Burly Living: Six Projects DC Comics Needs Working On

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/06/six-by-6-by-sixth-gun-cullen-bunns-six-nostalgic-dream-projects/#more-47120

Above is a question to a current comic book professional about the Six Nostalgic Projects he'd undertake in comics if given a free hand.

Because I always love an excuse to write about what I want to write, in much the same manner, I'll follow suit. My projects, in order of basic import and improbability of ever having the opportunity:

Dr. Occult: http://www.toonopedia.com/droccult.htm

Read the above for Don Markstein's great summation. This character was created by the dudes who created Superman. That right there is worth looking into. He carries around a mystic talisman, has a cool hat, his two fists, and probably an ex-wife or two somewhere.

Like most great characters, "Dr. Occult" is just that. He hasn't a secret identity. He's a supernatural private eye. He's the first supernatural investigator, and we've had no shortage of those over the years, peaking with Kolchak "the Night Stalker" for 1970s television and bastardized by "The X-Files" later. Still, I'd jump all over an ongoing series using a two-fisted PI who can kick ass in the real world and on the astral plane as well. Kind of like Doctor Strange, but without the suave. A 1930s PI character fighting microscopic demons, bleeding heart social workers, Neanderthal undead, and at one point trapped on Dinosaur Island, you'll love Dr. Occult. Plus he allows for the inclusion of other obscure characters like Prince Ra-Man and the G.I. Robot. Trust me.

Space Ranger:  for one thing, he was designed in the 1950s by the great Bob Brown, an artist who is criminally unknown today. For another, he's almost predominantly yellow in space-age cool, meaning he could dust off a Green Lantern with no trouble. He's a tough outer space dude who uses all kinds of slick 1950s-type weapons and his dukes to fix little red wagons. The way I think about him, he's cooler than most science fiction heroes since he's a regular joe who has to depend on his science to survive. He also has his own shapeshifter Girl Friday, who is like Maya on the 1970s "Space 1999" show who could become a variety of cool animals and alien creatures. Figuring too that Ultraa the Ultra-Alien will be heavily featured, and the stories basically as Harlan Ellison would have written them, and I think Space Ranger is full on frontal awesome.

Metamorpho the Element Man: the first time I knew about this character, I was a kid who had bought a two-sided 45 rpm record with one side a Plastic Man adventure "The Invasion of the Plastic Men" and on the other Metamorpho versus "Fumo the Fire Giant." I don't care how you slice it, I never forgot Rex Mason, the Element Man, saying, "Oh Yeah?Here. Try this...Cobalt Fist! Unf!"

Rex is another tragic hero. He was an Indiana Jones type cursed by an alien artifact buried in an Eygptian tomb, transformed into a being made up of the known elements. Needless to say, the resultant bad complexion and odd fact of not being human any more was really unfortunate. As such, Rex uses acerbic humor and his own good nature to combat freakish depression. He's been kicking around comics since the 1960s, mostly as a member of other superhero teams. I've simply always loved Rex Mason, and I think he would work really well in a "buddy comic" instead. Like the old POWER MAN AND IRON FIST comic or CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON.

The best partner? Read below.

Wildcat: Ted Grant, the ex-heavyweight boxing champion of the world who got framed for murder and became a costumed hero, is simply one of the great characters ever. He's the epitome of the Burly Man, he's non-PC, he's arrogant and he's misogynist. He's also an "old guy", somewhere in his 50s. He's trained Batman on boxing. He's knocked out a young Muhammed Ali. He has a motorcycle with a giant cat face on the front of it. He was cool in the 1940s and he's cool now.

The problem with Wildcat over the years is that he's been written "old." He's a retired superhero with tenure. Any story that Ted Grant is involved in invariably involves boxing. I realize every hero needs a schtick, but Wildcat can do much more. If you figure Ted will probably be a drinking hunk who punches first and never asks questions, you'll have it right. Just because he's in his 50s doesn't mean he can't bring it. Charles Bronson was 55 years old when he made HARD TIMES.

Anyway, WILDCAT AND THE ELEMENT MAN sounds like a television pilot from the 1970s, starring George Peppard and Darren McGavin. Which is as it should be. This counts as one project here, just so you know.

SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE/ "Golden Age" Sandman: Wesley Dodds is an amateur detective who looks like Mr. Limpet (below) and battles crime by sneaking around and knocking criminals right the f*ck out with a sleeping gas gun.

He's another hero from the 1940s, but I'm interested in bringing him into the modern era. Much as I'd like to leave him in the 1930s, Wesley simply merits the cool of being a different kind of vigilante in our world. His insulated intellect, his gas-mask covered features, his gloved fists, indicate how Wesley is removed from society while obsessed with what is infecting it: human evil, victimization, rape, torture, murder. The Sandman finds those responsible and his sleeping gas causes all kinds of freaky hallucinations that just don't go away overnight. You can be assured, if Wesley blasts you, you're never going to sleep without nightmares again. Which is probably one of the most hardcore punishments out there, isn't it? Imagine it. Imagine the psychological impact. Who wouldn't kill themselves to escape the mists of the Sandman?

The Doom Patrol:  the first time a superhero team was ever killed outright in their own comic, it was the 1960s and writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Primiani decided to end it all for the Fabulous Freaks. Ever since, the team, revitalized from death after almost four decades, has seen its good days and bad. Mostly though, it's been a tribute to the weirdness of the original series and the unfortunate need to keep the DP smothered in bizarreness that has been both a strength and weakness for the comic.

The best DP stories work when the living brain trapped in a robot body, the woman who can shrink to ant-size or grow to King Kong-size, and the man who has a radiation being inside of him and is cursed as a walking atomic pile, and their weird enemies are all contrasted against the mundane. They fight an alien invasion in a gas station, defend a nursery school from giant ferrets, they solve a murder mystery in a full baseball stadium. To me, and I'm just saying, I belive the Doom Patrol to be the greatest example of pure iconic story-telling, because there's no limit to where they can go or what they can do.

Hawkman: there may be no character more intriging to so many, who feel the urge to change everything about him until he is universally reviled and is quickly shunted off to cancellation. Or, worse, having Hawkgirl replace him in his own comic.

Carter Hall is an archaologist who may or may not be reincarnated throughout the ages. He has memories of past lives and he is skilled at ancient weaponry, like cestus and the all-mighty mace. To me, trying too hard to fit all of Hawkman's history into his character is stupid. He's a guy who uses a hawk avatar and knows how to beat ass with weapons people have never seen before.

If it's me, I put Carter Hall into some kind of strange Dinosaur Island type place where he's constantly fighting six-armed burning gorillas and invaders from other dimensions. Essentially, Hawkman would gather up some local color and turn into the Herculoids (above.)

If that doesn't seem cool, I just don't know what would.

Note: All "Microheroes" property of their respective creators. I do love some Microheroes, man.

Burly Fun With Paint: The NEW Doom Patrol!

Obviously not the whole Doom Patrol.

Over yonder http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=34606&PN=1&totPosts=65 there is talk about what characters would you swap between DC Comics and Marvel Comics, and who would work best in the others' Universe?

I postulated that Machine Man, a Jack Kirby creation from the late 1970s, would work great at DC Comics.

The idea is that Cliff Steele, known as Robotman after his only living tissue (his brain) is transferred into a robot body, is destroyed in the fatal explosion which killed the original Doom Patrol circa 1969 http://earthboundburlyman.blogspot.com/2010/01/friday-night-fights-villainous-victory.html

However, as happened in "actual" history, Cliff's body was salvaged and a new robotic body built to house his brain. Here's where the Machine Man design steps in, complete with Kirby's badass "Hand Weapons System" which means the right hand has an entire arsenal of weaponry inside it. Powerful destructive force, on top of being super strong and durable.

I think Cliff would be digging this more "human" robot design, complete with plastic "mask" of his own human visage!

Burly Things I Want to Write: Stop F*cking With the Doom Patrol!

