| 1 | [[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/doom_patrol_vol_2_19.jpg]] |
| 2 | [[caption-width-right:350:Robotman desperately attempts to make sense of this issue's plot.]] |
| 3 | |
| 4 | ->'''Cliff''': All I want is the answer to one simple question before I run screaming back to the ''bug-house:'' is this ''real'' or isn't it? |
| 5 | ->'''The Chief''': Reality and unreality have no clear distinction in our present circumstances, Cliff. |
| 6 | -->-- ''The Doom Patrol,'' vol. 2 #21 |
| 7 | |
| 8 | In 1963, Creator/DCComics published a book with a new kind of superhero team: the Doom Patrol. They were loners, misfits, mistrusted by the public, and led by a genius in a wheelchair. Despite obvious similarities, this team came out several months before ''ComicBook/XMen'' was published by the [[Creator/MarvelComics marvelous competition]], which has led to unproven accusations of plagiarism. The series was written by Arnold Drake (with an assist on the first issue by Bob Haney) and penciled almost entirely by Bruno Premiani. The Patrol first appeared in ''My Greatest Adventure'' #80 (June 1963) and continued appearing in subsequent issues. With #86 (March 1964), the book was renamed after the team. While the X-Men eventually flourished in the [[TheSeventies 1970s]], initial sales of ''Doom Patrol'' died down and the original series ended quickly when Drake decided to go out with a [[NoOneCouldSurviveThat bang]] and kill them all off. The last issue was numbered #121 (September-October, 1968). |
| 9 | |
| 10 | [[NotQuiteDead It didn't quite stick]]. Over a decade later, the team was relaunched, with all new characters reminiscent of the older ones... and it turned out Robotman survived because he was everyone's favorite anyway. The second version of the Patrol appeared in ''Showcase'' #94-96 (August-December, 1977), written by Paul Kupperberg. Sales were not good enough to get them a new title, but they went on to become regulars of the DC universe, receiving guest appearances in Kupperberg-written titles featuring ComicBook/{{Supergirl}}, the ComicBook/TeenTitans, and ComicBook/{{Superman}}. |
| 11 | |
| 12 | ''Doom Patrol'' vol. 2 was launched in October 1987, still written by Kupperberg. Eventually, most of the original team was revealed to have been resurrected in some way or alive all along, and the new book added several other characters who colored within the superhero lines and didn't quite set the world on fire. Then came Creator/GrantMorrison, who dedicated them more specifically to fighting "weird" crime and disasters. Their first StoryArc, "Crawling from the Wreckage", built up the weirdness of the comic to extremes and delved into some adult subject matter. There were cloth beings with scissor hands from imaginary worlds, a painting with infinite pocket dimensions based on various art currents, the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E, and a [[GeniusLoci friendly crossdressing street]] named, well... Danny the Street. Just in case you were wondering, he dresses like a boulevard. [[NotMakingThisUpDisclaimer No, really.]] And then it got even weirder. Morrison left and, with the switchover of the book to Creator/VertigoComics, Creator/RachelPollack, more well known as a tarot expert and prose fiction writer, took over. Her run touched on similar topics of gender politics and chaos vs. order, and added new characters like Coagula (One of the earlier trans superheroines) or the Bandage People, but the book did not retain its popularity and it got canceled. The title ended with issue #87 (February 1995). |
| 13 | |
| 14 | Since then there have been a few subsequent revivals. [[ComicBook/{{BPRD}} John Arcudi]] wrote a series for twenty-two issues - the first few issues seemed like a typical "corporate superhero" reboot [[MidSeasonTwist but this was a fake-out]], and they rapidly got entangled in more typically "Doom Patrol" schemes involving [[TheBusCameBack characters from the previous series]], corporate manipulation, a soul-stealing demon, and Chinese sorcerer spirits. Unfortunately, due to the fake-out opening issues, the series shed regular readers and was eventually canceled. Creator/JohnByrne did a ContinuityReboot that [[PoorlyDisguisedPilot had its starting point occur in]] the "Tenth Circle" arc of ''ComicBook/JLA1997'' and was straight superhero fare - ill-fated to begin with and eventually ended with the CrisisCrossover ''ComicBook/InfiniteCrisis'' undoing most of Byrne's changes and restoring the team's history, albeit with the implication that Byrne's run [[BroadStrokes still occurred in some capacity]]. To give credit where it is due, Byrne did finally manage to bring the original member (the ''only'' one who had yet to return) Elasti-Girl BackFromTheDead, though. After an appearance in the ''ComicBook/TeenTitans'' comic and [[WesternAnimation/TeenTitans2003 its 2003 animated series]], their popularity resurged enough for them to get their new series in 2009, written by Keith Giffen (of ''[[ComicBook/JusticeLeagueInternational JLI]]'' fame) who was practically begging for the position. This time, the original team was employed as a policing force of sorts on Oolong Island, the haven for [[MadScientist mad scientists]] from ''ComicBook/FiftyTwo'', and Giffen made it clear that (in typically weird Doom Patrol fashion) ''everything'' had happened to them. [[MultipleChoicePast Even the contradictory stuff]]. It came to an end with ''ComicBook/{{Flashpoint|DCComics}}'' and the subsequent ''ComicBook/New52'' relaunch. |
| 15 | |
| 16 | In the ''New 52'' era of DC Comics, Creator/GeoffJohns' run on ''ComicBook/{{Justice League|2011}}'' introduced two new versions of the Doom Patrol during the ''ComicBook/{{Forever Evil|2013}}'' event and the "Injustice League" arc, the first roster being similar to that of the Paul Kupperbeg era and seemingly wiped out by the [[Characters/JusticeLeagueOfAmericaCrimeSyndicate Crime Syndicate]] (though Celsius and Joshua Clay were later revealed to have faked their deaths) and the second being closer to the original roster, but with the addition of a new teammate named Element Woman. |
| 17 | |
| 18 | As part of [[Music/MyChemicalRomance Gerard Way]]'s Creator/YoungAnimal imprint at DC during the ''ComicBook/DCRebirth'' era, ''ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016'' launched as the imprint's flagship book, written by Way himself. This run reinstated the team's pre-''Flashpoint'' history and made their ''New 52'' appearances CanonDiscontinuity, with Way's run picking up from elements of Giffen's. |
| 19 | |
| 20 | The Doom Patrol featured prominently in the final season premiere of ''WesternAnimation/TeenTitans2003,'' since Titans member Beast Boy was a Doom Patrol alumnus, while the Brotherhood of Evil would become the antagonists for the rest of the season. The team got ADayInTheLimelight in ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheBraveAndTheBold'', fighting Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man and General Zahl. They also got their series of shorts on ''WesternAnimation/DCNation'' which are almost verbatim adaptations of some of Drake's earliest stories. The 2019 revival of ''WesternAnimation/YoungJustice2010'' had Beast Boy established to have been a member of the Doom Patrol before everyone else except Mento and Robotman died off-screen. After that, they'd appear in the ''Teen Titans'' spinoff ''WesternAnimation/TeenTitansGo'', making their debut in the sixth season. |
| 21 | |
| 22 | A [[Series/DoomPatrol2019 live-action series based on the Doom Patrol]] premiered on Creator/DCUniverse in 2019, as a spinoff of ''Series/{{Titans|2018}}''[[note]]Though they then declared the two shows take place in separate, but almost identical, continuities. One where the Chief is Demián Bichir, one where he's Timothy Dalton. For anyone other than the Doom Patrol, that would be weird[[/note]]. This version of the team features a classic lineup of Caulder, Robotman, Negative Man, and Elasti-Woman, but is primarily influenced by Morrison's run of the comic. |
| 23 | |
| 24 | In 2023, a new ''Doom Patrol'' miniseries was released, ''ComicBook/UnstoppableDoomPatrol'', in which the team is once again integrated into the wider DC universe. In this iteration, the team deals with strange crises and offers shelter to new metahumans empowered by the fallout of ''ComicBook/LazarusPlanet''. |
| 25 | |
| 26 | ---- |
| 27 | !!''Doom Patrol'' provides examples of: |
| 28 | * AbledInTheAdaptation: The ''ComicBook/New52'' incarnation of Niles Caulder is able to walk and doesn't use a wheelchair. |
| 29 | * AdaptationalEarlyAppearance: In the New 52 canon, most of the Paul Kupperberg run's roster (the exceptions being Robotman, [[AdaptationalLateAppearance who doesn't join the team until the second roster in this continuity]], and Rhea Jones, who [[AdaptedOut doesn't appear at all]]) are introduced during the ''ComicBook/ForeverEvil2013'' event as the first incarnation of the Doom Patrol, when in the original continuity they were the second iteration of the team. |
| 30 | * AdaptationalLateAppearance: The New 52 continuity has the original roster of Robotman, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl introduced in the "Injustice League" arc of ''ComicBook/JusticeLeague2011'' as the second roster of the Doom Patrol with the majority of the Paul Kupperberg version of the team being [[AdaptationalEarlyAppearance their predecessors]], when it was the other way around in the original continuity. |
| 31 | * AdaptationalSkimpiness: The New 52 incarnation of Negative Man has a jacket as his only apparel besides his bandages. |
| 32 | * AdoptingTheAbused: |
| 33 | ** After he was orphaned, Beast Boy lived under the care of his abusive guardian Nicholas Galtry before Elasti-Girl and Mento adopted him as their son. |
| 34 | ** Dorothy Spinner lived with AbusiveParents (who were retroactively established in John Arcudi's run to not even be her biological parents) before joining the Doom Patrol and ended up having the Bandage People George and Marion become her more caring surrogate parents in Rachel Pollack's run. |
| 35 | * AllJustADream: Used as a FramingDevice during the Creator/GrantMorrison run to introduce an AffectionateParody ({{Pastiche}}, really) of the '60s ''ComicBook/FantasticFour''. |
| 36 | * AnthropomorphicPersonification: A few during Grant Morrison's run: |
| 37 | ** The Candlemaker is [[spoiler:the personification of the fear of the apocalypse, particularly of the nuclear bomb/WorldWar3]] |
| 38 | ** Number None represents the concept of the enemy in any situation. Everyone at one point has been him. He is the chair that colapses when you're trying to make a good impression, the man who blocks the sideway, the one who bumps you when you're late... [[MindScrew Yeah,]] [[NotMakingThisUpDisclaimer really]] |
| 39 | * TheAntiGod: Decreator, also known as Anti-God, is the first shadow cast by God's light. Once awakened, it will unmake all existence. However, Crazy Jane points out that it's a reflection, a vibration... and therefore, can be interfered with like any other wave-form. With the help of Rebis and Kipling, they manage to set up a counter-vibration that almost completely cancels out the Unmaker so that it's now only unmaking the universe very, ''very'' slowly. One bite at a time... |
| 40 | --> '''The Chief:''' [[BrickJoke That's odd. I seem to have misplaced my pen.]] |
