The End of JLA Pt. 2: "The Tenth Circle"

Certainly someone at DC Comics in 2004 thought that reteaming writer/artist John Byrne with Chris Claremont was a pretty big deal. 

Both were among the superstars of mainstream superhero comics in the1980s, thanks, in large part, to their popular work at competitor Marvel Comics throughout the decade. 

Claremont had a 17-year stint on Marvel's X-Men characters, spanning 1975 to 1992, during which time he created many of the franchise's characters, popularized others and delivered most of what are now considered the team's classic and most influential stories.

Byrne, meanwhile, had lengthy and well-regarded runs on Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four, The Sensational She-Hulk and X-Men spin-off Alpha Flight. Teamed with Claremont for a time on the X-Men, he drew some of those classic and influential stories, like "The Dark Phoenix Saga" and "Days of Future Past."

Byrne also did plenty of pivotal work by DC, of course, most notably recreating the Superman franchise for the modern, post-Crisis market. He also drew the crossover series Legends, served as writer/artist for a rather lengthy run on Wonder Woman and spent a few years on New Gods/Jack Kirby's Fourth World, as well as drawing and writing another event crossover miniseries, Genesis. He also had some big Elseworlds projects and a pair of inventive DC/Marvel crossovers on his resume.

Claremont's DC output up to that point, meanwhile, wasn't exactly remarkable. He created and wrote the 1995-1998 series Sovreign Seven, penned a 1997 Superman and Wonder Woman Elseworlds miniseries and contributed a 10-page Fire story to an issue of anthology title Showcase '96. Oh, and Claremont also penned a six-issue JLA miniseries in 2003, JLA: Scary Monsters, although I confess that, at this point, all I remember of it are Arthur Adams' covers. 

Still, it's easy to imagine someone at DC thinking Byrne and Claremont reuniting for a Justice League story would be a big deal, and that the creative team, rounded out by inker Jerry Ordway, would be as significant a draw as some of the past big-name creators on the title, like Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Bryan Hitch and Howard Porter. (And hey, maybe it was a draw...for any older readers who remembered the X-Men of the early '80s, anyway. In my late 20s at the time, I had barely read anything from either man, and I had considered their appearance in the pages of JLA at that particular juncture to be a particularly weird move).

Their story was "The Tenth Circle", which ran from JLA #94-99. Byrne and Claremont shared writing credits on the six-part story, while Byrne penciled it and Ordway inked it. 

It wasn't merely a matter of one of the most popular X-Men creative teams reuniting on a Justice League story, though, it was also a sort of stealth pilot for a new Doom Patrol series by Byrne (Although it's admittedly far less stealth at this point, over 20 years later; the final cover from the arc, depicting the JLA and the Doom Patrol together, was the one DC used for its first collection in 2005's JLA Vol. 15) .

Launching a new Doom Patrol out of the pages of JLA probably made some sense at the time too, as DC had in the recent-ish past used the JLA to help launch other super-team books. The 1998 JLA/Titans miniseries lead directly to a new Titans, that same year's miniseries JLA: World Without Grown-Ups immediately preceded the launch of Young Justice and 1999 JLA arc "Crisis Times Five" reunited a new version of the Justice Society, presaging the launch of JSA the month after it concluded (albeit with some significant line-up changes). 

Of course, the difference between all of those launches and this Doom Patrol launch was that Byrne and Claremont were here introducing the Doom Patrol of The Chief Niles Caulder, Robotman Cliff Steele, Negative Man Larry Trainor and Elasti-Girl Rita Farr as if they were brand-new characters being introduced here for the first time.

This, then, was to be a reboot of the then 40-year-old team, one completely unconnected to the sorts of space/time/continuity crises that DC usually organized such reboots around, not unlike the one DC did with Supergirl in the pages of Superman/Batman that year (Unlike Supergirl, though, the Doom Patrol's recent history wasn't anywhere near as weird and convoluted, nor had it drifted so far from their original conception as the post-Crisis Supergirl had; the Doom Patrol's last title was canceled just a year previously).

(And yes, admittedly it is kind of clever to put some of the X-Men's most famous creators on a story featuring the Doom Patrol, who, like Marvel's merry mutants, also debuted in 1963 and featured a wheelchair bound older man leading a team of super-powered outsiders branded as freaks by mainstream society. Interestingly, there's even a panel where Caulder uses what looks like some sort of Cerebro unit.)

