Burly Reading: OLD MAN LOGAN, or WHY MARK MILLAR WILL BURN IN HELL

Mark Millar may be a good man. Like the kind of good man Henry Fonda played in the movies, like THE GRAPES OF WRATH and 12 ANGRY MEN. He may be the type of man who gets other men to stand up when he passes, out of respect.

But as a writer of superhero comics, specifically superhero comics using the icons of Marvel Publishing, he's everything that's ever been wrong with Brit import writers who are too smart for the material they are working on. See Grant Morrison. See Bryan Hitch.

I read this here story free, from the public library. The public library I work for. I've never been into censorship, and I can't bring myself to want OLD MAN LOGAN off the shelves. It has to be a choice by people who have choices. But this is bad ju-ju, Mark Millar.

OLD MAN LOGAN is a project Millar worked on with Steve McNiven a few years ago. It appears as maybe the apex of the "alternate world" story, or future history, of Marvel Comics' icon characters like the Hulk and the Avengers and Spider-Man. And, to a lesser extent in my eyes, Wolverine aka Logan.

I'm going to spoil the sh*t out of this thing as I write about it. Because I can't not write about it. Like I can't not act to stop a woman being raped or an man beaten mercilessly.

In this future, the super-villains of the world and of other dimensions band together as one irresistable army. This includes gods mind you, like Loki the Trickster and brother of Thor. And Dormammu, overlord of his own dimension. Somehow, in the first of Millar's amazingly awful contrivances, the Red Skull inspires these villains to operate as a monstrous superhero extermination wave.

I'd like to say, right now, that Millar has ignored the one golden rule of superhero comics. Because, presumably, he's too cool to adhere to it. That rule is: villains, no matter who they are, super or not, simply cannot coexist under any circumstance. I mean real villains, like the Red Skull, who is a Nazi super-soldier psychopath. He is irredeemable, a murderous monster. We're not talking about the Beetle, a low-level burglar type who really wasn't ever a bad guy, just a poor one. Financially poor. A lot of villains are the crime element of the superhero ghetto, homeless and disenfranchised. Not evil, but desperate. Petty, small-minded, ect.

So this super-villain army decimates the superheroes, murdering most of them, miaming the rest, and taking over the United States. They split it into territories.

For some reason, even Dr. Doom has a territory in the U.S., even though he is a fierce jingoist for his country, called Latveria. But far be it for Millar to ever wonder why Doom would bother ruling land in a foriegn country, far from his nation. Why worry about character integrity?

Logan, former Wolverine, is a Pacifist after his experiences decades before. He was "broken" and refuses to use his claws on any living thing. Early on, Logan is living in California in the territory of the "Hulks." Yes, that's right, the Hulk rules his own territory with his family, which he sired by f*cking his cousin, Jennifer Walters aka She-Hulk. This has resulted in Bruce Banner, brilliant scientist, being the patriarch of a horde of green-skinned cannibal "greenneck" DELIVERANCE extras.


I guess it's supposed to be humorous. Logan receives a beating for not paying tribute to Banner. Logan is told his wife and children will be killed if he doesn't pay up in a week. Then a blind Hawkeye, the purple-clad archer Everyman of the Avengers, arrives looking like an aging hippie and offers the old man Logan money to drive Hawkeye across the United Super-villain Territories. Why? To deliver a suitcase filled with Super Soldier formula to a secret resistance movement on the East Coast. This resistance will become, via the serum, superhumans. They will form a new Avengers to take back the world.

A fairly pithy journey begins, with Millar showing off the grand sight-seeing tours of these territories. Lots of impressive McNiven visuals. I don't blame McNiven necessarily. He's a talented dude. He's under the mighty sword of The Writer. He's drawing what the Lord Writer has demanded. Still, McNiven contributed to this thing. He helped give birth to a deformity of everything superhero comics stand for.

I'll put it to you this way: Logan turns back into his feral berserker self and kills everybody he meets. This includes Wolverine hacking up a bunch of retarded Hulks and the main Hulk himself, who has devolved into a giant retarded fat guy. Oh, and Bruce Banner is superhuman before he transforms into the Hulk the final time. Just because. And when Wolverine kills the Hulk, we forget that the Hulk shouldn't be killed. He's invulnerable, and he heals from anything, just like old Wolverine. At least if you buy into Marvel Comics' bullsh*t.

