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| "Waterproof Robotman" from Doom Patrol vol.4 #3 (DC, 2004) by John Byrne and Doug Hazlewood |
John Byrne obviously has a love for the Doom Patrol, or else he wouldn't have asked to draw all their entries in Who's Who (or their issue of Secret Origins). It would be almost 20 years before he got a chance to do a series though, and again, this is one I missed first time 'round. All I really know is that he rebooted the team, eliminated every other appearance from continuity, and brought back the characters killed by Arnold Drake. Well, everyone else had made a comeback of one sort or another, except Elasti-Girl. Cancelled after 18 issues, it was all undone anyway as Infinite Crisis restored the DP's continuity. So those Superboy-Prime punches weren't all bad.
After his relaunch of Superman, Byrne became, well, very George Lucasian. It seemed as if almost every project he wrote had to involve rewriting continuity (West Coast Avengers, Spider-Man Chapter One) or exploring unexplained gaps (X-Men Hidden Years, Marvel Lost Age) or long, long Elseworlds excursions.
ReplyDeleteIt was almost as if he lost the taste for playing in other people's continuities, so he tried rewriting the universes to his own pleasing, but in the process getting more and more relegated to the Big Two's backwaters.
There seems to be some truth to that, though it's something that plagues a lot of superstar writers. While Byrne has taken his beloved Kirby creations back to their roots, and DP too, eliminating much of what was established after HE was a reader, we've had Meltzer and Johns taking us back to the late 70s or early 80s in books like Justice League, Legion and the Flash. Or we've had guys like JMS who read like they've never even read any comics starring the character they've agreed to write. In other words, continuity is for working shlubs.
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