So there was a lot going on in this particular story, and I don't think it all quite seemed to come together in a way that was particularly satisfying. 

In addition to telling a superhero story big enough to give each member of a sizable Justice League something to do (In addition to the "Big Seven" minus Aquaman, the team in this story also consists of The Atom, Faith and Manitou Raven), the creators also have to introduce the quartet of misfit heroes from the Doom Patrol, and they also set about introducing some new characters who would ultimately join them in the new Doom Patrol title.

The title of the story refers to the name of a group of extra-dimensional vampires, monsters that were banished from this plane of existence by Wonder Woman's mom and the other Amazons centuries ago. They currently have a representative on Earth, a vampire with an extraordinarily bad haircut and the extremely unlikely name of Crucifer. 

He lives in a castle brought over from Europe brick by brick, and commands a small band of loyal vampires, and a group of more loyal still acolytes in cloaks and hoods; these latter he is able to subjugate via mind-control, which seems to be most effective when he bites someone...but doesn't turn them all the way into vampires.

After a few chance encounters with Crucifer and his followers, the League realizes that there is a rash of child kidnappings across the county, the victims all seeming to possess the metagene and relatively minor super-powers (if this were the Marvel universe, we could call such people "mutants"), and so the heroes begin to investigate. 

Also investigating are a mysterious group based in an old Spanish fortress in the Florida Keys, a group we will gradually learn are meant to be a new, rebooted version of the original Doom Patrol (They all get something of a makeover, the most dramatic being Trainor; rather than the traditional bandages wrapping his face up like that of a mummy, he here has what looks like some kind of leather fetish mask on, and when he releases "The Negative Man," rather than the familiar streaking silhouette with an electric yellow aura, the powerful energy form now appears as a black flying skeleton in a bluish aura).

A great deal of attention is paid to a couple of kids working for Crucifer, a girl named Nudge who possesses some form of low-level mind-control and has a close relationship with a four-armed gorilla named Grunt (which is, later in the story, referred to by Caulder as a "mega-primate"), and Vortex, a boy with the power to emit some kind of powerful energy blast from his mouth, powerful enough to break through one of Green Lantern's constructs and knock him on his ass.

Meanwhile, Manitou Raven, who we see at the opening of the story, his magical telling stones and a swarm of bats presaging some upcoming disaster, has gone missing. When The Atom searches the stones for clues to his whereabouts, he ends up shrinking down to investigate them in person and then falling through some sort of dimensional portal and into a bizarre, alien microscopic world, the inhabitants of which regard visitors from our world as a god. The Atom will spend most of the arc there, and how that connects to the rest of the story isn't even suggested until the very end, making his part of the adventure feel oddly grafted-on.

Frustrating the League's efforts is the fact that, after Nudge brings a mind-controlled Superman back to the castle, Crucifer bites him on the neck, and the vampire is thus able to mentally dominate the Man of Steel (This is in rather sharp contrast with 2002's Superman #180 by Jeph Loeb and Ian Churchill, where in Dracula tries to bite Superman's neck and recoils as he burns; Superman being a "living solar battery" meaning that his blood was suffused with "the power of daylight"). 

Under Crucifer's command, Superman acts as something of a double agent, at one point kidnapping Faith (who will spend most of the arc kidnapped actually, tied to a chair in Crucifer's castle) and fighting Wonder Woman a couple of times. Crucifer even seems to kill Wonder Woman at one point, impaling her on a sword, but, thanks to the Amazons' purple ray, she gets better.

It will prove no surprise that the League eventually wins the day, our heroes storming the still-forming Doom Patrol's HQ and then teaming up with them to take on Crucifer's forces, dispatching the dumb-looking but seemingly unkillable vampire in a neat way, a sort of superhero comics twist on an element from folklore, wherein other immortals achieve their invulnerable status by hiding their hearts outside of their bodies. 

I thought Byrne and Claremont did a decent job with all of the Justice League characters, at least the ones they spent the most time juggling, and while we don't get nearly as much of the Doom Patrol, they mostly all felt like themselves (Caulder seemed a little cooler and, well, douchier than his Silver Age self, but then, he had been trending that way since Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, hadn't he?).

