I picked up DC’s Phantom Stranger Showcase a couple weeks ago, and it’s a pretty entertaining read. It can be pretty hokey, and you’re obviously not meant to read more than one or two stories in one sitting, but it’s still fun: The Phantom Stranger is a cool character, and there are some nifty Neal Adams covers. It also features one of the biggest losers in comic book history: Doctor Thirteen.
He means well. He tries to protect people from sham artists and con men trying to cash in on fear and superstition. But this naturally sets him against the totally mysterious and mystical Phantom Stranger — though they always seem to team up reluctantly in the end — and he just can’t win.
Doctor Thirteen, of course, is a guest-star in The Phantom Stranger. He’s not appearing in That Guy Who Pretends to be a Phantom But is Just a Janitor with a Smoke Machine. Granted, the Stranger isn’t a totally out-there spook – most of the time, he’s just mysterious. But the whole point of the book being The Phantom Stranger and not Scooby Doo is that there are mystical, magical menaces out there.
Consequently, Doctor Thirteen, rational fanatic as he is, ends up looking like a complete ninny as he tries to explain away the obviously magical stuff that’s always going on. It would be one thing if he were some sort of lame villain or foil, but he’s actually a good guy, part of a crime-fighting odd couple. He’s just a really, really lame one.
Is it too much to ask him to mellow out? To adjust his position just a little bit, so that maybe most supernatural occurrences are frauds (the Phantom Stranger exposes frauds too), but accepting that there actually are freaky, unexplainable, supernatural things out there? Like, say, the star of the book?
I suppose it is.