Death Patrol reaches a bit by introducing so many characters for only 6 pages, but that was the comics biz of the early years...although the Patrol consists of a millionaire playboy (yawwwnnnn), and some escaped convicts, the introductions are short because it was important to get right to the action. The kids who were reading this didn’t really care much about individual motivation...they just wanted to get to the butt-kicking.
In its initial run Cole left Death Patrol after three episodes.I am showing the first two here.
From Military Comics #’s 1 and 2 (1941):
While the original twist to the Death Patrol was that some character or characters would be killed on a routine basis — Cole definitely had a morbid streak, which repeatedly affected his work and presumably fed into his suicide — apparently it was later decided that this principle was too grim to be sustained, or even to have had lasting effect, as previously killed characters were unkilled.
ReplyDelete(Of course, André of the Blackhawks was also killed and then unkilled.)
Daniel, I would think it would be self-defeating to have a character killed in each episode, although it would be a hell of a gimmick. Or had it been a constant for the feature they could have handled it like South Park, where Kenny is killed in every episode and alive in the next.
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