Byrne had drawn most of these characters before—and, in the cases of Superman and Wonder Woman, he had drawn them a lot—although I still thought it fun to see what, say, his turn-of-the-century Batman, or Atom, or John Stewart might look like. 

And, after reading the arc to completion, I even kind of developed a love/hate feeling toward Crucifer, who is in many ways your stereotypical old horror movie vampire, but so much so (and with such a ridiculous hairstyle), that he comes around to almost being kind of...neat?

The story ends with a great two-panel sequence, wherein Batman makes a deadpan joke and turns away, and we get a silent panel showing the League's shocked reaction, the Dark Knight betraying just the slightest hint of a smile. That was pretty great.

As the last issue is winding down, Faith assures Nudge how well she fought against Crucifer and says, "I'd like to help teach you," while Vortex expresses and interest in joining Nudge and Grunt with the Doom Patrol.

"I'm intrigued by all three of you," Caulder says, adding, "Faith, as well...if you're interested!" 

They all join the departing Farr, Trainor and Steele on a teleportation platform, Robotman telling the League, "You guys ever need backup, we're there! Just call on the-- --DOOM PATROL!"

It's kind of curious that Faith leaves with Doom Patrol, as she was created by Joe Kelly specifically for his JLA run, and while she lasted some 30 issues or so in the title, she was never too terribly distinct a character, neither in her ambiguous powers, nor her personality, nor her history. 

I really can't imagine what Byrne might have saw in her, aside from the fact that with Kelley's run on JLA ending and Kelly not using her on the upcoming Justice League Elite, she was available, and perhaps Byrne wanted to use her as a sort of bridge character to the Doom Patrol...? (At any rate, she would only appear twice more time in the pages of JLA; she's among the Leaguers in Kelly, Doug Mahnke and company's JLA #100, wherein Kelly has her say in an aside, "Think stickin' with the Doom Patrol for now is best..." and later, during Kurt Busiek and Ron Garney's "Syndicate Rules" arc, she's among the heroes recruited to help the League deal with twin threats from the anti-matter universe.)

She actually didn't stay with Byrne's Doom Patrol much longer, though, leaving the book and the team with issue #5. 

As for Byrne's Doom Patrol, which he wrote and penciled while Doug Hazelwood inked the majority of the series, it only lasted 18 issues, the final one shipping in January of 2006. All in all, then, it didn't even last as long as the 22 issues of the 2001-2003 John Arcudi/Tan Eng Huat series hat it followed (and, of course, rebooted), and only about as half as long as Sovereign Seven. 

If you missed it the first time around and are curious about it after reading this post, "The Tenth Circle" was collected multiple times, including in the aforementioned JLA Vol. 15 from 2005, 2016's JLA Vol. 8 and 2020's Doom Patrol by John Byrne: The Complete Series. While the Doom Patrol business now sticks out oddly, the rest of the book is fairly evergreen, and fans of Byrne's art especially should find plenty to enjoy in it.

Next: Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen's "Elitism" from 2004's JLA #100.

I recently learned something new: Beast Boy was originally totally awesome

Here's a brief history of the DC Comics character Beast Boy: Introduced in a 1965 issue of Doom Patrol by writer Arnold Drake and artist Bob Brown, the green-skinned teenager with the ability to transform into any animal joined the ranks of "The World's Strangest Heroes." He survived the cancellation of the title (and the deaths of the rest of team), and in 1980 he changed his name to Changeling and became part of the cast of Marv Wolfman and George Perez's New Teen Titans, one of the decade's bigger hits and more influential books.

During the soap operatic run of the book, and various iterations of Titans comics that followed, Beast Boy/Changeling had the sort of biography typical of post-Silver Age superheroes.

While on the Titans, he became a wise-cracking, comedy-relief character, only his bravado masked his insecurities about being lame, green and less awesome than Robin and the cooler Titans. He became tight with Cyborg, whined a lot, had a rather ill-fated attraction to Terra, the teenager who would betray the Titans team in one of their more famous storylines.