| 41 | * AntiVillain: The Brotherhood of Dada as led by Mr. Nobody believed they were genuinely making the world a better place by embracing insanity and strangeness, feeling a world without order or boundaries would be far less oppressive for the majority of the downtrodden, the abused, and the mentally ill. In their last appearance, Robotman ends up trying to save them when the government dispatches a team to kill them. |
| 42 | * AnyoneCanDie: Usually only at the end of one writer's run or the start of the next, but it's practically tradition to kill a few characters to clean the slate. |
| 43 | * TheArtifact: |
| 44 | ** Rita Farr and Beast Boy were dressing in the red-and-white costumes from their earliest ''Doom Patrol'' days for decades after the rest of the team retired them. It's all the more jarring since the loss of the outfits' "team uniform" status highlights how little relevance it has to either character as an individual. At least Beast Boy had one version featuring a paw print design. |
| 45 | ** Cliff Steele's struggles with his robotic body are becoming increasingly outdated as technology continues to advance; nothing is stopping him from becoming a RidiculouslyHumanRobot, especially in a universe with both FantasticScience and WeirdScience in play. |
| 46 | *** This got addressed a bit in Grant Morrison's run, where Cliff gets a replacement body that has the sense of taste and touch. (things go a bit odd when it decides to run around on its own afterward and gets blown up). |
| 47 | * ArtificialLimbs: Cliff Steele, his entire body has been replaced with robotic parts. |
| 48 | * ArtShift: The issues that deal with the second return of the Brotherhood of Dada are done in a much more cartoony style. Possibly justified since they're centered a lot around LSD, and all the characters are tripping balls. |
| 49 | * BackForTheDead: |
| 50 | ** Arani Desai, Negative Woman, Karma, and Scott Fischer of the early-80s Kupperberg era showed up in the New 52 ComicBook/ForeverEvil2013 event purely to be [[CListFodder killed by Johnny Quick and Atomica.]] [[spoiler: It's later revealed in ''ComicBook/JusticeLeague2011'' that Celsius and Tempest faked their deaths and have gone into hiding just to get away from Caulder, while Karma, Scott Fischer, and two unseen members called the Negative Twins are dead.]] |
| 51 | ** Keith Giffen's run starts by bringing back Nudge and Grunt from John Byrne's run, only for the former to be killed off. |
| 52 | ** The Toy reappears 18 years after her initial few-panel appearance, only to immediately be another casualty of Keith Giffen's run when she is killed by [[spoiler:Mr. Somebody]]. |
| 53 | * BackstoryInvader: Rachel Pollack's run had the False Memory, a character who had the power to make people remember things that never actually happened. She tries to infiltrate the Doom Patrol by using her power to dupe the team into believing she's a longtime associate of theirs, but is ultimately forced to leave when Dorothy Spinner refuses to believe her deceptions and convinces the rest of the team to pull the wool from their eyes. |
| 54 | * BadFuture: |
| 55 | ** It's implied that ''Doom Force'', a one-shot focusing on an alternate future incarnation of the team with an adult Dorothy Spinner as the only member retained from a previous roster, takes place in a future where [[spoiler:the Chief's global catastrophe intended to raise the metahuman population while culling the ordinary humans occurred]]. |
| 56 | ** Another Bad Future occurs in ''[[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Weight of the Worlds]]''. [[spoiler:Cliff continued to upgrade into a planet, and Mento tries to stop him but loses control. This ends up trapping the team in a city called Goliath on Planet Cliff. Overtime Rita has lost control of her body, looking like a large bud-like creature; Beast Boy became trapped as a chimpanzee; Casey entered Jane's Underground and became trapped, with her becoming Jane's dominant and only personality; Danny disappeared; Flex became lost in space; Larry was used as a power source for Mento's helmet.]] |
| 57 | * BadPeopleAbuseAnimals: When Dorothy Spinner describes how awful her bully Bernard Muller (who was killed as a result of the first wish the Candlemaker granted her, [[IWishedYouWereDead much to her regret]]) was to her, a flashback panel shows Dorothy horrified that Bernard had hung a cat (no context is given on whether the cat was Dorothy's pet or merely a stray she befriended). |
| 58 | * BananaPeel: |
| 59 | ** The cover to volume two, isue 34 showed a heavily armed gorilla (Monsieur Mallah) walking along the street pushing a baby carriage and about to slip on a banana peel. |
| 60 | ** Volume two, issue 50 has Crazy Jane slip on a banana peel because of Brotherhood of Dada member Number None. |
| 61 | * BestialityIsDepraved: Deconstructed and ignored with the Brain and Monsieur Mallah's relationship. While both are villains, the only thing that's ever really discussed is that they're gay, and rarely, if ever, does the fact that that the Brain is well, a human BrainInAJar and Mallah is an evolved gorilla comes up. |
| 62 | * TheBlank: The Fact and Yankee Doodle (both parodies of The Question). |
| 63 | * BlessedWithSuck / CursedWithAwesome: |
| 64 | ** The whole point of the original field team; each had a horrible disfigurement or some other way in which their powers were supposedly as much a curse as a blessing. The problem is, this wasn't true of Elasti-Girl; WordOfGod says this is the reason she was the only member of the original team not brought back for Morrison's run. (Later runs that include Rita now compensate by endowing her with BodyHorror -- her body melts like wax when she's not consciously shaping it). |
| 65 | ** Morrison's run made this a primary element, particularly surrounding how none of the team could function in society. |
| 66 | * BlobMonster: The Keith Giffen series reveals [[spoiler:Rita]] can degenerate into this. [[spoiler:She's become so elastic that prolonged periods without seeing/picturing her original form (like while asleep) result in her becoming an amorphous mound of... stuff]]. |
| 67 | * BookEnds: |
| 68 | ** When Cliff first meets Crazy Jane, it's raining, she's upset that her painting has been spoiled by the rain, and Cliff implores her to 'Come in out of the rain'. Later in the series, [[spoiler:Crazy Jane is transported to (what seems to be) our reality, where Cliff finds her again on another rainy day, and says once again 'Come in out of the rain']] |
| 69 | ** The covers to the first and last issues of John Arcudi's run both depict the rest of the team reflected on Robotman's head, the former having him think to himself "We're doomed" while the latter has him remark "I was right. We '''are''' doomed." |
| 70 | * BrainInAJar: Monsieur Mallah's partner, The Brain, of course. Cliff, too, as he's just a brain in a robot body. [[spoiler: And by Pollack's run, Niles Caulder is reduced to a bad-tempered head on a tray. He gets better]]. |
| 71 | * BrainUploading: [[spoiler: After Cliff's original brain is crushed by the Candlemaker near the end of Grant Morrison's run, he survives by having a digital copy of his mind installed into his robot body. This is later undone in Rachel Pollack's run, where Cliff's inability to cope with no longer having an organic brain causes him to glitch and he isn't fixed until he is given an empty organic brain to store his memories in by the Teiresiae.]] |
| 72 | * BreakfastClub: The team composed of societal rejects who stick together mainly because they have no one else to turn to. |
| 73 | * BreakingTheFourthWall: The final arc of the 2009 series is "resolved" when [[spoiler: ComicBook/AmbushBug tells the villain of the arc that [[EndOfSeriesAwareness the book is being canceled]] to make room for ''ComicBook/{{Flashpoint|DCComics}}'' tie-ins.]] |
| 74 | * BreatherEpisode: Subverted. The arc that introduced Rhea Jones awakening from her coma had various side bits that were shaping up the final confrontation with the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. and Flex Mentallo, but the arc itself had the main team traveling in space when all this took place. |
| 75 | ** Issue #45 is a more conventional one, but still offers some {{Foreshadowing}} to [[spoiler: the twist of the Chief being EvilAllAlong.]] |
| 76 | * BroadStrokes: Creator/JohnByrne's run was infamous for ignoring the preceding runs and starting over the team's history from scratch. By the events of ''ComicBook/InfiniteCrisis'', a CosmicRetcon reinstated the previous runs as canon, but did not necessarily do away with the events of John Byrne's run (as Grunt and Vortex, two of the new teammates introduced in Byrne's run, still appeared during an issue of Creator/GeoffJohns' run on ''ComicBook/TeenTitans'' that tied in to ''Infinite Crisis'' and at the beginning of Keith Giffen's ''Doom Patrol'' run), presumably indicating that the John Byrne era now occurred without the alterations to the canon that occurred in that run (particularly, the Doom Patrol being a novice superhero team who had operated in secret prior to the "Tenth Circle" arc of ''ComicBook/JLA1997'', changing who was responsible for crippling the Chief from General Immortus to T'oombala, the shaman of a tribe the Chief once helped out who was jealous of the Chief's medical expertise, and Elasti-Girl being in love with Robotman). |
| 77 | * TheBusCameBack: [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's run]] has established that the entire history of the Doom Patrol before ''ComicBook/{{Flashpoint|DCComics}}'' still happened, picking up where Keith Giffen's run ended and acknowledging most of Morrison's run, with no mention of the team's New 52 appearances. |
| 78 | * CallBack: The remains of the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. and the Ant Farm were briefly seen in the Pentagon during Rachel Pollack's run. They're referred to as "Mistakes of the past." |
| 79 | * CallingYourBathroomBreaks: A group therapy session in Grant Morrison's run has awkwardness ensue when Dorothy uses her turn to state that she needs to use the bathroom. |
| 80 | * TheCameo: |
| 81 | ** Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and their then-sidekicks (three of the then-four ''ComicBook/TeenTitans'') appear at the actual wedding of Steve Dayton and Rita Farr, which is possibly related to Beast Boy being a GuestStar in the ''Titans'' comics at around the same time. Steve's and Rita's BigDamnKiss makes Wonder Woman swoon. |
| 82 | * CanonDiscontinuity: As far as Gerard Way's ''ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016'' is concerned, the team that appeared in the New 52-era ''ComicBook/{{Justice League|2011}}'' don't count, and instead the series picks up an ambiguous amount of time after Giffen's series ended[[note]]Admittedly, Giffen had already rid himself of the last few old members by having Nudge sawn in half with machinegun fire and her companion Grunt run off into the wild in a panic[[/note]]. The Doom Patrol is relatively rare among DC titles in that it's never had a true reboot (except for Creator/JohnByrne's, which rapidly got un-rebooted), and all the previous series "count" to [[BroadStrokes some]] [[ComicBookTime extent]]. |
| 83 | * CaptainErsatz: Willoughby Kipling is a stand-in for [[ComicBook/{{Hellblazer}} John Constantine]] (and in fact was created because DC prohibited Grant Morrison from using Constantine), and the Decreatot/Anti-god one for the Great Evil Beast of Moore's ''ComicBook/SwampThing'' run. |
