of 1968 Marvel had introduced ensemble cast members such as Gabe Jones and Robbie Robertson, background characters like Bill Foster (who would become Black Goliath in the 1970's) and most importantly T'Challa, The Black Panther, a black super-hero and genuine African prince. The next year would see the debuts of The Falcon and The Prowler followed by Eddie March ( the original black Iron Man, before Jim Rhodes), Monica Lynne and Jim Wilson in 1970. But in late 1968 the very young Marv Wolfman and Len Wein submitted a script for Teen Titans to Dick Giordano in which a new super-hero enlists the Titans' help fighting a gang that had been recruiting disaffected black youth. A number of articles in both Comic Book Artist (TwoMorrows) Vol.1, #1(Spring/98) and Vol.1, #5(Summer/99) relate bits and pieces of the story behind the story from the key players. They were interviewed by different persons in different contexts and thirty years' distance has left some memories a bit hazy and inconsistent, but the approved script was pencilled in its entirety by Nick Cardy. In the surprise ending, after Jericho and the Titans have captured the gang's leaders and lectured their teenaged recruits, would-be recruit Mark is shocked to find that Jericho is actually his brother, Ben. What should be even more shocking to the readers is that both Mark and Ben, who spend this scene talking at length about what it means to be black men in a white man's world, are both clearly white themselves. The art is reproduced without color, and Cardy (or any other capable artist of this period) would no doubt take great pains to avoid drawing black characters as broad stereotypes. In fact, a year later we would see him drawing Mal as a handsome and unquestionably African-American young man. Yet Mark and Ben have thin lips, narrow noses and straight, straight hair showing obvious comb-strokes. Editorial Director Carmine Infantino didn't cite that glaring inconsistency when rejecting the story, though. His main concern was that the dialogue for a story purportedly endorsing racial harmony was written in such a ham-fisted manner that it would be offensive to both black and white readers.

.....So, to recap: Wein and Wolfman brought the script to editor Dick Giordano, who approved the story.

.....Nick Cardy drew the story and then dialogue was added.

.....Editorial Director Carmine Infantino nixed the final version (probably prior to coloring).

.....At this point the story was brought to Neal Adams by one of the five people above. An attempted rewrite was also rejected and Adams found himself scripting a new story almost from scratch with about a week to make the printer's date. This is the point at which the original story, "Titans Fit The Battle Of Jericho", becomes the story eventually published. With little time in which to work, Adams took Cardy's finished cover (with the story's title on it) and four or five additional pages to form the basis of a story with a similar plot. In the new story, Adams took the logical step of making the hero's name Joshua and have him oppose a vast organization called Operation Jericho (which eventually "comes tumbling down"). For reasons that are less clear, Joshua's real identity is not Ben but David, and his younger brother is not Mark but Chuck. The gang is now recruiting mostly white teenagers by pandering to generational tensions. This undermines the 'reveal' of Joshua's identity; in the rejected version of the story when Mark finds out that the mystery hero is his brother Ben, and their previously presumed racial differences don't exist. In the newer version, Chuck discovers that the mystery hero is his brother Dave, but that doesn't change the fact that they are different ages. As befitting its lesser impact, the scene is relocated from the end to about two-thirds into the story. The new finale is the revelation that while the teenagers were dupes of the gang, the gang were dupes of the aliens from Dimension X (seen in issue #16). What the teenagers were told would be a method of political demonstration turned out to be a disguised method of breaching the dimensional wall and unleashing a monster on Earth. Joshua, an electronics genius, uses a sonic weapon (a 'horn') to tear down the alien 'wall', fulfilling the biblical metaphor. In addition to the Cardy pages there were two pages by Sal Amendola showing an interlude with the aliens' human agent. The rest was pencilled by Adams and inked by Cardy.

