Niles Caulder

69 years ago - Niles Caulder is born.

53 years ago - 16-year-old Caulder begins college.

50 years ago - 19-year-old Caulder graduates & begins a series of postgrad studies.

48 years ago - 21-year-old Caulder is one of the scientists hired by Vandal Savage to attempt to isolate and replicate the immortality effect inhered by his daughter Scandal Savage. Objecting to the way she is being used Caulder tries to free her, the resulting explosion leaving him in a wheelchair. Scandal escapes him and returns to her father.

46 years ago - 23-year-old Caulder earns his first Doctorate & begins the Caulder Foundation.

44 years ago - 25-year-old Caulder offers Ernst Morden a place as a researcher in his labs, recognizing that his work could save lives.

43 years ago - 26-year-old Caulder is called upon to save the life of Cliff Steele, and does so by creating Robotman.

36 years ago - 33-year-old Caulder's labs are destroyed and his equipment stolen, by Ernst Morden and his assistant Mallah after a lab accident decimates Morden's body, leaving him an insane disembodied Brain.

29 years ago - 40-year-old Caulder saves Larry Trainer's life, creating Negative Man.

26 years ago - 43-year-old Caulder is a founding member of the the global think-tank H.I.V.E. but his association with the group quickly wains.

24 years ago - 45-year-old Caulder saves Rita Farr's life, creating Elasti-girl. To give purpose to her life, as well as the lives of others he's saved, he creates the Doom Patrol. They first come into conflict with the Brotherhood of Evil.

19 years ago - 50-year-old Caulder first reveals his identity to the Doom Patrol.

18 years ago - 51-year-old Caulder begins regularly consulting with Will Magnus after he helps build a device for the Doom Patrol.

15 years ago - 54-year-old Caulder is able to track the Brotherhood of Evil back to Paris after their attack on the Doom Patrol's Doom Manor, where they are able to corner them in the Parisian catacombs.

14 years ago - 55-year-old Caulder sees the Doom Patrol lost in the destruction of Vandal Savage's submarine headquarters, sacrificing themselves. He begins working to to rebuild the team.

13 years ago - 56-year-old Caulder recovers Cliff Steele in a body built by Will Magnus, awakens Valentina Vostok from her coma, and recruits Rex Mason into his reassembled Doom Patrol. Steve Dayton & Gar Logan join in the hopes of finding Rita Farr.

12 years ago - 57-year-old Caulder is able to declare Valentina Vostok legally dead so that she can't be arrested as a Russian deserter by Dmitri Pushkin of the Rocket Red Brigade.

11 years ago - 58-year-old Caulder finds evidence that Rita Farr's body was scattered across the ocean, leading to Steve Dayton's mental breakdown and departure from the Doom Patrol. Caulder does not share his plans to scour the ocean for her body.

10 years ago - 59-year-old Caulder is introduced to Jane Morris by Cliff Steele. Even though her powers are magical, he believes he can help her understand them by helping her understand her alternate personalities. She starts helping the Doom Patrol.

9 years ago - 60-year-old Caulder, seeing that Valentina Vostok is suffering as the host of The Negative Soul-Self devises a way to extract if from her & place it into stasis.

6 years ago - 63-year-old Caulder takes the Doom Patrol into the blast zone of the Qurac bombing for Gar Logan to rescue the surviving members of the Teen Titans West. Caulder saves Karen Beecher's life from her fluctuating powers, and takes her into the Doom Patrol.

3 years ago - 63-year-old Caulder implants a bio-energy harness into Kitty Faulkner, allowing her to bleed off energy before her body metabolizes it, letting her leave her stasis for days at a time.

2 years ago - 67-year-old Caulder recovers Rita Farr's body & manages to bring her back. He is later sacrifices himself trying to save Rebis from being captured by The Key.

Of all the characters effected by the tonal shift in the various versions of the Doom Patrol, I don't think you can argue that anyone has seen more sizemic changes in their story and disposition than their leader Niles Caulder. The Chief is a character in the story, true, but he's really more of a framing device for the team's adventures; their benefactor and leader and teacher and doctor. For a team that's gone through such big changes and HUGE stories, the Chief basically had to become an entirely different person. So we really have to decide who our version of the Chief is, and that's going to mean making some hard choices about some great stories that we love.

The Chief's Comic History

Niles Caulder and the rest of the Doom Patrol debuted in 1963 in My Greatest Adventure #80, an invention of writers Bod Haney & Arnold Drake. I'm obviously not the first person to point out that the original Doom Patrol were practically a one-to-one copy of the Fantastic Four, who had debuted less than two years earlier and changed comics forever. The Chief (who wouldnt reveal his name until much later) was the team's leader and financeer, and much of that first issue was him introducing the original three members and convincing them that they could help the world by working together. The small blue device worn on Robotman's chest was a remote two-way radio and miniature television camera, which was a MUCH more sci-fi idea in 1963.

My Greatest Adventure was renamed Doom Patrol with issue #86, and their adventures continued for a full decade. Stan Lee never specifically reacted to the obvious copying of his flagship team, unless you count him copying them right back less than four months later when he created the X-Men.

The Chief was a major fixture through the initial run of the Doom Patrol, and was actually with them in their final issue when they were all supposedly killed in an explosion. The new team that assembled in the new Doom Patrol series in 1987 was largely built around finding him. The series famously meandered for its first year or so before it was taken over by Grant Morrison who turned it into the groundbreakingly innovative work it became. Any take on the Doom Patrol, and even more so on Caulder, all take their cues from this series.

This is important, because it's during Morrison's run that we eventually discover that Caulder was actually responsible for the accidents that created the original Doom Patrol in the first place. He had even done the same to others, but those 'subjects had merely died. The altruistic, fatherly figure that had brought together the original Doom Patrol and inspired them to greatness was actually the architect of all their misery. Also, it turns out he could actually walk the whole time.

Then his head got torn off and cryogenically preserved. He spent the rest of the book as a disembodied head sitting in an ice tray. This series was INSANE.

Wait... Is the Chief EVIL?

Admittedly, even in the very beginning of the Doom Patrol, the Chief was a distant, mysterious authority figure, and while I don't think the character himself was particularly sinister the whole series was permeated with a sense of lingering dread, so you could argue there was always something tonally dark about the Chief. Still, the twist executed by Morrison in their run was just that; a twist. It was a last minute rug pull that spiked that story into overdrive, executed by one of the most creative minds in comics. It's an absolutely killer read. BUT...

If we want our Doom Patrol to continue to operate as a regular part of the DC world, rather than to dive deeper into metafiction, we want to keep the team feeling more complete, and so we've chosen to keep the Chief as the benefactor of the team and not include this part of his story. So the next step, then, is to work out just what his story IS.

Our Niles Caulder Story

The early parts of Caulder's story remain intact; his work as a multi-discipline scientist, inventor and surgeon. He has a huge budget provided by a mysterious benefactor who turns out to be Vandal Savage, trying to replicate his immortality effect. When he finds out who he's working for he tries to destroy his research, the resulting explosion costing him his legs. Now a reclusive genius, his medical expertise has been called on to save people in horrible accidents, and has occasionally had to do some unorthodox, perhaps even unethical things with some of his patients. He spends his fortune to give his patients a home and a purpose, and to try to make the world a better place, right up until his death.

This is, clearly, the original concept of who Caulder was, and while we absolutely acknowledge that we're making a deliberate choice here to leave some really weighty story beats on the table, the reality is that this is the version of the character that allows our Doom Patrol to continue to feel like part of our DC world.

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