| 84 | * CentralTheme: |
| 85 | ** Morrison's run: Normalcy vs. weirdness. |
| 86 | ** Pollack's run: Stagnancy vs. change. |
| 87 | * ChekhovsBoomerang: In one of the earliest scenes in [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's run]], there's a murder of someone in a cape, a girl lying on the ground, and a man in a suit holding a bloody brick that has the words "I'm so sorry!!!" written on it. Later on, the scene is partially explained for Casey's origin - [[spoiler: Danny the World tells her that he was then Danny the Brick and traveling the universe with Crazy Jane when someone ambushed them and used Danny as a weapon to murder someone. This scene reappears again to start the Milk Wars, it turns out the victim was the God of Superheroes and he was murdered by Retconn so that they can take the stories of the Trinity and corrupt them.]] |
| 88 | * ComicBookMoviesDontUseCodenames: The original team was given their codenames by the press and didn't care for their "freak names". The second Doom Patrol was much more of a superhero outfit and went back to using them, but from Morrison's run onwards, when they are less of a "team" and more just a group of misfits who stick together, they usually don't bother. Many of the later characters don't even ''have'' codenames. |
| 89 | * CompensatingForSomething: Codpiece has a massive laser cannon fastened over his groin due to an...inferiority complex. |
| 90 | * ConjoinedTwins: Volume 2, issue 37 features a pair of conjoined twin acrobats called Romulus and Remus, the Siamese Aerialists. |
| 91 | * ContrastingReplacementCharacter: Pollack's run introduced some of this to the characters Morrison asked her not to use. |
| 92 | ** Crazy Jane's a biological woman who had been abused as a kid, had an implied hatred towards sex and was, at her best, unstable. Kate Godwin on the other hand was born a male but later changed her sex, had a relatively normal childhood but was lead to believe she had been abused, is very sex positive (She worked as a hooker at one point) and is the OnlySaneWoman on the team. |
| 93 | ** Rebis was an intersexual EnergyBeing covered in bandages who was very aloof and cold, very single minded, and had troubles with their own identity. The George and Marion on the other hand are a married couple of also {{Energy Being}}s covered in bandages who nevertheless were very affectionate, caring and friendly, and were perfectly OK with being the Bandage People. |
| 94 | * CopeByCreating: In the Pollack run, Dorothy Spinner uses her psychic abilities to create lots of imaginary friends as a way of coping with her profound loneliness. She even created her own version of Robotman, one that would never leave her. [[spoiler: She does this again during the Arcudi run.]] |
| 95 | * CreativeSterility: During the Morrison run, the Department of Defence kidnapped [[spoiler: Wally Sage]], a young reality warper to help them conceive of exotic means of weaponry. Unfortunately, after over a decade of exploitation, Wally's ideas started to diminish with his failing health, resulting in underwhelmingly twisted creations such as bird skull-headed wraiths armed with toy boomerangs. |
| 96 | * {{Crossover}}: |
| 97 | ** The original run by Arnold Drake had a crossover with ''ComicBook/ChallengersOfTheUnknown'', which occurred in the 48th issue of ''Challengers'' and the 102nd issue of ''Doom Patrol'', as well as a team-up with the Barry Allen Flash in the 65th issue of ''ComicBook/TheBraveAndTheBold''. |
| 98 | ** The Kupperberg run made a habit of using ''ComicBook/{{Superman}}'' (naturally, since he was also writing for that title), featuring a crossover with him when Robotman accidentally got a hold of Metallo's spare parts, an adventure with ComicBook/PowerGirl fighting the Lord of Chaos Pythia, and even got visited by Lex Luthor, who was trying to force the Patrol into a desperate position to make them his pawns. |
| 99 | ** The 14th issue of John Byrne's run had Robotman find himself shifting to several alternate timelines, with one of the timelines being John Byrne's ''ComicBook/SupermanAndBatmanGenerations'', where Cliff finds himself a member of this continuity's Doom Patrol and assists Kid Flash, Supergirl, Dick Grayson as Batman and Bruce Wayne, Jr. as Robin in confronting the Brain and Monsieur Mallah (the scene in question in fact being the only time the Brain and Mallah appear in John Byrne's run). |
| 100 | ** Keith Giffen's run featured a crossover with Gail Simone's ''ComicBook/SecretSix'' near the end, with part one occurring in the 30th issue of ''Secret Six'' and part two occurring in the 19th issue of ''Doom Patrol''. |
| 101 | * CuckooNest: Creator/GrantMorrison's final issue centers [[spoiler: on Crazy Jane in a mental hospital in the real world, where one of the supervising doctors, convinced all of her Doom Patrol adventures have been delusions, subjects her to electroshock and discharges her to live a humdrum "normal" existence. However, in the end, teammate Cliff Steele saves her from suicide by taking her "home" to the utopian [[GeniusLoci Danny the World]].]] |
| 102 | * CurbstompBattle: The first time they fought the Brotherhood of Dada, Doom Patrol only had Cliff, Rebis, and Jane in the field. Outnumbered and with no one matching the power of the Quiz or Sleepwalker's brute strength, the Patrol went down fast. Doom Patrol never did defeat the first Brotherhood of Dada as the latter had a HeelFaceTurn and helped save the world. |
| 103 | * DarkAndTroubledPast: |
| 104 | ** Played straight with Crazy Jane and Dorothy Spinner, with the former suffering sexual abuse so bad her mind fractured into sixty-plus split personalities,[[note]]She's based on artist Truddi Chase, author of ''Literature/WhenRabbitHowls'', who was sexually abused from an early age and had ''92'' selves. She claimed to have some psychic ability.[[/note]] and the latter was cruelly bullied because of her appearance and mentally traumatized by her first period. |
| 105 | ** Subverted in Rachel Pollack's run. In #83, Coagula remembers a supressed memory of being joint-raped by her "husband and his friend". Kate spends the rest of the issue trying to figure out when it happened until Dorothy manages to bring her back to her senses: [[spoiler: It's a fake memory implanted by the False Memory. Kate is outraged that the False Memory believed she was giving Kate's life more "meaning" by making her think she was sexually violated when she was a teenager.]] |
| 106 | * DarkerAndEdgier: The Morrison run is by far much more disturbing and surreal than the Drake run or Kupperberg run, discussing topics such as sexual abuse and the evils of the government while using fouler language. |
| 107 | ** Pollack's is even darker than Grant's run, toning down a lot the SurrealHumour DenserAndWackier stuff of the Morrison Era. |
| 108 | * DeadpanSnarker: |
| 109 | ** Flash Forward is soon nicknamed Negative Man by his teammates for his icy temperament. |
| 110 | ** Likewise, Beast Boy. Yes, [[ComicBook/TeenTitans that Beast Boy.]] He made his debut here, where he frequently made snippy remarks towards the rest of the team. |
| 111 | ** In Grant Morrison's stint as a writer, Robotman had a tendency to make dry remarks. |
| 112 | * {{Deconstruction}}: Despite the word being beloved of comics critics at the time, Creator/GrantMorrison (in ''Supergods'') maintains their run was ''not'' a deconstruction of superhero comics. Rather, it was the most traditional superhero comic they'd done at the time, it simply proceeded from a different cultural background than most comics. Instead of coming from a background of Creator/JackKirby, ''Franchise/FlashGordon'', ''ComicBook/TheShadow'' and Creator/EdgarRiceBurroughs, Morrison started from Creator/JorgeLuisBorges, PostPunk, Abbie Hoffman, and Creator/WilliamSBurroughs, and wrote what a superhero comic inspired by them might look like. |
| 113 | * DefrostingIceQueen: Celsius, who periodically showed that she had a human side despite her obsession with finding the Chief. |
| 114 | * DemotedToExtra: Tends to happen to them. Often lampshaded at the end of their newest guest appearance in some other hero team's series. |
| 115 | * DenserAndWackier: Than almost ''anything'' else in DC's entire library. They were billed as the "World's Strangest Heroes" for a reason. [[MindScrew Morrison's run]] mostly averted this by being absurdist horror, but even its LighterAndSofter issues were so weird it made ''other Doom Patrol comics'' seem normal by comparison. |
| 116 | * DependingOnTheArtist: |
| 117 | ** In series following the original Arnold Drake run, Cliff Steele would be lucky if his Robotman body could keep a consistent design for longer than a few issues. |
| 118 | ** Dorothy Spinner's physical appearance had several aspects subject to change depending on who drew her, such as whether she wore her hair in pigtails or wore her hair down, whether she'd have hairy arms and the severity of her ape-like deformities (with Erik Larsen, Doug Braithwaite and Tan Eng Huat depicting her with a high forehead and a prominent brow, features which almost every other artist to draw her didn't use). |
| 119 | * DerailingLoveInterests: Of the non-LoveTriangle variety. In Volume 5, writer Keith Giffen dismantles two HappilyMarried couples into a handful of divorcees via retcon: Steve Dayton and Rita Farr on the one hand and Mal Duncan and Karen Beecher on the other. |
| 120 | * DisabilitySuperpower: Everyone. Morrison's run deliberately leaned into this. |
| 121 | ** Negative Man and Negative Woman are both radioactive and can never take off their bandages. |
| 122 | ** Robotman doesn't even have a real body anymore; he's just a brain in a can. |
| 123 | ** Zigzagged with Rita Farr, who suffered from PowerIncontinence in her backstory but had a handle on things by the time the Patrol officially began; her newer, DarkerAndEdgier post-''Infinite Crisis'' self is a BlobMonster trying to keep a human shape. |
| 124 | ** Downplayed with Beast Boy, who survived a fatal accident as a kid but is now stuck [[AllOfTheOtherReindeer with unappealing green skin that caused him a fair bit of grief]]. |
| 125 | ** Crazy Jane is an exaggerated take -- she has dozens of multiple personalities, and every single one of them has its superpower. |
| 126 | * DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: The "Empire of Chairs" issue included imagery of Crazy Jane being ambushed by the horrific Keysmiths, creatures with keys sticking out of their blank faces, for the sake of "unlocking" her. With the already phallic imagery of the keys protruding from their faces and the scenes of a large group of Keysmiths surrounding Jane while they (it is said) insert their keys into her, the whole thing comes across as if Jane is being gang-raped. Given Jane's origin story (similar to the real-life Truddi Chase) this is nightmarish. |
| 127 | * TheDogWasTheMastermind: The would-be cosmos destroyers in the Cult of the Unwritten book were led by the [[spoiler:Archons of Nurnheim —- i.e. a couple of Punch And Judy puppets]]. |
| 128 | * DroppedABridgeOnHim: [[spoiler: Kate]] was killed in a flashback [[spoiler: by Dorothy, accidentally]] in the Arcudi series. Nudge and Grunt are killed and run away respectively in the first issue of the Giffen series, with poor Nudge getting KilledMidSentence. Note that this is practically a Doom Patrol tradition - if the outgoing writer doesn't kill them all, the incoming writer will often do this. |
