Doom Patrol

24 years ago - Niles Caulder, after saving the life of Rita Farr, assembles individuals he's saved as the Doom Patrol. They first come into conflict with the Brotherhood of Evil.
Membership: 45-year-old Niles Caulder, 45-year-old Cliff Steele, 28-year-old Larry Trainor, 24-year-old Rita Farr

22 years ago - 31-year-old Steve Dayton becomes a part-time member of the team. They try to stop protestors in the labs of Benjamin Love until Kate Godwin exposes that they are keeping some test subjects as prisoners.
Membership: 47-year-old Niles Caulder, 47-year-old Cliff Steele, 30-year-old Larry Trainor, 26-year-old Rita Farr

19 years ago - 5-year-old Gar Logan's parents die in a tragic accident. He is taken in by Galtry, his scheming foster father who hopes to embezzle his inheritance. He breaks into the Doom Patrol's mansion, wanting to find friends more like himself. They help 30-year-old Kate Godwin find Benjamin Love's old experimental subjects, and discover his creation Bones. Cliff Steele convinces him to turn on his creator and try to make the world better. Niles Caulder first reveals his identity to the team.
Membership: 50-year-old Niles Caulder, 50-year-old Cliff Steele, 33-year-old Larry Trainor, 29-year-old Rita Farr

18 years ago - 25-year-old Will Magnus is sought out by the Doom Patrol to help build a device they need. He begins regularly consulting with Niles Caulder.
Membership: 51-year-old Niles Caulder, 51-year-old Cliff Steele, 34-year-old Larry Trainor, 30-year-old Rita Farr

15 years ago - The Brotherhood of Evil attack the Doom Patrol's Doom Manor. Niles Caulder is able to track them back to Paris, where they corner the Brotherhood in the Parisian catacombs. The Brain is presumed dead.
Membership: 54-year-old Niles Caulder, 54-year-old Cliff Steele, 37-year-old Larry Trainor, 33-year-old Rita Farr

14 years ago - Vandal Savage forces the Doom Patrol to choose between the destruction of the small town of Codsville, Maine, or to die in the destruction of his submarine headquarters. They choose the latter. 55-year-old Niles Caulder sees the Doom Patrol "die", & begins working to to rebuild the team. 55-year-old Cliff Steele's body suffering catestrophic damage, 38-year-old Larry Trainor's body is destroyed, & his soul-self bonds with 30-year-old Valentina Vostok, their identities blurring, leaving her in a coma. 34-year-old Rita Farr's body is scattered her body across the ocean. 10-year-old Gar Logan is left in the care of 39-year-old Steve Dayton, who begins to slip mentally when he loses Rita. Codsville is renamed Three Heroes, Maine.

13 years ago - 56-year-old Cliff Steele has his brain is placed in a new robot body by Will Magnus. Niles Caulder reassembles the Doom Patol, recruiting Valentina Vostok as the Negative Woman and Rex Mason. Steve Dayton & Gar Logan join in the hopes of finding Rita Farr.
Membership: 56-year-old Niles Caulder, 56-year-old Cliff Steele, 11-year-old Gar Logan, 26-year-old Rex Mason, 31-year-old Valentina Vostok, 40-year-old Steve Dayton,

11 years ago - Niles Caulder finds evidence that Rita Farr's body was scattered across the ocean, leading to 42-year-old Steve Dayton's mental breakdown, and departure from the Doom Patrol. Caulder does not share his plans to scour the ocean for her body.
Membership: 58-year-old Niles Caulder, 58-year-old Cliff Steele, 13-year-old Gar Logan, 28-year-old Rex Mason, 33-year-old Valentina Vostok

10 years ago - 14-year-old Gar Logan leaves the Doom Patrol to join the Teen Titans. Cliff Steele meets Jane Morris, who brings her to Niles Caulder, who agrees to help her begin understranding her alternate personalities. She starts helping the Doom Patrol.
Membership: 59-year-old Niles Caulder, 59-year-old Cliff Steele, 29-year-old Rex Mason, 34-year-old Valentina Vostok, 19-year-old Jane Morris

9 years ago - 35-year-old Valentina Vostok, clearly suffering as the host of The Negative Soul-Self has it extracted from her & placed in stasis, ending her time as Negative Woman.
Membership: 60-year-old Niles Caulder, 60-year-old Cliff Steele, 30-year-old Rex Mason, 20-year-old Jane Morris

8 years ago - The Negative Soul-Self begins taking possession of cadavers, animating them with its own personality derived from a synthesis of Larry Trainor's, Valentina Vostok's and his host bodies. It takes the name Rebis, becoming the Doom Patrol's new Negative Man. 31-year-old Rex Mason leaves the Doom Patrol when Saphire leaves him.
Membership: 61-year-old Niles Caulder, 61-year-old Cliff Steele, 21-year-old Jane Morris, Rebis

