Doom Patrol



"Tempest: You shot your imaginary friends? With what? Dorothy Spinner: An imaginary gun! What else?"

- The Doom Patrol

In 1963, DC Comics published a book with a new kind of superhero team: the Doom Patrol. They were loners, misfits, mistrusted by the public, and led by a genius in a wheelchair. Despite obvious similarities, this team actually came out several months before the X-Men were published by the distinguished competition, which has led to accusations of plagiarism. The Patrol first appeared in "My Greatest Adventure" #80 (June, 1963) and continued appearing in subsequent issues. With #86 (March, 1964), the book was renamed after the team. While the X-Men eventually flourished in the 1970s, initial sales of Doom Patrol died down and the original series ended quickly when the writers decided to go out with a bang and kill them all off. The last issue was numbered #121 (September-October, 1968).

It didn't quite stick. Over a decade later, the team was relaunched, with all new characters reminiscent of the older ones... and it turned out Robotman survived because he was everyone's favorite anyway. The second version of the Patrol appeared in "Showcase" #94-96 (August-December, 1977). Sales were not good enough to get them a new title, but they went on to become regulars of the DC universe, receiving guest appearances in titles featuring Supergirl, the Teen Titans, and Superman.

Doom Patrol vol. 2 was launched in October, 1987. Eventually, most of original team was revealed to have been resurrected in some way or alive all along, and the new book added a number of other characters which colored within the superhero lines and didn't quite set the world on fire. Then came Grant Morrison, who dedicated them more specifically to fighting "weird" crime and disasters. His first Story Arc, "Crawling from the Wreckage", built up the weirdness of the comic to extremes and delved into some adult subject matter. There were scissormen from imaginary worlds, the Brotherhood of Dada, the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E and a friendly "transvestite street" named, well...Danny the Street. Just in case you were wondering,. No, really. And then it got even weirder. He left and, with the switchover of the book to Vertigo Comics, Rachel Pollack, more well known as a tarot expert and prose fiction writer, took over. She had much the same approach, but the book did not retain its popularity and it got cancelled. The title ended with issue #87 (February, 1995).

Since then there have been a few subsequent revivals which reverted the series back to a traditional superhero comic. John Arcudi wrote an unsuccessful series turning them into Corporation superheroes. John Byrne did a Continuity Reboot that was ill-fated to begin with and downright ignored by other DC books of the time. It eventually ended with the Crisis Crossover Infinite Crisis, which undid most of Byrne's changes and restored the team's history. Byrne did finally manage to bring original member (the only one who had yet to return) Elasti-Girl Back from the Dead, though. After an appearance in the Teen Titans comic and Animated Series, their popularity resurged enough for them to get their own new series in 2009, written by Keith Giffen (of JLI fame) who was practically begging for the position.

The team got A Day in the Limelight in Batman: The Brave And The Bold, fighting Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man and General Zahl.