| 129 | * DudeShesLikeInAComa: Red Jack attempts to marry a comatose Rhea Jones. Cliff practically quotes this trope when he points this out. |
| 130 | * DyingMomentOfAwesome: Captain Zahl forces a SadisticChoice on the Patrol--save their skins, or save a dinky fishing village off the coast of Maine with a population of only thirteen people, a sacrifice that's not likely to be remembered. The Patrol grins and makes their choice: |
| 131 | -->'''The Patrol:''' [[BringIt Fire away!]] |
| 132 | * DysfunctionJunction: Practically every version of the Doom Patrol is this trope. |
| 133 | * EarlyInstallmentCharacterDesignDifference: |
| 134 | ** When the team first appeared in issue 80 of ''My Greatest Adventure'', Elasti-Girl and Negative Man wore solid green uniforms. By issue 89, three issues after the comic was retitled ''Doom Patrol'', the team started using the more familiar costumes colored red and white. |
| 135 | ** Mento in his first appearance wore a yellow costume and had his helmet leave the top part of his head uncovered before quickly having his ensemble changed to a black costume that only had the lighting bolt insignia colored yellow and a helmet that covered the top of his head completely. |
| 136 | ** The Brain originally appeared as a generic BrainInAJar and wouldn't be depicted encased in anything resembling his iconic skull-tank until issue 108. |
| 137 | * EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: |
| 138 | ** Frequent in the earlier issues from MediaNotes/TheSilverAgeOfComicBooks, to wit: |
| 139 | *** In one of the earlier issues, the Chief claims that Cliff Steele's robotic body still allows him the use of all five of his senses, when Cliff's later appearances would stress the traumatic loss of his normal senses of touch, taste, and smell inherent in having a whole-body prosthesis. |
| 140 | *** Early on, no clear explanation is given for why Larry Trainor, aka Negative Man, must wear bandages at all times. The idea that the bandages protect others from radiation given off by his altered body comes along later in the 1960s run. |
| 141 | *** While Cliff Steele is generally referred to by his given name, in the first two stories his codename is Automaton, not Robotman. |
| 142 | ** The original 1960s series made it clear that Cliff could die if his head was removed from his body, when later comics would establish that one of the benefits of his robotic body is that he can survive decapitation and will be okay as long as his head can be attached to a new body. |
| 143 | * EldritchAbomination: Many, the three most notable probably being the Decreator (a giant bloodshot eye in the sky rapidly unmaking all of existence), the Telephone Avatar (something that has haunted the telephone system for decades and is so horrible the dead are afraid of it) and the Candlemaker. |
| 144 | * EldritchLocation: |
| 145 | ** Orqwith is a parasitic dimension that was created when a dictionary about it was written in a langaguage that didn't exist. It sends [[HumanoidAbomination Scissormen]] to cut people from our world and bring them to Orqwith. The city itself is very bizarre, with bone buildings, surreal constructions (Such as a "weeping clock" or a machine that tracks the movement of the starts using the skull of kid) and a sickening brown atmosphere. |
| 146 | ** Danny the Street is a benevolent and pleasant version of this, in fact possibly the most well-adjusted member of any incarnation of the Doom Patrol. Regardless, they are a sentient street who can teleport to anywhere they want, they feed on human emotions, can understand human language and can regenerate themself from a brick. |
| 147 | ** The Pentagon (yes, really), which is filled with all kinds of messed up and horrific things that are only barely understood by the Department of Defense themselves, if at all. |
| 148 | *** Of note with the Pentagon, it has repeatedly been destroyed but the next time it is seen, has been rebuilt with a new eldritch horror working within. |
| 149 | * EmbarrassingDampSheets: Dorothy Spinner was occasionally subjected to the menstrual blood variant, with Creator/GrantMorrison's run in issue 55 and Rachel Pollack's run in the Annual tying to ''ComicBook/TheChildrensCrusadeVertigo'' both starting with her waking up to find her bedsheets stained with period blood. |
| 150 | * EndOfSeriesAwareness: |
| 151 | ** The 121st issue of the original run (which was originally ''My Greatest Adventure'', but was retitled after the Doom Patrol six issues after their debut in issue 80) concluded the series by killing the team off and had the title on the cover read "Is This the Beginning of the End of the Doom Patrol?" Three more issues were published several years later, but they all consisted of reprints of earlier stories. |
| 152 | ** The 22nd issue of John Arcudi's run has the cover titled "Exit the Doom Patrol" and has Robotman remark "I was right. We '''are''' doomed", completing the BookEnds of the covers for the first and last issues depicting the rest of the team reflected in Robotman's head. |
| 153 | ** The 18th issue of John Byrne's run has the cover's title read "The End of the Doom Patrol". |
| 154 | ** The 22nd issue of Keith Giffen's run had the battle end prematurely when [[spoiler: Ambush Bug whispers something to Mr. Somebody in Veronica Cale's body, the responses implying that the comic has been cancelled to make room for more ''ComicBook/FlashpointDCComics'' tie-ins.]] |
| 155 | * EndOfTheWorldSpecial: This seems to be what happens at the end of Morrison's run, with [[spoiler: Danny the Street expanding to become the magical Danny the World for Cliff and Jane.]] |
| 156 | * EnemyMine: |
| 157 | ** The original Doom Patrol was forced into this situation with the Brotherhood of Evil on more than one occasion, usually to avert the erasure of all existence or some other problem that would make world conquest by the Brotherhood kind of moot. |
| 158 | ** Both Brotherhood of Dada arcs ended up this way, with the second one especially emphasizing that they didn't have to be enemies at all. |
| 159 | * EpisodeDiscussionScene: ''Doom Patrol'' #121 featured one with the writers. |
| 160 | * EverybodyDiesEnding: Almost every version of the Doom Patrol ends with almost all of the main team dead, in a coma, etc., as a way to make room for the next writer to do what they want. (Grant Morrison did not do this, however. Aside from the Chief, who had died already, everyone just walked into the sunset, so to speak.) And if they don't, the next writer will often do it themselves. |
| 161 | * FaceHeelTurn: In [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's run]], "D" or [[spoiler:The Disappointment]] used to be a superhero called [[spoiler:Haxxalon the Star Archer]], but the cancelation of his comic book right before he was to be married to the love of his life, Starlene, turned him into a deicidal {{Yandere}} obsessed with bringing about the matrimonial story that never was. |
| 162 | * {{Fanservice}}: |
| 163 | ** Elasti-Girl. Her [[http://whysoserious.wikia.com/wiki/File:Elasti-Girl_01.jpg gigantic upskirts]] and [[http://whysoserious.wikia.com/wiki/File:Elasti-Girl_Naked_Confused.jpg wardrobe problems]]. |
| 164 | ** Fever, from Vol. 3, accidentally kept burning her clothes off. |
| 165 | * TheFantasticFaux: The original iteration was a rather obvious homage to the Fantastic Four, with Robotman having super-strength and a freakish appearance as well as an orange coloring, Elasti-Girl having stretching abilities, Negative Man having energy powers and flight, and the Chief having super-intelligence, and except the Chief, all their powers came from freak accidents (later retconned as having been caused by the Chief himself.) Creator/GrantMorrison's run took this further in one issue, where an out-of-continuity story drawn in a style mimicking Jack Kirby renamed the team the Legion of the Strange (the name itself referencing ''ComicBook/ChallengersOfTheUnknown'', who were also created by Jack Kirby and are considered the Fantastic Four's inspiration), had Robotman go by his original codename Automaton as well as given a clunkier appearance reminiscent of The Thing and depicted the team wearing matching uniforms similar to those worn by the Fantastic Four with the differences of being colored green instead of blue and the insignia being a question mark as opposed to the number four. |
| 166 | * FatBastard: The villain Garguax is sometimes drawn as fat, with the Paul Kupperberg run depicting him as morbidly obese. |
| 167 | * FauxAffablyEvil: Darren Jones likes to believe he's a normal guy living a 1950s sitcom-esque life with his wife in the suburbs, complete with a LaughTrack built into his house. This is the first indicator that he's a dangerously insane and hypocritical idiot obsessed with stomping out anything considered to be a "Quirk", using a knock-off version of the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. to hunt down strange things and destroy them. Both issues he's in rapidly point out how disturbing Darren is despite how "normal" he insists he is. He engages in such activities as eating "skinless stew" (which appears to be made from blood and bugs), gouged his wife's eyes out and made her wear googly eyes, planned to use something called "love worms" on her when she pointed out that they are strange, and his boss seems to have a lava lamp head. |
| 168 | * FeedTheMole: In an early issue, the press got hold of a photo of the Chief, who had kept out of the public eye. Suspecting that one of the team may have been responsible, he gives each of them a different story about his origins. When the story he told Elasti-Girl shows up on the news, he knows who the mole is. (She swears she's innocent, of course, and he believes her, but knowing which one of them was compromised gives them the clues they need to turn things around on their enemies.) |
| 169 | * FirstPeriodPanic: Dorothy Spinner recalls experiencing her first period to be a horrifying ordeal for her, initially thinking she was going to die. |
| 170 | * FlippingTheBird: |
| 171 | ** Crazy Jane gives The Fog the finger in volume 2, issue 28. |
| 172 | ** Willoughby Kipling flips off the Candlemaker in volume 2, issue 61. |
| 173 | ** Coagula gives Niles Caulder the finger in volume 2, issue 71. |
| 174 | ** Lucius Reynolds gets flipped off in volume 6, issue 8. |
| 175 | * {{Foil}}: Morrison's and Pollack's versions of the Doom Patrol come across as contrasts to one another. |
| 176 | ** The majority of Morrison's team spent most of their time dealing with their respective anxieties and traumas, feeling they didn't belong in the world and that life was miserable. The ongoing story focused on Jane dealing with her sexual abuse, Rebis' identity issues concerning Larry Trainor and Eleanor Poole's lives, Cliff's ongoing depression and angst about his body, Dorothy Spinner's alienation, and traumatic childhood, and the Chief's megalomania. |
| 177 | ** Pollack's version of the team introduced new members who, despite suffering trauma like Morrison's team, were far better adjusted and at peace with themselves. Kate was a trans woman who suffered abuse from her peers when she was younger but found a community who accepted her as an adult, and George and Marion are completely in love with each other and refuse to let losing their bodies and the torture they endured from the Builders stop them from living life. |