.....Mal Duncan, of course, is not Joshua. But when the Titans were revived in the later 70's there was a push to give Mal some sort of super-power. Although there was a flirtation with the Kirby Guardian costume and exo-skeleton, the shtick that stuck was a magic horn provided by divine intervention. Of all the possible gimmicks in the world of super-heroes, what kind of a coincidence is it that DC's first black hero is retrofitted with a device that recalls the motif of what would have been DC's first black hero?

.....Mal's eventual debut came in Teen Titans #26 (03-04/70). Of all the Marvel characters named above, only Jim Wilson followed Mal. Sadly, he rarely appeared on the covers. In the original run he made it onto the front of #32(03-04/71), #38(03-04/72) and #42(11-12/72). By that time you were more likely to see an inset of Page Peterson, fictional advice expert of the romance titles, on the cover of, say, Young Romance. He was also beat out to the covers by Lois Lane, who spent "24 Hours As A Black Woman" in the notoriously silly story and cover "I Am Curious (Black)", written by Robert Kanigher (who also wrote the Titans arc that introduced Mal) and drawn by Werner Roth (who worked with Arnold Drake on X-Men).

.....In Part 3 I look at several stories from the 80's that attempt to fill in the holes in continuity from the 70's, including a chronology of Gar Logan. Then in Part 4 I shoot for a comprehensive list of all of Mal and Gar's appearances during the 1970's.

DP02-03 Showcase #96(12/77-01/78)[a]

.....FYI: This is a critical review of a comic book published over thirty years earlier. It was the third issue of a three issue arc. This blog's internal search can be used to find reviews of the previous two issues as well as related essays on the period by typing in the codes 'DP02-01' and 'DP02-02'.

.....On June 16th, 1963 cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space, riding aboard Vostok-6. It turned out to be the last Vostok mission, a series that began with the first man in space to orbit the Earth, Yuri Gagarin, in April, 1961.

..... The details can be found here and here.

.....The week before Gagarin went up, Journey Into Mystery #69(06/61) and Patsy Walker #95(06/61) became the first comic books to carry the "MC" logo, signifying the first public expression of the new Marvel Comics identity that had been clawing its way out of Atlas' grave since 1957. That fall, Fantastic Four #1(11/61) used the space race as a premise for what would become Marvel's flagship title. For the next few years the leap-frogging accomplishments of the USA and USSR space programs were echoed by Marvel and DC feverishly introducing new characters to capitalize on the public's renewed interest in super-heroes. The significance of this point in comics history was not lost on Warren Ellis, who used the ripple effect of Fantastic Four on comics publishing as a premise for his Planetary series. Fans of the Doom Patrol would no doubt recognize the importance of Tereshkova's historic flight to their favorite series. Not only was it coincidently during the same month as the cover date of the DP's first appearance but provided the name of one of its later members: Lt. Col. Valentina Vostok.

.....To be honest, I've never read Paul Kupperberg (or Paul Levitz, for that matter) explaining the derivation of Val's name. One or other may have trawled their memory for reasonably Russian-sounding names and picked them for alliteration, not remembering where or in what context they heard them originally. If that's the case it's an astounding coincidence and we may have to take a strop to Occam's razor. The reason I mention it is because Val becomes the focus of issue #96 as Arani had been in #95 and Cliff had been in #94. Her defection provides the plot for this issue as both American agent Matt Cable and Soviet agent Igor Brunovich each seek to capture her for their respective governments. In fact, the story is entitled "Defection!". Bruce Patterson replaces Frank Chiarmonte on inks and Ben Oda replaces Bill Morse on lettering. Otherwise the script (Kupperberg), pencils (Staton), colors (Berube) and edits (Levitz) are the same credits as in the previous issues. That consistency can work in a feature's favor when there is a limited window in which it can create an identity for itself and also win acceptance from a substantial readership for that identity. For that reason, this issue seems like a lost opportunity. The same team that has brought us this far and put Val front and center leaves her unconscious for much of the issue and unable to reveal any substantive background about herself. We don't learn why the Negative Energy Being envelopes her body instead of projecting from it a la Larry Trainor. We don't even know if its abilities and limitations are the same as Larry's (although she was contained by lead in #94). We don't know how she acquired the NEB (or how it acquired her). We don't know what her life was like before her defection; we don't know how she came into contact with either Joshua or Arani following her defection; we don't even know the details of her motives for defection. Perhaps she longed for the freedom we Americans have to wear stretch leotards with cleavage split to the navel. (I'm reminded of Lily Tomlin, who wondered what the world be like if we all grew up to take the jobs we wanted as small children-- a national economy built on astronauts and ballerinas, firemen and nurses. Could you imagine a world where we all dressed in the costumes of our 1970's heroes? Spend a day comparing the physiques at your local shopping mall and you'd know that all those gravity-defying codpieces and bustiers would have their work cut out for them.)

