Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities The All-Doom Patrol thread

Why? Because there's no threads about the classic Arnold Drake/Bruno Premiani version, the wildly inventive if uneven Grant Morrison version, or the daring and controversial/the ideas may have been better than the execution Rachel Pollack version. Or, for that matter, the Paul Kupperberg version immediately before Morrison's that started out with Steve Lightle on art and some real promise, but quickly went off the rails.

So here you go, fellow DP fans. Now let's post away!

Rataplan rataplan rrrrrrr...

P.S. Almost forgot -- the Gerard Way DP revival is coming our way soon! Yay!

As Danny the Street would say, "Bona to vada, Sarky."

My first thought on this is a letter column back in the Morrison run. It had just got a new editor in Mark Waid. This would have been right around the time of the TMK run/ Superman editorial spat that saw him leave that book.

Someone had written in and suggested Clayface as a reformed villain member of the team. Now bear in mind that hero teams are full of such characters, and that Clayface (sort of like the Brotherhood's Plasmus) could be just the sort of traumatised, outsider character to get some mileage out of in DP.

New editor's reply: Hey- why not Signalman and the Cluemaster, as well? Get with the program, Charles.

I thought that was the reply of an utter tool. Way to get readers to be enthusiastic about the book.

Waid does tend to put his foot in his mouth. It seems to me like there's good editors who are bad writers, and good writers who are bad editors. Waid would certainly appear to be the latter.

Here's a brief but fruitful DP discussion that Fat Cramer and I had in the Random Review thread several years ago:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=503023#Post503023

I have mostly changed my negative views on Morrison's run since I made those posts.

And I just perused this old DP thread about the 2009-2011 version. Lots of Lash goodness there. *sniff*

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=494814&page=1

Looking forward to posting on this one Fickles. Thanks for setting it up. I've not dug out the old '60s DP issues in ages.

You're very welcome, Thoth.

And for newcomers curious about the Doom Patrol, the Morrison run is getting the double-sized trade treatment. Volume One came out just a few weeks ago. I'm hoping that, just as the JLA reprints went beyond the Morrison run, then maybe the Pollack run will be reprinted at long last.

Doom Patrol was one of those groups I developed an interest in as I was moving out of my DC niche. My interest in them as not as indepth as the Titans, Legion, or JSA when I was younger. It extended solely to the Celsius iteration of the team, but not into the Blaze/Lodestone/Karma era.

And it was Teen Titans that really did it. In that issue when the Titans fought Superboy-Prime and suddenly the DP remembered their past, my attention was fully hooked by that double page spread.

Celsius was, IMO, a tragically wasted character. An interesting, complicated, non-stereotypical South Asian character for a change, and she gets unceremoniously killed off. So wrong...

Celsius, Dorothy, Coagula, Alice, Ava, Fever, Kid Slick, Nudge, Grunt, they all were.

I keep reading some nonsense about how Rachel Pollack tried to retcon Crazy Jane's time with the team through the False Memory issue, but I have no idea where anyone's picking that up.

My favorite DP story ever is the journey thru Crazy Jane's mind conducted by her personality of Driver 8. This is easily one of my favorite Morrison stories, if not one of my overall favorite stories ever.

IMO, Morrison's run crested around the Brother of DaDa story. It got kind of dodgy after that. In any case I think Danny the Street was pretty much the best thing ever!

My favorite stories are the ones involving Rhea Jones, as well as the introductory tale about Dorothy's imaginary friends and the final battle with the Candlemaker. He's one of my favorite villains.

That story is definitely near the top of my DP list. I also liked the reference, in Driver 8's name, to a song from the underrated third R.E.M. album, "Fables of the Reconstruction."



Agreed. Doom Patrol #50, which climaxes with the Brotherhood of DaDa ready to take on the world, is, IMO, one of the greatest anniversary issues of all time. Their fate in the next couple of issues is a downer, although I also think it goes to show what a memorable character Morrison developed with Brotherhood leader Mr. Nobody (to think that he began as a forgotten bit character in the Silver Age run.) In subsequent issues, I think we get some good stuff, but also (no spoilers) a lot of shock for shock's sake.



Quite so!

My favorite DP member ever:

I'm looking forward to the new iteration, but for me there will always be something missing without REBIS...

^^Ahh, Rebis...yes, one of Morrison's most ground-breaking moves, taking an established character (Negative Man) to places never seen before in a DC comic.

Morrison's run was so phenomenal. You can see in retrospect how what he did on Animal Man and Doom Patrol were so creative and fresh for the times.

His influence on all writers since, especially those who have emerged in the last 10 years, is immense. And while that is sometimes good, it's also led to a lot of other writers trying to write like Morrison wrote in the early 90's but not being able to pull it off.

I loved them all. I love the Chief revelation and how Morrison wrote him during those issues. Any usage of the Chief ever since just doesn't fly for me.

^^Well said, Cobie, altho I'm not as sold on Morrison's Chief as you.

Have you read Morrison's "Flex Mentallo" mini-series yet? I see that as the culmination of this fruitful era for him.

While the revelation was stunning, the character himself became a bit too unrealistic for me. It's a shame Milligan's 70 issues on "Shade, the Changing Man" doesn't get the same love. I found it better in terms of balancing weird, adult and characterization. Morrison totally won in terms of high-brow concepts, but some of the characterization suffered.

I agree with you about the Chief, Drake, but while I love some of Milligan's work, I'm not that big a fan of his Shade. A lot of it was hard for me to stomach.

But, to each their own.

Since TMK has been on my mind...

Was the Doom Patrol after Morrison's run so difficult for others to do anything with those characters, leading to a reboot? A number of them were radically changed and it would have been very difficult to move from that into, say, John Byrne's thoughts for the team.

In which case, was that similar in the way that creators struggled to make the Legion work after TMK. They were too far removed from their younger selves to continue in a way that later writers wanted, leading to a reboot?

Just a passing thought really. I'll actually get to some proper Doom Patrol posts at some point.

Thoth, please don't take this the wrong way, but TMK is a very sensitive and polarizing topic, and I don't want this thread to get derailed. Besides, I think discussions about Legion creative teams belong in the Legion forum.

No hurt feelings, I hope. Just trying to keep things steady and positive.

Speaking of different DP eras, I'll admit to being ignorant of most. I jumped on board during Morrison, stayed around for Pollack, though wasn't a huge fan. The Arcudi run had some interesting bits, but not enough characters that I enjoyed so I dropped it early on. Byrne's team just turned me off from the get-go for some reason, especially since DC let him totally reboot them and forsake previous incarnations. I liked Giffen's series though - it kept things quirky, had a bunch of characters I liked and acknowledged the past. Not perfect, but my second fav run after Morrison.

Before Byrne departed DC he went through a radical purity phase, where nothing to him was as good as the original versions, so in short order he dumped the Demon's rhyming, turned the New Gods into a strict photocopy of Kirby's first stories, and brought the Doom Patrol back to the original formation. The problem I had with him was that his "pure" interpretations of these properties were stale and lifeless. They clung so heavily to Kirby et al, that they weren't dynamic in any way (ironic in the case of Kirby because that was the point of these new creations).