| 178 | ** The team as a whole can be considered in contrast to [[ComicBook/JusticeLeague DC's most famous team]]. The Justice League, self-appointed ambassadors of mankind, are mostly comprised of gorgeous people with amazing powers who are admired by the public; the Doom Patrol consists of freakish misfits feared by society, with relatively few having any impressive abilities. |
| 179 | * FluffyTamer: An early issue showed Rita in her giantess form ''cuddling'' lions and tigers at the local zoo like they were housecats. Little wonder she was so good raising a child who can shapeshift into any creature he can think of. |
| 180 | * FullFrontalAssault: |
| 181 | ** Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man goes on a rampage while completely nude in the seventh issue of Keith Giffen's run. |
| 182 | ** The tenth issue of Keith Giffen's run has the Porcelain Doll fight the Doom Patrol with no clothes on. |
| 183 | * FunWithAcronyms: The fake Men From N.O.W.H.E.R.E. can only speak in sentences that are acronyms for "N.O.W.H.E.R.E.". |
| 184 | * GeniusCripple / EvilCripple: |
| 185 | ** The Chief -- he is stuck in a wheelchair, but still orchestrates the creation of the Doom Patrol. |
| 186 | ** Also the Brain (who can't even move on his own in some incarnations) and General Immortus (who is [[WhoWantsToLiveForever immortal, but not unaging]]). |
| 187 | * GeniusLoci: Danny the Street is a ''sentient transgender street''. (Imagine gun shops with pink curtains in the front windows and fire hydrants that are painted yellow because bright crimson would be too gauche...) |
| 188 | * GenocideFromTheInside: When Garguax resurfaced in Paul Kupperberg's run, he reveals that he's the last surviving member of his race because he destroyed his homeworld. |
| 189 | * TheGhost: |
| 190 | ** Polly Polly Tinker Boy is the sole one of Dorothy Spinner's imaginary friends who never makes a physical appearance, his existence only confirmed through Dorothy mentioning him in volume two, issue 80. |
| 191 | ** Dorothy's parents never appeared on-panel. While her mother Margaret Spinner would become UnseenNoMore in John Arcudi's run (which also retroactively established that the Spinners were Dorothy's ''adoptive'' parents), her father isn't named or shown and is mentioned to have died off-screen. |
| 192 | * AGodAmI: |
| 193 | ** The team briefly encountered a dapper entity called "Red Jack" that insisted it was also God and created the universe. Since it was insane almost nothing it said could be taken at face value, though, except for the fact that it needed the pain to live. |
| 194 | ** The Candlemaker insists multiple times that he "created all of this" after being let out into the physical world. |
| 195 | ** Even the Chief gets in on it; after [[spoiler:creating nanomachines]], he says that now they have the technology to be like gods, though he admits it sounds over the top. |
| 196 | * GoMadFromTheIsolation: How Cliff starts Morrison's run, both in the sense that [[EverybodysDeadDave most of his friends are dead or comatose]], but also that his [[NighInvulnerability robot body]] limits him to sight and sound -- he bashes down a cement barricade with his head to demonstrate how this doesn't hurt but is driving him insane. |
| 197 | ** Also how Mr. Nobody gained his powers. |
| 198 | * GoryDiscretionShot: What happened to the Telephone Avatar. [[spoiler: All we're told of what the Candlemaker did to it is that several inhuman screams were heard, and it is then seen strung up by the neck with its wires. Given this is a creature the dead itself is afraid of, we shouldn't be shown just what the Candlemaker had to do to kill it for good.]] |
| 199 | * GovernmentConspiracy: Morrison's run has the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E, who seek to rob the world of weirdness and chaos (And who'd serve as an inspiration for ''ComicBook/TheInvisibles'''s Outer Church), while the Pollack run has the similar Builders, ancient beings lead by the Beard who seeked to rebuild the Tower of Babel and set rigid order and a single language on the world. |
| 200 | * GrandfatherClause: It's been decades since Robotman's beefy body and LanternJawOfJustice were even remotely close to what a "[[{{Zeerust}} futuristic robot]]" looked like, but his design is far too iconic for anyone to consider changing significantly. Robotman's destroyed original body itself is also rather obsolete as a plot device on the grounds of DC's surplus of magic and super-science. |
| 201 | * HappilyAdopted: Garfield ends up adopted by Rita (Elasti-Girl) and Steve (Mento). And while his relationship with Steve is sometimes troubled by Steve's copious mental health issues, Gar loves Rita dearly and even got into acting to follow in her footsteps. |
| 202 | * HappilyMarried: |
| 203 | ** Rita and Steve had this briefly in the sixties but have suffered repeated {{Happy Ending Override}}s. |
| 204 | *** Despite a rocky start, they did end up happily married until Rita died with the rest of the patrol, which made her TheLostLenore (Steve Dayton would later die in the pages of ''ComicBook/{{Deathstroke}}''). |
| 205 | *** John Byrne's series revamp in Volume 4 resurrected Rita but erased her history and instead had her get together with Cliff, which was undone by the CosmicRetcon in ''ComicBook/InfiniteCrisis'' to restore both Rita and Steve Dayton to a living married couple. |
| 206 | *** However, in Volume 5, Keith Giffen [[DerailingLoveInterests dropped a nuclear bomb on their relationship]] by retconning Steve Dayton into a wicked pervert abusing his PowerPerversionPotential and having Rita put him in traction by hurling him into the distance. They divorced and went un-followed up until ''ComicBook/{{Flashpoint|DCComics}}'' brought an end to the post-crisis universe. |
| 207 | *** Currently they seem to be suffering a ContinuitySnarl. Rita Farr appears in the pages of Doom Patrol Vol. 6, while in the pages of ''Titans: Burning Rage'', Steve Dayton's wife Rita has passed away. |
| 208 | ** Bumblebee and Vox (former members of the Titans who joined the Patrol during the events of One Year Later) had been married happily since the 1980s, but are revealed in Doom Patrol Volume 5 to have divorced off-screen. |
| 209 | ** Averted with Larry, Eleanor, and the Negative Entity. While all sharing Rebis' body and mind, their internal dialogue shows both deep anger and happiness. |
| 210 | ** George and Marion (the Bandage People) are as happy as they seem with each other. |
| 211 | * TheHeart: In the original series, Elasti-Girl. The only reason the team worked was because of her. |
| 212 | * {{Hermaphrodite}}: Rebis is a merging of a man and a woman. |
| 213 | * HeroicSacrifice: To stop an out-of-control Robotman, who has grown to the size of Brainiac's skull ship, Casey drives Danny the Ambulance into Cliff's head to stop him. Casey doesn't die, but she reverts into a comic book character on a permanent vacation. |
| 214 | * HesBack: As of Issue 11 of Giffen's run, [[spoiler:Mr. Nobody, now evolved in terms of his philosophy and calling himself Mr. Somebody]]. |
| 215 | * HijackedByGanon: In the Way run, [[spoiler:Terry None, who is distributing the sinister miracle condiment $#!+, is actually the daughter of and frontwoman for Mr. Nobody]]. |
| 216 | ** In Morrison's run, [[spoiler: the Chief's plans to use nanomachines to evolve the world is cut short when they're used to give the Candlemaker a proper body in which to manifest.]] |
| 217 | * HollywoodCyborg: Cliff Steele. |
| 218 | * HorrorHost: The 16th issue of Keith Giffen's run began with a horror show spoof hosted by a vampire named Count Suckula. |
| 219 | * HypocriticalHeartwarming: A crossover with ''ComicBook/ChallengersOfTheUnknown'' (occurring in the 48th issue of ''Challengers'' and the 102nd issue of ''Doom Patrol'') has Larry break up a fight between Cliff and "Rocky" Davis. |
| 220 | -->'''Negative Man:''' Hold it, chum! That's my buddy you're pushing around!\ |
| 221 | '''Robotman:''' Why, Larry! I didn't know you still cared!\ |
| 222 | '''Negative Man:''' Sure! Nobody's gonna rap your corrugated cranium...except me! |
| 223 | * IconicOutfit: |
| 224 | ** One of the villains has an iconic ''form''. The Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man is nearly always depicted with his partial Tyrannosaurus Rex morph from the cover of his main issue. |
| 225 | ** Robotman's dark civilian wear of jeans and a leather jacket with shoulder pads from the Grant Morrison run made quite the impression, to the extent that he is depicted with such apparel in [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's run]], [[Series/DoomPatrol2019 the live-action TV show adaptation]] and the Max revival of ''WesternAnimation/YoungJustice2010''. |
| 226 | * IfItsYouItsOkay: Kate considers herself a lesbian until she begins to fall for Cliff. |
| 227 | * ImaginaryFriend: Subverted in that Dorothy Spinner's imaginary friends are made real by her mind. Brutally real, as evidenced by [[spoiler:the Candlemaker]]. |
| 228 | * ImproperlyParanoid: The Codpiece's backstory showed he spent his life obsessing over his penis size and thinking women were rejecting him for it. One girl in high school said he "wasn't big enough" just to make him leave her alone (and meant big as in tall) and a woman in college only went out with him two times before he started insinuating she was dumping him because of his penis. |
| 229 | * IndyPloy: The heroes have to rely on the Indy ploy fairly regularly. Even the most CrazyPrepared hero can't anticipate some of this weirdness. |
| 230 | * InsufferableGenius: |
| 231 | ** The Chief tends to explain as little as possible and be pretty smug about it when his plans work. |
| 232 | ** Mento falls here, too, especially if he's in one of his less-than-sane periods. |
| 233 | * IntangibleMan: Negative Man (later Rebis) can make their "negative spirit" leave their body and do things. Except it can't leave for more than a minute, or else they will die. |
| 234 | * IWantGrandkids: The Beard-Hunter's mother berates her son for never settling down and giving her grandchildren. |
| 235 | * IWishedYouWereDead: Dorothy deeply regrets how she once wished for her bully Bernard Muller to die, not expecting the Candlemaker to grant the wish by murdering Bernard. |
| 236 | * KnightOfCerebus: [[spoiler: The Candlemaker]], who, even in light of the many instances of mass character death and a truly wild RoguesGallery, remains one of the series' most horrific villains ''ever''. |
| 237 | * KnightsAndKnaves: [[spoiler:The expansion of Orqwith can only be stopped by the solution to one of these puzzles.]] |
| 238 | * LamePunReaction: In the 14th issue of John Byrne's run, Cliff's visit to the ''ComicBook/SupermanAndBatmanGenerations'' timeline has Elasti-Girl defeat the Brain by flicking him off of his mechanized tank. In response to this, Kid Flash quips about the Brain's defeat being how you "get ahead in the world", Supergirl reacting to the bad pun by groaning. |
| 239 | * LateArrivalSpoiler: The fact that [[spoiler: the Chief]] was responsible for the original Doom Patrol's accidents has been a major part of every series after the original revelation. Good luck reading any other ''Doom Patrol'' issue without learning that. |
| 240 | * LegionOfDoom: The Brotherhood of Evil (Mallah, Madame Rouge and the Brain) recruit General Immortus, Garguax, and his plastic army into an expanded organization, in a WhamEpisode of the original series. |
