Talk:Doom Patrol

Brotherhood of Dada

The Teen Titans/Outsiders Secret Files & Origins Handbook bring the Brotherhood of Dada at least back in-continuity. The Secret Society of Supervillains are said to be in talks with said group. The implications of this are either that the Brotherhood of Dada existed without the DP (which I find extrememly hard to believe, with Mr. Morden/Mr. Nobody relying heavily on the group and other various plot points) or that Morrison's run on DP, at the very least, existed. The only complicating fact is the appearance of Byrne's DP at the end of OMAC, during the desert battle. Why they did that, I don't know, but it serves to just complicate things. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by DoctorWorm7 (talk • contribs) 03:12, December 9, 2005 (UTC).: Please sign your posts!

Altered text regarding Superpunching continuity changes

I wanted to clarify that Superboy Prime's punching didn't overwrite history; it merely remixed it. Instead of a world where Jason Todd never died, Superboy created a world where Jason Todd died but was replaced by one who had lived. The fact that he died never changed.

However, things do get murky on the Doom Patrol. Nobody seems to remember them, although the effects they had on other people never changed or reversed. And during the Superboy-Prime fight, they regained memories of the adventures they had after the original line-up. So it may not be that those adventures never existed, once the original DP was back, only that no one remembered clearly until the Prime fight. (Beast Boy was having some nagging feelings in Teen Titans). Chris Griswold 15:28, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

My reading of that bit of Infinite Crisis was that everything happened — the original '60s stories, the Kupperberg, Morrison, Pollack and Arcudi runs, and the Byrne run. Just as Superboy-Prime brought Jason Todd back to life, he also restored Rita Farr, Larry Trainor, Cliff Steele and the Chief to (roughly) their Silver Age statuses and made everybody forget about their previous lives. Ironically, this creates a double-memory/multiple-life status for the Doom Patrol which is sort of similar to what Byrne did to Donna Troy.

I think we're saying the same thing here; I may just not have phrased it well in my first attempt. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 06:20, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Morrison-era villains

Much as I love Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, I'm not sure that this article needs to list every villain the team encountered on his watch. Should this be removed, perhaps to a daughter article? Should there perhaps be a List of Doom Patrol villains, organized by era? I think that would be more in the spirit of WP:FICT than, say, an article on Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 05:37, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. Disproportionately long in this entry but would work in a willains article. --Chris Griswold 08:22, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Right. I don't know that much about the Silver Age DP, but I'll try to whip something together this week. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 06:38, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

This obviously never happened. If anyone else wants to take the lead on this, please feel free. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 17:27, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Copyedit/impending potential snippage

I just gave the article a once-over, fixing grammar and whatnot and generally (hopefully) making it flow a little better, but I gotta say that it seems like there's a lot of extraenous stuff there, and the whole thing with, what, four or five different team rosters and lists of villains and whatnot just strikes me as confusing. Honestly, I think the article would benefit from a lot of cutting and reorganizing, but I don't quite want to do that without bringing it up here first. What do you guys think? -- Captain Disdain 04:16, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, since the notice above was up for about a week and no one objected, I got to work. I started out by cutting away the rogues' gallery list and the allies list, although I did add a summary about the Morrison villains (and Flex Mentallo is now mentioned under Danny the Street's entry). I also moved the trade paperback section way down, because right now it was just in a kind of confusing place.

I'm still thinking on how to deal with the team rosters, because they're just very long and unwieldy and unfortunately make reading the article a kind of a chore at best. (I think this is a prime example of a fairly common phenomenon on Wikipedia -- someone comes up with a certain way of organizing things, and when others continue along the same vein, it eventually snowballs into something that is no longer convenient.) As you can see, I ended up taking the entire team rosters away and putting them into one bigass "Members of Doom Patrol" section below everything else, but I don't think it's a terribly elegant solution, either (you can really see just how much stuff they take up in the article now, though!). Still, I do think it's a definite improvement, since it makes following the actual chronology a lot easier -- that kind of flow is very important to readability. Perhaps a separate article, along the lines of List of Avengers members, would be the best solution here? (I was going to make this into a table, as in the Avengers article, but frankly, the way Wikipedia does tables is such a pain in the ass that I couldn't find the energy to do it right now...)

