OK, so the premise of the original Doom Patrol series was that “Chief” Niles Caulder (a paraplegic) gathers together a group of disparate, ill-fated characters who all received super-powers in ways that also left them appearing like monstrous freaks:
Robotman was a race-car driver who was in a should-have-been-fatal car crash that completely shattered his body. His brain was transplanted into a robotic, metallic frame - granting him super-strength and invulnerability, but making look like a robot.
Negative Man was an astronaut whose spaceship crash landed after being exposed to some kind of cosmic ray in orbit. His body was left with hideous disfiguring burns covering his entire body, but he was able to separate his ‘soul self’ from his body and use it in a variety of ways.
Beast Boy (who later joins the Teen Titans as Changeling) was injected with a life-saving serum that enabled him to change into any animal shape - but his entire body was a neon shade of green.
And then there’s Elasti-Girl. She was a glamorous starlet (if there’d been a 60s movie version of this series, I’d envision Tina Louise playing her) who got exposed to some chemical that enabled her to grow to enormous size, but left her body…otherwise unchanged. She was still a beautiful starlet, AFAIK she could control her ability quite well (so that she wasn’t always some awkwardly tall giant.) In fact, when she wasn’t using her super-power, there was nothing at all that made her look out of the ordinary. She could pass very easily as a normal person if she had to. So why was she labelled a hideous freakish outcast of society, and not an otherwise ‘normal’ stalwart superhero like the contemporary JLA members?
Doom Patrol didn’t really follow through on that whole ‘we’re freaks!’ thing until Morrison’s run (and then Pollack’s), which involved very different lineups.
They occasionally angsted about it, but a) it never really came up with other people, and b) since they did live in the same universe where Superman et al did, it didn’t make sense. Cliff and Larry had some practical reasons to have problems with their powers (lack of human contact and all), but there was nothing external.
She also had stretching powers (not sure if she had those in the Drake/Premiani days) which might wilt a female celebrity’s sex appeal. I mean, I’d be okay with it, but 1963 America just wasn’t ready for that. Superheroines up to that point had “feminine” powers, and hers were kind of masculine.
In the original comic book, it showed that Rita Farr was unable to control her growth, so it could happen if she was indoors and wreck the building. She was labeled a freak because of that, and her fame caused the label to spread (think of modern tabloids). That’s when she joined up with Caulder and learned to control her powers.
In the early Doom Patrol comics there’s no indication that there are any other superheroes in the Doom Patrol universe. This, I think, really reinforced the “we’re freaks” vibe of the comic.
My impression was that she was only an outcast in her own mind. She wanted to be famous for her beauty and talent, but all the publicity she got was about her powers.
Not *exactly *stretching powers. I forget which issue it was in the original run, but at one point she learned she could make individual body parts grow, like an arm or a leg, without expanding the rest of her body. It wasn’t quite Elongated Man-style stretching, because she had to enlarge her arm in all three dimensions, not just length. It did look kind of grotesque in some panels to see a huge limb attached to a normal-sized body.
Madame Rouge, one of the DP’s enemies, did have full stretching powers.
That’s true. In the late '60s, there was a crossover with the Challengers of the Unknown, and a team-up with the Flash in Brave & Bold. And most of the DC universe attended the wedding of Rita and Steve Dayton. But as with most DC titles of the time, in the early issues the characters seemed to exist in their own universe.
In the current run version of the Doom Patrol, they have made her power a lot more freakish: when she’s grown to giant size, her face begins to sag grotesquely.
I always envied Mento (her millionaire husband), as I assumed that if she could make her hands or feet get big, she could do the same with other, more interesting portions of her anatomy as well.
I think a Watsonian answer is going to be an excuse after the fact. The obvious Doylist answer is that superhero comic-book teams generally had one token female, and she was pretty. So Rita was pretty, and a freak, and that’s how they did it.
(“Nameless” in the Metal Men broke the trope for a while, but she didn’t even have a name.)
Morrison’s Doom Patrol really got away from that, to his credit. He had both a sort-of-pretty girl and a surprisingly ugly girl.
Two superheroes were in a same-sex marriage back in the Silver Age 60s? Wow, I had no idea such progressive ideas extended that far back in comics history!