.....The story picks up immediately after the previous issue's ending with the Doom Patrol returning to the old headquarters in Caulder's abandoned Midway City mansion. They are met by Lt. Matt Cable, who identifies himself as an agent of US intelligence but neglects to mention that he is with the covert DDI and not the CIA. When he tries to take Val into protective custody, Cliff and Josh stuff him into a closet. Val is no more willing to be interrogated by her team-mates than by Cable and she storms out. What happens in the next panel [page 5, panel 2] could be easily over looked, but for readers who would go on to try and reconstruct the chronology of this often mysterious group it became a source of many headaches. Blaming Cliff for the conflict with Val, Arani says, "Cliff Steele...my husband told me you could be stubborn at times... but he never mentioned anything about stupidity!" Insults aside for a moment, for her husband, meaning Niles Caulder/The Chief, to tell her about Cliff's personality would require him to be in contact with her after the formation of the Doom Patrol, long after their brief relationship in India. From what we learned through the 'psychoprobe' in the last issue, Caulder had the use of his legs and was unaware that Immortus was financing his experiments when he gave Arani the immortality serum prototype. The probe doesn't reveal anything else after that (at least not to the readers), but Caulder's own account of his origin from Doom Patrol #88(06/64) recently reprinted in Super-Team Family (see DP01-AR3) shows him learning Immortus' identity and faking his own death to escape him, losing the use of his legs in the process. He operated on Cliff from a wheelchair according to the Robotman origin in the DP's first appearance, so he would only come to know Cliff after having left Arani behind in India. In post-Crisis appearances, Caulder claims to have never met Arani at all, that she was delusional and obsessed with him. He could easily be lying or the scene with the psychoprobe revealing her memories may have been wiped from history by Crisis and never happened at all or happened differently. In this pre-Crisis story we are only assuming that the probe accurately displays what Arani remembers as she remembers it and that it reconstructs what her physical senses saw and heard rather than merely what she believes happened. For what it's worth, Immortus says, "After his marriage, Caulder left Arani in India, unaware that I knew of her existence..." As much as Caulder no doubt strongly desired to learn the results of using the immortality serum on Arani, it would also be possible that he avoided contacting her hoping to keep her off Immortus' radar. Not that I give much credence to anything Immortus says, but he found her, and not vice versa. How either of them knew of the existence of the other is not disclosed here or, I believe, ever. Yet they clearly both did. If, as Arani contends, Caulder informed her of the Doom Patrol and his part in it and went so far as to provide her with the alarm codes (in Showcase #94) and profiles of the team members, we have to consider a disturbing possibility that would not have even been on the table for readers back in 1977.

.....Consider the possibility that Niles Caulder himself activated Arani as an agent to flush out Immortus after the 'death' of the Doom Patrol at the end of the original series.

