The Metal Men in the suburbs, squabbling with each other-- (and the occasional robotic menace.)

This is a collection of the Metal Men back-up stories that ran in the Doom Patrol Comic a few years back padded with a chapter from the Batman-Metal Men team-up that was part of a big JLA miniseries even further.

Sadly, all we get is the standard Giffen-De Matteis chatter that they seem to think is so hilarious. The Metal Men were always rather light-hearted as the book always had a suitable number of comedy relief characters in its cast. But in this collection, we see all of them, even the serious characters like Gold and Iron, reduced to one-joke buffoons for no reason at all. Virtually all of the characters come off as unlikeable, particularly Will Magnus and Platinum, who were once such a cute couple.

There are certainly a number of interesting situations for the robot team to deal with, from an insane actor to murderous mannequins but the story is told in such a way as to drain all the drama out of the situations so none of them engage the reader.

The art is wonderful in capturing the emotion and uniqueness of the characters but it doesn't fully showcase the shapechanging abilities of the team. Perhaps because the writers don't really know much about the elemental properties of the metals or how to use these properties in an interesting way.

If they were going to reprint something about the Metal Men, they could have used the Ross Andru stories of the 1960s or even the Simonson stories of the 1970s. Those were far superior. And in many cases, were even funnier.