Doom Patrol

• 1. Introduction

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  The Doom Patrol, a team of misfit superheroes at DC Comics, ended its first run in the autumn of 1968 by dying together in the final issue, number 121, to save Codsville, a small fishing village in Maine. Nobody in comics had done that before. It was the first time a cancelled title was closed out by killing its whole cast. The ending set up an odd question that the team has been answering ever since. Why would a group of heroes who loathed being heroes keep coming back from the dead? Their creator also spent years wondering whether a rival publisher had borrowed the idea for a famous team of its own. And across more than half a century, writers have turned the Doom Patrol into everything from a plain action squad to one of the strangest series ever put on a comics rack. This documentary follows the team from a desperate editorial meeting to its many returns.

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• 2. Misfits Wanted

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  In 1963, editor Murray Boltinoff had a problem. His adventure anthology My Greatest Adventure was sliding toward cancellation, and he needed a superhero hook to rescue it. Writer Arnold Drake later recalled that he left the editor's office, then returned a couple of hours later with a pitch. It centered on a brilliant man in a wheelchair who leads heroes who hate being heroes.

  Drake believed that resentment was the point. In his words, the Chief kept telling his team to "Stop crying in your beer." Drake's first pitch featured Elasti-Girl and a character called Automaton, who had become Robotman by the team's third appearance, in issue #82. Drake wanted a third character, so he asked fellow writer Bob Haney to help invent Negative Man. Artist Bruno Premiani gave the group its look. For a time the team was announced as "The Legion of the Strange."

  My Greatest Adventure #80, with a cover dated June 1963, introduced them. Drake and Haney plotted the issue together, then scripted half each, with Drake taking the first half and Haney the second. The line-up was the Chief, whose real name was Niles Caulder, plus Robotman, or Cliff Steele, Elasti-Girl, or Rita Farr, and Negative Man, or Larry Trainor. Garfield Logan, known as Beast Boy, and Steve Dayton, known as Mento, joined soon after. Boltinoff billed them as the "world's strangest heroes," and the book was renamed The Doom Patrol with issue #86, in March 1964.

  The members quarrelled and nursed private troubles. Marvel's Fantastic Four was already doing that, but it was new among DC's heroes. The villains were just as odd. General Immortus sought immortality, and the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man could change into almost anything. The Brotherhood of Evil was led by the Brain, a disembodied brain kept alive by technology. Its members included the intelligent gorilla Monsieur Mallah and Madame Rouge, who had a stretchy body and a face she could reshape to impersonate anyone.

  The team also crossed over twice. One story paired them with the Challengers of the Unknown against Multi-Man and Multi-Woman. The other was a team-up with the Flash in The Brave and the Bold #65. Neither crossover could save the series from what came next.

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• 3. Curtain Call

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  The last page of Doom Patrol #121 carries an odd detail: the people asking fans to write in were not the people who should have been. Artist Bruno Premiani and editor Murray Boltinoff appear at the start and end of the story, urging readers to write to DC and demand the team's return. That role was supposed to belong to Arnold Drake. By his own account, he had just resigned over a pay dispute and moved to Marvel Comics, and he finished the script only out of friendship for Boltinoff.

  In the story itself, Madame Rouge and General Zahl were the ones behind the team's death. Falling sales had already sealed the title's fate.

  The silence afterward was not complete. A few years later, three more issues appeared under the numbers #122, #123 and #124. They were reprints of older issues, #89, #95 and #90 in that order. A real revival did not come until 1977, nine years after the team's death.

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• 4. The Copycat Question

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  Marvel's own humor title, Not Brand Echh, joked about the resemblance between the Doom Patrol and Marvel's original X-Men. The jokes had a point. Both were misfit heroes shunned by society, and each was led by a man of unusual intelligence who used a wheelchair. Drake concluded the X-Men must have grown from his idea.

  He said he had become convinced that Stan Lee knowingly stole the concept. He pointed out that many writers and artists quietly worked for both companies. Any of them could have overheard his pitch in Boltinoff's office, he reasoned, and Lee may have had four, five or even six months of lead time.

  Drake softened that view shortly before his death in 2007. He allowed that Lee might have reached a similar concept on his own, since, as he put it, "Since we were working in the same vineyards, and if you do enough of that stuff, sooner or later, you will kind of look like you are imitating each other."

  There is also a second comparison. The four original Doom Patrol leads line up closely with the Fantastic Four. Each team has a woman and three men, a stretching power, and a strong member trapped in a distorted orange body. John Byrne, who has drawn all three groups, wrote that he wished someone would ask Drake about the Fantastic Four resemblance instead of always raising the X-Men.

