Thank You, Matt Fraction

...for inspiring me to buy this:

The Doom Patrol Archives vol. 1, by Arnold Drake, Bob Haney, and Bruno Premiani

For all the comparisons that have been made between the contemporaneous debuts of the Doom Patrol and the X-Men, the Doom Patrol really read like a slightly skewed take on the Fantastic Four.  The "World's Strangest Heroes" are the product of a couple of polished DC craftsmen trying to loosen up and capture the Lee/Kirby feel with the requisite aloof scientist leader, hotheaded flyboy, beautiful girl, and cranky, self-pitying guy trapped in a monstrous body.  It's a dynamic that Grant Morrison grasped in his Kirby tribute issue of Doom Patrol, one of many reminders of just how true Morrison and Case (or in that case, Ken Steacy) were to the spirit of the original.  Arnold Drake may not have matched Stan Lee's knack for irreverent dialogue, and Bruno Premiani certainly couldn't duplicate Jack Kirby's kinetic compositions.  But they more than made up for any failures to mimic the Mighty Marvel Manner with a surreal imagery that was all their own.

At first glance Premiani's figures appear to have the stiff banality characteristic of a lot of Silver Age DC art, although he frequently inks them in ominous shadows that give his work an almost photographic realism no matter how outré the subject matter.  Both features play well against the weird menaces and unsuppressed tensions that are always erupting into the Doom Patrol's world.  The shadows give the tension visual expression; the banality gives the weirdness definition and contrast.  This panel is both a hyper-real horror and a Pop Art masterpiece:

That image is courtesy of Matt Fraction.  His tribute to Drake and Premiani might look like one of the just-add-captions scanfests that make the comics blogosphere go 'round, but it's actually a treatise in pictorial disguise.  Fraction identifies the recurring motifs that give the Doom Patrol its dreamlike appeal, maybe because if you read through every issue of Doom Patrol your only options are to come up with a thesis or go insane.  Fraction saves his sanity by latching onto the recurring body trauma that twists and distorts nearly every character.  It's no wonder Morrison loved the Doom Patrol, who are perfectly designed for embodied anxieties and fantastic adventures. Rita allows for dramatic variations in scale; Cliff affords endless opportunities to mutilate, dismember, and destroy the human form.  Larry?  Larry's just weird.

The first couple of stories haven't quite risen to the polymorphic madness Fraction's scans promise, but then I haven't gotten to this issue yet: