Here is the latest cool comic book moment in our year-long look at one cool comic book moment a day (in no particular order whatsoever)! Here's the archive of the moments posted so far!

Who else could we look at today but Doctor Thirteen's adventures, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang?

Enjoy!

The Doctor Thirteen story in the back-up pages of Tales of the Unexpected #1-8 (collected as the trade paperback Doctor Thirteen: Architecture and Morality) tells the story of Doctor Thirteen, a classic DC character whose position as a skeptic began to look pretty foolish when DC took him from his out-of-continuity back-up stories and began to have him interact with the rest of the fantastical DC Universe.

In this storyline, after the events of Infinite Crisis, Thirteen encounters a group of other characters who are currently "unwanted" by the current DC Universe (the heads of the DC Universe are represented as the Four Architects, a reference to the four writers of 52, Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Geoff Johns and Greg Rucka). What I especially love about Azzarello's take on the architects is that he clearly is not picking on these four guys or anything like that, but rather, just the idea of a universe having "architects," as obviously, as soon as these guys leave the company, someone ELSE will be in charge and things that they did not want to have happen will happen (which we have seen over and over in comic history).

Well, while the Architects are willing to take Doctor Thirteen's attractive, half-Asian teen daughter to be part of the DC Universe (which, amusingly enough, she is right now - the only one of the characters in this book to appear with any degree of regularity in the DC Universe), Thirteen (who spent a good part of the comic trying to come up with rational explanations for his companions - a Legion of Substitute Heroes member, a vampire, a Nazi gorilla, a ghost - who at that point was missing - and a little kid who is a genius and will solve any mystery for a dime) finally takes a stand, and it is really impressive....













There are so many cool moments by Azzarello and Chiang (who was SO good on art in this series) that I really have a hard time picking "the" cool moment. I guess I would go with him walking through the fire or the neat ending.

Hmmm...I think the ending is more memorable.