Flex Mentallo laments Destiny Beach’s demise in this Doom Patrol exclusive
Doom Patrol: Weight Of The Worlds is the biggest mindfuck in superhero comics. Co-written by Gerard Way and Jeremy Lambert, this miniseries outdoes the wildly ambitious ideas of Young Animal’s first Doom Patrol volume by bringing in a cavalcade of outstanding artists, starting with two issues drawn, inked, colored, and lettered by James Harvey. His innovative approach to graphic storytelling combines a wide variety of stylistic elements pulled from superhero comics, manga, comic strips, street art, and experimental cartoonists like Chris Ware, immediately distinguishing DP: WOTW from anything else on the stands.
DP:WOTW #3 artist Evan “Doc” Shaner has a much more traditional approach to the comics page, but that’s not a problem when the art has so much character. His slick linework blends beautifully Tamra Bonvillain’s lush colors, delivering high-contrast, neon-colored visuals that give the sci-fi neo-noir story a distinct flavor. Artist Nick Pitarra joins Way, Lambert, Bonvillain, and letterer Simon Bowland for this week’s DP: WOTW #4, spotlighting the team’s reality-warping muscle man as he returns to the beach he once called home. The Frank Quitely influence on Pitarra’s artwork makes him an ideal artist to handle Flex, a character defined by Quitely’s interpretation in his 1996 miniseries, but Pitarra leans into cartoonish exaggeration to heighten the fantastical qualities of this off-kilter superhero narrative.
This exclusive preview of DP: WOTW #4 highlights Pitarra’s mix of intricate detail and animated expression, introducing Destiny Beach with a page overflowing with visual stimuli to highlight the vitality of this setting in its prime. All that energy is stripped away for the first shot in the present, revealing Flex collapsed on a beach littered with garbage. Bonvillain’s coloring reinforces this degradation with a duller palette for the present, and these pages show how much of a difference color saturation affects the atmosphere. This excerpt also shows Robotman getting his latest upgrade in Dannyland, with saturated colors giving the quick scene extra pep. Editors Andy Khouri and Maggie Howell do exceptional work picking artists that enrich Way and Lambert’s story, making each issue a surprising, rewarding journey into the weirdest corners of the superhero genre.
