A Comic Lover’s Memories, Part Something
The Challs Meet the Doom Patrol and the Sea Devils
This was the concluding chapter in that rarest of DC Silver Age occurrences, not just a two-issue story – a unicorn –-- but a genuine crossover between two titles -- a hippogriff.
And yet, even with all those extra pages, the madcap Arnold Drake was still squeezing in more nuttiness as DC could be expected to bear.
Offered for your perusal from the pages of
Doom Patrol 102:
Robotman entertaining sick kids at a hospital by hoisting a kid in an iron lung… not just the kid, the whole damn lung, too!
A requisite Rocky-Robotman mini-scrap that continues throughout the story as a wisecrack-off:
Rocky: “What keeps you from sinking, dead weight?”
Cliff: “Rocket fuel! You know – hot gas! The same thing that comes out of YOUR mouth when you talk!”
Mamet it ain’t, but it’s worth a giggle;
The ever obnoxious Steve Dayton, who clad only in bathing suit and his dopey Mento* helmet, a World War I tin pan (topped with cheesy antennae) and what looks like an overly large helmet liner with eyeholes, degravitizing Rita in the air until she agrees to marry him;
Rita gigantizing her right hand to smack Dayton upside the face;
Robotman magnetizing his left foot to yank the insipid Dayton (“WHOOOSH!)” smack into it (“KA-LANG!”) for allowing Rita to fall into the pool;
Negative Man test-flying a rocket plane, which allows him to unwrap his bandages without endangering anyone else, giving the readers one more glance at his hideous irradiated skull-face;
And then hearing him say, more pitiful in his plight as Spider-Man or the Hulk, “Alone up here I can unwrap my special bandages and just be horrible me!”
And we’re only on page 5!
The Challenger-Haters (who must have derived their name from the Little Rascals):
Kra, the King of the Robots; Multi-Man, the macrocephalic, mustachioed midget; and his towering, bouffanted robot assistant Multi-Woman; and Volcano Man, a Thing-like slab o’lava who may be the only super-villain with intestinal issues. (What elseare we to think when, underwater, Prof says, “HOLD IT! THAT’S a familiar nasty sound!” (The sound effect reads “BLUB BLUB.”)
Apparently V-Man announces his arrival at scenes of his crimes by venting his wrong-way belch of a war cry on his backdoor bassoon. Kind of like the Blackhawks screaming “HAWK-AAAAA!” or Cap yelling “AVENGERS, ASSSEMBLE!”
BTW, Ace, who is forever condescending to Rita even though she pulls his Ace-ass out of a couple of death-traps, is at it again here when he tells her, “Don’t get your fur up, kitten! In a second he’ll be floated upward by his own oxygen bubbles!”
(I think he means methane, don’t you?)
When that doesn’t happen, Prof explains with a look of alarm on his face,” That’s what happened before! But now he’s controlling his heat so it doesn’t create too many bubbles!” (Keep that tactic in mind the next time you go swimming in a public pool after eating a few too many peanuts.)
Back to the LIST OF COOL STUFF, which also includes…
An underwater city called Atlantis (was there no copyright law protecting the undersea realms of DC Comics?) that’s packed with zombies preserved for centuries in lava ruled by King Zatopa, who when awakened by Multi-Man from his centuries-long nap, slips back seamlessly into comic book king-speak: “Who -- dares -- disturb the -- sleep –of – King -- Zatopa?”
Where would we be without “Who dares disturb?”
Atlantean cavalry emerging from the ocean via an enormous plastic tunnel, attacking Asian villages, using hand-held heat rays to melt a battalion of apparently Red Chinese tanks into steaming slag, leaving no survivors;
Cool gadgets like the Chief’s 600-mph rocket-foil; Schnootzy, the DP’s “electronic brain,” which has “compressed and recorded al human knowledge [into] a compendium of every major library, museum and lab… current to within 48 hours of all events;” and Mento’s flying saucer
cum submarine;
Beast Boy sneaking into a locked refrigerator as a caterpillar through a hole he’d drilled into the door earlier behind the “Frigee” name plate and then somehow sitting inside on the middle shelf as his regular-sized teenage self and feasting on chicken, milk and a sandwich;
Beast Boy addressing Mento as “pot-head” when the latter appears at his front door.
And, yes, the doorbell goes “Bong Bong” when Dayton arrives… Way to be subversive, Arnie!