But what the hell. No reason to dwell on such things. Wolverine kills everybody. Except for one of Bruce Banner's little babies, whom Logan is going to raise to be a "good" Hulk. The idea is Wolverine is the hope of Mankind and superhero kind as well. He's going to make it all right again.

Fine. Wolverine wankery. Everyone hypes the Wolverine. I don't much care, as it's a product of a lot of fans who can't let go of their badass identifier.

But Millar commits yet another crucial sin: he treats all the characters with vicious contempt, but saves the most loathing for the Wolverine fans. As well he should, but the problem is he surrenders logic to pull it off.

There's an internal mystery to Logan's "breaking" that fuels the early part of the story. Logan as Wolverine, along with the X-Men, were attacked in their Westchester mansion home by a unit of super-villains, including Sabretooth and the Blob, Doctor Octopus and Klaw. Keep that in mind. Klaw. Master of Sound. Klaw is a being who is made of sound. Do you dig that? He's not flesh and blood.

Back to the mystery: Wolverine in his younger costumed version slaughters all these attacking super-villains by himself. Every one of them. He guts Sabretooth and decapitates Mr. Hyde. He cuts off Klaw's weapon hand and stabs him through the throat. Wolverine wins, of course, but is torn up and injured.

At the end of the fight, Mysterio shows up. Mysterio is the Master of Illusions. He lifts his illusion to show Wolverine the battleground, and the true victims of Wolverine's savagery.

The X-Men! Wolverine killed the X-Men!

All of them. Mysterio was so good with the illusion, Wolverine couldn't smell his friends, couldn't tell it was them. Oh god.

But I keep coming around to Klaw, the dude made of sound. Wolverine killed him with his claws. The thing is, Klaw isn't alive. He's sound. Everyone knows that. And if I was a superhero in the Marvel Universe, and I knew I might run into guys like Klaw at some point, I'd be a scholar of super-villains and other superheroes. I would know what their basic thing was. I would at least know enough to survive against them.

I guess the suggestion is Wolverine doesn't care about that stuff. Facts about super-villains who might kill you. Not a big thing. It's only Klaw, a longtime classic villain, a member of the Masters of Evil and mortal enemy of the Black Panther and the Fantastic Four.

But Wolverine doesn't know this sound construct isn't Klaw. He's a rube. He's a dupe. He's taken advantage of by Mysterio, who used him to kill the X-Men. And Mysterio just shows up for that deft manuever. He never shows up again. Wolverine breaks. And Millar's insanely stupid story keeps on trucking.

Mark Millar. Stick to obvious analogues of superheroes, like your new NEMESIS series. All the blood and gore and embarrassing dialogue won't bother me so much there. Because your superheroes were not designed, created, to be extensions of empowerment for children. They are not teaching tools, symbols of the moral and ethical education of kids. Because that's what superheroes are, Mr. Millar. I hate to break it to you, but superheroes are not for old c*nts like me and you. They're for young people to perceive the way to see the world, its adventures, its fears, its horrors, without being scarred forever by the experience.


Mark Millar, you're what's wrong with superhero comics. You're at the core of the corruption that is superhero comics today. Nobody else is going to tell you. I'm nobody, so I'm here to say: you're a corrupt writer. I know you've made good money on this tripe, but you're destroying the medium, one of the few legitimately great American mediums. If this is revenge for the Colonies, I can understand that. But OLD MAN LOGAN is a turd, whether it sinks or floats. It's still a turd.

I feel awful after reading this thing. And so should anyone who cares about comics.

Burly Movies: BLACK DYNAMITE!

Michael Jai White, scripter/star of BLACK DYNAMITE, will be referred to as "King" Michael Jai White on this blog from this day forward. As in King of the Wakandas. King of the Jungle. King Black Bolt. Elvis the King. He's not who would be King, he is the King.

BLACK DYNAMITE isn't a send-up of Blaxploitation movies such as SHAFT and TRUCK TURNER. It's more like a flipbook of the B-movies of the 1970s, one of those little books where the flipped pages show the same character, drawn over and over, seemingly moving as if by magic.

White, and his co-writers and crew, know they have a hell of a flipbook. They keep showing it to you throughout this movie, over and over. It's fun the first time, it's fun every time. Until the end of the movie, you don't get a sense of watching a movie. It's more like seeing the dreams of Fred Williamson, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown and Isacc Hayes. We're plugged right into their experience as stars of B-movies in the 1970s. Dreams of the cool, the ludicrous, and the miserable conditions they worked under.