7 years ago - Rebis is able to help Cliff Steele travel into the psyche of Jane Morris. He discovers the core of her fractured indentities, and helps her alters work together. She is able to start living a normal life.
Membership: 62-year-old Niles Caulder, 62-year-old Cliff Steele, Rebis

6 years ago - 18-year-old Gar Logan & the Doom Patrol go into the blast zone of the Qurac bombing to rescue the surviving members of the Teen Titans West. Niles Caulder saves Karen's life from her fluctuating powers. She joins the Doom Patrol, beginning her graduate studies.
Membership: 63-year-old Niles Caulder, 63-year-old Cliff Steele, Rebis, 19-year-old Karen Beecher

3 years ago - Paul Booker, freed from prison after helping the Elite defeat Manchester Black, joins the Doom Patrol to try to understand his own powers.
Membership: 66-year-old Niles Caulder, 66-year-old Cliff Steele, Rebis, 22-year-old Karen Beecher 34-year-old Paul Booker

2 years ago - Gar Logan brings the Teen Titans to help the Doom Patrol recover 46-year-old Rita Farr, racing the Brotherhood & Vandal Savage. The Key attempts to access the Dream Realm, capturing Rebis & using them as a fuel source to break through Danny the Street into the Paths Beyond. 67-year-old Chief Niles Caulder sacrifices himself to try to save them. Gar Logan & Raven pursue him into the Paths Beyond with the remaining Doom Patrol and the help of 41-year-old Will Magnus. Rebis ultimately defeats him by transcending to a higher plane of existence, diffusing the Key across the surface of reality. 67-year-old Cliff Steele & 46-year-old Rita Farr are recruited by the Justice League. Gar chooses to rebuild the Doom Patrol, moving the team to Will Magnus's Oolong Island where Magnus & Karen Beecher invite35-year Kitty Faulkner & 53-year-old Pat Dugan to join the staff. They help Mikaal Tomas repel his people's invasion, & he joins them.
Membership: 22-year-old Gar Logan, 20-year-old Rachel Roth, 23-year-old Karen Beecher, 35-year-old Paul Booker, 25-year-old Mikaal Tomas

1 years ago - Karen Beecher expands the labratories of Oolong Island, inviting 43-year-old Kimiyo Hoshi to join their staff. The Doom Patrol helps Scandal Savage counteract the nano-virus rewriting her consciousness. She joins the Doom Patrol. They join the battle against Mageddon.
Membership: 23-year-old Gar Logan, 21-year-old Rachel Roth, 24-year-old Karen Beecher, 36-year-old Paul Booker, 26-year-old Mikaal Tomas, 63-year-old Scandal Savage

Noteworthy Teams

Original Team

Other Members

Mento

Modern Team

Raven

I'm not going to say anything here about the Doom Patrol you haven't already read... they are so singularly their own thing that I think there are actually more failed versions of the team then successful ones as people have tried over and over again to capture just what makes them tick. I think we all intrinsically GET it, even if it's proven really tricky to capture. There is an inherent fatalism in these characters. From the beginning, Negative Man and Robot Man and Elasti-Girl were, if you'll forgive me, doomed. When done right they all reflect vastly different perspectives on their doomed nature, and it's those perspectives that have always made the Doom Patrol what it is.

The Doom Patrol's Comic History

The Doom Patrol first appeared in My Greatest Adventure #80 in 1963, a creation of Arnold Drake & Bob Haney. They were so popular that the book was renamed Doom Patrol six issues later. I don't know if there's any evidence that confirms that they were created as a direct pastiche of the recently created and wildy successful Fantastic Four, other than, you know... literally everything about them? Even their signature vaguely monsterous, unwaveringly melancholy tone is a spin on the new Silver Age vibe that Stan Lee was pioneering with the FF.

Whatever the origin of the IDEA of the Doom Patrol, it was impossible to ignore just how innovative they were. Even from their very beginning, as we watched them work together do simple tasks like disarming bombs or crazy ones like fighting giant alien dinosaurs, there was an unmistakeable appeal to following the adventures of this particular little family. As time went on they were joined by one of the weirdest teen sidekicks ever in Beast Boy, and by the notably bad-at-this hero Mento.

The book went on for five years and was pretty much always a great read, until 1968, when the main team of heroes were captured by their enemies Captain Zahl & Madame Rogue. They were given an impossible decision, to either be destroyed in an explosion, or to have another bomb destroy a remote small town of strangers they'd never met. It was meant to prove that they would make the selfish choice to save their own lives, but in the end, they agreed to sacrifice themselves. The boat they were on was destroyed... and they were all killed.