| 241 | * LIsForDyslexia: Inflicted in Grant Morrison's run by a big GovernmentConspiracy on a whistleblower who's writing (or, rather, trying to write) an exposé. All his typewritten pages contain gibberish. He later gains recognition as an underground surrealist writer, compared to Creator/JamesJoyce or Creator/WilliamSBurroughs. |
| 242 | * LosingYourHead: |
| 243 | ** Grant Morrison's run features a trio of minor characters consisting of bizarre government agents known as the [=SeX=]-Men. One of them gets decapitated, but lives perfectly fine without a body. |
| 244 | ** [[spoiler: The Chief]] spends Rachel Pollack's series as a head on a tray of ice. |
| 245 | ** Due to his brain being the only part of him that's still organic, Cliff Steele has occasionally survived having his head removed from his body and able to have his predicament solved by simply attaching his head to a new body (though [[EarlyInstallmentWeirdness the original 1960s comic did say several times that removing his head could kill him]]). |
| 246 | * MagicFloppyDisk: Cliff's whole personality and memories fit in a couple of floppies. |
| 247 | * MaliciousMisnaming: Mr. Nobody calls the team the "Dumb Patrol" in the tenth issue of [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's run]]. |
| 248 | * ManicPixieDreamGirl: A non-romantic example with Terry None in [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's run]]. She just shows up at Casey Brinke's apartment one day, does a tap dance for her birthday because she thought Casey looked sad on the subway, and [[spoiler: accidentally blows up Casey's asshole roommate]] before moving in with her. Though after [[spoiler:Lotion]] makes himself scarce, Casey decides to [[spoiler:have sex with Terry in the meantime.]] |
| 249 | * MeaningfulRename: Occurs several times during ''[[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Weight of the Worlds]]'': |
| 250 | ** After living multiple lifetimes through his dreams, Larry changes from the "Negative Man" into the "Positive Man". As a result, Keeg does not need to inhabit Larry's body and can exist independently. |
| 251 | ** After Keeg builds Cliff a new body, Cliff names himself "Cliff Fixit" as he sets out to fix any person's issues and do more heroic deeds. |
| 252 | * MenstrualMenace: Dorothy Spinner's first menstruation causes her imaginary friends to try to force her to wear "red, bloody shoes." The comparisons to ''Film/TheWizardOfOz'' are all intentional, too. |
| 253 | * MentalTimeTravel: The 13th issue of John Byrne's run has Robotman send his mind back in time to try and prevent the accident that led to his brain being put into a robot body to save his life, with Rita doing the same to try and talk Cliff out of altering history. |
| 254 | * MindlinkMates: Coagula and Robotman after they share a body during "The Teiresias War." |
| 255 | * MindScrew: Although the Doom Patrol were always considered weird, this really came to a head with all of Creator/GrantMorrison's and Rachel Pollack's runs, both of which really went to town in how bizarre and surreal things could get. Much later, [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's run]] made a return to their unfiltered strangeness. |
| 256 | * MistakenForPedophile: The 13th issue of John Byrne's run has Robotman and Rita use MentalTimeTravel, the former to prevent the accident that resulted in Cliff Steel's brain being put into a robot body and the latter to talk Cliff out of altering history. Robotman and Rita still see themselves and one another as their present-day forms, but to onlookers appear as a human man and a 13-year-old girl, which leads to trouble when Cliff's girlfriend walks in on him embracing what looks like an underage girl. |
| 257 | * MorphicResonance: In the arc of Arcudi's run where the team is caught in the bodies of the original team, Kid Slick/Beast Boy's head of hair remains in every animal form, even non-mammalian ones. |
| 258 | * MostCommonSuperpower: The concept of comic book superheroines being depicted with large breasts is lampooned in the ''Doom Force'' one-shot, where Doom Force members Flux and Spinner (an older version of Dorothy Spinner) as well as the villain Count Zero's sister Una are depicted with sizeable mammaries. |
| 259 | * MultiGenderedOutfit: Morrison's run portrayed Rebis exploring their metamorphosis into [[OtherworldlyAndSexuallyAmbiguous an alchemical fusion of male, female, and energy spirit]] through clothing - for example, adding [[https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/scale_super/3/31666/1801988-rebis_13.jpg pearls, briefs, and a lace bra]] to their customary full-body bandages and sunglasses. |
| 260 | * MultipleChoicePast: |
| 261 | ** In the 82nd issue of ''My Greatest Adventure'', the Chief suspects that there is a traitor within his team and gives different accounts of his backstory to Elasti-Girl, Robotman and Negative Man to see which story gets leaked. He tells Elasti-Girl that he is an alien, Robotman that he was raised in a Tibetan monastery and Negative Man that he was a model student of Cambridge University. [[spoiler: The story he told Elasti-Girl is the one that gets leaked, and it turns out none of these origins are true.]] |
| 262 | ** Creator/JohnByrne's run notoriously disregarded every preceding run by having the series star a revamped version of the team's original roster of the Chief, Robotman, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl, with new characters Faith, Nudge, Grunt and Vortex included as additional recruits. One of the changes was the identity of who was responsible for crippling the Chief. While it was originally established to be General Immortus, Byrne's run instead revealed that the one responsible was T'oombala, the shaman of a tribe the Chief once helped during a plague who made the Chief disabled out of jealousy at his medical expertise. With the CosmicRetcon caused by ''ComicBook/InfiniteCrisis'' restoring every previous ''Doom Patrol'' series to continuity, this presumably included restoring General Immortus to being the one who crippled the Chief. |
| 263 | * MyGreatestFailure: For Cliff, it was for [[spoiler: not being able to help Dorothy and having to take her off life support]]. When a Scissorman appears masquerading as her, Cliff is not happy, to say the least. |
| 264 | * NakedPeopleAreFunny: |
| 265 | ** Fever in the John Arcudi run would sometimes have the misfortune of destroying her own clothes because of her difficulty controlling her powers, being left naked before she can get a means of covering up. In the final issue, when [[spoiler:Robotman dreams that]] Doc Magnus puts the team's brains into robot bodies, Fever is upset that her new body has no clothes and desperately tries to cover herself. |
| 266 | ** The eighth issue of the John Byrne run has a de-evolved Rita Farr returned to her human form and left nude in the process because she tore off her uniform shortly after becoming an ape monster while at giant size. Panicked at her nudity, she shrinks down to avoid being seen and quickly fashions a temporary outfit from a discarded tissue before she is able to put on a spare uniform. |
| 267 | ** The cover of the 20th issue of the Keith Giffen run, [[CoversAlwaysLie which had diddly-squat to do with the issue's actual story]], depicts Robotman, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl stranded on a rock in the sea while butt naked. |
| 268 | -->'''Negative Man:''' So...''that'' went well.\ |
| 269 | '''Robotman:''' Stuff it, Trainor. |
| 270 | ** The fourth issue of ''[[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Weight of the Worlds]]'' ends with the villain Skarg being left naked as a result of the Secret Spandex being separated from his body, his crotch [[SpeechBubbleCensoring obscured by his own speech bubble]] and his humiliation at everyone seeing his privates being played for humor. |
| 271 | * {{Narm}}: Deliberately invoked in-universe with the Codpiece, a man so insecure about his small penis that he built a literal weaponized dick and used it to rob a bank. Unfortunately, many readers took him at face value and didn't realize he was supposed to be a joke. |
| 272 | * NewPowersAsThePlotDemands: |
| 273 | ** Crazy Jane. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] in that she has 64 separate personalities with 64 separate powers. Not all the personalities are nice, either. |
| 274 | ** One of the Doom Patrol's enemies, The Quiz, also has "Every power you haven't thought of," literally, so in order to fight her, people have to constantly think of and/or shout out a long list of all known superpowers. Unfortunately nobody can ever think of every superpower, so the Quiz has yet to be defeated in a conventional battle (that we get to see) [[note]] In her introduction, the Japanese superhero Rising Sun beat her when she was newly emerged. He broke her arms and legs and had her chained in her underwear, so that her dirt phobia kept her from using her powers. [[/note]] |
| 275 | ** In a new body built by Keeg, Robotman gets a new upgrade each time he does a good deed. |
| 276 | * NiceJobBreakingItHero: Keeg builds Cliff a new robot body that upgrades each time Cliff does a good deed or act of heroism, for example rescuing a cat from a tree. Cliff goes on a hero spree which results [[spoiler: in a BadFuture where Cliff has become a planet and assimilated most of the galaxy into Planet Cliff.]] |
| 277 | ** Subsequently, [[spoiler: Mento tried to stop Planet Cliff into his helmet, only to lose control and lead to everyone becoming trapped for years.]] |
| 278 | * NightmareFuel: An in-universe invoked use of this trope appears during the "Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E." arc. The officials who run the Ant Farm project create the aforementioned Men by [[spoiler: collecting the husks of the newly dead. They're then traumatized by being read to from Lucy Clifford's "Anyhow Stories," which is apparently the one thing out there terrifying enough to shatter whatever willpower the dead might still have.]] |
| 279 | * NonHumanNonBinary: Rebis, the FusionDance of Negative Man (Larry Trainor), Dr. Eleanor Poole, and the genderless Negative Spirit, who refers to themselves in the plural. |
| 280 | * NoNameGiven: In ''[[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Weight of the Worlds]]'', issue 5, Cliff meets a young boy whose last name is "Clark". When the boy is about to tell Cliff what everyone calls him, he is cut off. It is heavily implied that "Clark" might actually be a version of [[spoiler:Kate Godwin, since Kate's dead name was Clark. Some implications are their same green eye color, a Pride poster in Clark's room, and Clark's references to ''Doom Patrol'''s Vertigo run, in which Kate first appeared.]] |
| 281 | * NotHimself: [[spoiler:Mr. Somebody's philosophy is completely the opposite of Mr. Nobody's, to the point that some fans believe that he wasn't the same person at all, though due to that run being CutShort, the truth about Mr. Somebody was never revealed]]. |
| 282 | * NothingIsTheSameAnymore: By the end of ''[[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Weight of the Worlds]]'', several characters have gone through changes: |
| 283 | ** Larry [[spoiler: has changed from the Negative Man into the Positive Man, and Keeg the Negative Spirit can exist independently of him.]] |
| 284 | ** Casey Brink [[has reverted into a comic book and Danny has been reduced to a call box.]] |
| 285 | ** Robotman [[after realizes he has gone insane with power, rebuilds himself as a cyborg baby.]] |
| 286 | * NotWearingTights: Three of the four new members from the 2001 series (Fever, Kid Slick, and Freak) wear street clothes rather than a costume. |
| 287 | * NudeNatureDance: Rachel Pollack's run has an arc where Dorothy Spinner saves the day by performing a ritual where she dances topless while drenched in pomegranate juice. |
| 288 | * OnlySaneMan: During the ordeal with the Fox and the Crow, there was an elderly woman staying with the Fox's geriatric army constantly trying to get her friends to understand the Fox was using them and that this whole situation was insane. She later tries the same thing with Cliff when he ends up joining the Fox, but again her protests fall on deaf ears. |
| 289 | * OrderVersusChaos: The Doom Patrol is normally on the side of Good Chaos and opposed to (kind of) Evil Chaos (the Brotherhood of Dada) and Evil Order (the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E.) However, [[spoiler:when the Brotherhood of Dada returned, though, the Doom Patrol didn't try to stop them]]. |
| 290 | * OutlivingOnesOffspring: Flex Mentallo's creator [[spoiler: Wally Sage]] dies at the end of the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. arc, with his mother shown in mourning two issues later. |
| 291 | * OutOfCharacterAlert: In volume one issue 90, Larry figured out that the putty-like [[spoiler: Madame Rouge was impersonating the Chief]] when "he" called Rita Elasti-Girl -- "the Chief would NEVER call Rita by that freak name!" |
| 292 | * OutOfFocus: The Brain was established in the original series as the Doom Patrol's greatest enemy, but would have his prominence downplayed in the subsequent series. He doesn't appear at all in Paul Kupperberg, Rachel Pollack and [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's]] runs, he makes only a handful of appearances in Grant Morrison's run, John Arcudi's run only features him in a minor two-part story that involves the current roster of the Doom Patrol having their minds trapped in the bodies of the original roster, his sole appearance in John Byrne's run is in an alternate timeline in issue 14 (specifically the ''ComicBook/SupermanAndBatmanGenerations'' continuity) and Keith Giffen's run only includes a flashback cameo in issue 6 (which, to be fair, was because of the Brain and Mallah being killed off in ''Salvation Run''). |
| 293 | * ParentalIncest: The more traumatic part of Crazy Jane's origin is that she was molested by her father at age five. |
| 294 | * PeriodShaming: According to Rachel Pollack's run, one of the many causes of Dorothy's dysphoria is the fact that when she started menstruating, the bullies who were already targeting her because of her apelike appearance started beating her up while chanting "Monkey on the rag!" Not helping matters was when her mother subsequently told her to her face that she should've been aborted, [[spoiler: which was made worse in hindsight when John Arcudi's run later established that the Spinners were Dorothy's ''adoptive'' parents]]. |
| 295 | * PervertRevengeMode: The tie-in to ''ComicBook/TheChildrensCrusadeVertigo'' has Dorothy Spinner punch [[DirtyKid Junkin Buckley]] in retaliation to him groping her breasts. |
| 296 | * PhotoDoodleRecognition: A story in the 81st issue of ''My Greatest Adventure'' has the Chief realize that Dr. Janus is actually a Nazi war criminal named Josef Kreutz by drawing facial hair on a picture of Kreutz with Adolf Hitler. |
| 297 | * PitifulWorms: The seventh issue of the 1987 series has Shrapnel dismiss Karma, Rhea and Scott as gnats that are in his way. |
| 298 | * PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: Mr. Jones in Grant Morrison's run wants Danny the Street destroyed for not conforming to his view of normalcy, especially taking issue to Danny's window displays using feminine decorations. |
| 299 | -->'''Mr. Jones:''' Gentlemen, this street is a shameless ''transvestite''! |
| 300 | * PorkyPigPronunciation: In issue 109 of volume one, Beast Boy struggles to say "ornithology" while taunting Mandred and settles for instead saying "bird study". |
| 301 | * PoorlyDisguisedPilot: The John Byrne run was set up in the "Tenth Circle" arc of ''ComicBook/JLA1997'', which established revamped versions of the original team's roster of the Chief, Elasti-Girl, Negative Man and Robotman in addition to adding more team members through Justice League member Faith and new characters Nudge, Grunt and Vortex. |
| 302 | * PowerPerversionPotential: |
| 303 | ** At the beginning of the final arc of Rachel Pollack's run, Dorothy Spinner attempts to make a more libidinous use of her power of bringing her imaginary friends to life by creating a boyfriend for her imaginary friend Pretty Miss Dot. After conjuring an attractive shirtless man she names Mr. Right-And-Cool, she almost watches them canoodle before she's forced to make them go away after hearing Cliff call for her. |
| 304 | ** Keith Giffen's run broke up Mento and Elasti-Girl by retconning the former as an abusive pervert who used the psionic powers his helmet enabled to force Rita into indulging his carnal whims. |
| 305 | * PsychopathicManchild: The Beard Hunter is an emotionally stunted and repressed gay man with an intense hatred of facial hair, lives with his mother, has only a stuffed dog for companionship, and seems to have some very warped sexual fetishes. |
| 306 | * PsychosexualHorror: A staple of the team. Let's recap: There's Daddy, Crazy Jane's reflection of her [[AbusiveParents incestuous father]], the Keysmith's phalic imagery, Terry None's gynic costume, the Codpiece's CompensatingForSomething, the Sex Ghosts being spectres of people who died in sexual accidents, Shadowy Mr. Evans and the [=SeX=]-Men.... |
| 307 | * PuffOfLogic: The Robotman we'd come to know early in Arcudi's run fades into nothingness when Metamorpho asks how he survived that explosion four years before. [[spoiler: It turns out he was one of Dorothy's imaginary friends -- her idealized version of Cliff.]] |
| 308 | * PutOnABus: Five issues into John Byrne's run, Faith leaves the Doom Patrol to go back to the Justice League. Beast Boy literally leaves town on a bus after the real Robotman is rebuilt in John Arcudi's run, because he's an actor and can't turn down any opportunities in Hollywood; he's BackForTheFinale arc, though not the final issue itself. |
| 309 | * RageAgainstTheReflection: The backup story for ''Doom Patrol'' volume one issue 100 shows that Cliff broke the mirror in anger after seeing his robot body for the first time. |
| 310 | * RagtagBunchOfMisfits: Every incarnation, but most notably Fever, Kid Slick, Freak, and Fast Forward ("Negative Man II"), who were relatively normal but faced difficulty working as a team. |
| 311 | * RapeAsBackstory: Crazy Jane was sexually abused by her father when she was 5 years old and before her personalities manifested (at which point she was still Kay Challis). [[spoiler: And again years later, after the Miranda personality took over. Miranda was attacked and raped by a homeless man in a church on Easter, which resulted in Miranda's death and the emergence of the other personalities.]] |
| 312 | * RealityWarper: Dorothy Spinner. She has little control of her abilities and they terrify her. Later the Danny the Street can do the same as he evolves into Danny the World and Dannyland. |
| 313 | * RememberTheNewGuy: The John Byrne run introduced a few enemies of the Doom Patrol that the team faced off-screen before holding them prisoner at their base with little to no details given about their previous encounters: Rubber Maid, Barrage and Megalith. |
| 314 | * ReplacementScrappy: In-universe, Thayer Jost feels this is what a popularity poll indicates about the new team. His plan at first blush is to hire actors to impersonate the Chief, Negative Man, and Elasti-Girl for the sake of appealing to the public better; he ends up deciding on developing a TV series based on the original team. |
| 315 | * ResentfulGuardian: Nicholas Galtry became Beast Boy's legal guardian after his parents died and, in addition to treating Gar like trash, plotted to keep the child's inheritance for himself. Galtry's abuse is in fact the main reason Beast Boy turned to the Doom Patrol. |
| 316 | * {{Retcon}}: All over the damn place, and several tend to go with a heaping helping of SameCharacterButDifferent. |
| 317 | ** After famously dying at the end of the original title, Paul Kupperberg's work with the team [[NotQuiteDead undid the demise]] of The Chief, Negative Man, and Robotman. (Not Elasti-girl, alas). |
| 318 | ** One of the [[MindScrew wilder]], and more famous, examples are the recontextualization of the group's origin by Creator/GrantMorrison at the end of their run when it turns out [[spoiler: the Chief has been EvilAllAlong and not only caused the accidents that turned them into "freaks' in the first place but engineered their deaths at the end of their first comic series. This revelation was of a piece with Morrison's [[SameCharacterButDifferent radically different take]] on the Chief who was cold and manipulative, rather than the kindly and heroic figure he was originally depicted as.]] |
| 319 | ** Rachel Pollack's run introduced a character called the False Memory, who tries to implement several retcons to get into the team. Mostly, she hangs around Cliff and keeps granting him memories of adventures he had with Crazy Jane that never happened. George and Marion are kept idle with nostalgia-fueled memories of cookouts with George Bush Sr. and John F. Kennedy, while the Chief keeps his distance and Kate is traumatized by memories of being gang-raped. The retcons only exist within the characters' memories, which are removed thanks to Dorothy actively rejecting them because her mind is fragile enough as is. |
| 320 | ** Creator/JohnByrne's run dismissed the entire Doom Patrol history and rebooted the series to start all over again with the original cast of the Chief, Robotman, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl (who had been killed off in the original series and never resurrected). |
| 321 | ** Geoff Johns, in an issue of Teen Titans, had the rebooted Doom Patrol regaining all their memories of their previous continuities so that all versions of the Doom Patrol (including Byrne's and Pollack's) were no longer ExiledFromContinuity, although it was now unclear how Elasti-Girl and the Chief could be alive. |
| 322 | ** Johns' Teen Titans run later provided a flashback in which the Chief saved Elasti-Girl by regrowing her from a surviving cells after the explosion. Then Keith Giffen's Doom Patrol series included another flashback showing the moment where Robotman was reunited with the restored Elasti-Girl. However, Giffen's run was cancelled before he could explain how the Chief had come back to life after his death in the Pollack run. |
| 323 | ** [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's run]] re-establishes the previous ''Doom Patrol'' series as having happened, and implicitly throws aside their New 52 -era ''ComicBook/{{Justice League|2011}}'' appearances. |
| 324 | * RubberMan: Elasti-Girl. Also their enemy, Madame Rouge. |
| 325 | * RuderAndCruder: Grant Morrison, Rachel Pollack and [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's]] runs have considerably stronger language than the other eras due to having mature ratings. |
| 326 | * SameCharacterButDifferent: |