 * All Just a Dream: Used as a Framing Device during the Grant Morrison run to introduce an Affectionate Parody (Pastiche, really) of '60's Fantastic Four.
 * Artificial Limbs: Cliff Steele
 * Beyond the Impossible: Relative to the rest of the DC universe, the Doom Patrol and their foes step into this territory frequently.
 * The Blank: The Fact and Yankee Doodle (both parodies of The Question)
 * Blob Monster: The most recent series reveals can degenerate into this..
 * Brain In a Jar: Monsieur Mallah's partner, The Brain, of course. Cliff, too, as he's just a brain in a robot body.
 * Brain Uploading: This happens to Cliff after his original brain is crushed by the Candlemaker.
 * Breakfast Club
 * Breaking the Fourth Wall: The final arc of the 2009 series is "resolved" when
 * Captain Ersatz: Willoughby Kipling is one for John Constantine.
 * Compensating for Something: Oh, dear God, the Codpiece!
 * Cursed with Awesome: The whole point of the original team; each had a horrible disfigurement, or some other way in which their powers were supposedly as much a curse as a blessing. The problem is, this wasn't really true of Elasti-Girl; Word of God says this is the reason she was the only member of the original team not brought back for Morrison's run.
 * Dark and Troubled Past: Subverted in Rachel Pollack's run. In #83, the False Memory gave Coagula fake memories of being joint-raped by her "husband and his friend". Kate spends the rest of the issue trying to figure out when it happened until Dorothy manages to bring her back to her senses. Kate is outraged that the False Memory believed she was giving Kate's life more "meaning" by making her think she was sexually violated when she was a teenager.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Flash Forward is soon nicknamed Negative Man by his teammates for his icy temperament.
 * Likewise, Beast Boy. Yes, that Beast Boy. He made his debut here.
 * In Grant Morrison's stint as writer, Robotman.
 * Deconstruction
 * Defrosting Ice Queen: Celsius, who periodically showed that she had a human side despite her obsession with finding the Chief.
 * Disability Superpower: Everyone, basically (except perhaps Rita Farr, though they tried to imply it in the original). Negative Man can never take off his bandages, Robotman doesn't even have a real body anymore. Crazy Jane has multiple personalities.
 * The Dog Was the Mastermind: The would-be cosmos destroyers in the Cult of the Unwritten book were led by the.
 * Dysfunction Junction: Practically every version of the Doom Patrol is this trope.
 * Eldritch Abomination: Many, the two most notable probably being the Decreator and the Candlemaker.
 * End of the World Special
 * Fan Service: Elasti-Girl. Her gigantic upskirts and wardrobe problems.
 * Follow the Leader: At one time the Patrol acted as a school... for young mutants. The two groups debuted within months of each other, however, not nearly long enough for one to be based on the other. That being said, there are also some very clear parallels between the original Doom Patrol and the Fantastic Four, who came first by a much wider margin.
 * Four-Temperament Ensemble: The original team is one of these.
 * Genius Cripple / Evil Cripple: The Chief
 * Genius Loci: Danny the Street is a sentient transvestite street. (Imagine gun shops with pink curtains in the front windows, and fire hydrants that are painted yellow because bright crimson would be too gauche...)
 * Hermaphrodite: Rebis is literally a merging of a man and a woman.
 * He's Back: As of Issue 11 of Giffen's run,.
 * Hollywood Cyborg: Cliff Steele
 * I Would Say If I Could Say
 * Imaginary Friend: Subverted in that Dorothy Spinner's imaginary friends are made real by her mind. Brutally real, as evidenced by.
 * Insufferable Genius: Chief
 * Mento falls here, too, especially if he's in one of his less-than-sane periods.
 * Intangible Man: Negative Man (later Rebis) can make their "negative spirit" leave their body and do things. Except it can't leave for more than a minute, or else they will die.
 * Kill'Em All: Almost every version of the Doom Patrol ends with almost all of the main team dead, in a coma, etc., as a way to make room for the next writer to do what he wants.
 * Grant Morrison did not do this, however. Aside from the Chief, who had died already, everyone just walked into the sunset, so to speak.
 * Knight of Cerebus: The Candlemaker, who, even in light of the many instances of mass character death and a truly wild Rogues Gallery, remains one of series' most horrific villains ever.
