Kate Godwin

49 years ago - Kate Godwin is born in Sycamore, Il.

38 years ago - 11-year-old Kate is teased by her father for ‘being feminine’.

32 years ago - 17-year-old Kate leaves high school early due to intense bullying. She starts working as a freelance programmer, saving money towards her eventual transition.

29 years ago - 20-year-old Kate moves to Midway City, working as a programmer, bartender, and occasional sex worker.

27 years ago - 22-year-old Kate undergoes the first of series of gender reassignment surgeries.

24 years ago - 25-year-old Kate gets involved in local activism, quickly becoming an outspoken voice in the community.

22 years ago - 27-year-old Kate, while protesting the laboratory of Benjamin Love and it's use of homeless volunteers, is subjected to his mutagenic experiments and develops her liquidation powers. When she and other protesters try to force their way into the labs they are confronted by the Doom Patrol, before it's revealed that the labs was keeping some test subjects as prisoners. She first meets Cliff Steele.

20 years ago - 29-year-old Kate buys the bar she works in. She starts running an unlicensed shelter for unhoused teens upstairs.

19 years ago - 30-year-old Kate learns that several of Benjamin Love's old experimental subjects are being kidnapped. She goes to the Doom Patrol for help, tracking him to Uruguay. They discover Doctor Love’s creation Bones, and Cliff Steele convinces him to turn on his creator and try to make the world better. Kate chooses to follow the same advice, starting to study pre-law. She kisses Cliff.

14 years ago - 35-year-old Kate earns her bachelors in pre-law, and starts law school.

11 years ago - 38-year-old Kate passed the bar exam. She opens her offices, offering whatever help she can, from pro-bono legal services to private investigation.

9 years ago - 40-year-old Kate reconnects with Cliff Steele when he comes to her for help getting legal emancipation for Jane Morris. They begin a tentative relationship.

1 year ago - 48-year-old Kate creates a new detective agency with Cliff Steele. They are joined by the Metal Men, so that they can learn more about what it means to be human.

We had a version of Kate Godwin on the site some time ago, but there were some pretty glaring issues with it that became worse the more we refined out take on the Doom Patrol. Eventually she just needed to come out and be updated, and rewriting her story became a major topic, even occupying her own thread in our discord! She was always going to come back, though, once we worked out what we wanted from her and found a way to build it that also gave her the focus and space she deserved.

I enjoy a lot of what we do here, but I think this might be one of my favorite updates to a character we've done in some time. We really wanted to do her right, for our version to be fully representative of the original, but also give her a thoroughly expanded role in the world.

Kate Godwin's Comic History

Kate first appeared in Doom Patrol #70 in 1993, an early issue by new writer Rachel Pollack after the completion of Grant Morrison's run. Kate was a freelance computer programmer and sex worker who had gained superpowers when she'd slept with Rebis, a character from the previous Doom Patrol incarnation. She was also a trans woman, and when she used her powers to defeat a villain named Codpiece and was subsequently invited to join the Patrol, she officially became the first ever Trans superhero.

The Pollack Doom Patrol was in a weird position; it marked the transition of the series to DC's new mature reader Vertigo imprint, and had the unenviable task of following up a fan favorite run that ended spectacularly. Still, Pollack crafted a thoughtful, esoteric story, and a big part of that was Kate. She was clearly an author-insert character, but she had such a fresh and fascinating voice that was not just absent from comics, but from almost all popular fiction. Kate was killed in flashback in the following Doom Patrol series, but has since made appearances in the post-52 DC in their Pride events.

Rachel Pollack

It is impossible to talk about Kate without talking about her creator. Rachel Pollack was an absolutely fascinating person. She was a speculative science fiction author, writing 46 books both science fiction and non-fiction, winning the Nebula, the Arthur C Clark, and the World Fantasy Award for best novel. She was also a scholar in the study of Tarot where her book 78 Degrees of Wisdom is considered a definitive work on the subject. Her writing probes ideas of change and growth and magic, exploring the emotional and spiritual experience of her own transition. Her voice was absolutely unique.

Grant Morrison, who has since come out as non-binary, loosely brushed on the subject of gender identity in their run, but Pollack used the book's new mature readers status to delve into it completely, exploring ideas that, quite frankly, the audience simply had no context for. It just seemed TOO weird. Looking back on it now, however, it is an absolutely audacious piece of writing, an exploration of certain extremely human experiences told through magical metaphor by one of the world's foremost experts on the subject. Rachel Pollack might be the most underappreciated writer in comics.

Our Kate Godwin Story

Perhaps the most difficult part of adapting Kate was working out just what role she needed to fill. In our adaptation of the Doom Patrol, we've done quite a bit of work to create something that felt like it drew from the classic Doom Patrol story while still fitting within the tone of our worldbuilding. This relied heavily on recreating elements of the Morrison run, which has an extremely definitive end. Pollack's story is a fantastic piece of fiction and a great reading experience, but it is true that it feels peripheral at best to the larger Doom Patrol story. Kate's strength as a character, however, isn't so much tied to the Doom Patrol. She's a fascinating singular character all by herself, and also a core part of Cliff Steele's personal supporting cast.

What eventually gave us a framework for our version of Kate is the fact that we can have her become part of their story at any time we wanted... allowing us to bring her in way back during the ORIGINAL Doom Patrol years, making her part of their world the whole time. We crafted a story that we think really leans on her strengths, giving her her own story where she finds lots of nontraditional ways to be a hero, but who also just fully has her superpowers and in that capacity can become a more traditional superhero and work alongside the Patrol.

We created a new origin for her, tying her to Doctor Love, the creator of the Helix over in the pages of Infinity Inc. In our timeline, this just means he's the creator of Director Bones, but that really felt like a strong new element that gives us a lot of structure to work with.

This new much longer relationship between Kate and Cliff lets it feel far more important to his overall story, which is really great, but I also really like how Kate feels like she's starring in her own narrative here. She gets to be so much more than just a superhero.

Related Characters