.....Before forming the Doom Patrol, Caulder by his own account had been defeated by General Immortus three times. During the Doom Patrol's history they gained a number of other enemies, most of whom were dispatched in some way or other, but a few who recurred as Immortus would. Principally those were Garguax and The Brain with his Brotherhood Of Evil. A little more than half-way through the Original Period the Doom Patrol teamed with the Flash against all three factions in The Brave And The Bold #65(04-05/66). After that, Immortus seemed to disappear. The others (including Monsieur Mallah and Madame Rouge) attack the DP again around the time of Steve and Rita's wedding. This cooperation among villains continued for about a year until it was interrupted on two fronts. Madame Rouge began to realize that she was in love with Caulder and Garguax betrayed the others to side with a fellow, more powerful invading alien. The Patrol and Brotherhood temporarily joined to fight the aliens together, successfully driving them back into space. Garguax does not appear again pre-Crisis. Caulder eventually gains custody of Madame Rouge after learning her origin-- she was a mentally unstable woman whom The Brain was able to make coherent and rational by focusing her mind on being purely evil. Caulder didn't consider this to be the "cure" that The Brain seemed to think it was. His attempts to restore her sanity eventually resulted in her being split physically into two people, one good and one evil. The 'evil' one died, but the 'good' one gradually went insane again. Enlisting the assistance of an aging Nazi named Captain Zahl she 'killed' both the Patrol and the Brotherhood. [Of course we saw earlier in the Showcase arc that Cliff survived. We next see The Brain and Mallah in The New Teen Titans #13(11/81)- 15(01/82), but their escape was not explained until Teen Titans Spotlight #11(06/87). After that the others emerged gradually.]

.....HYPOTHESIS: After surviving the blast that appeared to kill the Doom Patrol (presumably using either a force field or transporter built into the chair whose remains were later retrieved by Cliff and Arani in Doom Patrol #1(10/87)), The Chief offered his services to the U.S. government for a three-fold purpose:(1) to exploit the one advantage he had over his remaining enemies, that they thought he was dead, so that he could amass funds, weapons and political influence to fight them later; (2) to continue cutting-edge research without interruption; and (3) to monitor Mento's progress tracking down Madame Rouge and Captain (later General) Zahl. Brain and Mallah would not reemerge until that Zandia episode in NTT and with Garguax still in space the only player not accounted for was Immortus. With access to government data in the "mere months" before Cliff's return, The Chief would have learned about AWOL soldier Joshua Clay and defecting Soviet officer Valentina Vostock as well as Doc Magnus being in the custody of the military, just the man capable of repairing Cliff's body so that The Chief could remain hidden. What he did not have was bait that would flush out Immortus but the one thing he knew would cause Immortus to lose all caution was the prospect of obtaining an immortality formula, the same desire that brought them together in the first place. Arani would become that bait.

.....If we were to believe that the psychoprobe used in the previous issue revealed actual events being remembered, then Arani had developed super powers through training by a secretive order and was given an immortality serum prototype by Caulder, who left and formed the Doom Patrol. After the DP 'died' at the end of the original series, Caulder found her, still young, transferred his property into her name and provided her with the information and means necessary to collect Josh and Val and to leave a trail that Immortus could follow. Her perpetual 'search' for The Chief was actually meant to dissuade anyone else from conducting a search of their own that might actually find him-- anyone truly inclined to find him would join her instead and she would lead them into some unrelated mission far from him, which she would then decry as an "interruption" of her search. She could not reveal The Chief's whereabouts or the fact that he was still alive until Immortus was captured or killed, either due to an oath or by psychological blocks imposed by The Chief. In fact, the very next adventure involving Immortus was the one near the end of the Kupperberg period in which The Chief revealed himself to be still alive. Shortly after that, Arani gave up her life fighting aliens in Invasion! before any satisfactory explanation could be wrested from either of them.