I was so happy during BLACK DYNAMITE, with a grin so big the top of my head might fall off. Not everything works well in BLACK DYNAMITE, but the stuff that does is unsurpassed by any contemporary treatment of Blaxploitation. BLACK DYNAMITE glories in the shoestring budget, the poor audio/visual, the stilted dialogue and the random lost extras whose delivery and expressions reveal amateur realism you just can't teach. The wonder of the B-movie is in its struggle to survive, onscreen, right in front of you. In that, the B-movie and your average Joe Schmuck are in much the same boat: lacking talent, money, and good looks. And yet sometimes brilliant, sometimes beauiful, sometimes sexy as hell. That's the average.

BLACK DYNAMITE has a couple of off-setting cameos from more established performers, and some welcome lost stars as well. The cameos, particularly the "big reveal" villain's wife in the Honky House, grates a bit, steals some of that authentic delight. But King Michael Jai White stays so iconic and regal in his role as Black Dynamite that you just can't care.


Sign me up to become the first Afronaut to orbit King Michael's hair and moustache. I just can't imagine anyone having a better time than with BLACK DYNAMITE.

Burly Movies: Hollywood, Suck, and Atoms

I believe that society can only be as good as its movies.

This kind of thinking might not seem clear to you. But after watching more movies than I have hairs on my body, and that being a lot of movies over the years, I see a pattern.



Short-sighted people can proclaim all they want about this being the "greatest" time in which to live in human history. Those people drive big gas-guzzling suburban vehicles while chatting on cell phones on their way to getting their hair coiffed properly. I speculate.

I don't think you can proclaim any time to be the "greatest" time in which to live. Frankly, I'd think our time would look like a chaotic hell to our past selves. People in the past used to start wars just to escape boredom. So life was pretty docile comparitively. Once the Industrial Age began, war moved beyond territory right into technological superiority. You can thank long-range war rocket capability for getting Mankind as far into space as he's gotten.


At some point, Hollywood became the focal point for an alternate world, in which mundane death, love, and sex had little reality but far more poignancy to the culture. Moving pictures represented a way to experience a new reality. A penetrating crater of far-reaching inclusion, we all could see life's high points without being vaporized by the meteor's impact.

Not only did Hollywood recreate reality unrelentingly, it recreated reality artfully. This enabled culture to bear itself, endure the ooze of time, and withstand the awful certainty of mortality.

Movies have done more than reflect or ponder their time, their era. I have begun to sense their true importance. The act of attending a movie, in a theatre, with other human beings, had a meaning to it once. When I was a kid in the 1970s, you wore your better shirt and clean pants to go to the movies. Older men and women wore evening clothes, or their Sunday-go-to-meetings, with the women in earrings and men in hats. Social responsibility extended into a movie theatre. It wasn't just you and a horde of other people. It was an audience.

The movies showed all kinds of events, square-jawed, or skeletal, but agreed as an honest assessment of time and space. The important aspect of movie-going in the past was more than escape, more than belief. The images toppled across the screen in such a way that the atoms of our bodies responded. In truth, we were shaped by the images as much as the images were shaped by us.

In the last fifteen or twenty years, Hollywood lost the shiny silver star of the authority of Earth. Among a horde of cockroaches and declining vision, Hollywood's producers suffered the alienation of the inbred. Without exposure to the outside world, to us, the regular human being, Hollywood had forgotten the simple atom.

I think people today believe society is going to get all "Star Trek" and find its higher moral/ethical balance, erasing racism, depravity, sexism, and so on. Like, somehow this enlightenment is just going to happen from the core goodness of all humanity. Which isn't going to happen. Not ever.

We need Hollywood to produce the movies it once had, with that understanding of the atom. How we, the audience, need them to show us once again what we are, truly. As ugly, petty, and vile as humans can be, they can be noble, righteous, and brave. Without the movies to remake us, redefine us, how can we hope to be reminded? With all these people thinking themselves better than any, in a time more enlightened and worthwhile, who is going to show us we are wrong?

Who is going to show us ourselves?

Burly Webbing: No Idea But Some Idea

I have no real idea what this is. I caught it on the smoothly cool blog http://arthurignatowski.blogspot.com/

I can't tell you, but I can tell you it is a kind of magic.

Burly Fun With Paint: The NEW Doom Patrol!

Obviously not the whole Doom Patrol.

