Thoughts upon getting ahild of Doom Patrol, volume 2 and 3. Long w/unboxed spoilers.

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been interested in the Doom Patrol since running into their Who’s Who entry, way back when (Morrison era), but, until recently, haven’t been able to FIND them. By the time I discovered them, they were already direct market only, by the time I was anywhere I could get to a comic shop, volume 2 had ended. Volume 3 was entirely contained within a period where I wasn’t buying much in the way of comics, so I missed it completely.

Recently, though, I’ve managed to get my grubby hands on the entire run - or close to, anyway. I may or may not have the entire run of the first series…I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.

And…damn, now I know what I was missing…it’s even better than everything I’d seen about them led me to believe.

OK…onto some thoughts…

Vol 2 can be divided into 3 distinct eras:

Kupperberg
Morrison
Pollack

So, I’ll divide my comments by the era.

Kupperberg

General feeling: Fairly standard Superhero fare.

The team. Not much of a team.

Arani’s obsession with finding the Chief conflicts with the desire of the rest of the team - particularly Josh and Cliff - to do good, to be superheroes. This does not foster teamwork. This is bad. And she is, to be blunt, an unlikable bitch. Her death completely lacked impact for me.

Josh isn’t doing much to help keep the team remain coherant, spending more time butting heads with Arani than trying to reason with her - or much of anything else, for that matter. His pining over Val wasn’t very interesting, either.

Val…is bland, but she does provide a point around which to do some interesting things with Larry. But I guess every Doom Patrol needs someone in bandages.

Larry, I like what Kupperberg was doing with him. And he ended it at about the right point. Milked it a little further than it really ought to have been stretched, but not too far. Being cured when he lost the stolen Negative Man was pretty cool - and Val’s reaction was great.

Cliff…is bland, but he’s the major thread to the Morrison and Pollack eras.

Lodestone/Rhea - pretty standard teenaged superheroine under Kupperberg. Standard super-heroic soap-opera. Most likable female character in this incarnation of the team…but that’s damning with faint praise, and I actually like her more than that. Her pining over Josh was tedius, though.

Karma/Wayne - I actually liked him. Judging from the lettercols in the Kupperberg era, I’m one of the very, very few. Granted he needed to grow up a lot, and was doing even more damage to team coherance than Arani, but he was an interesting character, and seemed to have some potential for that much needed growth. While I liked his exit - and it was pretty much inevetable - I wish someone - be it Kupperberg, Morrison or Pollack - had followed up with SOMETHING. His power kicked ass.

Blaze/Scott was my favourite character in the Kupperberg era. He was a sweet, sweet boy, but able to kick ass when it came down to it. His determination to risk his life as a superhero, rather than waste away in a cancer ward was, at once, heroic, and massively stupid. I wish something had happened between him and Rhea before he died. (And that that had happened in Doom Patrol, not Invasion.) At least he got his wish, and died in action, not in a hospital bed.

The Chief - first indications that Dr Caulder isn’t quite the man Cliff thought. Was an interesting concept, that Kupperberg never got a chance to explore. Glad it got left to Morrison, though. I think he handled it better than Kupperberg would have.

Rita - still dead. Glad someone from the original team stayed that way.

Dorothy - not part of the team, yet, but introduced.

Impressions: Solid, but not impressive. Torn between too many conflicting intentions - bring back the old team, leave them dead; Replicate the old team, do something new; eliminate the kids, give them more time - and never really found its direction. Way too many crossovers. Although the Doom Patrol/Suicide Squad special was good, despite having Hawk. Villains, save for Shrapnel, who was pretty cool, were unmemorable. Best storyline was Larry stealing the Negative Man back from Val. Finally finding the Chief came way too late - that plot as played out long before Kupperberg brought it to an end. I’ve never been a fan of Erik Larsen’s art…his work here isn’t helping any. Had to laugh at the letter asking for Rob Liefeld to replace him.

Morrison

General feel: Wierd and arty.

The team. Now things are coming together.

Josh gets along better with Niles than Arani, but not by much. Was a non-entity except in Dorothy-centric stories, where he’d taken something of a fatherly role. Despite this, his death was effective - probably mostly due to being a mistake.

Cliff gains some more personality. It’s often grating, but it’s there. He starts to really develop as the ‘core’ of the team.

Rebis… Well, first impression was ‘damn, that’s weird’. But s/he was developed pretty well. S/he actually made the line ‘I was having sex with myself. I’ll tell you about it later.’ seem natural, which was pretty amazing. Hir staying in Danny the World was somewhat disappointing.

