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.