Doom Patrol #98 (1965)
by Arnold Drake & Bruno Premiani
This is one of the most memorable stories of the original Doom Patrol.
We begin with four mysterious figures planning the start of World War III.
Chief discovers this on the last day: there’s only ONE MINUTE before the bombs go off.
Which means THE ENTIRE STORY is going to take place in just a minute. Even if it’s just 8 pages, that’s an insane pace!
Surprisingly for the time, the bad guys are not the Soviet Union: they’re tricked exactly like the United States into attacking each other.
Also note that, according to the clock, Chief is able to say all these words in FIVE SECONDS.
This is the first story that showcases Negative Man, and holy crap is he a threat: he’s able to single-handedly take out an entire Russian base!
IN THREE SECONDS!!!
And just TWO SECONDS LATER he finds a bomb planted by the bad guys, which is supposed to make the Russian think that the Americans have attacked.
He can’t just blow it up, instead needing to force it out of out of a well by boiling water.
Again, Chief is able to give him all these instructions in TWO SECONDS.
The second target is near an American submarine, which he manages to reach with little problem.
And after going through various ships at the bottom of the ocean, he’s able to find and destroy the second bomb. We’re at the halfway point of the story here, with 35 seconds to spare.
But he wastes a full 10 seconds locating the third bomb.
Five seconds later he destroys the third bomb, by displaying a level of super-strength I don’t think he will ever show again.
If this story was entirely seen from the point of view of Negative Man I wouldn’t have a problem, since he’s fast enough to fly from “a midwestern area of the US” to Siberia in less than a second… but how are these people able to keep up with the commentary???
I mean, would they have even enough time to sing about this?
Aaaaaand then the fourth bomb explodes.
Yep. We just started World War III.
ONE SECOND LATER, Chief contacts the President of the United States.
Who is rather clearly Lyndon B. Johnson.
And I’m generous when I say one second!!!
The explosion was at 45 seconds, and “5 seconds later” the President has already tried to call the Russians.
This is important because Negative Man can only exist outside of Larry’s body for 60 seconds, and he only has 10 seconds to spare.
Negative Man then needs the following 5 seconds to find what happened to the line.
And to use HIMSELF to repair the line, allowing the President to talk to the Russian premier.
Who, for historical context, would have been Leonid Brezhnev.
FOUR SECONDS LATER, the Russian premier calls off the attack.
So to recap, these are the events of the story:
0 seconds: Larry releases Negative Man
5 seconds: Negative Man arrives in Russia
8 seconds: he destroys a Russian base
10 seconds: he finds the first bomb
12 seconds: he destroys the first bomb
20 seconds: he finds the American submarine
25 seconds: he destroys the second bomb
35 seconds: he finds the third bomb
40 seconds: he destroys the third bomb
41 seconds: he arrives in Siberia
45 seconds: the fourth bomb explodes
46 seconds: Chief speaks to LBJ
50 seconds: LBJ discovers the line is broken
55 seconds: Negative Man repairs the line, allowing LBJ to talk to Brezhnev
59 seconds: Brezhnev calls of a nuclear attack
60 seconds: Negative Man returns to Larry
Historical significance: 0/10
Never referenced.
Silver Age-ness: 10/10
Only in the Silver Age you could possibly accept people narrating this entire thing.
Does it stand the test of time? 9/10
I was waiting to get to this one because out of all the Silver Age stories of the Doom Patrol it’s easily the one I remember the most vividly. Mostly because it’s very short and keeps you at the edge of your seat the entire time.
Having the rest of the Doom Patrol comment on every single moment is the only part that doesn’t hold up. Just remove the commentary and just have Negative Man thinking about what’s happening, remove the need for the phone call, and almost everything else holds up.
A great story, but I would go the other way to make it even better.
Have the countdown start at, say, five minutes. Carefully measure or estimate the time required for the spoken words and some of the light-speed travelling. Add some more time to account for the various parts where some character has make observations or decisions. Intercede a few bits of emotional reactions to the impossible situation.
If you do it well enough, we will be more reluctant to suspend disbelief and feel the anxiety that much more deeply. We could even have N-Man collecting some copper and welding it to the line at superspeed in order to have yet another source of uncertainty to add.
I like that last image of the Chief in the panels above. Bruno Premiani did a good job of showing very understandable distress and disarray on the usually impeccably presented Chief.
This story established that Negative Man can travel at the speed of light; as was said at the beginning, he can circle the world over seven times in one second.
I always wondered why Negative Man didn’t return to Larry at the ten second mark and then emerge again. Maybe there’s a required buffer time to allow Larry to recover before sending Negative Man out again? Anyway, if Negative Man was given consistent treatment, according to what he could do in this story he can handle most things solo before the reader can turn the page.
But are the saboteurs in the first panel the dumbest people of all time? Mysterious client (Ra’s Al Ghul, I’m calling it) says he’ll pay them four million dollars to start world war 3. And just how and where will they spend the money afterward?
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
[or a Negative Man?]
Good example of “dramatic time” if nothing else. And like you said, replacing the dialog with Larry’s thoughts (IIIRC we never, ever see what N-Man is thinking himself, if he even has a separate consciousness) or even caption boxes from a non-existent narrator fixes suspension of disbelief for a modern audience – but of course we’d miss out of the dance routine and disheveled Chief that way. 🙂 And of course there’s a lot more time available for both leaders to get a call through to the other than the story makes out, although that would spoil the 60-second conceit. There wasn’t an ICBM in the world that could even finish launch preparations in 15 seconds and there still isn’t, strategic defense planning for nuclear war revolved around anything up to thirty minutes to get strikes off the ground as long as the enemy didn’t manage to achieve surprise and launch without being detected. That’s why the MAD doctrine worked, and to some degree continues to do so. Just no way to attack without ensuring a counterstrike. The real nightmare scenario is having nukes smuggled into your territory and set off with no warning at all, not the ICBM arsenal.