I've occasionally noted my liking for the Silver Age DOOM PATROL for an assortment of reasons. One was that it was one of the first DC features to successfully ape the "soap-opera adventure" mode popularized by Marvel Comics. Another was that writer Arnold Drake was the only talent who even came close to Stan Lee in the department of making witty quips. That said, Lee also benefited from the fabulous design-abilities of his collaborator Jack Kirby. Drake's DOOM PATROL collaborator, the Italian Bruno Premiani, produced visuals with a wonky charm (partly because of his dicey use of forced perspective), but he probably didn't bring any new ideas to the table.
The feature had been running about two years by the time of "The Death of the Doom Patrol." Like a lot of shock-based concepts seen at Silver Age DC, it depends on a sudden upheaval in the status quo, when the Patrol's wheelchair-bound mentor, The Chief, tells his freaky superhero subordinates that he's terminating their employment.
Nothing daunted, the heroes proceed to build their own HQ (with what resources, Drake does not specify). Then, rather than waiting the entire length of the tale for the big reveal like many DC stories, Drake provides two panels in which The Chief confirms his self-diagnosis of imminent death. He's only kicked out his proteges in order to force them to make their own way in the superhero game, which is a adult-to-child psychological trope that's appealing, however problematic.
Meanwhile, the newly independent Patrol is confronted by their first new super-villain, Mister 103, named for the number of elements on the periodic table in 1965. The dorky-looking fellow successfully robs a bank vault by turning into such diverse elements as lead, neon, magnesium, sulfur and magnetic iron, all in a mere two pages. The team's first encounter with the villain is a total failure, and they immediately "run to daddy" for advice. They learn learn the reasons for the Chief's rejection and the nature of his malady, a fatal infusion of radioactive copper. However, it just happens that the very thing the super-scientist was investigating during his accident is the thing that can defeat the Atom Master.
Armed with a new weapon, Robotman and Negative Man (who get all the action, Elasti-Girl being consigned to weeping over her dying mentor) confront 103 and paralyze him with an alien freeze-ray. Negative Man saves the day by figuring that if 103's element-transformation ray can give the villain the power to change himself, it can also change an individual human into one element-- that of pure copper-- and then totally reverse that transformation. I confess that even for a comic book, this problematic science doesn't even make as much sense as the Tootsie Pop ad at the bottom of page 16, and the quick reversal of the Patrol's "death" is not all that mythic in and of itself.
What "Death" does well, though, is to play upon the cosmological fascination of the elements of nature, through the lens of a superhero adventure. I've addressed the idea of "element-villains" a couple of times on this blog, noting that the earliest example known to me, the Justice Society tale "Vampires of the Void," failed to develop the epistemological patterns implicit in the theme. Then with the advent of the Silver Age, a number of DC writers seemed to become fascinated with the periodic table as a source of villain-powers. The first mythic villain of this kind was 1958's Mister Element, quickly followed by a less well developed fellow, Bill Finger's Elemental Man in DETECTIVE COMICS #294 (1961). A year later, metals, rather than elements, were turned into crusading crimefighters in the form of Robert Kanigher's METAL MEN (1962), and 1965 also brought to DC a new "Element Man" in the form of Bob Haney's Metamorpho. But one of the more interesting aspects of the Drake story is that the Chief's illness via "radioactive copper" plays upon the body's real need of copper in the formulation of hemoglobin, and upon the fact that too much copper can poison a human body-- giving this comic-book illness a bit more vraisemblance than was usual.
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