The Chief - just keeps getting creepier. The reveal that he was behind the original Patrol’s ‘accidents’ came as only a mild surprise by the time it came up. A well timed reveal, that. His murdering Josh was a bit of a surprise, but it was clear who it was immediately. The suspense was not there. The chocolate thing was weird.

Dorothy, like Josh, was mostly a non-entity when the story wasn’t focussing on her specifically. But when she WAS in the limelight, she was very interesting. Her powers are probably the most unique I’ve ever seen.

Crazy Jane…well, I have to go with the majority…she was the coolest thing. They were the coolest thing. Each of her personae being a fully developped person, and having their own individual powers was a neat idea. The Underground was an interesting imaging of that. She lost it at the very end, though. ‘No more stupid super-powers’? WTF? Now is not the time for that, dear! Ar least the final, wrap-up story-arc was good. That Cliff was never able to really see, or properly return her affection was one of the more grating aspects of his character.

Danny the Street started as something of a ‘WTF’ moment, but he became rather an interesting character. A sentient, mobile, apparently gay, tranvestite ROADWAY. Too weird, but…somehow it worked.

Lodestone - not really a team-member in the Morrison era…but she got a nice ending under him.

Impressions:

W. T. F.

Well, not really. It was WIERD, but it all hung together, and made sense, in the long run. His tendency to kill off his almost invariably interesting villains was annoying. Good villains shouldn’t be wasted. While a couple came back - the Brotherhood of Dada, the thing under the Pentagon, the Men From N.O.W.H.E.R.E. (after a fashion) - most of them were lost, lost, lost. When the second Brotherhood were killed off, entirely, it was actually SAD. They were, technically speaking, villains, but…they were just great. At least Agent “!” and Alias the Blur went down fighting…but Love Glove and Mr Nobody were just out-and-out murdered. Kipling was the most annoying character ever, and he used him far too much. I have no idea whether I’m reading things into it that aren’t there, but Morrison seemed to include a lot of gay references, even aside from the overt ones, like Danny. I hope I’m not reading into it. The lettercols are almost as much fun to read as the comics themselves. The Doom Force Special was absolutely hillarious. Especially in light of the aforementioned suggestion that Liefeld should take over the art back in the Kupperberg era. Lesson learned: Never make out with a robot that’s rigged to explode, no matter whose brain is in it.

Pollack:

Overall feel: I bet she did a lot of gender studies and Queer Theory in college.

The team. Overall good. The lack of Jane is disappointing, but I got over it.

Cliff really develops into a character I like under Pollack. He still has his agrivating moments, but overall he’s pretty cool - particularly after he and Kate share a body.

Speaking of Kate, she is pretty damn cool. A lot of readers commented in the lettercol on how great it was to have a transexual lesbian character. While this is true enough, the fact that she’s a strong, interesting character, regardless of her sexuality and gender identity is more important.

Dorothy comes into her own here. While she pisses me the hell off a lot with her over-reactions to the older characters actions…she’s an insecure teenaged girl…that’s just a sign she was being written well.

The Chief, I really like in this era. Well…no…I don’t like him…he’s well written, and interesting. He’s still a jerk. Although I think some of the worst (getting on Kate’s back about her surgery) comes across as being a jerk for the sake of being a jerk. Being a head seems to have mellowed him. The chocolate thing is VERY weird.

The Bandage People are strange, but don’t come across as ‘strange for the sake of strange’ - particularly once their origin is explained. It’s nice to have someone so wholeheartedly enjoying life in this group. Even Kate, while not an angst-monkey like Cliff or Dorothy (er…ok, not the best choice of words to describe her), isn’t as much fun as George and Marion.

Impressions: Loss of Morrison’s additions - Jane, Rebis, Danny - was disappointing, but at least they got closure. The characters not created by Morrison - either carryovers from previous eras, or created by Pollack - were well done, though. Adolescence, sex (in both senses of the word) and sexuality seem to be the major themes Pollack wants to explore, and she does well with them. Ended far too soon.

Volume 3

Overall feel: Back to pretty standard superhero stuff.

The team. Standard superhero team.

