A missed opportunity for a Danny the Street reference.

Now we’re having Keith Giffen handle them. That means it’ll either be 4th-wall breakingly funny, or depressingly tragic, or both. That MIGHT fit in with DP… but still feels out of place. Will it work?

To which Nitz replied:

The more famous DC heroes were pretty white people who held respectable community positions in both identities and had powers that were completely desirable.

The main line of the DC Universe is the Justice Society to Justice League to Teen Titans superhero dynasty. It certainly feels like an old line WASP dynasty stretching from the Country Club to the Boardroom to the Prep School. Marvel tends to be more Jewish with all its doctors (Richards, Banner, Pym, Blake, Strange and Doom) and lawyers (Murdock and Walters) coupled with an outsiders ethos.

Both are fine. There are lots of great insider stories and lots of great outsider stories.

Of course, in order to be either an insider or an outsider, you need people on the other side of the fence around. Marvel has a great set of insiders in The Avengers, but DC has always struggled to have a consistent cast of outsiders. To me, Giffen is a perfect fit for creating a Doom Patrol to fill that role. His JLI and later Defenders titles really had that ethos.

I can be wrong.

Another thing that’s interesting to me about the Doom Patrol is that the book’s regular writers have alternated between excellent and poor.

Arnold Drake (some of the craziest, most fun stuff of the Silver Age)
Paul Kupperberg (just bland and unmemorable)
Grant Morrison (full of some of Morrison’s best ideas, and more heart than anything he’s ever written)
Rachel Pollack (too much of a Morrison imitation)
John Arcudi (the new characters were fun, and the story went forward at a mad pace for 22 issues)
John Byrne (2004-era John Byrne. Do I really need to say more?) (Actually, I will. It was a terrible choice to let him reboot the series even though the team’s ever-advancing continuity has always been part of its appeal.)

Not really, given how little of the human condition’s scope the popular franchises in the DCU cover. The highest compliment I can pay to the Doom Patrol is that they’re one of the most Marvel-like casts in the DCU ( a point made prominently by the Kirby-tribute issue Grant Morrison did, which basically recast the Doom Patrol as the Fantastic Four with little difficulty ), because they were the angels with dirty faces who operated on the fringes of their world. The more famous DC heroes were pretty white people who held respectable community positions in both identities and had powers that were completely desirable. This made most of them entirely unconvincing as heroes, when most of the Justice League had the profile of Skull and Bones alums. The villains weren’t much better either, and the result was making superheroes vs. supervillains an elaborate gentleman’s sport with no relevance to anyone else. And I can’t really say it’s that much better now, since while Identity Crisis was much more violent, it didn’t concern anyone other than the upper class version of superhumanity that DC represents.

The Doom Patrol is one of DC’s few credible glimpses of the world outside itself, full of contradictions and not always conventionally pretty. Morrison just took that as far as he could go, and the fact that the collections of his stories have the Vertigo branding isn’t the fault of him writing out of sync with the DCU, but the DCU having such a narrow profile of what it’s in sync with.

Humans that were originally treated with high regards, made to feels special, are now being treated as animals, some humiliated and shipped away to some unknown fate…each being told what they could or could not do, under the guise of it being in humanities best interest.

With a feeling of dread, a small group declares war on the more advanced Evers in hopes of returning things to the way they should be…to the way they had been. John and his make-shift crew of humans and hybrids (half human/half Ever) must not only find a way to break free of the mistakes of the past and find out the disturbing secrets that the Evers have hidden away, but they must also deal with their own personal issues and learn to live, grow, and deal with each others’ emotional issues of love, regret and fear.

Will man give up youth and perfect health to live in the past? And will John take the chance of restoring Earth to its former state even though there’s a good chance his life-threatening disease can return?

The idea that Doom Patrol was created as a way to continue to exploit the horror/Sci Fi genres in comics after the Code came to effect is an interesting but likely true angle. It certainly would explain things like the Animal/Vegetal/Mineral man!

A good question would be: in this times, where superheroes dominate then industry, and society is more sensitive to outcasts, does Doom Patrol still have a place? Morrison basically used it as an excuse to pour out all his weird ideas, which, while interesting, felt really out of place in the DC Universe. Now we’re having Keith Giffen handle them. That means it’ll either be 4th-wall breakingly funny, or depressingly tragic, or both. That MIGHT fit in with DP… but still feels out of place. Will it work?