The Patrol Of Doom!

One of the great bargains in comics in the last decade have been the large black and white reprints from both Marvel in their Essentials line and later from DC in their Showcase volumes. These relatively cheap volumes have put some outstanding and some curious material into my hands, stuff I never expected to have access to only a few years ago. After twelve years or so of collecting these things though, at a rate faster than I read them, I have a figurative mountain of this material to enjoy at some future date.

One of these collections which I'm planning to explore this month is the two volume set featuring Arnold Drake's and Bruno Premiani's Doom Patrol. This legendary team disappeared from the comics racks at just about the same time that I started to read as a youngster in 1968. I read others rave about them, I knew they seemed to have an uncanny similarity to The X-Men having been created almost simultaneously with the Merry Marvel Mutants, and I knew that their ending was the stuff of comics lore, a team that lived up to its title and went to meet their maker when the title folded. I've long admired the evocative Bob Brown covers. I was around for some of the revivals, all entertaining enough, but always echoing some legendary past. All of this would make any comics fan want to read their adventures, and it was so with me. But something always got in the way, something always seemed more urgent, or I just plain forgot.

Now I'm going to rectify that oversight and  read the adventures of The Doom Patrol. I know how it begins, I even know how it ends, but I don't know what the journey is like between. That's a lot like real life now that I think upon it. This should be interesting.

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