.....If we were to believe that the psychoprobe was merely revealing an implanted memory, however, it could be possible that Arani was found by Caulder after his apparent death with the team. She may have always been mentally ill and Caulder applied a modified version of the 'cure' he used on Madame Rouge, once again resulting in a physical dichotomy but instead of splitting the subject in two it caused some latent metahuman ability to manifest extremes of hot and cold. To hide Caulder's part in this should she be subjected to interrogation, he would have implanted a memory of this taking place years earlier when he had working legs and replacing his own treatments in the sequence of events with the training of a fictional religious sect. Later, when Immortus captured her and witnessed this fabricated memory through the probe, he claimed to have been searching for Arani for years in order to maintain a facade of omniscience rather than admit that he had been kept unaware of her for years. He is, after all, an egomaniac. This explanation of events would answer several other questions: Why did the psychoprobe not reveal the years of Arani's life while Caulder was with the Doom Patrol? Because there weren't any. If Immortus really had known of Arani's existence, as he claimed, why not invade the religious sect that trained her? Because he was lying and/or they didn't exist anyway. Why did The Chief have a romantic relationship with the reformed Madame Rouge near the end of the original series if he was married to Arani, who was in hiding? Because they weren't married.

.....Of course, both of the above speculations would answer some questions the same way. How did Arani know enough to locate Val when she had only recently defected, let alone (as we would learn in flashbacks published later) only recently bonded with the Negative Energy Being? Because Caulder contacted Arani after surviving the disaster that released the Negative Energy Being and when the new Negative Woman was first sighted, he could explain to Arani what that meant. Why would anyone trying to hide from Immortus in order to surprise him do so in the headquarters of his bitterest enemies? Because she was actually trying to lure him.

.....And the proof of these hypotheses? Well,... none. Absolutely none. But if gleaning back issues for some vague hint that corroborated either of the above proposed scenarios were difficult, finding any scrap of evidence that might disprove them isn't any easier. During this arc the four characters we are given are the old pro, the mysterious heiress, the fugitive and the angry young man. The pro (Cliff) we already know, but even if we didn't, he's a bit of an open book anyway. The heiress (Arani) we gradually learn not to trust, mostly because she doesn't trust anyone else. Of the other two we know nothing. The fugitive is an unconscious hostage when our attention is on her and the young man doesn't get any solo exposure at all.

.....HYPOTHESIS ENDS.

.....The highlight that would most likely be included in encapsulated descriptions of this issue, such as in price guides or online comics data bases, would be the introduction (and dispatch) of this issue's villain. Accompanying Brunovitch on his mission to retrieve Val is the massive, period-costumed COSSACK. In the age of Sky-Lab, an antiquated Soviet stereotype might have seemed quaint, but the Cossack is not quite that. Actual cossacks were not one thing, but several things. Different versions appeared in different regions. They were often a home-grown (and largely self-appointed) force for law and order at the local level dating back centuries prior to the communist revolutions. Their various relationships to the czars would fluctuate over decades, alternately fighting on their behalf or rebelling against them. Many, if not most, were not Russian. Poring over this issue (the character's only appearance) I grasped at any straw I could to give him some kind of context. There, on page 9, panel 3, is the only instance of him speaking something other than English. After evading the team and with Val in tow he shouts, "Na zdrowie, fools!" "Na zdrowie" is a Polish toast, comparable to "To your health" in English. The Russian counterpart would be the similar "Za zdorovye". If an actual Russian cossack were taunting opponents with a sarcastic drinking toast, he might use the Ukranian "Budem", but probably not Polish.

.....Still, even knowing all of this isn't enough to make sense of the character, especially when it is revealed that the Cossack is a robot. There were some signs, such as his speed despite his size and the fact that his horse sprouted wings to fly away when necessary. Also, when Val discovers him in the mansion he is one man on horseback, standing in front of a similar sized hole in the wall of an upper floor with rubble strewn about but no obvious blast marks. The physical damage could be attributed to a mechanical horse alone, true, but he did manage to survive riding through the wall on the horse. The revelation that he is also mechanical is not so much of a shock, then. But it is confusing. While the team was on the moon (in Showcase #95), Cable spotted Brunovich casing the mansion, also looking for Val. It's implied that Brunovich is a capable operative, meant to smuggle the defecting officer back to the Soviets using stealth. Why then is Plan 'B' to employ a large robot in a century-old costume with a flying horse? If you can't get the stealth you want, if you are forced to deal in public, then why not a robot who might blend in until you need him? Hell, they had enough sense to make the horse's wings retractable, although not enough to understand that a horse might seem out of place in Midway City after hours. And why choose the motif of a cossack, of all things? The cossacks died out under the Soviets. And why does the Cossack repeatedly threaten to kill Val if this essentially a 'catch-and-retrieve' mission? We get "The defector shall not live to see another day!", "Valentina Vostok will die!", (to Val:)"...you may call me... your executioner!" and "My orders are to kill you... and the Cossack does not fail!" That's all within three consecutive pages (pp4-6). Despite that, when his sword impales Val while she is in Negative Woman form it merely renders her unconscious. While she is unconscious, he does nothing to harm her.

