Monday we said goodbye to comics legend Gardner Fox. He wasn’t the only creator and character leaving DC as the 1960s approached their end.
John Broome stuck around but wrote a lot less. Arnold Drake, co-creator of the Doom Patrol and Deadman, left but like Fox he went out on a win: Doom Patrol #121. Well, mostly a win; topping DC’s shabby treatment of Fox, they had Drake erased from the splash page. The opening, you see, has editor Murray Boltinoff, artist Bruno Premiani discussing if they’re really willing to kill their creations. Drake should have been there too but he was now a non-person at DC Comics.
That doesn’t make the issue itself any less startling. Several issues earlier, the Chief had undone the brainwashing that turned Madame Rouge evil. In #119, a mystic working for the Brain restores her programming. I’d love to have seen how Drake originally planned to handle that but cancellation hits with this issue and the plotlines, I assume, were adjusted accordingly.
First, Rouge kills the Brain and his gorilla aide Monsieur M’Allah; being evil again doesn’t mean Rouge likes her former brainwasher. Then, with the help of Nazi Captain Zahl, who has an old score with the Chief, Rouge hunts her former lover down.
Her motives are unclear as she doesn’t want to kill Niles. Possibly that’s a holdover from whatever Drake’s long-term plans for her were. Then again, she’s not terribly stable so maybe she’s not thinking it through (if she had, she’d have anticipated how this issue ends up). With her help, Zahl traps the Chief and his team (Beast Boy and Mento are absent) and gives them an ultimatum: he can kill them or he can blow up a worthless fishing village inhabited by 14 worthless fishermen and their families. Zahl’s supremely confident the Chief will choose his life and his team’s lives, thereby discrediting his heroic reputation. Needless to say, the DP don’t consider any lives worthless and tell Zahl to fire away. He does. We end on Mento mourning and vowing revenge.
The creators (well, the two who are still in the issue) are quite clear that if sales reverse, the DP can return. Even so, this was a shocker when I read it in the early 1970s (I went about buying up the entire series). The loneliness I spoke about in my previous post had grown more acute after we moved to the US; I had friends but at the same time I felt very isolated. The Doom Patrol were the first DC Comic to do the “found family” trope and I think I connected with that. Seeing them die was … unsettling. I had no way of knowing that in 1977, at least some of them would love again.
God alone knows what I’d have made of their death if I’d read it in 1968.
Along with Fox, Drake and the Doom Patrol departing DC, so were a number of other comic books and characters. As shedding low-sellers is a normal part of the comics industry — DC did it in 1966 and 1967 — I’m not sure if the losses of 1968 signify any serious problems or worries or they’re business as usual. We have Dial H for Hero and Martian Manhunter gone from House of Mystery—
Plastic Man—
Blackhawk—
Adventures of Bob Hope—
and Hawkman
The Winged Wonder would transfer over to the new Atom and Hawkman, a format that would last into 1969.
Of course, DC was also trying a lot of new stuff in this same period. Next Silver Age Reread post (hopefully) we’ll look at the additions rather than the subtractions.
#SFWApro. Covers top to bottom by Premiani, Jim Aparo, Sal Trapani, Jack Sparling, Pat Boyette, Neal Adams and Joe Kubert.
I’ve always wondered how Doom Patrol #121 made it past the Comics Code Authority, which required criminals to be punished, or at least for evildoers to be thwarted, since it ends with the villains getting away with murdering the heroes.
Possibly “if it sells we’ll revive everyone, here’s our plan” would satisfy them?