Doom Patrol by Drake & Premiani

Showcase Presents: Doom Patrol
Arnold Drake: Writer
Bruno Premiani: Artist

Vol. 1 – ISBN: 1401221823
Collects My Greatest Adventure/Doom Patrol #80-101
1963–1966
520 pages

Vol. 2 – ISBN: 1401227708

Collects Doom Patrol #102-121

1966–1968

512 pages

Blame Grant Morrison. Morrison is the reason that in all my years of comic reading, only recently have I read the original DP stories by Drake & Premiani. After reading Morrison’s re-imagining of the DP from the late 80’s I wasn’t overly interested in catching up on the original version of the DP. That’s not to say that Morrison’s run wasn’t very good, but personally, I’ve always found Morrison’s writing to be in the incredibly wide range of the “average” comic. So, nothing to blog about frankly.

What changed? Well, by pure chance, I read a brief article regarding the life of Bruno Premiani (I forget where, maybe an old issue of Alter-Ego, but I’m not sure.) It isn’t within the scope of this article to enlighten you, dear reader, concerning Mr. Premiani’s fascinating life, but I would encourage you read what you can about him. He has surely lead one of the most interesting lives in comics, and he seems to be fearless in the face of fascist bullies.

The article mentioned Premiani’s work on Doom Patrol, which was practically every issue of the original run, some 40 comics, with the main writer for the run being Arnold Drake. So I took the plunge and bought both volumes of Showcase Presents: Doom Patrol, and there’s no hesitation when I tell you that it was a regret free purchase.

The Showcase Presents: Doom Patrol collect every issue of the original DP run from the 1960’s. One small quibble is that the single crossover issue with Challengers of the Unknown isn’t included. For the sake of a mere 23 pages in a volume that already contains over 500, it seems churlish not to include it as a little bonus. It’s relatively common to find similar issues collected in the Marvel Essential line (the inclusion of a single issue of Dr. Strange in Essential Tomb of Dracula vol. 2 springs to mind.) so why not expect the same from DC.

The two volumes represent an absolute top line Silver-Age adventure, sci-fi and super-hero book. It’s as good as anything else that was being published in the mid to late sixties and does deserve to be read by a wider audience. So the question is, why isn’t it?

For my money, the answer is November 1961. The penultimate month of 1961 saw the release of Fantastic Four #1. A mere 18 months later Doom Patrol debuted, if you were a kid with a limited financial resource and these two books were an option, which would you go for? Both books had an aloof leader with little attachment to the mundane world, two bickering hot-heads one with great strength, the other with a flying, crackling alter-ego, and they both had a motherly, level headed female to keep the peace and remind them to eat meals between adventures.

But only one of them had Stan and Jack. Who’d get your money?

Doom Patrol is not an FF derivative. There are many original ideas employed by Arnold Drake, not least the inclusion of an outside love interest for Sue, I mean Rita, named Namor, I mean Mento. Oh well, I’ll give up with this paragraph.

Seriously, Doom Patrol is excellent, but unfortunately it wasn’t quite as fresh as it needed to be in the formative days of the Silver-Age. It was up against stiff competition. But in retrospect, it’s my favourite DC title from this period and it does attempt stories that you’ll not find elsewhere. Drake is an accomplished writer that offers us self contained issues but with over arching plot threads and character development, particularly with Rita Farr (Elasti-Girl) and Gar Logan (Beast Boy). Premiani is an excellent artist with a great deal of skill and ability at rendering figures, in dynamic but believable poses, also, he can draw a great gorilla, which is important when Monsieur Mallah appears in several story arcs.

Monsieur Mallah

As is true of any story, the heroes can only be as interesting as the villains they face, and that is where Doom Patrol really excels. With bad guys such as the Brain, Monsieur Mallah, General Immortus, Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man and the tragic Madame Rouge, the only other comic that has as colourful a rouges gallery is Batman. Batman however, built up his rogues gallery over several decades and hundreds of issues, Doom Patrol does it in considerably less than a decade and in forty issues. There’s a lot going on in these comics.