 * Knights and Knaves:
 * Magic Floppy Disk: Cliff's whole personality and memories apparently fit in a couple of floppies.
 * Menstrual Menace: Dorothy Spinner's first menstruation causes her imaginary friends to try to force her to wear "red, bloody shoes." The comparisons to The Wizard of Oz are all intentional, too.
 * Mindlink Mates: Coagula and Robotman
 * Name's the Same: Elastigirl from The Incredibles.
 * New Powers as the Plot Demands: Crazy Jane. Justified in that she has 64 separate personalities with 64 separate powers. Not all the personalities are nice, either. One of the Doom Patrol's enemies, The Quiz, also has "Every power you haven't thought of," literally, so in order to fight her, people have to constantly think of and/or shout out a long list of all known superpowers. Unfortunately nobody can ever think of every superpower so the Quiz has yet to be defeated in a conventional battle (that we get to see).
 * Order Versus Chaos: The Doom Patrol is normally on the side of Good Chaos and opposed to (kind of) Evil Chaos (the Brotherhood of Dada) and Evil Order (the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E.) However,.
 * Parental Incest: The more traumatic part of Crazy Jane's origin
 * Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Every incarnation, but most notably Fever, Kid Slick, Freak, and Negative Man II, who were relatively normal but faced difficulty working as a team.
 * Reality Warper: Dorothy Spinner
 * A species of Retcon yet to be assigned taxonomy, inverting Remember the New Guy? and related to Multiple Choice Past, in which Rachel Pollack retcons Crazy Jane out of existence through the introduction of a character called "The False Memory", who displays Crazy-Jane-like powers plus the ability to create false memories, and who instructs the protagonists to "remember me in the Doom Patrol all these years". The reference to "false memory syndrome" appears to express Pollack's disgust with Jane's Dark and Troubled Past. This was such a widely decried dick move that Pollack denied that this was her intent.
 * This move was so unpopular that it is apparently Canon Discontinuity nowadays, or rather DC has only limited it to Vertigo while Morrison's stuff is still in main DCU continuity. Giffen has recently reintroduced Jane into the book, along with Danny the Street (now ).
 * Was it really? From the way I read that issue, the False Memory had used her abilities to insert herself into the team and had just been screwing with Cliff's memories of Jane. In that same issue Cliff had finally explained the circumstances as to why he left Jane and Danny the World.
 * A more obvious, if wild example is the recontextualization of the group's origin by Grant Morrison at the end of his run.
 * Another from Giffen was retconning the Byrne reboot so all versions of the Doom Patrol, including Byrne's, are in continuity.
 * Rubber Man: Elasti-Girl. Also their enemy, Madame Rouge.
 * Serial Escalation: Especially Grant Morrison's run.
 * Schrödinger's Butterfly
 * Shout-Out: Danny the Street is named for Danny laRue (Rue is French for "street"), a well known British drag queen.
 * Crazy Jane's "manager" personality is named Driver 8, after the REM song.
 * Signs of the End Times:
 * As reality begins to merge with Orqwith -
 * In Stuttgard, all the clocks chime 15. Simultaneously.
 * In Kyoto, four stainless-steel pyramids are found rotating five feet above the ground.
 * In Patagonia, a library is discovered. The books it contains are unknown, unreadable.
 * In Johannesburg, a little girl named Harriet inexplicably catches fire.
 * In Reykjavik, three shadows come to life and murder their owners.
 * In London, Madame Tussaud's wax figure of John Lennon begins to bleed from bullet wound stigmata.
 * 'In Rome, in Leningrad, in Darwin... "The door flew open, in he ran - the great, long, red-legged Scissorman."'
 * In Barcelona, when the Cult of the Unwritten Book starts to summon the Decreator -
 * A bus full of teenagers was possessed by the Unquiet Face and driven through the Corridor of Hallucinations
 * The Needle Children, who cannot be seen through glass, laid pointless siege to an old folks' home in the suburbs.
 * At 11:30 there was an outbreak of spirit skywriting which continued for an hour and a half.
 * At midnight the word 'harmony' disappeared from the vocabulary of everyone in the city.
 * At 12:30 the Embryo Stains invaded the marrow of a nightclub owner and forced him to compose terrifying poetry.
 * Everything blue became temporarily invisible.