Over yonder http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=34606&PN=1&totPosts=65 there is talk about what characters would you swap between DC Comics and Marvel Comics, and who would work best in the others' Universe?

I postulated that Machine Man, a Jack Kirby creation from the late 1970s, would work great at DC Comics.

The idea is that Cliff Steele, known as Robotman after his only living tissue (his brain) is transferred into a robot body, is destroyed in the fatal explosion which killed the original Doom Patrol circa 1969 http://earthboundburlyman.blogspot.com/2010/01/friday-night-fights-villainous-victory.html

However, as happened in "actual" history, Cliff's body was salvaged and a new robotic body built to house his brain. Here's where the Machine Man design steps in, complete with Kirby's badass "Hand Weapons System" which means the right hand has an entire arsenal of weaponry inside it. Powerful destructive force, on top of being super strong and durable.

I think Cliff would be digging this more "human" robot design, complete with plastic "mask" of his own human visage!

The Broken Grunt

An ex-Special Forces soldier/medic named Robert Coffman lay down in his bed sometime around 11:30 pm, March 7th. He placed a .38 revolver to his temple and fired. His body was discovered by police in his dingy apartment the next day. His employers had been unable to reach him. Coffman's behavior, his very persona, had made it clear he was wounded long before the final shot.

I worked with Robert Coffman for eleven years at Central Rappanhannock Library in Fredericksburg VA. I won't pretend to have been friends with Robert, but eleven years is eleven years. Coffman was an aging man, within weeks of turning fifty years old. His years were complicated by a distinct loneliness of being. He had no family that he claimed, yet spoke of abuse and neglect and injustice as if they'd happened yesterday. He had no wife or girlfriend, yet remembered fondly a slender, shiny-eyed Panamanian girl he'd known during his service in the 1980s.

Coffman was a courier, his tasks involving the menial labor of transferring library materials of all kinds, placed in large transport bins, from one branch of the system to the others. The job is of core importance to the function of a healthy library system, menial or not. Coffman had a degree from Mary Washington College, obtained after his military service. He had a keen mind, if a humorless one. He had no definitive endeavors, yet longed to use his degree, his learning, as a professional of some kind. He perceived himself as intelligent and unwavering in his individuality. He considered the social rites and tribal manipulations of his fellow white Anglo-Saxons to be trite and deceptive, and yet he'd go out of his way to offer a good-morning greeting.

Despite his nostalgic memories of his military life, he eschewed discipline. He wore sweat pants at all times, with boots, and baggy over-long shirts designed to obscure a swelled middle-aged paunch. He feared growing old, his medical background conspiring against him as his mind preyed on the pains of age. Prostate issues and alienation mocked him with pointing, twisted fingers. He perceived an end to his life, an end lacking nobility, and self-respect.

Without loved ones, who adored him or were adored by him, he could never escape the insistent tug of mortality. We are buoyed by our relationships. We live for others. Robert distrusted women on a personal level, but he was comforted by their offerings of a hand-knit scarf. His views of women were probably informed by his mother, who by Coffman's account had been a doting, invisible woman full of platitudes. Tortured by his relationship with his father, Coffman seemed to gravitate to men with violence in their pasts, especially other veterans. He had no forum with which to discuss his own experiences, and yet the most periphery discussion of his life made him glow with satisfaction. He had been of use once, in Panama, and his life had deteriorated since. He had allowed himself to falter, had ceased to be relevant, had instead chosen momentary comforts--a good 12-year old Scotch, for instance--to get him through the night.

Robert Coffman struggled with life like a man without hands trying to build a kite. Devoid of the basic tools of any natural life, he could only sift the tangled debris that amounted to a wreckage. Eventually this wreckage ceased looking like a kite to him. The wreckage was just pieces of things, and he had long lost any idea why he possessed it.

If all goes well, Coffman will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. I don't know if he qualifies for the distinction. The remnants of his life, movies about war and books with photographs of life in the 1950s, are packed and piled into his tiny apartment. A keen mind seeking meaning, Robert collected unrelatable bits and pieces, seemingly useless to anyone else, disgorging from his filing cabinets, clamoring on shelves, impermeably static within a gun safe. Somewhere in the wreckage were probably his most prized possessions. This includes, I hope, his medal for heroism, campaigned by another ex-military man who believed Coffman deserved the distinction decades after the act.