DP 89, Cover by Bob Brown

As I mentioned earlier, I read these comics in the two Showcase Presents black and white volumes, that’s the equivalent of 40 comics for less than £20. If you chose to, you could buy the hardback colour reprints in Archive Edition for considerably more money, but in terms of reading pleasure the Showcase Presents are certainly a bargain, I guarantee that any reader that enjoys Silver-Age heroics won’t be disappointed.

Mad Thinker Reads………..

More comics by Arnold Drake & Bruno Premiani.

Captain Marvel by C.C. Beck & Otto Binder (Reprint Checklist)

I’m not a great believer in the idea of there being “definitive” interpretations of comic characters. The most successful characters are flexible enough and have the longevity to sustain multiple and varied reinventions by different creative teams.

What most people mean when they talk of the definitive Batman for example, is “My favourite interpretation of” Batman. This is a very different thing indeed.

Captain Marvel has been around for as long as any other Super-Hero. He was there at the dawn of the Golden Age and he’s still appearing, along with the Marvel Family, in the mainstream DC Universe continuity. After all those years there have, of course, been many superb interpretations of the Big Red Cheese, but my personal creative dream team for Captain Marvel stories is C.C. Beck & Otto Binder.

Beck was the original designer of Captain Marvel, he was in the thick of it from the start, with a considerable proportion of all Captain Marvel art being credited to him. Binder came later, a successful writer for science-fiction pulps already, he tried his hand at the funny books with great results.

Beck’s ability as an artist is deceptive in it’s simplicity. His minimalistic approach to his art was not about showcasing his own considerable talent, but rather about telling the story in a clear and concise fashion, in a way that even a child would have no problem in following, and these stories are certainly aimed at a juvenile audience, but that’s not to say they aren’t enjoyable for an adult. Beck’s style is certainly simple and easy to imitate, but his great strength is in his composition. His ability to frame a succession of images in such a way that there is no ambiguity in the readers mind as to how a character has progressed from one panel to the next.

Binder’s contribution to Captain Marvel can seem a little more nebulous. Most of the major elements of the Captain Marvel mythos were firmly in place before Binder’s arrival as writer. What Binder gave the reader, perhaps unconsciously, I don’t know, was an absolute fearlessness in regard to mixing genres. Any single Binder written story has the potential to flow from a straight up super-hero tale, to funny animal (with Mr Tawky Tawny, the talking tiger) to science-fiction, time travel, or even mystery. The only other comic that I’ve read that comes close to Binder’s scope of story-telling is Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, although Cole’s stories were certainly more anarchic in comparison to Binder’s Marvel, who acted as the stabilising element.

There’s a wealth of biographical and anecdotal information available on the internet for both Beck and Binder, so I won’t be covering that here and as for Captain Marvel, as soon as you read any story about the poor orphan boy who gets a job as journalist and can say a magic word to become an indestructible super-man, well, I’m sure the appeal to any young boy becomes obvious. Indeed, I’ve heard that there was a time that Captain Marvel comics sold more copies than any other comic on American news stands, including his rival, Superman.

Unfortunately, Beck & Binder material is not easy to come by in collected editions, so I have to rely on single story reprints, unless your lucky enough to be able to spend, literally, hundreds of pounds on single volumes from obscure British publishers.

Many months ago DC announced a Hard Back reprinting of the original Monster Society of Evil epic story line, but that is no longer on the cards, supposedly because of the negative portrayal of certain nationalities, specifically the Japanese.

Whatever the case, that volume is no longer available as a pre-order item.

But don’t panic just yet, below is a list of (what I believe to be) all of the Beck & Binder team of Captain Marvel stories that have been reprinted in affordable, floppy comic format since the Seventies.

The list below is sorted by the original publication date of the story, rather than publication date of the comic that is reprinting it (ie. On the first line, Shazam & Shazam Family Annual 1, is actually the most recent comic printed, but it contains the earliest of the Beck/Binder stories that I could find a reprint for, hence it’s place at the top of the list.)