If you guys disagree with me here, feel free to voice your concerns! -- Captain Disdain 03:37, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Ages ago, I was going to try to create separate articles for the members and villains, but never got around to it. I still think it would be a good idea, and would streamline this entry considerably. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 17:26, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Question of facts

Coming to this article late, but I’ve got a big question… Is there a factual reference to the statements that the intent of all of the subsequent teams was to catch the spirit of the original? If not the paragraph sounds, in part, like opinion. Should this be flagged, rewritten, or dropped? — J Greb 01:02, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

John Arcudi's Doom Patrol Roster

I quote from the article as it is as of this post: "Rounding out the four new members and Cliff were Elongated Man, Doctor Light, and Beast Boy, another former Doom Patroler."

Excuse me, no. Those were the replacements that Jost tried to use when they got the copyright. While I haven't seen Kid Slick, Fever, Flash Forward/Negative Man and (the Indian woman's name escapes me at the moment) used since the title was cancelled, that was the Doom Patrol.

It becomes a quibbling point. Jost was the one behind the new version of the DP. His first strategy was was to use Slick, Fever, FF, and Freak as the team. When they, and the faux-Cliff walked he hired replacements, as he saw as his right.

The article needs the point clarified though, as written it makes it sound like all 9 were in from the start. The role the "replacements" played needs a few more lines. — J Greb 23:42, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

And the "four new members" should be named, at the very least. --Noclevername (talk) 04:01, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Matthew Cable

The page for Matthew Cable claims that he was a member of the Doom Patrol. If so, when (what issueS)? --Scottandrewhutchins 14:29, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Cable appeared in the three-issue story arc in Showcase #s 94-96 that launched Paul Kupperberg's "New Doom Patrol" in 1977. Seems to be his entire connection to the DP. Never a member, apparently. Ted Watson (talk) 19:11, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Bob Haney as co-creator--maybe not!

The article flatly credits Bob Haney as co-creator of the Doom Patrol—in fact, it gives him top billing—which he may very well not truly deserve. Here is the evidence, mostly courtesy of a "Hero History" of the feature, "The Life and Death of the Doom Patrol" in Amazing Heroes #6, November 1981, Zam Inc., (not Fantagraphics!), Stamford, CT, by George Guay, pp.36-54.

[V]eteran editor Murray Boltinoff asked writer Arnold Drake to develop a feature suited to the book [that is, My Greatest Adventure]. Drake remembers one Friday outlining the idea for the characters and the series to Boltinoff, who then asked for the finished script the following Tuesday. Drake decided he could use some help in meeting the deadline, so he turned to another DC freelance scripter, Bob Haney, for help in fleshing out the concept and writing the first story. As Drake recalls it, Haney contributed one of the male characters, "probably Negative Man, although it could have been Robotman, I don't remember. Bob didn't have an assignment and I was overworked, so I went to him and said 'let's plot it together, then you write one half of the story and I'll write the other.' I believe he ended up writing the second half." (p. 39, last paragraph of column one)

Let me stop for a couple of points. Nowhere in the entire article is there an acknowledgement of DC's earlier Robotman character, who was as close to this one as the Flash and Green Lantern of that 1940s era were to Julius Schwartz's then-current characters of the same names and powers. If Drake's memory was a little off and Cliff rather than Larry was Haney's work, that obviously restricts Bob's level of creative imput. There is a similar aspect to Drake's claim of who scripted what in MGA #80. While the story is divided into three chapters, this was not done evenly. The opener, the origin of the team, takes up exactly half of the 24-page story-&-art allotment. The remainder depicted their first battle against recurring villain General Immortus. If Drake's version/memory is accurate this time, Haney's input in the creation of the feature itself is limited. Back to Guay's article, picking up exactly where we left it.