After the run peaked, Changeling grew a mullet, became an evil villain, went off in to outer space, returned to earth to help start a new iteration of the Titans (1999's Titans), changed his name back to Beast Boy, left the team to have his own miniseries (2000's Beast Boy), founded a new Titans team that only appeared once in a single special (Titans West, in Titans Secret Files and Origins #2), joined another new version of the Titans (2003's Teen Titans), left to join a new version of the Doom Patrol that didn't have its own book, joined another new version of the Titans (2008's Titans), and then left that Titans team to re-join the Teen Titans team that he'd left to join the Doom Patrol.

By the time I had started reading comics, the glory days of the Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans were ending, Changeling looked like this, and, from his appearances during crossovers and in the back issues I'd find in fifty-cent bins, I gathered that he was basically a lame character design with a visually interesting superpower who told corny jokes, moped about being green and was secretly in love with Cyborg.

I certainly didn't see any indication that, when he was first introduced in the pages of Doom Patrol, Beast Boy was totally awesome.

I owe this discovery to Showcase Presents: The Doom Patrol Vol. 1, which reprints the six issues of My Greatest Adventure, the title the DP first appeared in, and the first seventeen issues of The Doom Patrol. These include the first three comics to feature Beast Boy.*

The issues Beast Boy appear in are split into two stories apiece, and he's featured in one of each of the stories in each issue. What's his deal? Basically, he breaks into the DP's headquarters to kick their asses, tell them all off and then get them to make him a member.

It's maybe not the most effective way to join a team, but it does sound a little like the sort of plan a teenager might come up with, and it's certainly a lot more fun to read than one of those try-out issues you see on a semi-regular basis in DC super-team comics these days.

I like the tossed-off, cavalier, casual approach that Drake and Brown (and, in the second and third appearances, Bruno Premiani) take to introducing the character. There's something, at the risk of sounding corny myself, precious about the first appearance of a new superhero in old comics. At that early point, the throwing-stuff-at-the-wall-and-waiting-to-see-if-it-sticks stage, of many long-lived superhero's histories, there's a sort of danger about the characters. The creators have no idea if the character is going to appear a second, third, 33rd or 333rd time, let alone if they'll be starring in movie serials or TV cartoons and selling sticker, toys and t shirts. Nor do they really care. It's simply a matter of trying something new and seeing what happens (This happens a few times in this volume; not only in the introduction of the original Doom Patrol, but about halfway through the book the character Mento is introduced, tested for a while, and then forgotten for the next few hundred pages).

Anyway, the plan with Beast Boy seems to have been to introduce an asshole teenager to the team. As I said, his plan for getting on the team is to break into DP HQ. On his first attempt he trashes a room, a mess that Robotman reacts to by declaring, "H-H-Holy Hannah! What hit this joint--a Beatles fan convention?" Brown lovingly renders the trashed room, including little details like a spare Robot Man head on the mantle, with an axe in it, and a framed portrait of Rita "Elasti-Girl" Farr on the back wall, tilted and a mustache drawn on its face.

Beast Boy comes back the next night, and the trio use their fantastic powers to capture him. Here's the first panel in which he actually appears: Then he turns into a lion, mauls Robotman while calling him an overgrown jukebox and an "Alumni-numb skull," turns into a kangaroo to make a fool of Negative Man and call him an old man and turns into a fish to elude Elasti-Girl, with a "hang up your crutches, Grandma!" When they finally pin him down, he calls the bearded Professor Caulder Santa Claus.

Since he's a "freak" like them, the DP let him tag along on a mission, protecting some jewels from some high tech jewel thieves, and then send him on his way, with a box at the end cajoling readers to write National Periodicals and let them know if they want to see more Beast Boy.

In the next issue, he walks into headquarters, makes fun of the Doom Patrolers, then fights Robotman for a page before storming out. This time we learn the extremely complicated origin of Beast Boy, and the Doom Patrol come to him, when his amazing (and scientifically suspect) superpowers are used as the fuel for a mad scientist's plan to resurrect dinosaurs to help him pull off bank heists.

And in the next issue, Beast Boy learns his legal guardian has taken out a hit on him, so he goes to the Doom Patrol to demand their help, and fights Robotman for another page. Before they can look into his story about his foster father trying to off him, the Chief sends them all off to fight Kranus, The Emperor of Robots, a giant robot with a crown and scepter whose "every part...can live and kill--separately!"