The Doom Patrol is a comic book. The first incarnation of the DP happened in 1963, at DC Comics, who had just realized the upstart "rival" company, Marvel Comics, had hit upon a new formula for success with mags like FANTASTIC FOUR and THE UNCANNY X-MEN. Those books had come in response to DC's own JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA of the late 1950s. Marvel had kinked the formula of the superhero team to reflect then-current moods and tensions, such as the Cold War and racial pressures. So DC wanted their own version of Marvel's success, and thus was born DOOM PATROL, by writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Premiani, with a few issues drawn by strong journeyman Bob Brown. The 1960s stories all involved the Doom Patrol core of original characters:

Robotman, a pro racecar driver named Cliff Steele whose body was destroyed in an accident, his brain salvaged and placed in a special robot body, giving him superhuman strength and durability. The drawbacks are, Cliff as a robot cannot sleep, taste food, feel a breeze, or make love to a woman ever again. Definitely not good times.

Negative Man, Larry Trainor, an Air Force pilot who becomes fused with a strange ionic shadow being of unknown origin, which leaves Larry's body for 60 second intervals to fly around at impossible speeds performing all kinds of incredible feats. Larry dies if he's seperated from the Negative Being for longer than a minute, it's theorized. Worse yet, Larry Trainor is a "radioactive" man, his body's radioactive levels deadly to anyone near him. Only by wearing mummy-bandages, "specially-treated" by the Chief, is Larry able to even be in the same room as his comrades.

Elasti-Girl, Rita Farr, an actress exposed to weird gases in a volcanic region, she is able to shrink to ant-size or grow to King Kong mass in an instant. Rita can be "normal", unlike the other DP members, despite her powers, but her lost film career has left her with only an undying loyalty to the Doom Patrol. A kind of compensation as the field leader and matriarch of her new family.

And their leader, wheelchair-bound, bearded super-inventor The Chief. He had rescued them from the despair of their accidental marrings by Fate, giving them purpose and meaning. The Chief pushes the Patrol to be more than they are, stronger than the sum of their powers. He gives them meaning.

The DP considered themselves "freaks", and with good reason, but within the stories they were viewed by DC civilians as a benefit to Mankind. In fact, the Doom Patrol are the hardest working superhero group ever created. They didn't go off dimension-hopping for no reason, like the Fantastic Four. The Doom Patrol maintained a far more blue-collar ethic. They saved normal people from natural disasters, averted accidental man-made mass destruction, as a primary reason for being. In the DP's world, early on particularly, they faced off against the ocassional weird freakazoid, like the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, or Mr. 103, or some alien invasion menace. Only later in the run did their mirror-image rivals, the Brotherhood of Evil, consisting of a disembodied genius brain called The Brain and an intelligent French gorilla, Mallah, deviate the DP's focus from their service to Man by providing a constant superhero threat.




Strangely, DOOM PATROL for all its reputation hadn't nearly the strangest stories to be found at DC Comics. Because in those halcyon days, DC had cornered the market where weird was concerned, starring much more prominent/respected characters like Batman and Superman. Almost anything could happen to a DC superhero at any time, like traveling eight billion years from Earth or having their head turn into a giant ant's. By the end of the story, the superhero was normal again, returned to the status quo to return for another opium-induced plotline the next month.

But DOOM PATROL did something that had never been done before. With cancellation looming in 1968, Drake decided to blow up his Doom Patrol, literally: the heroes sacrifice their lives to preserve a small Maine fishing town. The ploy was designed to get readership to write in and "save" the DP and thus the DP's comic. You know how that went. The Doom Patrol stayed "dead" for almost ten years. Then the revivals began. And then some talented people started f*cking up the Doom Patrol.

There's plenty of places online to read more. Writer Paul Kupperberg has decried his 1977 revival Doom Patrol comic, which brought back Robotman in a new robot body, along with several new characters, one of which took on the "Negative Being" once belonging to Larry Trainor and became Negative Woman.

After that short series, the second DP revival happened in the mid-1980s. Starting off as a typical superhero yarn, with mediocre results, DC Comics brought in Brit intellect and writer Grant Morrison. He decided to completely alter the comic book landscape in order to appeal to the adult readers of the 1990s who replaced the 8-16 year old comic book reading demographic. DOOM PATROL wasn't the first comic book property to be distorted by Brit writers, or Morrison specifically. Morrison turned the DP into a nearly-impentrable puzzle, devoid of the formula trappings, which were replaced with myriad intellectual references and symbology. DOOM PATROL became "cult", establishing itself as the canon by which many pretentious college students would proclaim the comic book to have "grown up."

