It's already out!

Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol is still one of my favorite runs of all time. Full of wonderfully crazy ideas, mind expanding without chemical additives! Some of the most reread comics in my collection.

After he left, Rachel Pollack tried to keep the weird going, but it was pretty execrable.

John Byrne's revival was more traditionalist, but was a fun blend of Silver Age and modern styles.

That's all what I'm familiar with regarding DP.

Great thread, Hoosier!

A few random thoughts about the original DP;

COOL name.

COOL look.

They may seem weird for Silver Age DC at first glance, but they were right in keeping with the oddness of Earth-B (Boltinoff), where many of the non-super-heroic types hung out.

Much has been made of their similarity to the X-Men, but there was cynicism at work in the pages of the Doom Patrol. I never sensed in the X-Men the bittermess that ran through the characters of Cliff Steele and Larry Trainor. The DP were adults, of course, and the X-Men teenagers, so the cynicism was more understandable.

I wrote about the DP a bit in my most recent post in A Comic Lover's Memories, but I never got to see any of their adventurs until very late in the original run. They hooked me immediately, though, and as I got older and back issues were more readily available, I bought as many as I could.

Bruno Premiani's art was so different from standard superhero art. The expressions on faces, the naturalness (is that a word?) of the figures, and the humanness of all the characters, even the villains, made the stories stand out. On the other hand, there were never more chilling images in comics back then than the moments when Larry Trainor, often when he was alone piloting his plane, free from the sight of others, removed his bandages and showed us his death's-head visage.


No hero, it seemed, not even Ben Grimm or Bruce Banner, suffered more because of his appearance.

Trainor never ever could show himself. He had no real "face," just a hideously ghoulish skull-face. And he couldn't even console himself with the glories of being a super-powerful being. When he used his power, which he could only do for 60-seconds at a time, he collapsed into a near-coma. It wasn't larry who performed the feats, but the Negative Man within him, a lifeless electrical charge. Negative Man (and as I've said before, no superhero's name is more appropriate), was like a demon that possessed Trainor; in some ways the relationship between hom and the being who lived inside him was a forerunner of the relationship between Boston Brand and those he controlled as Deadman. I'm sure Arnold Drake drew upon Trainor when he created Deadman.

One more thing for now. Drake often "destroyed" Cliff Steele's robot body in ways he never could have depicted if he had been human. In mmeory, anyway, Cliff always seemed to be hopping inot DP headquarters carrying an arm and a leg, barking at Caulder to repair him. Black robotic humor.



More anon. Ben Grimm and Cliff Steele? Midway City? The beguiling grace of Rita Farr. And more!

Rita Farr was great! Her name may have been a nod to Senorita Rio, whose civilian ID was Rita Farrar. 

I love that she could both grow and shrink.  And wouldn't you know, a few months after her debut Hank Pym/Ant-Man became Giant-Man.

(I know there was an older character called Mighty Man who could both grow and shrink too, but he had some other powers as well).


 

I remember being a bit freaked out seeing that when I'd come across the occasional DP story as a kid.

But then I looked around and found this:

Preview: Doom Patrol #7

Which says #7 is going on sale tomorrow.