  Comic writer Mark Evanier disagrees with the theft theory. He argues the gap between My Greatest Adventure #80 and The Uncanny X-Men #1 was far too short to produce an imitation. Sales figures for the Doom Patrol debut would not have been tallied until the issue left the stands two months later, and Evanier put the wait for reliable numbers at probably a good six months. The original concept's sales turned out mediocre anyway, so copying it would have made little sense.

  While this argument simmered, one longtime fan of the Doom Patrol was growing up and learning to write comics.

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• 5. Second Teams

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  Showcase #94, dated August-September 1977, brought the Doom Patrol back. Paul Kupperberg, that longtime fan, wrote it with artist Joe Staton after editor Paul Levitz asked for a Doom Patrol feature. Showcase was then an anthology for trying out new characters, and issue #94 was its first new issue in almost seven years.

  Kupperberg chose a new line-up out of respect for the story in which the original team died. He was also inspired by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum's recent all-new, all-different X-Men. He later regretted it, saying he had missed the point of the Doom Patrol. The originals were outsiders and freaks, while his new heroes were just comic-book superheroes.

  The new team was led by Celsius, whose real name was Arani Desai, the Chief's previously unseen wife. Robotman, the sole survivor of the original group, received a futuristic new body built by Will Magnus. The Negative Spirit now possessed Russian cosmonaut Valentina Vostok, making her Negative Woman. The last member was Joshua Clay, a Vietnam veteran and deserter called Tempest, who fired energy blasts from his hands.

  The three-issue tryout did not lead to a series, which Kupperberg blamed on poor sales. The characters turned up as guests in Superman Family, DC Comics Presents and Supergirl. Robotman also joined the Teen Titans in the Marv Wolfman and George Pérez era, where he and a new Brotherhood of Evil fought Madame Rouge and General Zahl. The two villains who killed the original team died in that battle. In 1984, Eclipse Comics published a two-part Doom Patrol: The Official Index with covers by John Byrne.

  In October 1987, DC launched a full series with Kupperberg writing and Steve Lightle drawing. Lightle had disliked Kupperberg's Showcase version and took the job reluctantly. He left after complaining about being shut out of plotting, despite repeated promises. Erik Larsen replaced him after issue #5. The new members included Lodestone, a magnetic strong-girl named Rhea Jones, and Karma, whose attackers fell over themselves. Scorch had to wear protective gloves because of his heat. Sales slid until Kupperberg was removed and Grant Morrison was brought in to rescue the book.

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• 6. Morrison's Strangeness

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  Issue #19 changed everything. After the first 18 issues, Grant Morrison replaced Kupperberg, and the series stopped going through the Comics Code Authority for approval, which removed several limits on what stories could show. Kupperberg helped by writing out characters Morrison did not want, including Celsius, Karma, Lodestone, Scorch and Tempest.

  Morrison used DC's Invasion crossover to restart the book. They described the goal as stripping the team down to its roots and returning as fast as possible to the freewheeling weirdness of the early stories. Negative Man was reworked by forcibly merging the Negative Spirit, now a cosmic entity, with Larry Trainor and his doctor, Eleanor Poole. The result was Rebis, an agender gestalt being.

  New characters arrived. Crazy Jane carried 64 personalities, each with its own ability. Danny the Street was a sentient neighborhood. Dorothy Spinner was a girl with an ape's face and powerful imaginary friends. The stories drew on Dada, surrealism and the cut-up technique pioneered by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, as well as ideas from Jorge Luis Borges and Heinrich Hoffmann. Arnold Drake himself said Morrison's was the only later run to reflect the intent of the original.

  Morrison also devoted issues to parody. Issue #42 introduced Flex Mentallo, meant to be the character from the Charles Atlas advertisement. The Charles Atlas Company later sued, and the case showed DC was protected by fair use and an expired statute of limitations. Issue #53 staged a dream sequence echoing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four, borrowing from the Galactus trilogy. A 1992 one-shot called Doom Force mimicked Rob Liefeld's X-Force. Issue #45 gave readers the Beard Hunter, a clean-shaven killer of bearded men who targeted the Chief.

  The villains matched. Red Jack believed he was both Jack the Ripper and God, and he tortured butterflies in a windowless house to produce the pain he needed. The Brotherhood of Dada fought reality itself. Sleepwalk could use her powers only while asleep, so she took sleeping pills and listened to Barry Manilow before battle. The Quiz had every superpower you had not thought of, along with a pathological fear of dirt. Number None never appeared, yet caused daily annoyances like bumping into a half-open door. The Scissormen came from the dimension of Orqwith and cut people out of reality with their scissor hands.

  Issue #57 delivered the run's darkest turn. The Chief confessed that he had secretly engineered the accidents that gave Cliff, Larry and Rita their powers. He hated them, thinking them spoiled and shallow, and he believed turning them into freaks would improve them. He also admitted lying about Celsius, whom he had denied being married to. When Tempest and Robotman learned the truth, Tempest was killed and Robotman was paralyzed.