This version of the DP was the most impactful with a certain reading public, and it's this version which the characters and conceit have yet to shake. After Morrison and his successor Rachel Pollack had their way with the DP, the comic again was cancelled. The cult status, however, did not end.




There have been several more attempts to revive the DP, none lasting very long. The DP has continued to vex talents trying to produce tales about them. Writer/Artist John Byrne attempted to reboot the Doom Patrol from scratch, but the comic suffered from a kind of inexplicable antipathy. Just last year, another DP comic began, and has strained through a dozen or so issues, unremarkably. This version has steepled itself in the conceit that all of the various histories of the Doom Patrol are, in fact, wholly extant. Drake's, Morrison's, Kupperberg's, Byrne's and Giffen's lukewarm take.

Meanwhile, the DP twist in the wind, prepared as always for extinction and eventual resurrection by the next whims of talent.

The essential core of the Doom Patrol is evident in the original stories from the 1960s. Prior to the ascension of the Brotherhood of Evil, and the superhero melodrama they represented to the DP, the comic was about something fundamental. The nobility of Man, overcoming the "worst" Fate had to offer. The Patrol members are "handicapped", but they continue on despite their tragedies.

For the record, if I was writing the Doom Patrol, I'd know exactly how to create a successful version of the team. And it wouldn't be yet another quirky take derived from the unfortunate Grant Morrison-ization of the comic. Because anything less is just f*cking with a great conceit and great characters.



Many people believe if you went back to the original DP series and began it seconds before the DP are "killed" by an exploding island off the coast, you could ignore all the versions of the DP which have come since. All of which are as different from one another as the members of the Doom Patrol themselves.

But I'm here to tell you, this is unnecessary. You have to go back further in Doom Patrol history. You have to return to the core of the conceit. Which is not how strange the DP are in relation to the world around them, but how strange they think they are. The Doom Patrol is a comic about noble pursuits, and the odd love between people who feel they have no one but each other.

The Doom Patrol are treated like the Addam's Family of the DC Universe. There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea, as the DP themselves believe they are the strangest team of all. But again, it's only perception by the Doom Patrol themselves. Their very name suggests a fatalism, an acknowledgement that without "normal" life they will risk their lives again and again until they are dead. There is nothing else for them to do, no children they can raise who are not irradiated and suffering, no husband who could endure his wife's superior mammoth size and strength. Even poor Cliff Steele hasn't enough tissue left to create a clone he might transfer his brain into.






I love the Doom Patrol. The stories that worked the best with the Patrol presented these odd, broken people with an impossible situation to overcome, and they managed to overcome it. Not because they were more powerful, more intelligent, or more savage. They were simply more unified and strengthed by the love for each other. DOOM PATROL is a love story unlike any you will ever read. A true love story, devoid of the worst cliches, and full of all of the hope and dreams of Mankind.

Doomed Patrol!

One of the most infamous stories in superhero comic book history was, to my eyes, a clear breaking point for the comic book. What was once adventure stories for boys had become a more mature, but altogether more grim place of finality. The Doom Patrol, whose group pessimism status is only rivaled by the World War 2 "Losers" and the "Suicide Squad", was a fun comic from the 1960s aping more or less the "Marvel style" prevalent at the time, and doing it one better. The funky freaks of strange accidents had banded together to help Mankind. Unlike the X-Men, the DPers were accepted as heroes and positives, even if it was not always easy to realize it themselves.

So it was, creators Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani set up a scenario for the DP's mortal enemies Captain Zahl and turncoat Madame Rouge to slay them. This was a ploy by Drake/Premiani to generate interest in the comic, with a write-in "vote" from the readers to either continue the series or allow the DP to "die." And thus:



BONUS: to his real credit, John Byrne produced a Doom Patrol comic a few years ago with his wish-fulfillment solution to the above scene, which I include here because it really irks me that there hasn't been a great Doom Patrol comic since the DP "died." Much as I liked Mr. Byrne's series, it didn't quite meet expectations until the last few issues prior to cancellation. The less said about Morrison's DP and the current unfortunate Giffin version, the better.



Long live the Doom Patrol!