On Doom Patrol

            I could not have asked for a better show.

            I’ve loved the Doom Patrol since first seeing them in issue #26 of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man. In that issue [SPOILER ALERT], the writer explains to Animal Man that he also writes the Doom Patrol, though they don’t know it. I had to find them.

Bear in mind, this was well before any of the series had been collected. This was a true comic hunt. I scoured every store I could in southern Ontario, picking up bits and pieces, unwilling to read them until I had the whole story. And then, oh then, it was love. True and pure. These broken and cracked, faded and sad, beautiful and perfect characters touched me in a way that few other stories ever have.

Over the next few years, I managed to track down all but one appearance of the Doom Patrol from their first issue, My Greatest Adventure #80, in 1963 to the end of Keith Giffen’s excellent run of 2009. I missed a bit during DCs very mediocre “New 52”; I’m tracking them down. And Gerard Way’s current run is bonkers and lovely in totally different ways. But in all forms, even the weird 80s superteam version, the story of people cast aside, broken individuals doing wonderful things and staying broken, struggling to heal, speaks to me like no other story ever has. Well, maybe one or two others.

            

I write all this not to claim authority or ownership of these characters. I write this to let you know how much I love these characters, how much I love this story. And it’s best to understand, the Doom Patrol is a single story, as Rita says in the show, told over and over again.

The comic Doom Patrol is unique in the DC Universe, in that their histories, with the slight exception of John Byrne’s take on the team, are never rewritten with the constant universal crises that plague the DCU. This is thanks to the death of Rita Farr. The final issue of the first series, from 1968, features the death of the entire team. Over the years, as superheroes are wont to do, the various members return. Except for poor Rita. Hers is the ghost that haunts the team. She never returns from death, though she keeps them together in death in very much the same way she kept the original team together in life. A version of Rita returns to the team in 2004, though she is a clone of the original, grown from a fragment of the original Rita’s skull, all that Niles could find when he went back to search for her. It is, in fact, only in 2018’s “Milk Wars” crossover that Rita, the original, returns. Gerard Way demonstrates a beautiful understanding of Rita’s place in the team’s history as he has Jane note that Rita’s always been on the team, even though she’s missing from some of their memories. There's a grandeur to the tale, a scope that none of their coeval comics manage.

            Which is also why, when the team was first introduced IN A LIVE ACTION TELEVISION SHOW!!!!! I was curious to see what they’d do with Rita, who’s never really had a proper story of her own, not the way the others have.

            But I’m jumping ahead of myself. Let me start here (after 500 or so words) by saying that Doom Patrol is, without doubt, the best comics to screen adaptation of a mainstream superhero comic. 100%. No other show has captured the spirit of the original, cleaved to the canonical but added something new and perfect to the story, in short, has adapted the original property this well. I knew, the minute that we had the moment before the painting with Cliff and Jane in the first episode, one of the most important and beautiful moments in the team’s entire history, that this series was being made by people who loved this story. Perhaps as much as I did. Over the course of 15 episodes, I felt such joy, such utter joy, that one of my favourite stories of all time had been given a proper and respectful treatment. I said to my son, who loves the team as much as I do, that even if we only ever got this one season, it was one perfect season. Absolutely perfect.

            

And you know what? Other people liked it too. Some, perhaps, loved it. I think it’s because we all feel bruised and broken and damaged by life, but unlike many of the superheroes, whom I also love, we don’t find our strength in our trauma and suddenly become saviours. Instead we fight through our trauma and we find those golden moments of purpose and peace, and sometimes we fall back into our nightmares, and sometimes it’s hard to pull ourselves out. I worry for Jane in the coming season. The Doom Patrol never fully heals, because we never fully heal. We persevere, sometimes into excellence. They’re superheroes who are like us. At the beginning of the first episode, Mr. Nobody’s narration echoes the introduction to the first collected edition, in which writer Peter Milligan tells us that the Doom Patrol isn’t a superhero story, and that that’s a good thing. They’re not superheroes. But they still manage to do amazing things.

I could go on, but I won’t. I live in a world where I see flashes of Danny the Street, in the beautiful, wonderful people I choose as my family. We are all of us broken, but we help each other and we love each other, and sometimes, we excel with each other. Imagine, for a moment, what Danny the World must be like.

You should watch Doom Patrol. It’s really, really good. 

Other things I've written about the Doom Patrol are here.