Deadman

 

Mike Baron & Kelley Jones Deadman (1989)
The closer I get to actually finishing Moby fucking Dick, the harder it becomes. I'll open the book, set my eyes to yet another droning chapter, and before I know what's happening, I'm half way through something more enjoyable - even anything more enjoyable given that it's a massive fucking category encompassing every book ever written except for Moby-Dick and possibly the works of Dostoyevsky. This time it was Deadman, specifically a single story spanning a couple of prestige format series - two issues each - published '89 and '92 respectively.

Deadman is the creation of Arnold Drake, who also came up with the Doom Patrol, and is similarly at odds with the mainstream caped milieu upon which he occasionally intrudes. His superpower is that he's dead - hence the name and the red costume with a big white D on the front. Specifically, he's a crime-solving ghost, or at least that's the resume. The supernatural is a realm where DC Comics always fared quite well, not least since Alan Moore knotted all of the various characters together into a single spooky continuum during his run on Swamp Thing, and which arguably resulted in the founding of the Vertigo imprint. I liked Vertigo, but I still think their best stuff happened before they felt like they had to give it a special name - Mike Baron's Deadman, for example.

Firstly, the art of Kelley Jones is incredible, drawing on the expressionism of all those pre-code horror comics to render something which is as much its own visual language as Giger's biomechanics - to which it's a sort of swampy, mushroom festooned rural cousin. Mike Baron's writing further abstracts the story from its distant caped origins to forge what I suppose you might call tender horror, allowing a crushing sense of pathos to a character who may as well be the contents of a butcher's shop window and without any obvious aesthetic contradictions. Deadman falls in love with another ghost, it all goes horribly wrong, and ludicrous though it probably should be, it still does its job better than Herman Melville evidently did his. This is one of those things which I had on eBay for a while, but no-one bought it presumably due to none of the usual attention grabbing names being involved. This has at least meant that I haven't had to buy the thing twice - as happened with a few of the comic books I ended up selling - but seems like a sad indictment on the taste of the comic buying public.

Doom Patrol

John Byrne, Doug Hazlewood & Terry Austin Doom Patrol (2006)
This is a stack of eighteen comic books picked up in continuation of my efforts to catch up with all those versions of the Doom Patrol which happened while I was looking the other way, and comprising a story John Byrne began during his run of Justice League comics. The strangest thing here was Byrne's decision to ignore all previous versions of the book, starting again at the beginning as though we'd never before met any of these characters. There's an editorial in the first issue explaining how this return to year zero has been effected so as to tell new stories without any crippling continuity getting in the way, although I have to say that John Arcudi seemed to do fine with the previous run of Doom Patrol, taking it somewhere entirely different without any need of a reset button; and for all its finer points, I still can't help feel that Byrne simply didn't want to deal with all that weird homoerotic Dadaism.

That said, I suppose there's an argument that Hans Bellmer and the Marquis de Sade probably don't belong in a children's comic; and so far as taking Doom Patrol back to its roots with stories thematically faithful to the Arnold Drake version, Byrne does a decent job without descending into pastiche. This is as mainstream as the book has ever been, although it's still reasonably weird when compared to - off the top of my head - silver age Superman. The premise suffers a little from somewhat modular Thunderbirdsisms with the tidily secret base from which the team go forth to fight crime and effect rescue operations, but this is at least a little offset by the characters, old and new, with their brain transplants, four-armed gorillas, friendly Confederate ghosts, and so on - and not forgetting a pleasing sidestep into alternate Doom Patrol realities somewhere around issue fourteen. John Byrne is quite good at this sort of thing, essentially pulling the characters apart, working out what makes them tick, and then spinning stories from whatever he's found - which he did to great effect with Alpha Flight back in the eighties; but apparently he's not very good at dialogue, which really shows in the wake of Chris Claremont having co-written those issue of Justice League which foreshadowed this book. It's not that the dialogue is bad so much as that it lacks Claremont's flair and thus exposes the fact that we're actually reading what may as well be a peculiar take on Scooby Doo. Characters think about what they're doing within their thought bubbles as they're doing it, or they describe that which we can see with our own eyes, or they point out that they would have got away with it were it not for that meddling Doom Patrol.

Despite this, Byrne's Doom Patrol has enough going on to keep it engagingly odd and even gripping, and the only problem is simply that it could have been better.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers

Arnold Drake, Steve Gerber, Gene Colan & others
Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers (1977)
Neither talking raccoon nor pugilist tree anywhere to be seen, this collection being a reprint of the original version of the Guardians, as previously reprinted in the English Star Wars Weekly back when I was a boy of the age group for which these strips were written and drawn. I liked the film a lot, but for me the Guardians of the Galaxy will always be these guys - Charlie-27, Martinex, Vance Astro, and the others.

