Gear Live Comic Book News: Articles Tagged Doom Patrol

Doom Patrol #1: Keith Giffen and Matthew Clark

I’ve always had a soft spot for the goofy Doom Patrol series from DC Comics. Originally created by writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Premiani, it debuted in My Greatest Adventure #80 in 1963, the same year that Stan and Jack debuted X-Men #1. A lot of fans argue that there are similarities between the Fantastic Four (which debuted before Doom Patrol) and the DP (both teams have four members with the same type of characters: a bitter non-human character, two men - one a scientific genius and the other who can burst into flames/energy - and a woman; in DP the woman – Elasti-Girl - can increase and decrease her size, a power somewhat similar to Mr. Fantastic’s stretchable skin). Others argue that there are similarities between DP and the X-Men (DP debuted three months before X-Men #1). Both teams are led by older guys in wheelchairs who love to boss mutants around, although Professor X clearly has the cooler, higher-tech chair thanks to Mr. Jack Kirby’s design sensibilities. Seriously, if I was a chair-based comic book character, I’d shop at “Chairs by Kirby.”

The original Doom Patrol has that typical 1960s DC Universe appeal and that early run reads like a dinner theater version of X-Men/Fantastic Four with somebody like Sterling Hayden playing Niles Caulder as Monte Wooley. (Forgive the Golden Age of Movies reference point, but I recently saw The Man Who Came To Dinner on Turner Classic Movies, and the first thing I thought of, because I’m a geek, is “That’s Niles.”) While Stan and Jack and company were creating an interconnected universe of recurring villains and cosmic storylines for their DP-similar books with multi-faceted villains like Doctor Doom and Galactus, DC had the Doom Patrol fighting the equivalent of space worms and monsters made from cuts of meat. So it doesn’t really matter if the Doom Patrol looks similar to either the Fantastic Four or the X-Men because it’s not the idea, or the make-up of the team, it’s what you do with them.

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