.....At best, the behavior of the Cossack adds up to a robot that is so sophisticated that it uses intimidation tactics, is programmed to use interjections in a language other than the one in which it's been conversing, can adapt to new threats and yet dresses in 19th century clothing. In the long tradition of suspending disbelief in comic book stories, that's far from the worst case scenario. What is harder to swallow than the fact of the robot is the fact that since he is a robot, the profile I've just presented is the result of someone else's (probably a Soviet committee's) deliberate, conscious design. And bear in mind that while this story ran at DC, readers of Marvel comics were familiar with Red Guardian (Defenders), Colossus (X-Men) and Darkstar (Champions), all of whom were active in 1977, as well as numerous Soviet villains left over from the 1960's. That is, working models exist for comparisons. But knowing that the Cossack character would never be reoccurring is not a reason to allow his appearance to become incoherent. Being a robot, the Cossack himself may no longer be a concern for the Doom Patrol after this story but the still unseen interests who built and sent him should certainly be and many of the operating parameters they gave him should be cause for confusion for the team.

.....The basic plot of the story is much sturdier than the details. At its core, we see a fractious element within the team exposed, then one team member is threatened and the others cooperate to come to their aid, strengthening their bond in the process. Although that basic plot plays out in its entirety in this issue, there are clear indications that future installments and possibly an ongoing series were presumed to follow. After Cable is locked in the closet, Val storms out and is ambushed on an upper floor by the Cossack. When the other DP members chase after the Cossack and the unconscious Val, Joshua's dialogue repeatedly reinforces the subplot that he is in love with Val. This would be a point of interest for ongoing readers because an intragroup romance can change team dynamics, but that can only be evident if there are ongoing adventures. It can't be a plot in itself, it can only be a plot element of a series. While the DP chase the Cossack, Cable escapes from the closet then finds and subdues Brunovich, taking him into custody. We could tell ourselves that bringing Brunovich to the proper authorities would take Cable out of the DP's lives for the moment, if not for the caption at the bottom of page11: "In the light of dawn, Matt Cable drags his prisoner back to Doom Patrol headquarters to wait once again for its occupants..." We never see that second confrontation. This issue ends with the Cossack in pieces and the four new teammates leaving the scene together. The fate of the robot horse is unclear. Overall the story suffers from an over-dependence on there being future issues. It is written with the presumption that (a) anything written further on will have to be foreshadowed here in the present and that this foreshadowing is so important that it is given precedence over providing backstory for the readers here and now and (b) that the readers here and now will bother following the series into future installments when so much is kept so cryptic.

.....Perhaps you should give your eyes a rest while I hose off my brain and gear up for a following installment in which I try to piece together a hypothetical proposal for an ongoing series that could have followed this Showcase arc. (Obviously, I can't give a critical review of something that didn't happen, so this would only deal with plotting rather than style or execution. It should be much shorter.) This post has under gone several rewrites, some of them weeks apart from one another, so if something doesn't seem quite coherent it could be that I wiped a sentence I hadn't intended to. Feel free to point out any shaky syntax in the comments section, as well as any points you feel I may have missed.

[Final draft posted October 25th, 2010]

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.