Doom and Goo

Much cooler, after rain, wind and mess New Year's Day. High, thin clouds rolled in later. Full moon so bright the horizon looked like dusk. Huge ring, with refraction "streamers." (Is it refraction, or reflection? I dunno.)

It's called A Very Short Introduction to ... . The Oxford University Press mini-book series, that is. The more I dig into the Concise OED, the more impressed I am. The software version still sits, unused, in administrator mode.

While surfing the 'net (in this mode), I went looking for news about the Buffy S8 comic. As many may already know, it's due later this year. The series could take two years to complete! I'll try to stick the link I found here ... oh, forget it -- the URL is a mile and a half long. Just go to tvguide.com and search Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the search bar at the top of the homepage. The article is dated Dec. 7. There are also some (apparent) sample pages at the website. I'm not sure I'm ready (at my age, in particular!) for fanboy nail-chewing every month or so for two-plus years. I'm also not sure I'm ready for Buffy and crew wearing armored space suits and brandishing ray guns. I guess they're on Earth, otherwise they'd all have big bubble helmets with little antennae sticking out! (I'm kidding! No, really!) If I'm still around and still interested, maybe I can lug home the graphic novel(s) in 2010. I can put them beside the Cerebus and Love and Rockets volumes I hope to get someday.

Speaking of "bubble helmet" science fiction and comics, one of the weirdest of the so-called Silver Age was The Doom Patrol. Conceived (I think) as a DC competitor to Marvel's Fantastic Four, the Doom Patrol were an elastic woman, a man with a negative-energy self, and a robot-man. Their arch-nemesis was a talking brain in a portable tank. His partner (later, I think) was a talking gorilla. I realize the concept sounds stupid, and the hokey covers reinforce that impression. But the way Bruno Premiani (the artist) and the writer (Arnold Drake) did it, it was a very strange comic for the era. I always wondered how they got the talking brain through the super-strict Comics Code Authority: it was in some really gooey-looking fluid that grossed me out when I saw it for the first time in my older cousin's comic collection. The talking gorilla villain was a snob who (I think) spoke French. The negative guy was emotionally unstable and not always in full control of his negative self, which zoomed around the page in weird black and yellow electro-flame. The stretchable woman was always whining about something, and the robot guy (he also had whatever was left of his brain exposed in some episodes, I think) was always having mechanical problems, but was the sanest of the three. The Doom Patrol was led by an eccentric genius in a wheelchair, whom the three members blamed for turning them into freaks while in outer space. (Some say the handicapped leader and the immature behavior of the Doom Patrol were in turn imitated by Marvel's early X-men -- I can say the two companies competed fiercely back in the day.) The Doom Patrol story edge was 1950s horror gimmicks, and the backgrounds looked like The Forbidden Planet or The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was fun to read, once you acquired the taste.

My cuz loved the early Doom Patrol (he also had a taste for horror movies -- the color ones he took me to when I was 8 or so really freaked me out: the screens were huge then -- and horror fiction that was truly gruesome, at least for an 8 year old who read them utterly aghast.). But the comic's style was considered dated, so the sales must have slumped something awful around 1968, and DC actually killed off all the characters in the last issue. (That never happened in comics back then -- well, almost.) To go out on a still weird note, the last comic ended with drawings of the artist and editor pleading with the fans to write in and save it! That didn't happen. My understanding (I haven't seen any) is that attempts to revive the Doom Patrol in the modern era have all flopped. It was one of those "you had to see the original to believe it" kind of comic. I hope some get re-published in decent quality someday. It was a kind of classic -- in a class of its own.

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*The Doom Patrol original comic has been republished in a deluxe trade format.


LJ orig.: 01/02/07