Some Don't Play Well with Others

In addition to buying collected editions of different series, I'm usually hunting things down in back issues as well. Whichever is easier to manage, really, given how often things fall out of print these days. One of the series I tried at the start of this year was the post-Infinite Crisis volume of Doom Patrol, the one written by Keith Giffen.

The first six issues, which is all I bought at the time, didn't do much for me. Nobody on the team really seems to like each other or enjoy being around one another. It reminded me unpleasantly of where Teen Titans was at after the One Year Later jump, back when I first started this blog. One of those books where you wonder why any of the characters are even there if they hate being around each other so much. I suppose the standard response is, "a lack of anywhere else to go."

But the book really didn't get off to a good start with me. The first issue opens on the team on some mission. Negative Man, Robotman, Rita Farr, and two characters left over from the John Byrne run that preceded this, a (I'm assuming) telekinetic teenage girl codenamed Nudge, and a four-armed gorilla called Grunt.

Within about six pages, Nudge gets machine-gunned into nearly unrecognizable meat chunks by a helicopter and Grunt flees into the jungle with her corpse. And that's basically it. One other character questions the fact the team didn't even attempt to recover Nudge's remains, but otherwise, out of sight, out of mind.

I mentioned in the Sunday Splash Page for John Arcudi and Tan Eng Huat's Doom Patrol run that I'd never heard anything positive about the Byrne run that followed it. But this just seemed so, perfunctory. Like Giffen didn't want to deal with either of those characters and shuffled them out as quick as possible. In which case, why not just have someone make an offhand reference to why they aren't around and leave it at that? Nudge didn't want to hang out on Mad Scientist Island, and the gorilla only likes her so it went along.

I also get that the Doom Patrol have a long and distinguished tradition of some or all of the team dying. So much so, none of the team appear to be phased by the death. But if the point they're all highly depressed, inured to death or even actively suicidal, there are plenty of other ways to show it. I know, because Giffen does it in subsequent issues. All told, it came off as Giffen smashing a toy he didn't even want to use, just because he could.