Column one and two are comic title and issue number respectively, column three is the story title and column four is the original publication date, the first two digits being year, the next two being month, the two letters are the comic title (MF= Marvel Family, CM= Captain Marvel Adventures) the final three digits being the issue number.

If anyone is aware of any other Beck/Binder Captain Marvel stories that have been reprinted, please let me know, I’ll add them to the list and, hopefully, to my collection.

Shazam & Shazam Family Annual	1	mighty marvels join forces	4512 MF 001
Shazam (1973)	8	mighty marvels join forces	4512 MF 001
Limited Collectors’ Edition	C27	uncle marvel's rival *	4602 CM 053
Shazam (1973)	17	haunted girl	4603 CM 057
Shazam (1973)	13	captain marvel gets a secretary	4611 CM 067
Limited Collectors’ Edition	C21	missing red suit	4612 CM 068
Shazam (1973)	8	adventure in time	4704 CM 071
Shazam & Shazam Family Annual	1	sivana family strikes at the marvel family ^	4704 MF 010
Shazam (1973)	8	talking tiger	4712 CM 079
Adventure Comics	499	talking tiger	4712 CM 079
Shazam (1973)	8	twice-told tale	4801 CM 080
Shazam (1973)	8	return of mr. Tawny	4803 CM 082
Limited Collectors’ Edition	C27	trio of terror	4803 MF 021
Shazam (1973)	4	ownerless diamond	4906 CM 097
Limited Collectors’ Edition	C35	plot against the universe	4909 CM 100
Shazam (1973)	14	magic mix-up	4911 CM 102
Shazam (1973)	16	world hater	5011 MF 053
Limited Collectors’ Edition	C21	mr. Tawny's personality peril	5012 CM 115
Shazam (1973)	23	world's mightiest project	5102 MF 056
Shazam (1973)	13	mr. Tawny's sales campaign	5104 CM 119
Shazam (1973)	16	sneaking doom	5105 MF 059
Limited Collectors’ Edition	C27	mr. Tawny's diet dangers	5106 CM 121
Shazam (1973)	14	mr. Tawny's fight for fame	5111 CM 126
Limited Collectors’ Edition	C35	robot hunt	5202 CM 129
Shazam (1973)	17	curse of the black thumb	5202 CM 129
Shazam (1973)	13	new home for billy	5206 CM 133
Shazam (1973)	13	pandora pirates	5206 MF 072
Shazam (1973)	15	mr. Tawny's bouncing shoes	5207 CM 134
Shazam (1973)	16	king kull and the seven sins	5210 CM 137
Adventure Comics	498	world's maddest ghost	5211 CM 138
Shazam (1973)	2	captain marvel fights niatpac levram	5212 CM 139
Adventure Comics	495	man without a world	5302 CM 141
Limited Collectors’ Edition	C27	mistake of father time	5302 MF 020
Adventure Comics	499	man in the moon	5304 CM 143
Adventure Comics	502	human hawks	5304 CM 143
Limited Collectors’ Edition	C35	captain marvel battles the world	5309 CM 148
Shazam (1973)	24	sivana saves captain marvel	5309 CM 148
Shazam (1973)	22	captain marvel's most difficult task	5310 CM 149
Shazam (1973)	17	captain marvel's wedding	5311 CM 150

 * Sources disagree in regard to artist for this story, I personally believe that it is not Beck, I have however included it as I do not know absolutely.

 ^ Sources disagree in regard to artists for this story, I personally believe that it is Beck for parts 1, 3 and 5, credits on the reprint appears to confirm that it is.

Whilst these provide a great cross section of Beck/Binder stories, if you buy them you’ll actually have far more stories not by this team. Many of them are excellent and are well worth reading in there on right, and who knows, you may even end up preferring them to my own personal dream team.

On a final note to this post, a friend of mine was gently mocking my love of comics recently, by commenting on how much time I spent reading “Those silly children's picture books.” My reply was the standard “Well actually, not all comics are for kids.” I stopped and thought for a moment before qualifying my reply with “No, they’re not all for kids, only the best one’s are for kids.”

Mad Thinker Reads………..

Captain Marvel by Beck & Binder (or anyone else for that matter.)