Ted/Flash Forward - Annoying at first, grew on me. Think he just grew, period. Interesting power, but not a whole lot of use, really.
Shyleen/Fever - Cute. Fills the team’s ‘yay Cliff’ quota. Not a standout, but I like her. Her powers going haywire when she’s agitated was fun.
Vic/Slick - Interesting power. Sometimes interesting, sometimes his conflicts with Ted get real tedius.
Ava/Freak - Seemed interesting at first. Then she went completely and totally batshit nuts, latching onto Ted, and treating everyone else - particularly Cliff and Shyleen - like enemies. This might have made for an interesting plot, if the series had lasted long enough to do something with it. As it is, though, it just made Ava unbearable.
Cliff - Like his Dorothy’d design. The squarish design, and the remodel of that, not so much. A lot of his growth under Morrison and Pollack was lost, but that’s sort of understandable after Kate’s death and Dorothy’s coma.

Impressions: The stuff with Jost got tiresome, occasionally, but wasn’t too bad. The villains (or ‘villains’) were interesting, for the most part. As to Jost’s replacement Doom Patrol…wasn’t Metamorpho presumed to be DEAD at that point? With him alive, and in the publicity hungry Jostian Doom Patrol, it stretches credibility that people - particularly people like Arsenal, Nightwing and STAR Labs - thinking Shyft is actually him in Outsiders a year later.

Going from a Mature Readers book to a Code-approved one wasn’t a good move, I don’t think. A few reasons: After reading all of Cliff’s explatives in the Morrison and Pollack runs, the ‘#%@$%&’ that was always showing up in Ted’s dialogue was a little distracting. I can’t help but wonder if the restrictions put on it again to get in under the Code had something to do with a lot of what was lost from Morrison and Pollack’s runs. And, on a more juvenile note: Getting Shyleen naked or topless as often as they do, but not showing anything was just a tease.

Killing Kate pissed me off, although how it happened made sense, and how the situation was used in Cliff’s development was good. ‘Elasti-girl herbal breast enlargement’ is just…wrong. So very, very wrong. as much as Cliff didn’t care about the TV series, I can see him storming to Jost’s offices and kicking some ass if that ever hits the market.

All in all…I love the series, even when it’s just standard a Superhero book.

2

Great reading. It’s been years since I read DP and I’d forgotten some of the characters you mentioned (Dorothy is the monkey-faced girl, right? No memory whatsoever of Karma/Wayne or Josh. What were their powers?). The Morrison era is one of the best runs of a comic book ever. I read before and after and would have read up until the end but for the total meltdown of my personal life leading to the discontinuation of all comic book buying.

Someone told me once that Pollack plotted her issues based on Tarot readings she either did or had done for her. No idea if that’s true. At the time I was moving out of a new agey Wiccan pagan sort of thing, including forgetting how to read Tarot, so I thought it was cool if true. Now not as much, although I thought Coagula was one of the coolest characters in comics at the time. Pity she’s dead.

I know nothing of the new run so I can’t comment.

3

Yeah, Dorothy’s the monkey-faced girl.

Josh (AKA, Tempest) was the guy with the energy blasts. Not that that clears things up much… The doctor/army deserter/token black guy. During Morrison’s run he was almost entirely in a medical/support role, rather than combat.

Wayne was the punk guy with the bigass mohawk and swastika obsession (an earring and pair of boxers, that we see). His power was to mess with the brains of anyone who tries to direct aggression against him, so they miss - often injurring themselves or an ally in the process. It was worthless against anything without a brain. He’s wanted for murder for most of the time he was there. He’d gotten into a fight in the mall, and one of the guys he was fighting with went over the railing and dropped to the floor below.

One comment I meant to make on the Pollack era, and think I forgot (I wrote an awful lot there, didn’t I?):

Cliff came to accept Kate being a transsexual far too early, given his first reaction. He initially blew up at her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were a man!?’ But he’d already come to accept it (at least that’s how I saw it) by the time they were out the door of the house. While I’m glad he accepted her as who she is, it happened way too fast for realism, to my mind.

I don’t know about Pollack plotting based on tarot readings, but it would make sense, wouldn’t it?

4

A few further thoughts:

On vol 3:

I forgot to list Dr Kodenko in the team rundown. While I like him, and his death saddened me, I’m kind of disappointed they didn’t go to Dr Magnus to get the real Cliff rebuilt. Although I’m not sure they’d even have access to Magnus - or if anyone, even Gar, knew Magnus built several of Cliff’s bodies - it just seems wrong, somehow, for Cliff to be in a body that’s made by neither Caulder or Magnus.

Also, it was rather disappointing that it ended just as it seemed to be getting steady on its feet (aside from Ava’s idiocy, which I assume would have been dealt with later).