I didn't treat Robert Coffman with the kind of respect he probably deserved. He was an acidic, frustratingly monotonous man, yet also affectionate and loyal. His contrasts were like the sun shining on one side of a massive, seabourne iceberg, and on the other a vast, glassy shadow from a primordial past. Our lives are full of damp moments of regret, but I can only say Robert and I had many times mocked death, and talk of suicide was our way of whistling past the graveyard. We shared a bond of loneliness, the kind of loneliness that seperates an adjusted, silent majority and a gruff, disappointed man with a broken heart. Coffman had let himself down, and had never forgiven himself for it.

As far as I know, Coffman was a decent man who had never intentionally hurt anyone. His strange phobia of germs gave him an expression of wary disgust, and people seemed to be giant amoebas created by children with construction paper. He wasn't sure whether to believe people would infect him, but he was certain that they were infectious. He had no one to turn to, he was too intelligent to be fooled by warmth and generosity, and he had no desire to crave what did not exist.

Robert Coffman was alone two days ago. He was fully dressed, perhaps just preparing to stand up and get ready for bed. Instead he ended his life. I can only imagine his final moments. I feel a cold terror of Coffman's struggle. Or is it merely a realization that we are all bound for a moment, a struggle, in which we are alone one last time?

Go with God, Sgt. Coffman. If such would please you.

Burly Things I Want to Write: Stop F*cking With the Doom Patrol!

The Doom Patrol is a comic book. The first incarnation of the DP happened in 1963, at DC Comics, who had just realized the upstart "rival" company, Marvel Comics, had hit upon a new formula for success with mags like FANTASTIC FOUR and THE UNCANNY X-MEN. Those books had come in response to DC's own JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA of the late 1950s. Marvel had kinked the formula of the superhero team to reflect then-current moods and tensions, such as the Cold War and racial pressures. So DC wanted their own version of Marvel's success, and thus was born DOOM PATROL, by writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Premiani, with a few issues drawn by strong journeyman Bob Brown. The 1960s stories all involved the Doom Patrol core of original characters:

Robotman, a pro racecar driver named Cliff Steele whose body was destroyed in an accident, his brain salvaged and placed in a special robot body, giving him superhuman strength and durability. The drawbacks are, Cliff as a robot cannot sleep, taste food, feel a breeze, or make love to a woman ever again. Definitely not good times.

Negative Man, Larry Trainor, an Air Force pilot who becomes fused with a strange ionic shadow being of unknown origin, which leaves Larry's body for 60 second intervals to fly around at impossible speeds performing all kinds of incredible feats. Larry dies if he's seperated from the Negative Being for longer than a minute, it's theorized. Worse yet, Larry Trainor is a "radioactive" man, his body's radioactive levels deadly to anyone near him. Only by wearing mummy-bandages, "specially-treated" by the Chief, is Larry able to even be in the same room as his comrades.

Elasti-Girl, Rita Farr, an actress exposed to weird gases in a volcanic region, she is able to shrink to ant-size or grow to King Kong mass in an instant. Rita can be "normal", unlike the other DP members, despite her powers, but her lost film career has left her with only an undying loyalty to the Doom Patrol. A kind of compensation as the field leader and matriarch of her new family.

And their leader, wheelchair-bound, bearded super-inventor The Chief. He had rescued them from the despair of their accidental marrings by Fate, giving them purpose and meaning. The Chief pushes the Patrol to be more than they are, stronger than the sum of their powers. He gives them meaning.

The DP considered themselves "freaks", and with good reason, but within the stories they were viewed by DC civilians as a benefit to Mankind. In fact, the Doom Patrol are the hardest working superhero group ever created. They didn't go off dimension-hopping for no reason, like the Fantastic Four. The Doom Patrol maintained a far more blue-collar ethic. They saved normal people from natural disasters, averted accidental man-made mass destruction, as a primary reason for being. In the DP's world, early on particularly, they faced off against the ocassional weird freakazoid, like the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, or Mr. 103, or some alien invasion menace. Only later in the run did their mirror-image rivals, the Brotherhood of Evil, consisting of a disembodied genius brain called The Brain and an intelligent French gorilla, Mallah, deviate the DP's focus from their service to Man by providing a constant superhero threat.