  Caulder then planned to release nanobots to cause a catastrophe he thought would improve humanity. The Candlemaker, a violent cosmic horror freed by Dorothy, hijacked the plan and beheaded the Chief. Dorothy, Crazy Jane and Robotman defeated the creature with help from a newly reborn Rebis. In the finale, Jane landed in a world without heroes, where she was institutionalized. Robotman found her just as she was about to kill herself and took her home to Danny the Street. The run closed on a lyric from "Asleep" by The Smiths: "There is another world... There is a better world... Well there must be." A four-issue Flex Mentallo mini-series, drawn by Frank Quitely, grew out of the run.

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• 7. The Vertigo Years

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  Rachel Pollack took over writing with issue #64, after Morrison left at #63. Her first issue was also the first published under DC's new Vertigo imprint, though Morrison's original issues never carried that logo, only their collected editions. Cliff Steele returned, along with Dorothy Spinner and a Niles Caulder now reduced to a disembodied head, usually kept on a tray of ice.

  Pollack made Dorothy a core member, with her imaginary friends joining the fights. The stories dealt with the generation gap, humanity, identity, transgender issues and bisexuality. Elements of Judaism and Kabbalah arrived in the last issues, where the angel Akatriel became a major character for the final seven.

  The first arc, "Sliding in the Wreckage," found Cliff's computer brain malfunctioning and sending him back into old flashbacks. Dorothy was haunted by African spirits. Strange outbreaks spread across Earth with the arrival of something called the Book of Ice. A government agency called the Builders tried to stop it, and the trouble seemed tied to a race of shapeshifters, the Teiresias. In their world, little beings with backward letters for heads, called nannos, repaired the Chief so he could live as a severed head.

  The team then moved to Rainbow Estates in Violet Valley, a house haunted by ghosts of people who died in sexual accidents. New members joined there. The Bandage People, George and Marion, were escaped Builders workers, and the Inner Child embodied the ghosts' innocence. Kate Godwin, called Coagula, became one of the first transgender superheroes. The Identity Addict shed her skin to become different heroes, and used a False Memory identity to alter the team's memories until Dorothy threw her out.

  The foes were as unusual as ever. The Fox and the Crow were feuding animal spirits. The Master Cleaner had a human fetus in a bubble for a head and stripped the world to nothing, replacing what he took, even people, with paper tickets. The False Healers, led by the Rabbi of Darkness, were a group of Hassidic healers. Artist Ted McKeever drew most of the last 13 issues, and the series ended with issue #87, in February 1995.

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• 8. Relaunch After Relaunch

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  In December 2001, writer John Arcudi and artist Tan Eng Huat launched a third series that returned the team to the mainstream DC universe, away from Vertigo. It lasted 22 issues. Arcudi said an editorial agreement initially barred use of Morrison's concepts, including Rebis and Crazy Jane. Fan backlash eventually let him refer to those earlier events. His story featured a corporate team employed by Thayer Jost and an underground team run by Robotman. It ended with Dorothy's death, and the survivors split up with royalty money from a Doom Patrol television series that Jost had made.

  In August 2004, John Byrne launched a fourth series, billed as "Together again for the first time!", which wiped out all previous continuity. It was controversial and short-lived. One scene sent Robotman and Elasti-Girl back in time into younger bodies, where the adult Cliff kissed Rita while she was trapped in her twelve-year-old body. DC canceled it with issue #18, and the "Infinite Crisis" storyline restored the earlier history.

  On the 7th of February 2009, DC announced at New York Comic Con that Keith Giffen would write a revival with artist Matt Clark. It was canceled with issue #22 in May 2011. In September 2011, The New 52 rebooted continuity, and the Doom Patrol briefly resurfaced with the Chief assembling a new team after his old one was believed dead. Lex Luthor later revealed that Caulder had caused the accidents that gave the team its powers, just as in Morrison's run.

  Gerard Way's series, drawn by Nick Derington under the Young Animal imprint, began on the 14th of September 2016. It centered on Casey Brinke, a character Danny the Street had created and who became real. The team threw Caulder out for gambling again, and the run lasted 12 issues. A follow-up called Weight of the Worlds, first published in July 2019, saw Cliff upgrade his body until he became an entire planet. Crazy Jane helped bring him back. Dennis Culver, Chris Burnham and Brian Reber launched Unstoppable Doom Patrol on the 28th of March 2023, running seven issues with Crazy Jane leading as "The Chief."

  The team has also reached screens. They appear in Teen Titans, Teen Titans Go!, Titans and Young Justice: Outsiders, and in a live-action series with Jane and Cyborg among its members. One Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode, "The Last Patrol!", retells their end: the heroes sacrifice themselves to save Codsville, and the grateful residents rename their town "Four Heroes."

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