Review by Win Wiacek

This final desirable hardback collection of Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani’s Doom Patrol continues from Volume 4 to provide unconventional superhero adventure all the way to a still powerful shocking ending.

We open with the team aiding Soviet asylum seeker Anton Koravyk and becoming embroiled in a time-twisting fight against incredible caveman ‘Kor – the Conqueror!’ whilst Beast Boy’s back-up segment ‘The Kid who was King of Crooks!’ sees toddler Gar turned into a thief in Johannesburg.

‘The Mutant Master!’ pits the team against three hideous, incomprehensibly powerful atomic atrocities resolved to eradicate the world that had cruelly treated them. Things might have fared better had the Chief not neglected his comrades in his obsessive – and at last successful – pursuit of of former villain Madame Rouge.

Also included is ‘General Beast Boy – of the Ape Brigade!’, wherein a Nazi war criminal is accidentally foiled by lost wanderer Gar.

The mutant maelstrom concludes in ‘Two to Get Ready… and Three to Die!’ featuring Niles Caulder saving Earth from mutant-triggered obliteration to reap his reward in a passionate fling with the cured – but still fragile – Rouge.

The wheelchair wonder seizes centre stage as his neglect drives the team away, leaving him vulnerable to attack from a mystery man with a big grudge in ‘The Black Vulture!’, before a reunited squad deals with grotesque madman ‘Videx, Monarch of Light!’ even as the Brain challenges Caulder to return his stolen chattel Rouge. Nobody thought to ask her what she wanted, though, and that’s a fatal oversight.

Tastes were changing in the turbulent late 1960s and the series was in trouble. Superheroes were about to plunge into mass decline, and the creators addressed the problem head-on. They embrace psychedelic counter culture in a clever tale of supernal power, brainwashing and behaviour modification leaving the DP cowering ‘In the Shadow of the Great Guru!’ Then they face a furious Luddite’s ‘Rage of the Wrecker!’ when a crazed scientist declares war on technology – including the assorted bodies keeping Cliff alive.

The then-unthinkable occurred next and the series spectacularly, abruptly ended with ‘The Death of the Doom Patrol!’. Knowing the series was due to be cancelled, Drake and Premiani wrap up all the long-running plot threads as spurned Madame Rouge goes off the deep end and declares war on both the Brain and Caulder’s “children”. She captures the team and offers mercy if they abandon their principles and allow her to destroy a village of complete strangers instead.

At a time when comics came and went with no fanfare and cancelled titles seldom provided closure, the sacrifice and death of the Doom Patrol was a shocking event. Nothing similar would occur for decades.

Even the mercilessly exploitative many returns of the team since can’t diminish that incredible impact, and no fan of the genre or comic dramas in general should consider their superhero education complete until they’ve seen these classics.

This material isn’t as yet more readily available in other formats. If you can track it down, the stories are reprinted in crisp black and white in the second Showcase Presents The Doom Patrol, but otherwise it’s this or the equally pricey oversized hardback Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Omnibus.