Doctor 13: I was wrong

Back in the day, I wrote a Worst to First and mentioned a Tales of the Unexpected purchase and how much that book sucked. I said:

And the back-up story, which I’ve already forgotten the title of, was just piss-poor. Some annoying guy and some vampire are in a cave and have a stupid conversation about pointless crap. The end.

In part thanks to Devon at Seven Hells, but moreso because DC sent over a review copy, I now know that the backup story was called Doctor 13: Architects and Mortality. More importantly, I now know that this story is really, really good.

In my defense, I caught only the second part of the story, and that part was easily the weakest. What really hurt, though, was missing out on a bundle of jokes because I’d missed the set up in the first installment. Much like Arrested Development, Doctor 13 strings gags along from the first moment onward, continually building to ever better punchlines. Just read it, and thank me when you get to the banana.

Jokes are great, but a book has to be more than funny. And this one is, as Brian Azzarello takes a 180 from his typical work and strings along the most improbable story possible. In short, Doctor 13 and a motley assemblage of DC character chaff face annihilation from the Architects, who are actually DC writers that want to erase these crummy old characters. Think Grant Morrison’s Animal Man meets Jeff Parker’s Agents of Atlas.

Though probably unintended, the story points to a serious flaw with DC’s editorial staff: that they care more about continuity than they do about characters (though how well either is managed right now is certainly debatable). Azzarello shows that even the lamest characters can be great, as long as the writer cares about them.