In general:

One thing I don’t like so much is that instead of just breaking up or changing rosters, the Doom Patrol seems to have to be utterly destroyed whenever it changes writers or goes on hiatus. The original ended by killing the whole team (even if Rita’s the only one who stayed dead); Kupperberg handed it over to Morrison by having Wayne on the run from the police, killing Arani and Scott, putting Rhea in a coma, and retiring Val; Morrison started by altering Larry beyond recognition, then ended by killing Josh, and retiring Rebis, Danny, and Jane in a way that didn’t really lend itself to bringing them back; Pollack’s last story sent the Chief to another dimention, and while the rest of the team was fine, Vol 3 started with Kate dead, Dorothy in a coma, and Cliff dead (in the same sense he was dead after the original) - its ending, at least, left the majority of the membership alive and on the same plane of existence - but I have a dreadful feeling that if there’s a volume 4 it will start by doing the same thing to them that Arcudi did to Pollack’s team. While the willingness to destroy the team is great, and the rebuilt teams are always interesting, it’s kind of a downer to have it happening so constantly.

5

Ah, see, if you’d said Tempest I’d have known right away who you meant.

Given that Cliff is pretty much the ultimate example of radical body modification, I don’t have a problem at all with his accepting Kate’s TS status quickly. I can see his initial reaction, having undoubtedly had about as much contact with Transpeople as most people (that is, none), and I can also see him understanding it in terms of removing wrong or non-functional body parts. Not to mention that he had recently had some experience with Rebis, perhaps the ultimate in transgenderism. I don’t remember if there was any particular rationale offered for why he became accepting but I don’t see it as an issue.

6

Heh. I, on the other hand, had to think a few moments to remember he went by Tempest (and it’s mostly because Aqualad is using the name now (or was, last I saw) that I remembered it.). He’s just ‘Josh’ to me. I should have kept the Name/Codename formula for the whole team, though.

Mmm. Good point.

I’m not sure his situation would really give him any particular insight into Kate’s, though. I see a few differences I think are relevant.

First: Cliff’s current body is wrong, in his mind. He was born into the right body, then by way of an accident, he got stuck in the wrong one. Kate, on the other hand, was born into the wrong one, and chose to fix it. I’m not so sure someone in the first situation would go so quickly from not understanding/accepting someone in the second to understanding/accepting.

Second: his body gave him serious angst about what he is. Cliff was human before. He isn’t now. I can see this leading him to accept that Kate Is A Woman - because she has a woman’s body now - but Kate Always Was A Woman doesn’t follow quite so naturally from it, so I’m not so sure it would neccessarily help him understand that - rather than simply thinking ‘she was a man, why in the world did he want to change that?’

My problem with this is that for Cliff, accepting Rebis’s nature doesn’t come easy. He thinks of hir as Larry. He even refers to hir as ‘him’, as late as issue 60 (not long before Morrison’s run ended, and Rebis left this reality). He just doesn’t think of Rebis’s nature unless s/he points it out hirself. He thinks of Rebis in terms of what s/he was before the three entities were combined into one.

OTOH, that point could also argue in favour of him accepting Kate quickly - he could be argued to have thought of Rebis as Larry, because Larry is the part he knew. He knew Kate as a woman before he knew she was transsexual.

The rationale - to the extent there was any - is mostly Cliff’s insecurity about his identity. After Cliff digs into her a bit, she points out his body, and asks him what he is - sort of turning back his angst about what he is on him. That leaves him speechless. Then he broods for a bit, and apologises to her. The whole thing takes, probably, about 10, 15 minutes. I went into why this doesn’t work for me above.

You do raise some valid points on the matter, though. I’ll have to think some more and re-evaluate my thoughts on it.

7

Uh…[ib]if** there’s a volume 4? It’s already here; issue #4 comes out this week. The entire previous history of the DP has been jettisoned; John Byrne simply rebooted the original team and added a handful of new team members.

Back to the “standard superhero fare” of the Kupperberg era, only with better art.

8

Actually, rereading this part, I note an inherant - though not completely irreconcilable - contradiction in the points.

This is really working to make me rethink my position. Not so much because of the contradiction, but because both points are completely true. I’m thinking now that perhaps Cliff was rather less simplistic than I was giving him credit for.

Cliff doesn’t grasp what he is, but he doesn’t need to. He just accepts that he is something. I’m still not sure he understands Kate untill they’re merged into the Tireisia, but he doesn’t need to. He knows she’s a good person, and he can accept anything beyond that without really understanding it.

