Robotman

69 years ago - Cliff Steele is born.

51 years ago - 18-year-old Cliff becomes a stunt driver.

43 years ago - 26-year-old Cliff suffers a catastrophic accident. Niles Caulder moves his living brain into a robot body.

38 years ago - 31-year-old Cliff joins the All-Star Squadron as Robotman to stop Vandal Savage from taking over all the world's communications.

24 years ago - 45-year-old Cliff is recruited into Niles Caulder's Doom Patrol.

14 years ago - 55-year-old Cliff "dies" with the Doom Patrol, his body suffering catestrophic damage in the destruction of Vandal Savage's submarine headquarters, sacrificing themselves to save the town of Codsville, Maine.

13 years ago - 56-year-old Cliff's brain is placed in a new robot body by Will Magnus. He joins Niles Caulder's reassembled Doom Patrol.

10 years ago - 59-year-old Cliff begins seeing a therapist regularly to cope with the experience of being a disembodied brain. While leaving his sessions, he comes to know Jane Morris, and learn about her condition. He brings her to Niles Caulder to help her understand her alternate personalities and powers. She starts helping the Doom Patrol.

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

6 years ago - 63-year-old Cliff goes with the Doom Patrol into the blast zone of the Qurac bombing for Gar Logan to rescue the surviving members of the Teen Titans West.

2 years ago - 64-year-old Cliff and the Doom Patrol persue the Key into the Paths Beyond to save Rebis & Danny the Street after Niles Caulder sacrifices himself to try to save them. He brings Jane Morris to Danny the World before the path to return is closed, giving her a kindred spirit where she can be free to allow all her alters to coexit in harmony. He & Rita Farr joins the Justice League.

1 year ago - 68-year-old Cliff Steele is severely damaged during the battle against Mageddon. Will Magnus is able to rebuild him, uploading a digital copy of his brain into a new responsometer, making him anatomically the same as the Metal Men. He builds a new home outside Vegas, starting his own detective agency with the Metal Man so he can help them learn more about what it means to be human.

The fact that a lot of classic comic characters were invented in the middle of the mid-century boom of science fiction is sometimes a very fun fact to remember, when you start comparing these stories to movies that were happening at the same time. Robotman is such a fantastically era-specific concept; a human brain trapped in a robot body. It immediately evokes so many vintage schlocky sci-fi serials, which is very much the world the early Doom Patrol has always occupied. Then of course we get the more modern (or at least... from the 80's forward) Doom Patrol. creators like Morrison of Gerald Way have used characters like Robotman to ask questions about the nature of humanity and identity. Our challenge becomes to find a way to take these weirdly dispargent takes on a character, fold them into our timeline, and at the same time try to do this classic character justice.

Robotman's Comic History

The character Robotman first appeared in 1942 in Star Spangled Comics #7, an invention of Superman creator Jerry Siegel. He was a World War 2 era scientist named Robert Crane whose brain was put into a robot body after he was shot. This is the character that appears in the 1993 elseworlds series Golden Age.

When Arnold Drake first created the Doom Patrol in 1963 in the pages of My Greatest Adventure #80, He redesigned a classic golden age character (very similarly to the way Stan Lee used the Human Torch two years earlier when he created the Fantastic Four) and created a new Robotman; Cliff Steele. He was a racecar driver that was in a horrible crash, and boom... brain inside a robot body again.

Cliff has the distinction of being the only character to serve in every single incarnation of the Doom Patrol, no matter how obscure. This means tons of series that often contradict each other, that have wide disparity in tone, and that have a constantly shifting relationship to the mainstream continuity. Because he's essentially the face of the team, he'll often pop up in other series as a representative of their corner of DC.

Our Robotman Story

Without drilling down and picking apart the many adventures of the Doom Patrol, the biggest changes we're making is expanding the influence of Cliff Steele outside of his main team. First, we're actually making his accident happen long before the Chief ever started putting together the Doom Patrol. He actually has a whole history as a member of the All-Star Squadron. This is meant as a send-up of the classic Golden Age Robert Crane version of Robotman. He then is recruited by Caulder for his team of adventurers, and serves with them right up until the apparent deaths of the entire team.

Oh, right... I didn't mention that the entire team died in an explosion way back in 1968, decades before killing off characters was a thing comics even considered doing. Every single Doom Patrol story that's happened since then has had to deal with this absolutely lunatic event in their history, and we want to use that as well. Cliff becomes a member of a new group of adventurers deliberately set up to hunt down the surviving members of the original team, and we used his connection to the Metal Men to explain his new body. This team is meant to be transitional for us, to represent the weirder eras of the 80's Doom Patrol.

Sadly, we can't really follow the 80's Doom Patrol books too closely, even though they're some of the best comics out there. Grant Morrison (and then later sci-fi writer Rachel Pollack) took over the series and drove it into DEEP metafiction, creating weird, bizarre new characters whose entire existence were rooted in their own fictional nature. It was an absolutely awesome read, but for a book that started out crossing over with the Teen TItans and Superman, it became something completely different and impossible to translate into an ongoing DC Continuity.

What we can do, however, is use some of the ideas that relate specifically to Robotman. We got to see Cliff deal with the emotional trauma of losing his humanity and becoming a robot. This is where the iconic visuals of him wearing his black coat and staring mournfully off into the middle distance as he contemplates his own existance come from. This is the Robotman played by Brendan Fraser in the Doom Patrol series...and it's the Robotman that we decided would go on to join the Justice League.

This is maybe our biggest stretch with the character, but Robotman really is such an incredibly iconic and long-serving character in the tapestry of DC's characters, and he really does deserve a chance at the big stage. We want to show this new characterization for him after he's been confronted by his own lack of mortality in our timeline and have to deal with his own crisis of humanity, but moving forward, as Beast Boy takes over the Doom Patrol, it just seems like it's time for Cliff to take his place with the other icons.

Robotman's Future

Unlike his fellow Doom Patrol veteran Elasti-girl, who we really believe would thrive with the Justice League and become one of their main members, Cliff really isn't a person who would be up for that level of attention for long. We wanted to give him a chance to be on the big stage, but when that story is over, we wanted to give him somewhere to retreat to that feels more purpose-built for his actual personality.

The answer, we decided, was with another obscure team of DC heroes, the Metal Men. Cliff has already had a connection with their creator Will Magnus in the creation of his replacement body, and Magnus is already undergoing a big change as he opens up his new island labs to the Doom Patrol. the rest of the Metal Men would all be ready to expand their own horizons, and undergo that big step all kids eventually take when they move out on their own.

Suddenly, Robotman has a whole new role to play in the world. He's not the father of the Metal Men, but now he actually is, at least anatomically, no different than them, other than the fact that he has an understanding of what it means to be a person that they are still all discovering. Having him set out on his own with his new charges, helping them understand themselves seems like the perfect next step in Cliff's journey to understand himself.

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