Beware the Mutant Trio!

These outcasts of society are children of the atom, the first generation born after radiation has mutated their genetics! Mutants, if you will, who the world hates and fears! One is a cyclops who can shoot beams, another has mental powers, and … why does this sound so familiar?

Especially in a book starring a bunch of superhero misfits led by a guy in a wheelchair?

The Mutant Trio is led by the man whose head is composed of a single eyeball, The Mutant Master. In Doom Patrol #115-116, he gets his revenge on Earth and hatches a cunning plan to divert a passing comet and direct it straight to the planet and killing all life. It turns out when the three are together, they have some sort of telekinesis that is so powerful that it can redirect heavenly bodies.

it’s up to the Doom Patrol, The World’s Strangest Heroes, to stop them!

Elasti-Girl (and yes, this is the same hero that forces Pixar to pay DC Comics royalties when they mention her name), tries to reason with them, but rage and power have totally consumed our mutants.

Can we talk about artist Bruno Premiani for a second? I feel he’s one of the most underrated Silver Age artists out there. He’s a mix of Jack Kirby and Curt Swan and it’s genuinely disturbing. In a good way. Like, this is a superhero comic drawn by a counterculture artist. Premiani —- a man who fled Europe after drawing anti-Mussolini editorials —- also drew the earliest Teen Titans stories, and they are similarly surreal. The eyeball motif would appear there as well.

And wow does he take it seriously.  The red veins are the most upsetting aspect (well, outside the eyelashes that look realistically to be sprouting from the lids).  Notice, though, how he draws the eyeball to look slick and moist as well.  It is gross.

Take, for instance, this bizarre scene where Madame Rogue —— a sometimes villain and sometimes hero with stretchy powers (and who really should’ve scored the Elasti-Girl moniker) —- fights her good and bad selves.

This is something you’d expect out of Fantagraphics.

Our Mutant Trio is eventually defeated after our Doom Patrol wades through a bed or llamas, appease a yeti with an Alfred E. Newman button, and encounter a gigantic alien warrior who is more than he seems (as in… it’s a robot piloted by Doom Patrol mentor, Niles Caulder).