Strangely, DOOM PATROL for all its reputation hadn't nearly the strangest stories to be found at DC Comics. Because in those halcyon days, DC had cornered the market where weird was concerned, starring much more prominent/respected characters like Batman and Superman. Almost anything could happen to a DC superhero at any time, like traveling eight billion years from Earth or having their head turn into a giant ant's. By the end of the story, the superhero was normal again, returned to the status quo to return for another opium-induced plotline the next month.

But DOOM PATROL did something that had never been done before. With cancellation looming in 1968, Drake decided to blow up his Doom Patrol, literally: the heroes sacrifice their lives to preserve a small Maine fishing town. The ploy was designed to get readership to write in and "save" the DP and thus the DP's comic. You know how that went. The Doom Patrol stayed "dead" for almost ten years. Then the revivals began. And then some talented people started f*cking up the Doom Patrol.

There's plenty of places online to read more. Writer Paul Kupperberg has decried his 1977 revival Doom Patrol comic, which brought back Robotman in a new robot body, along with several new characters, one of which took on the "Negative Being" once belonging to Larry Trainor and became Negative Woman.

After that short series, the second DP revival happened in the mid-1980s. Starting off as a typical superhero yarn, with mediocre results, DC Comics brought in Brit intellect and writer Grant Morrison. He decided to completely alter the comic book landscape in order to appeal to the adult readers of the 1990s who replaced the 8-16 year old comic book reading demographic. DOOM PATROL wasn't the first comic book property to be distorted by Brit writers, or Morrison specifically. Morrison turned the DP into a nearly-impentrable puzzle, devoid of the formula trappings, which were replaced with myriad intellectual references and symbology. DOOM PATROL became "cult", establishing itself as the canon by which many pretentious college students would proclaim the comic book to have "grown up."

This version of the DP was the most impactful with a certain reading public, and it's this version which the characters and conceit have yet to shake. After Morrison and his successor Rachel Pollack had their way with the DP, the comic again was cancelled. The cult status, however, did not end.




There have been several more attempts to revive the DP, none lasting very long. The DP has continued to vex talents trying to produce tales about them. Writer/Artist John Byrne attempted to reboot the Doom Patrol from scratch, but the comic suffered from a kind of inexplicable antipathy. Just last year, another DP comic began, and has strained through a dozen or so issues, unremarkably. This version has steepled itself in the conceit that all of the various histories of the Doom Patrol are, in fact, wholly extant. Drake's, Morrison's, Kupperberg's, Byrne's and Giffen's lukewarm take.

Meanwhile, the DP twist in the wind, prepared as always for extinction and eventual resurrection by the next whims of talent.

The essential core of the Doom Patrol is evident in the original stories from the 1960s. Prior to the ascension of the Brotherhood of Evil, and the superhero melodrama they represented to the DP, the comic was about something fundamental. The nobility of Man, overcoming the "worst" Fate had to offer. The Patrol members are "handicapped", but they continue on despite their tragedies.

For the record, if I was writing the Doom Patrol, I'd know exactly how to create a successful version of the team. And it wouldn't be yet another quirky take derived from the unfortunate Grant Morrison-ization of the comic. Because anything less is just f*cking with a great conceit and great characters.



Many people believe if you went back to the original DP series and began it seconds before the DP are "killed" by an exploding island off the coast, you could ignore all the versions of the DP which have come since. All of which are as different from one another as the members of the Doom Patrol themselves.

But I'm here to tell you, this is unnecessary. You have to go back further in Doom Patrol history. You have to return to the core of the conceit. Which is not how strange the DP are in relation to the world around them, but how strange they think they are. The Doom Patrol is a comic about noble pursuits, and the odd love between people who feel they have no one but each other.

The Doom Patrol are treated like the Addam's Family of the DC Universe. There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea, as the DP themselves believe they are the strangest team of all. But again, it's only perception by the Doom Patrol themselves. Their very name suggests a fatalism, an acknowledgement that without "normal" life they will risk their lives again and again until they are dead. There is nothing else for them to do, no children they can raise who are not irradiated and suffering, no husband who could endure his wife's superior mammoth size and strength. Even poor Cliff Steele hasn't enough tissue left to create a clone he might transfer his brain into.






I love the Doom Patrol. The stories that worked the best with the Patrol presented these odd, broken people with an impossible situation to overcome, and they managed to overcome it. Not because they were more powerful, more intelligent, or more savage. They were simply more unified and strengthed by the love for each other. DOOM PATROL is a love story unlike any you will ever read. A true love story, devoid of the worst cliches, and full of all of the hope and dreams of Mankind.