Unstoppable Doom Patrol #1 – Dennis Culver, Writer; Chris Burnham, Artist; Brian Reber, Colorist
Ray – 8/10
Ray: The Doom Patrol has always been a hard team to figure out, with some of the most esoteric writers in comics taking turns at them. Between Grant Morrison, Rachel Pollack, and Gerard Way, the title is often bizarre—and usually at least on the fringes of continuity, if not off in its own line. But now, Dennis Culver and Chris Burnham are taking the current status quo and putting the Doom Patrol squarely inside it. We’ve got a pared-down team—Elasti-Girl, Robotman, Mr. Negative, Crazy Jane (with a new dominant personality of the team’s new Chief) and a new pint-sized kid monster named Beast Girl. More importantly, these characters are the perfect bizarre superhero team to take on the major problems caused by the Lazarus Planet event—which sent cosmic energy into the atmosphere and created a massive metahuman boom. Now we’ve got hundreds of new metahumans with unpredictable powers—not all of them desirable.
The main plot this issue involves a corrupt business, a twisted experiment, and a man mutated into a hulk-like figure with more body horror involved. Overall, it’s strong—the new characters are interesting, warts and all, while the writing does a good job of showing how the Doom Patrol handles things differently than Batman and co. Burnham’s art is note-perfect for this book—just the right mix of goofy and occasionally horrific. The main weak link of the story is the subplot involving Monsieur Mallah and the Brain, which finds the long-time lovers and frequent Doom Patrol enemies seeking out an old criminal collaborator just as some unexpected rifts form in their relationship. This is part of a frequent problem of taking things that work and shaking them up to kick off a run. Overall, it’s a promising start, but the transition to making the Doom Patrol mainstream DC heroes isn’t going to be smooth.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