Naturally I sought this out during a fit of nostalgia not entirely unlike that which recently inspired me to shell out on collections of old Captain America and Warlock comics. Happily it too seems to have stood the test of time in so much as that whilst the strips are very clearly aimed at boys of about twelve and not much older, at least psychologically, they work well within such limitations and with no obvious pandering involved. In fact, given that this is essentially a really fat kid's comic book, I'm surprised at how many days it has taken me to read the thing. This is because Guardians of the Galaxy was first published when Marvel was at its most wordy, each panel surmounted by loquacious captionage describing the contents of said panel in a voice combining Williams Shatner and Shakespeare or thereabouts; but the writing is of such standard as to resist the quality of parody even thirty or more years later. It's not Tale of Two Cities by a long shot, and one should keep in mind that Marvel's understanding of science-fiction was essentially capes, superpowers, and men frowning and saying behold! against a Kirby inspired backdrop of planets and cosmic forces, but there's nevertheless sufficient scope for plenty of pleasantly weird ideas - not the full on acid trip of Jim Starlin's Warlock, but coming fairly close in places.

Furthermore, Arnold Drake and Gene Colan's Earth Shall Overcome!, as reprinted from a 1969 issue of Marvel Super-Heroes - the first appearance of the Guardians - probably ranks amongst the strangest comics Marvel has ever produced - van Vogt-style evolved supermen inhabiting a harshly lit expressionist world of angles and half-seen horrors. It seems significant that Arnold Drake is probably better remembered as the creator of the similarly freakish Doom Patrol. Despite the promising start, the Guardians, so it would seem, lay more or less fallow for almost another decade barring uninspiring appearances alongside the Thing in Marvel Two-in-One and later The Defenders - all gathered here - before really finding their feet with the material which was eventually reprinted in Star Wars Weekly; and for a kid's comic which still reads like a kid's comic - aside from it being difficult to process issues of The Defenders without being reminded of Daniel Clowes taking the piss out of that sort of thing - it has generally aged very well.

The Doom Patrol volume one

Arnold Drake, Bruno Premiani & Bob Brown

The Doom Patrol volume one (1966)
I was a huge fan of the late 1980s revival of DC's Doom Patrol, both the wonderfully peculiar Grant Morrison run and those earlier, more mainstream issues written by Paul Kupperberg. At the time, I wasn't really sure who the Doom Patrol were supposed to be, had never heard of the original 1960s comic book written by Arnold Drake, and had only encountered the characters in some random issue of Marv Wolfman's New Teen Titans.

When I found a copy of Murray R. Ward's Official Doom Patrol Index - reprinting the covers and summarising all those 1960s issues - my eyes were opened; although it's probably worth keeping in mind that I'm talking about comic books here, so as revelations go this probably wasn't on the scale of when Einstein invented television or whatever. Arnold Drake's Doom Patrol were freakish misfit superheroes guided by a wheelchair bound genius three months before the first Stan Lee X-Men comic hit the stands, although to be fair, there's an argument that Drake had in turn borrowed a lot from previous Marvel titles, and conversely, if Stan Lee ripped him off, he arguably ended up doing it better. I've always thought Marvels' greatest invention was the mutant superhero which in one swoop did away with the increasingly ludicrous requirement of costumed superhumans forever being born from laboratory experiments gone wrong. There's only so many times you can pull that trick before it begins to seem a bit unlikely even by the standards of the genre.

As the legend has it, 1960s Doom Patrol was indeed weird, but more so in conception than execution, which becomes apparent once you sit down and try to read the thing. As outcast heroes, Cliff Steele, Rita Farr, and Larry Trainor endure the odd remark along the lines of check out the guy with the bandages, but it's hardly on the level of torch wielding mobs picketing Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters in X-Men; and whilst Garguax, the Brotherhood of Evil, and General Immortus may be engagingly odd as foes, every other issue seems either to be someone robbing a bank or stealing a rare diamond, or making a bid for world domination starting off by either robbing a bank or stealing a rare diamond in order to finance the operation. Essentially it's the usual super-powered crooks, plans explained to anyone who will listen, and low-quality gags delivered whilst fighting; and actually it's not even half so weird as some of those earlier issues of Spiderman.

That said, Bruno Premiani's artwork is lovely - clean, confident lines with just the right level of detail and the sort of figure work associated with an era of comics drawn by those who learned their craft through means other than just reading comics. If he'd been working in England at the height of Eagle, or drawing something that wasn't printed on recycled toilet paper, he might perhaps have flourished and been remembered as another Frank Hampson. Even though he succumbs to shorthand in later issues, it's the artwork that kept me going during passages where the dialogue and narrative became just a little too repetitive to be bothered with, seeing as how I'm not seven years old and this isn't 1963.

Maybe I needed to read the colour editions, or maybe twenty-two consecutive issues of one slightly repetitive comic was too much in just a couple of sittings. Doom Patrol isn't terrible, but I'm afraid I found it kind of dull in places. There's no mistaking its potential as the weird seed of what would come in decades to follow, but I'm afraid it was a bit of a plodder for me.