I got this book the other week and I too was disappointed with the Doctor Thirteen story. I felt the same discomfort at the use of incest. I don’t really have anything to add to the subject, though, so I won’t go into it.

Something else that bothered me, though, was the really poor handling of Doctor Thirteen’s character. Although I admit that I’ve only read him in Gaiman’s The Books of Magic and Morrison’s Zatanna (in which he died), he nonetheless struck me as a man who may be brusque at times, but is basically genial. Azzarello’s Thirteen, on the other hand, comes off as just a jerk.

Also, as mentioned above… how can someone live in the DCU not believe in telepathy or aliens or the like? Grant Morrison was the only person who got Doctor Thirteen right, IMO: he witnessed “magical” occurences, accepted their existance, and ascribed rational scientific explanations to them.

A good justification I’ve read for Doctor Thirteen’s existence in the DCU is that since the paranormal is demonstratably real, then scam artists can take advantage of the gullible far more easily, making skeptics all the more necessary.

Btw — “le septic” was a bathroom joke, wasn’t it?

But I agree it seems a bit Vertigoish to be appearing in a regular comic. What’s a lot stranger is that anyone in the DCU (this is a DCU story, isn’t it?) could refuse to believe in all manner of supernatural phenomena.