When they do investigate Beast Boy's claims about a hit being put on him, they don't find any evidence to support his claim, and basically tell him to fuck off. (Negative Man's actual words are, "Now get off our backs and stay off," but that's 1966, Comics Code Authority-approved way of saying, "Fuck off, kid").

So that's what Beast Boy was like at the beginning, apparently—an annoying, know-it-all, disrespectful a-hole teenager whom the Doom Patrol hated on sight and tried to avoid.

Another awesome thing about the original Beast Boy appearances, beyond the fact that he acted like an all-ages version of one of James Kochalka's SuperF*ckers characters, was the way his transformations were portrayed. From at least Perez on—and perhaps much earlier—Beast Boy's animal transformations tended to look like realistically rendered animals, only green. But Brown and Premiani draw each animal he transforms into with elements of his human appearance—they all have either his hair cut, or his nose and eyes, or, in a few cases, his whole head. He turns into animals, but never more than, like, 95% animal. He always retains enough of himself to look like himself.




I liked this a lot better, perhaps in large part because it was different than the way his transformations are usually portrayed in comics. That is, although this is the original, 45-year-old way of illustrating Beast Boy turning into animals, it seemed fresher, because it's so different from the way these acts have been illustrated over the course of the last 30 years.

********************

Finally, the second Beast Boy appearance features a scene with an exploding dinosaur: As awesome as a scene of superheroes throwing high explosives into a dinosaurs mouth and blowing it up from the inside is, it's worth noting that, like so many awesome things in comics, Jack Kirby did it first.



********************


*I should perhaps note that I'm talking about the comic book version of Beast Boy. It was apparent from the very first episode of 2003 cartoon series Teen Titans that that Beast Boy was awesome. He was wonderfully designed (I love the little snaggle tooth), wonderfully voiced and was now an honest-to-God vegetarian cartoon superhero.

The Chief has seen a lot of crazy stuff in his time, but spirits? That's crazy talk.

"Spirit of Osra? Please Rama Kara, you must understand how preposterous that sounds to me and my colleagues. Now if you'll excuse us, my friends Robotman, a human brain in a robot body, Negative Man, who emits and controls a semi-sentient being composed of radio waves, and Elasti-Girl, who can grow to gigantic size and shrink herself to the size of a small insect, have to go fight our archenemies, an evil disembodied brain and a talking gorilla."


*******************

Horribly-scanned images from the story "The Nightmare Fighters" from 1965's The Doom Patrol #94 by Arnold Drake and Bob Brown, which was reprinted in Showcase Presents: The Doom Patrol Vol. 1, which is where these horrible scans were horribly-scanned from

Something that's been bugging me while I make my way through Showcase Presents: Doom Patrol Vol. 1:

How do they know Larry will die if the Negative Man is out of his body for longer than sixty seconds?

Obviously I'm no scientist, let alone one of Dr. Niles Caulder's intellect, but it seems to me the only way one could test how long Larry could survive once Negative Man left his body would be to have him release Negative Man, click the stopwatch and wait to see how long it takes for Larry to expire. But then, you could only try that experiment once, and they obviously haven't, or Larry would be dead.



(Panel from 1963's My Greatest Adventures #80, drawn by Bruno Premiani and written by Arnold Drake and Bob Haney)

Monday Morning Man vs. Cephalopod Moment

(Beast Boy, in the form of an octopus, holds Robotman's severed head in one tentacle while rolling up the "sleeves" on a few other tentacles before laying into a supervillain in DC's Batman: The Brave and The Bold #7, by J. Torres and J. Bone).

Because a J. Bone picture is worth a thousand of my words

This is what J. Bone's Doom Patrol, who guest-star in this week's issue of Batman: The Brave and The Bold, looks like. So you might want to give that book a look.

Multiple choice question

The above image is a detail from a splash page in last week's Justice League of America #22, featuring Dr. Niles "The Chief" Caulder, the world's foremost super-surgeon and the wheelchair-bound leader of the Doom Patrol.

To what should readers attribute his suddenly heavily muscled torso?

(a) Caulder's been working out. A lot.

(b) By applying the same surgical skills that allowed him to preserve Cliff Steele's brain in a robot body to the field of cosmetic surgery, Caulder created a whole new torso and set of arms for himself.

(c) Pencil artist Ed Benes can only draw one sort of male physique.