Mento getting dissed again, this time for his choice of headgear, when Kra knocks off his helmet and bellows, “Let’s see how resourceful you are without that steel derby, Earthling!”
Larry summoning the willpower to urge Neg Man “p-p-pull yourself together!” after he is shattered into a hundred pieces by the zombies’ ray guns in another instance of a DP member’s being mutilated folded and spindled at least once an issue;
Multi-Man morphing into a rooster-fish, among other forms of sea life, and nearly crushing three of the Challs to death… that is, until Rita saves the day;
Muli-Man becomes a whale, whom Cliff promptly calls “Moby-Fink” before Beast-Boy of all freaks, takes him down by overloading the Sinister Cetacean as a colony of barnacles until M-M cries uncle;
The whole undersea city for some reason (perhaps because it was page 25 in a 25-page story) collapses and is reduced to dust, meaning that the usual feud-between-the-heroes can pick up where it left off.
You’ve gotta love Drake’s throw-it-at-the-wall-and-let’s-have-a-little-fun style, an approach he’d been taking with the Doom Patrol for three years. Drake had written a few Challengers stories at this point; within a year, he would be writing all of them, but his time would only last another year or so because of the infamous showdown between DC’s management and their writers and artists.
Drake became a Marvel writer around the spring of 1968, finishing his run with the Challengers with #63 and with the DP with #121, their justly celebrated swan song, and an issue I will be writing about in detail in the weeks ahead.
Oddly enough, the only other Earth-B DC Silver Age team-up would also be set under the sea, and would feature the Challengers and the Sea Devils. This one is equally goofy in a good way, though it is not written by Drake, but by longtime Challengers writer Bill Finger. (Yep, that Bill Finger!)
COTU 51 brought back a tortured Challenger foe, the Sponge (aka Sponge Man) for his second and last go-round with the Legion of Death Cheaters. The Sea Devils, were billed as co-stars, and as I wrote in the previous entry, it was probably an attempt to give their failing sales a boost.
Finger’s story included many of the elements that Drake had incorporated in his crossover team-up, including a recurrence of Ace Morgan’s incurable urge to flirt with the other team’s female member. Of course, Morgan’s style was all about chauvinism and condescension, but while Drake’s Rita Farr gave better than she took from Ace and had given him his comeuppance, Finger’s Judy Walton uses Ace’s attention to make her seagoing squeeze, Dane Dorrance, jealous to the max, and surprise, surprise, the teams feud.
Finger does do a wonderful job with his portrayal of the misunderstood, beleaguered Sponge Man, formerly a sponge fisherman named Miklos who is the hapless victim of a cut from a sponge (who obviously had hung out with a certain spider) and is transformed into a giant sponge-guy.
Yes, it would have been eerie if his name had not been Miklos, but Bob.
As ridiculous as his name may sound today, Sponge Man was a character of complexity and depth, especially by Silver Age standards, and he was capable of absorbing not just huge amounts of water, thereby increasing his size and strength, but other substances as well. In both of his appearances, he absorbs sound, so that his antagonists can’t communicate easily, and then color, which means that Bob Brown’s art is black and white on a few pages, except for the panels in which Miklos appears, his orange sponge-skin striped with rainbow colors. A clever touch.
You really feel for ol’ Spongy in
COTU 51, because his plight is compounded by constant betrayal, about which I’ll say nothing more lest I ruin your reading pleasure. For a DC Silver Age story, “Smash the Sponge Man – Or Die!” is strikingly dark in tone, even if you have to look for it beneath layers of DC-style Marvel dialogue.
And with the last panel of
COTU 51, we reach the end of our perambulations through DC’s Silver Age team-ups. As you can tell, these stories featuring the Challengers with the Doom Patrol and Sea Devils are favorites of mine. Now, I never got to read these when they came out; I think the only one I even saw an ad for was “The Twilight of the Challengers.” It was not until the fall of ’67 that I was able to find
DP and
COTU on the stands; I bought each title faithfully until they were cancelled.
I was lucky, too, because I was able, in the mid-70s, to find large batches of
COTU and
DP for 50 cents or a buck. I bought dozens of them and have enjoyed almost all of them.
NEXT TIME:
Princeling Hal Encounters Shakespeare for the First Time Ever… and It Was in a Comic!*If he named himself after his favorite candy, it’s a good thing it wasn’t DumDums.