Way back in 1951, in that golden age of 10-cent comics at every newsstand, Star-Spangled Comics debuted a new cover feature entitled “Ghost-Breaker,” about Dr. Terrence Thirteen, a parapsychologist who devoted himself to disproving supernatural phenomena.
Over the decades, as team-ups and crossovers became more frequent, the various comics DC published all began to slowly meld together, forming one big fictional universe. The downside of the shared setting? It rendered plenty of characters obsolete, relegating them to the dustbin of occasional trademark-retaining cameos.
If Dr. Thirteen’s whole schtick was to not believe in the fantastic, then he became a rather poor fit in a world full of it. Superman’s stomping grounds were no place for a cynic.
Recently Brian Azzarello glommed on to the good doctor’s refusal to believe in genre staples, making him the star of a hilariously executed, deliriously plotted storyline that ran as a back-up in Tales of the Unexpected. It’s just been collected as Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality.
He’s now a “professional cynic” in a world where alien invasions are as common as rainstorms, so Thirteen’s incredible incredulity makes him something of a farcical character. Azzarello exploits this aspect by bombarding Dr. Thirteen and his daughter, Traci (a practicing sorceress, who hides it from her dad), with a host of DC’s least-believable characters.
There’s the lace-and-ascot vampire who starred in pretentiously titled strip “I, Vampire”; a talking Nazi gorilla, who appeared in one issue of Weird War Tales; Genius Jones, who can answer any question for a dime and who hasn’t been seen since that was actually a lot of money; Infectious Lass, a Legion of Super-Heroes reject whose power is to give men diseases; and, my personal favorite I-can’t-believe-this-guy-ever-even-existed character, the ghost of confederate general J.E.B. Stuart, who haunted a World War II tank (whose adventures were recently reprinted in Showcase Presents: The Haunted Tank).
This rag-tag group find themselves pitted against a cabal of insidious foes with the power to shape reality itself: Four of DC’s most popular comic-book writers.
It’s an extremely well-drawn comedy trading in verbal humor and allusion as well as obvious situational jokes, a comedy that misses no opportunity to castigate the company signing Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang’s paychecks. But even as they barrel into metafictional territory, the DC-characters-vs.-DC-creators story becomes something of a symbol for a wider, more abstract conflict.
In delineating the criteria by which the evil writers decide to save certain characters and doom others, the villains reveal their own cynicism, a rejection of the silliness of the past in an attempt to earn respect in the present and success in the future. Fittingly, our hero is cynical of such cynicism, the double negative leading to a positive in a comic that’s as much manifesto as adventure story or comedy.
Plus, I did mention there’s a talking Nazi gorilla, right?