Since most of our other Thanksgiving Turkeys have been quaint, charming artifacts of comics' sainted Silver Age past, why not wrap up our holiday-themed, lame-villain retrospective with a jarring and abrupt 180-degree turn into the land of 1990's adult-themed comics?!? That's right, folks, we're celebrating Thanksgiving with CODPIECE, the Vertigo penis-villain!
After being absorbed into the "mature readers" Vertigo line, Doom Patrol just kept gettin' weirder and weirder. By Doom Patrol #70, the "team" consisted of the severed head of the Chief, a disoriented and hallucinating Robotman, ape-faced Dorothy Spinner and her creepy little puppet avatar-monkey-thing Charlie, and a couple of bandaged yuppie sex-ghosts. So when an embittered inventor with a persistent inferiority complex created a giant robotic schlong to compensate for what was lacking "down there", he was kind of at a disadvantage, still being the least weird thing in this particular comic.
For the record, a lesbian transsexual in a frog mask defeated the boner baron by dissolving his mechanical manhood, before being invited to join the Doom Patrol. Codpiece is shit out of luck when it comes to ever appearing again, given how unlikely he is to be needed in a Vertigo line that has moved on to such fare as Fables, Army@ Love, and DMZ; and how unlikely he is to be used in the DC Universe due the fact that he can't fight Batman because he wears a giant mechanical penis.
Happy Thanksgiving from Again With the Comics!
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9 comments:
Shazam!!! I wanna be this guy when I grow up.
That was a funny Doom Patrol issue. Too bad the title has been so mishandled since Morrison left. I'm still waiting on the article that outlines all the times that Jeph Loeb has disregarded continuity and story logic though. Unless, of course, you can't actually come up with anything... Which I imagine is the case.
Despite the drivel of Pollack's DP, I always thought that Codpiece was a stroke of genius. It's too bad that he got the shaft when he should have been given a hand. Maybe in the future, DC will get a grip on the character or, at least, erect a statue to him.
Ha! I remember this -- too funny! :-) In a way, Doom Patrol hasn't been as good since.
The Doom Patrol has always been a problem child-- nobody really knows what to do with it. It's too dark for DC may be part of the problem, and it is always mostly about sexual disfunction.
I hadn't seen Codpiece before, but it is sadly typical. The X-Men get the glory, the Doom Patrol gets the -- I can't do it.
Hey, Brian Hughes, why haven't you posted any new content since before Thanksgiving? I demand entertainment and you must listen to me as I pay your salary!!
Also, something something garbled something Jeph Loeb something.
While I am not a fan of taking the subtext of genre fictions and making them explicit, and thus don't much care for "Codpiece" here, I will say this:
Were he to fight Batman, I would buy that issue. I would buy more copies to give to my friends. I would set that issue to music and turn it into an off-off-Broadway play. Because "Batman Versus Giant-Mechanical-Penis-Man" would...well, it doesn't really need any justification, now does it.
Well, it would give Batman an opportunity to dust off that can of "Bat Saltpeter" spray. He gets to use it so very rarely.
Maybe I'm being reductionist (no pun intended), but I see this story in a different light since I've read that writer Rachel Pollack is a transsexual.
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