We're pretty used to heroes dying and coming back now, but this was 1968. It was completely unheard of. The Doom Patrol had died saving a small bunch of strangers, and they STAYED dead. We didn't see any of them for a whole decade until 1978 when a new Doom Patrol team appeared Showcase comics, and even then, the whole original team remained dead, save for Robotman. This new team starred in three issues, and then the whole team vanished back into obscurity. When former Doom Patrol sidekick Beast Boy joined the Teen Titans in the early 80s there were regular references to his old adventures with the Patrol, but it was understood that their deaths were now some time past.

This state of affairs continued until after the Crisis of Infinite Earths. A New Doom Patrol ongoing series started in 1987, at fist written by Paul Kupperberg, who had written the New Doom Patrol stories that had appeared in Showcase. This new series started out featuring that new team, but began to introduce other surviving members of the original characters. The book was fairly run-of-the-mill, introducing and trading out a few new members, but never quite managed to find it's own footing... right up until issue #18, when the book was taken over by a certain Grant Morrison.

We talk up Morrison all the time around here, so we understand if this seems like we're doing it again here as well, but it really is impossible to overstate what happened to this book when Morrison took over. The whole dynamic changed. They immedately started taking apart characters and putting them back together in new shapes, introducing entirely new ones, building a new core threesome that managed to beautifully mirror the original team while simultaniously making it feel unbelieveably original. The book played with meta concepts effortlessly while still being being completely comfortable as a mainstream part of DC proper. Beyond it's conceptual brilliance and unabashed strangeness, it was also just so GOOD. This is one of the best ongoing mainstream comics ever written.

Morrison's run has one of my favorite conclusions in any comic ever, wrapping up everyone's stories and resolving in ways that comics just never get. I'm actually not going to say much about it, because you honestly just need to read it. The series kept going, however, under science fiction writer Rachel Pollack, who used it to explore all sorts of ideas that would usually be alien in comics, like sexual identity and transsexuallity. It was a worthy continuation of the series, but it was very hard to ignore that the story this comics was telling really had ended, and the book followed suit in 1995.

A new Doom Patrol series attempted to introduce another team in 2001, but was fairly quickly written off, much like the new Doom Patrol from '78 had been. Another followed in 2004, this time by John Byrne who notably had no interest in any of the existing continuity, even going so far as ignoring the deaths of the original team back in '68. A third reboot in 2009 attempted to continue some of the classic versions of the team, and managed to last until the New 52 shut it down in 2011.

It's only in 2016 that a new series written by Umbrella Academy creator Gerald Way managed to finally innovate on the concept. The new spin on the team is readable in a way it hasn't been in a long time, and it does so by finally finding a way to capture the spirit of the classic team, but bring it into the future with new members.

Our Doom Patrol Story

Building a version of this team that honors the best of what it's been in the comics is absolutely precarious. To begin, we want to build that classic lineup, and give them lots of time to have their adventures. We also want to make sure that that fameous sacrifice happens here too... and we want to honor that sacrifice, to make their deaths, or at least the tragedy of their loss, really last.

We did struggle a little with what to do next, because we do obviously want to transition into Morrison's era, but getting there is a little tricky. The best way to do it, we found, is actually to not include the Chief among the characters lost in the explosion. Keeping him alive lets him continue to be the catalyst of the new Patrol.

We use a slightly different combination of characters; keeping Valentina Vostok's Negative Woman longer and adding Metamorpho, and moving some of the characters introduced by Morrison to treat them more like a supporting cast, which lets the Patrol behave more like a team of superheroes even when the stories involving them become stranger and, perhaps, more magically absurd In general DC's penchant for mixing different storytelling tropes is one of it's strengths, but trying to find ways to incoporate some of the ideas at play here has been among the hardest parts of building this project.

The Future of The Doom Patrol

Even though part of our Doom Patrol story was all about recovering the last lost member of the original threesome, it became clear to us that if we really wanted to do the Doom Patrol justice, we needed to resolve the stories of the original team. The final death of Niles Caulder, Rebis transitioning on to a higher plane of existence, Rita going on to join the Justice League, and Cliff exploring what it means to be a living machine with the Metal Men all means that there is a space for a new Doom Patrol. What then does that look like? What's the key to building a new generation of one of the strangest teams in comics?

The answer was three words; Beast Boy & Raven. The idea of these two building something new together makes so much sense... and of course if anyone would be able to capture the unique weirdness of the Patrol and make it something GOOD, it would be the kid that grew up with them, and who knows how to love the things that make us who we are, even the monstrous parts, The new team has a space alien weirdo, a weather manipulating ex-con, a shrinking genius and a murderous half-immortal... and it FEELS like the Doom Patrol.

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