 * The rain forgot how to fall.
 * Sizeshifter: Rita Farr, alias Elasti-Girl.
 * The Smurfette Principle: Elasti-Girl was the only woman in the original team.
 * Social Darwinist:  turns out to be one of these by the end of Morrison's run.
 * Something Person: The original team was made up of these: Robotman, Elasti-Girl, Negative Man and later Negative Woman. As time when on, though, Cliff (who hated being called Robotman anyway, since he wasn't technically a robot) just went by his real name.
 * Not just Cliff; Rita and Larry despised their noms de guerre too. Larry always referred to Negative Man as a separate entity, giving him orders (maybe Crazy Jane wasn't the only one with multiple personality issues?).
 * Something They Would Never Say: In one issue, Larry figured out that the putty-like Madame Rouge was impersonating the Chief when "he" called Rita Elasti-Girl -- "the Chief would NEVER call Rita by that freak name!"
 * Split Personality: Crazy Jane has 64 of them.
 * And yeah, Larry, Eleanor and the Negative Spirit do go through a bit of the same when they turn into Rebis. One scene shows him reading When Rabbit Howls.
 * Stepford Smiler: Elasti-Girl is given this trait in a team-up story with The Flash. We're told that since she used to be a glamorous movie star, being turned into a "super-powered freak" was especially hard on her, and she smiles constantly in order to "look pretty" and keep others from being afraid of her. She has no idea that it actually has the complete opposite effect.
 * This isn't brought up again in any other DP story; Word of God says that it took place during the team's early days (post-Byrne reboot) when Rita was still getting used to her new life.
 * Superpower Lottery: The Quiz has "every superpower you haven't thought of." She's basically able to do whatever she wants as long as you aren't thinking about it.
 * Sure Why Not: Scott Fischer wasn't given a superhero name during his time in the book, but prominent letter writer Charles J. Sperling decided that his name had to be "Blaze". Near the end of that era, the book's editor said that "Scott has adopted the name of Blaze, I think, but he hasn't officially used it."
 * Take That: Towards the end of his run, Morrison put out a one-shot Doom Patrol special entitled "Doom Force." It highlighted every trope of the Liefeldian Dark Age had to offer, from the artistic failings to the horrible characters. It ended with one member of Youngblood Doom Force dead, and the remaining members declaring him a creep, walking away in an "Everybody Laughs" Ending.
 * That Man Is Dead: Rebis, who is a combination of Larry Trainor and a nurse. Cliff still refers to him/her as "Larry," even though Rebis denies being Larry Trainor anymore.
 * Roughly played with in the Giffen series, which reveals Larry * has* been dead since the accident that turned him into Negative Man. Since then, it's been the N-Man entity in a variety of clones. But the N-Man isn't sure he's not Larry sometimes. Or something. The whole thing is sorta fuzzy for now.
 * Took a Level in Jerkass: The False Memory in Pollack's run. She started out as just one of the many personas belonging to the chameleon-like Identity Addict. When she came back in #83, she spends her time walking around giving people fake memories, eventually trying to insert herself in the Doom Patrol by manipulating their memories to her favor, such as making Coagula think she was raped as a teenager by her husband. Only Dorothy rejects the fake memories immediately and manages to snap her teammates back to their senses.
 * Transsexualism: Coagula
 * Transvestite: Danny the Street has male geared stores (like gun shops) covered in pink lance and the like.
 * Two Guys and a Girl: The original team, with Robotman and Negative Man as the two guys and Elasti-Girl as the girl
 * Welcome to The Real World: It is heavily implied that the final issue of Grant Morrison's run takes place in the real world. Aside from the fact that this world apparently has no superheroes, it also has the same colour scheme as, which explicitly takes place in "our" world.
 * Unless the Animal Man story was just a peyote trip.
 * Values Dissonance: When it turned out Monsieur Mallah and the Brain were in love, the reaction of most people was "OMG, they're gay! That's disgusting!" Never mind the fact that one's an ape and the other a brain in a jar, it's the fact that they're the same gender that they found offensive.
 * What Have I Become?: Most of the leads experience this at one point or another after their transformations.