The Doom Patrol #1 Review
What’s that thing villains say again? Something like “Go Woke, Go Broke”? Well, unfortunately, it’s happened to the Doom Patrol because they need funds, and they need them now. But for those of you out there in the World Wide Web reading this, pushing your glasses further up your nose to scoff with your “um actually” locked and loaded to tell me that the Doom Patrol was just a cool superhero team with matching outfits one series ago, I’m here to tell you that everything dies. I hope I’m not the first to give you that news, but if I am, tissues are on the side table.
Anyway, death isn’t the end in comics. Characters, events, and ideas treat death like a revolving door. If you push the door fast enough, then you’re going to get sick. Well, the Doom Patrol flew too close to the sun and have been spit back out in The Doom Patrol #1 in their truest form…depressed, troubled, and looking for answers.
Dr. Niles Calder and I have been thinking about the cyclical nature of life and death. His is more about his own existence within the comics, but mine has been about the comics themselves. Every time a book ends, it dies. Doom Patrol especially knows that pain, with their original deaths leading into Grant Morrison’s prestige run that defined them, in ways that changed their existence forever. But that series ended, so did the next, and the ones after that. Everything dies.
But in comics, everything lives again. Darcy Von Poelgeest and Niko Henrichon understand this idea and make it an integral part of this debut issue. While it’s a perfect jumping-on point for new readers who are looking for characters that have so much trauma that they could open up a trauma storage center in their souls, it’s also the perfect continuation of what the Doom Patrol is.
These characters aren’t Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman. They’re Robot Man, Negative Man, and Elasti-Girl. They don’t get parades or monuments built in their honor. They fight, scrape, and do whatever it takes to make it to tomorrow. Van Poelgeest and Henrichon understand these characters, not just in the story they tell, but also in every fiber of this comic’s creation.
For example, Robot Man’s redesign is the perfect look for what’s going on with Cliffe Steel (the brain behind the metal). After losing everything, he no longer fits neatly into this world. His form and feelings are just too big to fit into spaces he could easily access before. Making him more a hulking behemoth of a robot rather than a slim “normal” framed person speaks volumes. The Doom Patrol has always found its success in the eyes of weirdos, freaks, and those who just don’t fit. Having someone with a body that the world isn’t made for, such as my own, makes these characters relatable in ways you don’t look to the trinity of DC heroes for. The Doom Patrol is for the outsiders.
While Elasti-Girl, aka Rita Farr, is trying to figure out why she even did the superhero thing in the first place, you have Negative Man, aka Larry Trainor, sitting in the back seat, having his own existential crisis about being, death, and his identity. While Rita wears what looks to be a super suit, Cliff and Larry are wearing much more typical plain clothes. Rita is clinging to that small piece of comfort in her own identity that she is a hero.
But for Larry, his outfit serves as a juxtaposition to the bandages covering every inch of his exposed body. Even if there are two people inside the one body that is Negative Man, neither is ever truly seen as they are. There is the comic explanation of the radiation from his body hurting those around him, but there is the real one…the fear of truly being seen. Larry has been a character struggling with his identity his entire life, even before he became Negative Man. Even if the black-and-red color scheme of Larry’s outfit makes him look like he is in a My Chemical Romance cover band, it all flows back into the darkness swirling through these characters as they struggle to exist at all.
Even when they’re fighting aliens from other worlds that sustain themselves on household pets, there is a much more emotional journey going on for the Doom Patrol. You want to feel the emotional burdens of these characters because then it feels like yours aren’t so heavy to carry. They’re striving to survive and thrive despite everything. They are trying to live again in a world that would rather see them die as quickly as they lived.
While The Doom Patrol #1 is the start of another cycle of life and death for the Doom Patrol, it redefines what they mean in the larger scale of the universe. This life of the Doom Patrol is without a full roster of weirdos with matching orange jumpsuits. This life of the Doom Patrol is defined by a need for something more than just their need for money. What they’re really chasing is self-actualization, some proof that their existence means something. While I know that this series, too, will someday die… if this rebirth is an indicator of the quality of this new journey overall, I hope it lives to be as old and decrepit as so many politicians who exist like ghouls in the policies that plague us.
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