Haney remembered an 'almost 50-50' involvement in the beginning of the series. But he never did get too enthusiastic about it and left after 'two or three or four issues. After I dropped out, he did a fine job,' Haney said of Drake's work. Drake, however, remembers Haney being involved in only the first issue. 'I think Bob may have been unhappy that I didn't use him again,' said Drake. 'Maybe I didn't make it clear that I wasn't offering him a partnership on the series. I just offered to split a paycheck.' (p. 39, first paragraph of column two)

A further fact working against Haney's credit is that on a few occasions, someone would write to the DP book's letter column, asking just who created the feature. The response was invariably Boltinoff, Drake, and regular interior artist Bruno Premiani. No mention of Haney, ever (Murray was probably responsible for those text pages). One thing working in his favor, however, was the Flash/Doom Patrol team-up he wrote for The Brave and the Bold #65, April-May 1966. From the beginning of that feature/format, Haney had a bad habit of ignoring existing continuity for these B&B team-up stories and, worse, making up his own (I can give examples if they are needed, but won't bother right now), but not here. While the Flash could have been any character with the power to move at near light-speed, Bob's fidelity to the Patrol's feature is, for him, mind-boggling; in fact, it reads like the speedster was guesting in their title. Most telling, Haney has Rita mention something here that upon its one and only use in the regular series seemed to have been created as a throw-away excuse for a plot development. In DP #95, May 1965, "The Menace of the Turnabout Heroes," the Chief announced that he had found a possible cure for both her and Larry's conditions as Elasti-Girl and Negative Man. I don't remember the exact details, but it involved playing their respective energies off against each other, and Caulder explained that it was very risky, that it could prove fatal. This led Cliff to ask why Rita, who had simply gained super-powers from her accident, would take that risk. The answer: she was dying from the same thing that had given her those powers (the attempt resulted in the two temporarily having each other's powers, although the presence of the radio-energy being in her body—which sported her silhouette, "figure" and skirt, on emergence!—didn't render her radioactive, and Larry never checked his own level beneath his bandages). Haney's B&B story had Rita mention this terminal condition, and as far as I know, it's never been brought up in any DP story since! But even by Haney's own account here, his name doesn't deserve to come ahead of Drake's in the creator credit. So just how do we work this into the infobox and text? Ted Watson (talk) 21:25, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Nearly four months have passed with no comment here from anybody, so I've added Drake's alternate version of Haney's contribution to the text and moved Haney to the bottom of the infobox's list of creators with a "disputed" note, and cited Guay's article at both places (my edit summary includes a link to this thread, as well). Don't know just when, but I'll get my copies of the 60s run out of storage and cite each letter-column instance of listing the Patrol's creators with no mention of Haney, and I mean in the article. --Ted Watson (talk) 18:08, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Almost nine years later, and Ted Watson's user page reveals that he left Wikipedia way back in 2010 (he actually openly states that he opposes the policy that disputes should be resolved with civil discussion and believes that personal attacks and assuming bad faith are more appropriate), but the above post is still useful. I was puzzled why the article says that Arnold Drake disputes Haney's co-creator credit when in Back Issue #65 he explicitly credits him for co-creating Negative Man; this post makes clear that Ted Watson was performing original analysis on the source.

For those unwilling to read TW's wall of text post, the gist of his reasoning is: Drake says in the source that the character Haney co-created was probably Negative Man, but might have been Robotman. Robotman is basically the same as the earlier character of the same name, so if we assume Robotman is the one Drake was partially crediting to Haney, then Drake is saying that Haney didn't co-create anything.

I don't think I need to point out the flaws in that argument. TW makes a few other points, but none of them have anything to do with the source he cited, or indeed with anything Arnold Drake has had to say about Doom Patrol. In light of that, along with the info in Back Issue #65, I'm removing the "disputed" remarks.--NukeofEarl (talk) 21:46, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

When asked about whether Robotman had any connection to the Golden Age Robotman, Arnold Drake said no, during the interview that served as the basis for the cited article.

Also, in the first few issues of the series, Clifford Steele was identified as Automaton so that the "Robotman" designation only showed up later. Rhetoricofghostbikes (talk) 01:48, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

X-Patrol

a mention of the merging with one of the x-teams during the Amalgam saga perhaps? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.228.98.111 (talk) 20:49, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

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