Review by Dana: Doctor Thirteen

Doctor Thirteen: Architecture & Mortality TPB, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang

Think of writer Brian Azzarello, you probably think grim and gritty: His acclaimed series, 100 Bullets, or his various Batman projects (hopefully you don’t think of his incomprehensible, Superman: For Tomorrow). In Doctor Thirteen: Architecture & Mortality, Azzarello does a 180 turn, surprising us with a very entertaining ode to DC’s pre-crisis continuity.

One of DC’s more obscure characters, Doctor Thirteen is a paranormal investigator who has always found a mundane explanation behind each of his cases. Reasonably, he has become a complete skeptic despite existing in the DC universe.

In this storyline, originally published as a backup feature to the Spectre in Tales of the Unexpected #1-8(2006-2007), we find the good Doctor, who has been experiencing strange dreams, led to a plane crash in the French Alps. There, he and his daughter, Traci Thirteen, encounter D-list, horror character, I… Vampire! Things only get stranger and more absurd as Doctor Thirteen soon finds himself at the head of a small army of silver age characters so obscure, they had this comic reader of 35 years rushing to Wikipedia to find out who the hell most of them were! After battling Nazi gorillas and an animated Mount Rushmore, this motley cast of characters makes their way to New York City to battle against the ominous Architects, a quartet of men you might find vaguely familiar. Doctor Thirteen and his friends fight not just for survival, but for relevance in a “realistic” world.

Don’t pick this book up thinking it will be a piece of straight, in-continuity storytelling. It is a meta commentary on the direction of mainstream comics, that at times reads almost stream-of consciousness. That being said, the characters in Architecture & Mortality are written with such wit and warmth by Brian Azzarello, and are so beautifully illustrated by the thick line of Cliff Chiang, that this book can’t help but be a delight to longtime DC fans. In particular, those who feel a seemingly infinite number of Crises have excised a lot of wonder and fun from the comic book world.

Currently available through your local comic retailer, DCBS, or Amazon.com