This year, I had some wonderful conversations with some wonderful people and ended up promising to expand on some of the topics I introduced in a series of blog posts. But 2019 turned out to be a difficult year for me, and some things, sadly, fell by the wayside.
But no longer, I say!
Welcome to the first in a series that will cover some of the topics I touch on in the talk, and will (hopefully) spark some new ideas and conversations. One of the things I was constantly told while pursuing my PhD at the U of C is that mainstream comics aren't important. They're not worth the time and rigour of academic inquiry. I tried very hard to fight that attitude, but was ultimately unsuccessful. This is where I will prove those voices wrong. Don't worry, this won't become hardcore academic criticism (though I do love some of that), but I'll demonstrate some of the ways that I see that mainstream comics are deeply and profoundly connected to our culture.
Enough of that. On to Ms. Pollack and Ms. Godwin.
Rachel Pollack, a novelist and tarot expert, took over scripting of the DC Comics series Doom Patrol with Issue #64 in April 1993*, replacing outgoing writer Grant Morrison, and inaugurating the title into DC's highly-successful Vertigo imprint. Morrison's run was, and still is, lauded for its complexity and maturity, and has gone on to be the paragon by which all subsquent, and antecedant, runs have been measured. By many, anyway. Regardless, this was a huge pair of shoes to fill, and Ms. Pollack, as the legend goes, won the job through a tireless process of letter-writing to the editorial staff. She obviously had a story she wanted to tell.
Her run, until the series' end with #87 is not the most popular of the team's incarnations, though there are subtle references to her stories in the new DC Universe Doom Patrol television series. Who is the fox indeed, Cliff? The conclusion I find myself coming to about the run is that it is a series of stories that are too far ahead of their time. Ms. Pollack and company are telling stories in these 20-ish issues that are charting waters only now being dipped into by mainstream comics.
I should, perhaps, mention that Rachel Pollack is a transwoman.
Writing mainstream superhero comics.
In the early 90s.
Her stories delve into sexuality and femininity, moving Dorothy Spinner into the foreground, but most importantly, to me, they introduce a character who is, as far as I'm aware, the first transgender superhero in a mainstream superhero universe. And I mean without all of the retcons to historical stories. I mean from a creative point of view, the first. That's a big deal. And Kate Godwin, a.k.a. Coagula, is just the best. Her origin ties intimately (in two senses) to the Doom Patrol, Kate gaining her powers after a sexual liaison with Rebis, the intersex negative being from the Patrol's previous incarnation. She has the power to fuse or to dissolve anything, and her first foray with the Doom Patrol involves a paragon of toxic masculinity in super villain form, the Codpiece. I recently read an article calling for the Codpiece to be introduced into the television series, and if they can make Beard Hunter work, they can make anything work as far as I'm concerned.
So just to recap, we've got a trans writer creating the first trans superhero in the oldest continuous mainstream superhero universe.
Kate's relationship with Cliff continues an arc for his character coming to terms with what exactly gender is, in that he has no secondary sexual characteristics, just the memory of them. These sorts of issues of gender and sexuality might be becoming commonplace in superhero comics these days, but 27 years ago, that was certainly not the case. Later story arcs delve into Tarot and the Kabbalah, preceding Alan Moore's mainstream treatment of those topics early in Promethea in the 21st century. It is, perhaps, her affinity for the Tarot that gave her run on Doom Patrol a kind of comic book prescience. And if you want to know where your queer superheroes come from, you can't forget Kate Godwin.
Kate's story does not, however, have a particularly spectacular end. In a later incarnation of the title by writer John Arcudi, it is revealed that Kate was killed during a camping trip by Dorothy Spinner's out of control powers. She has never, as far as I know, been brought back in any of the subsequent DC universal reboots. Fingers crossed for next time.
The Pollack run has never been collected, but, honestly, it's not hard to find and usually quite cheap. There was supposed to be a compilation of it in 2018, but it was cancelled without any excuse. With the TV show's success, that might not be the case any longer, but I honestly can't imagine them delving into that era anytime soon. Then again, I never expected them to actually do the De-Creator and Danny the Street stories either, but they did, and they did them spectacularly. Perhaps some bandage ghosts, ice box Niles, and even Kate herself could be on the way.
Ms. Pollack continues to write in comics, recently with Ahoy Comics, and wrote some other mainstream titles for DC, including a run on The New Gods with co-writer Tom Peyer, another favourite of mine. That one's proving a bit more difficult to track down, but that's what collecting is all about!
Some further reading and links:
Rachel Pollack’s Influence on DC Comics is Still Being Felt Today
DOOM PATROL, New Gods, Old Gods, & A FISSURE KING: The RACHEL POLLACK Interview
Rachel Pollack at the Grand Comics Database
*comic publication dates are often 3 months ahead of the actual publication date, harkening back as far as I know to the date on the comic actually being when a news agent was supposed to remove the issue from the racks.
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