Man.

Thanks for making me think more on this issue Otto. It put it in a new light, and gave me a further appriciation of Pollack’s writing of the situation.

[Notes Biffy’s post on preview]

[Goes to look it up.] … … … OK, so I’m finding a bunch of message board posts, and a rant from someone who doesn’t actually read Doom Patrol, so I don’t know how accurate the information I’m finding is…

Uhm…am I to understand this is in-continuity with the rest of the DCU? And that the problems it causes for Beast Boy and other characters who are still in use are just being ignored? This…doesn’t sound too well thought out… Might be an interesting series, but I have a feeling it might be retconned out very soon.

But this really goes to prove my point, doesn’t it? Only this time the entire old continuity is destroyed.

9

Definitely in continuity; the new version was introduced in a six-story arc in JLA last spring.

10

Re Pollack

IIRC Rachel Pollack is actually a transexual lesbian. I enjoyed a lot of the things she did, and feel she was forced to rush the end of the series.

Re Kate and Cliff

The Chief seems to have known right away. Cliff isn’t aware that Kate isn’t a standard issue woman until he makes a comment to the Bandage People that Kate shouldn’t be in a super hero team but “Married and having babies.” Cliff is both angry, and very confused. IIRC

“Why didn’t you tell me you’re a man?”
“Because I’m not a man.”
“What are you then?”
(Kate poses to show her hips and breasts)
“A woman, obviously.”
“But you used to be a man, right?”
“No, Cliff. I was never a man.”
“Buy you had a penis right? In my book that makes you a man!”
“You don’t have a penis anymore Cliff. Does that make you a woman? What about the Chief? (Note-at this point the Chief is a selfsustaining head with no body of any kind.) He doesn’t have a penis. But, he has a beard. What is he? I think we should clear up just who is and who isn’t a man around here.”

Cliff had already accepted Kate as a woman when he first met her. When her learns that she is a transexual, the idea that she’s ‘really a man’ clashes with his idea of her. He does move quickly from ‘You are a sick freak who lied to me’, an idea based mostly on his ignorance of transexuals, to ‘You are my friend, other than that I don’t want to talk about it.’ He doesn’t really accept Kate as a woman again until they join to find the Tieresias. At first, he is embarrassed and disgusted and wants no part of it. As the joining takes place, he admits to himself and to Kate that he finds her very attractive and wants to have sex with her.

Re Magnus And Kolodenko

I wanted a better explanation of that as well. I accepted it because it fit so well into the feel of that incarnation of the DP as a second rate superteam that isn’t recognized by the public, or known by the JLA. STAR labs never came forward to help Shyleen control her powers, study the being in Ava, or help Flash Forward. These are people who could never get a message to Magnus, let alone talk to him face to face.

I disagree that this incarnation was standard superhero. I felt it was mostly a Gen13, Buffy feel but mixed with bits of the Morrison and Pollack eras. The Purple Purposeless comes to mind.

“I am not a super hero. I am a sub hero. I can’t help you. I cannot help any one.”

11

Yes, it’s quite true that even if they’d known of Cliff’s connection to Magnus, they’d probably not be able to contact him.

But it still doesn’t feel right for Cliff to be in a body not made by Caulder or Magnus.

I think you’re taking the second-rate theme too far, though.

They ARE second rate, but Kupperberg is really the only writer that didn’t play them that way - although in what I’ve read of the original series, their inadequacy seems to be percieved entirely by them, not by anybody else. The JLA actually snickered at them in Morrison’s era (in The Painting That Ate Paris). I don’t think anybody outside the people they interacted directly with even realised they were still around in Pollack’s run.

But they’re known, although how widely is not clear. Jost made sure that they always got publicity. Even not being the Doom Patrol, at that point, Jost was hyping them as such until recently, so they’re known (if not as popular as, say, the original team), and the replacement Patrol certainly didn’t condescend to them, so they have some respect among superheroes. Granted, none of the replacement team were first-stringers, but none of them are bush-leagers, either.

None of that takes it out of ‘standard superhero’. Gen13 and Buffy are, really, just good examples thereof, and while PP is on the odd side, and wouldn’t be out of place in Pollack, or especially Morrison’s run, it’s really nothing that wouldn’t exist in any normal superhero series with a certain level of humour and self-awareness. It’s a pretty basic meta-humour. The aspect most informed by the Morrison and Pollack runs is Dorothy-Cliff, and that’s not really enough to pull it out of the realm of standard superheroes.