| 327 | ** Grant Morrison's take on the Doom Patrol regulars, Chief, Robotman, and Negative Man. The Chief was newly depicted as an uncaring, murderous figure (compared to the original, who loved and cherished his team), while Robotman became a cynical everyman rather than the boisterous bruiser he started as. Negative Man was perhaps the most transformed of the three of them, being revamped into the tripartite figure of Rebis |
| 328 | ** Steve Dayton was retconned by Keith Giffen into being a nasty pervert and StalkerWithACrush who was abusing Rita in her sleep. |
| 329 | * SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong: During ''[[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Weight of the Worlds]]'', both Casey, inhabiting Jane's Underground, and Mento set out to stop the BadFuture from happening. They both travel back in time, independently from each other. Mento arrives with no memory of how he got there, while Casey travels through Jane's underground to send a message to herself. [[spoiler:Mento almost causes the BadFuture to happen again while Casey!Jane stops it, erasing that future version of herself.]] |
| 330 | * SerialEscalation: Especially Grant Morrison's run. |
| 331 | %%* SchrodingersButterfly |
| 332 | * ShownTheirWork: Crazy Jane doesn't just have 64 distinct personalities, but as with real-world cases of multiple personalities, they're all shallow and have specialized niches. Most directly visible when Jane, who's developing romantic and sexual feelings for Cliff, tries to prepare him for her Scarlet Harlot personality's attempt to seduce him... only for the Harlot to almost immediately taunt and reject Cliff, who's physically incapable of having sex with her. Similarly, Black Annis, representing Jane's anger at men for her rapes, finds herself actually liking Cliff for the same reason the Harlot dismisses him. |
| 333 | * SignatureSoundEffect: Negative Man's distinctive "crackle". Drake and Premiani often represented radio waves, Drake's AppliedPhlebotinum of choice, with '''"CRZZZZZZ"'''. |
| 334 | * SignsOfTheEndTimes: |
| 335 | ** As [[RewritingReality reality begins to merge]] with [[EldritchLocation Orqwith]] - |
| 336 | *** In New York (probably) an ''enormous'' refrigerator falls from a clear sky, crushing a priest. |
| 337 | *** In Stuttgart, all the clocks chime 15. Simultaneously. |
| 338 | *** In Kyoto, four stainless-steel pyramids are found rotating five feet above the ground. |
| 339 | *** In Patagonia, a library is discovered. [[Creator/JorgeLuisBorges The books it contains are unknown, unreadable]]. |
| 340 | *** In Johannesburg, [[SpontaneousHumanCombustion a little girl named Harriet inexplicably catches fire]]. |
| 341 | *** In Reykjavik, three shadows come to life and murder their owners. |
| 342 | *** In London, Madame Tussaud's wax figure of John Lennon begins to bleed from bullet wound stigmata. |
| 343 | *** 'In Rome, in Leningrad, in Darwin... [[IronicNurseryRhyme "The door flew open, in he ran - the great, long, red-legged Scissorman."]]' |
| 344 | ** In Barcelona, when the Cult of the Unwritten Book starts to summon the Decreator - |
| 345 | *** A bus full of teenagers was possessed by the Unquiet Face and driven through the Corridor of Hallucinations |
| 346 | *** The Needle Children, who cannot be seen through glass, laid pointless siege to an old folks' home in the suburbs. |
| 347 | *** At 11:30, there was an outbreak of spirit skywriting which continued for an hour and a half. |
| 348 | *** At midnight the word 'harmony' disappeared from the vocabulary of everyone in the city. |
| 349 | *** At 12:30, the Embryo Stains invaded the marrow of a nightclub owner and forced him to compose terrifying poetry. |
| 350 | *** Everything blue became temporarily invisible. |
| 351 | *** The rain forgot how to fall. |
| 352 | ** When Flex Mentallo tried to turn the Pentagon into a circle |
| 353 | *** People saw God, and thought he looked 'kind of shifty'. |
| 354 | * SingingTelegram: Terry None first meets Casey Brinke while delivering a singing telegram. |
| 355 | * {{Sizeshifter}}: Rita Farr, alias Elasti-Girl. |
| 356 | * TheSmurfettePrinciple: Elasti-Girl was the only woman in the original team. |
| 357 | * SocialDarwinist: [[spoiler: The Chief]] turns out to be one of these by the end of Morrison's run. |
| 358 | * SomethingPerson: |
| 359 | ** The original team was made up of these: Robotman, Elasti-Girl, Negative Man, and later Negative Woman. As time when on, though, Cliff (who hated being called Robotman anyway, since he wasn't technically a robot) just went by his real name. |
| 360 | ** Not just Cliff; Rita and Larry despised their ''noms de guerre'' too. Larry always referred to Negative Man as a separate entity, giving him orders (maybe Crazy Jane wasn't the only one with multiple personality issues?). |
| 361 | ** As mentioned above, this went so far as being an OutOfCharacterAlert. Typically, the only one regularly called by a codename was The Chief. Otherwise, they were Cliff, Rita, and Larry. |
| 362 | * SpeechBubbleCensoring: Issue four of ''[[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Weight of the Worlds]]'' ends with the villain Skarg being left naked when the Secret Spandex is removed from his body. His crotch is obscured by his own speech bubble exclaiming "My bits!" |
| 363 | * SplitPersonality: |
| 364 | ** Crazy Jane has ''64'' of them. |
| 365 | ** And yeah, Larry, Eleanor, and the Negative Spirit do go through a bit of the same when they turn into Rebis. One scene shows him reading ''Literature/WhenRabbitHowls''. |
| 366 | * StepfordSmiler: |
| 367 | ** Elasti-Girl is given this trait in a team-up story with ComicBook/TheFlash. We're told that since she used to be a glamorous movie star, being turned into a "super-powered freak" was especially hard on her, and she smiles constantly in order to "look pretty" and keep others from being afraid of her. She has no idea that it has the complete opposite effect. This isn't brought up again in any other DP story; WordOfGod says that it took place during the team's early days (post-Byrne reboot) when Rita was still getting used to her new life. |
| 368 | *** Which causes continuity problems of its' own, given that the story in question dealt with the Flash going to the Doom Patrol for help with his children's powers- who didn't show up in continuity until after Byrne's run on Doom Patrol was over. |
| 369 | * {{Stripperific}}: |
| 370 | ** Flex Mentallo is a rare male example, as he typically wore little aside from a leopard-print speedo. |
| 371 | ** The tendency for scantily-clad characters to be featured in superhero comics was mocked, alongside other conventions of comics at the time, in the ''Doom Force'' one-shot, where the villain Count Zero forced his sister Una to wear revealing outfits. When Dorothy Spinner asks why Una is barely wearing anything at all while her brother dresses more conservatively, Count Zero makes the unconvincing claim that his sister likes to dress that way. By the final battle, both siblings are reduced to wearing so little that Una has pasties over her nipples, she and Anton Zero have tiny coverings for their genitals and neither of them have anything covering up their rear ends. |
| 372 | * StylisticSuck: The ''Doom Force'' one shot is a deliberate parody of ''ComicBook/XForce'' and Rob Liefeld's art style, with rather ugly character designs and an unlikeable {{Jerkass}} cast that ends with them all celebrating a teammate they hated for being useless died in battle. |
| 373 | * SuicidalSadisticChoice: The first incarnation ended with one. Their archenemy General Zahl gave the Patrol the choice of nuking their location or nuking a small fishing village in Maine, a sacrifice that wouldn't be remembered. [[DyingMomentOfAwesome The Patrol's answer?]] [[BringIt "Fire away, Zahl!"]] |
| 374 | * SummonBiggerFish: The Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. arc culminates in the summoning of the Telephone Avatar, a horrific being said to have enslaved the dead and the telephone system ever since its creation. The only way it could be beaten was [[spoiler: for Dorothy to let out the Candlemaker to kill it for her and save her friends. After that, the Candlemaker becomes increasingly more insistent that Dorothy let him out for good.]] |
| 375 | * SuperheroTeamUniform: The original Doom Patrol originally [[EarlyInstallmentWeirdness wore all-green uniforms]] in their debut in the 80th issue of ''My Greatest Adventure'' before they started wearing the more recognizable red and white uniforms by issue 89 (three issues after the comic was retitled ''Doom Patrol''). During the Kupperburg run, the team wore uniforms with more variety in color. The Morrison run dispensed with uniforms entirely. |
| 376 | * SuperpowerLottery: The Quiz has "every superpower you haven't thought of." She's able to do whatever she wants as long as you aren't thinking about it. |
| 377 | * TakeThat: Towards the end of their run, Morrison put out a one-shot Doom Patrol special entitled "Doom Force". It highlighted every trope of the [[Creator/RobLiefeld Liefeldian]] [[MediaNotes/TheDarkAgeOfComicBooks Dark Age]] had to offer, from the artistic failings to the horrible characters. It ended with one member of [[strike:ComicBook/YoungBloodImageComics]] Doom Force dead, and the remaining members declaring him a creep, walking away in an EverybodyLaughsEnding. |
| 378 | * ThatManIsDead: |
| 379 | ** Rebis, who is a combination of Larry Trainor and Dr. Eleanor Poole. Cliff still refers to him/her as "Larry", even though Rebis denies being Larry Trainor anymore. |
| 380 | ** Roughly played within the Giffen series, which reveals Larry's been [[DeadAllAlong dead since the accident]] that turned him into Negative Man. Since then, it's been the N-Man entity in a variety of clones. Maybe. Because the N-Man isn't sure he's ''not'' Larry either. Or something. The whole thing is sorta fuzzy, and even Larry (or "Larry") isn't certain anymore. |
| 381 | * TheseusShipParadox: [[spoiler: Grant Morrison's run had Robotman's brain destroyed by the Candlemaker near the end. He survives by having his consciousness transferred into a computer system, with Rachel Pollack's run subsequently backpedaling on Cliff Steele being fully robotic by having him given an empty, organic brain to store his memories in. The issue of whether Robotman was still Cliff Steele at this point was eventually addressed in his story in ''DC's Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun'', where one of the ghosts of deceased Doom Patrol members haunting Robotman is ''himself'', with his death cited as occurring when the Candlemaker destroyed his original brain.]] |
| 382 | * TimeToUnlockMoreTruePotential: Invoked directly with the new cyborg body Keeg built Cliff. The only way to upgrade and enhance his body is for Cliff to continue doing good deeds. He goes on a good-deed bender which eventually results in him [[spoiler:becoming a planet.]] |
| 383 | * TokenEvilTeammate: The Brotherhood of Nada in [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's run]] seems even less malevolent than their Dada predecessors with the very notable exception of the Brutalist who feeds on the pain and misfortune of others by beating them to death. |
| 384 | * TokenBlack: Joshua Clay is the sole African-American member in Paul Kupperberg and Grant Morrison's runs, with Lucius Reynolds fulfilling that position in [[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Gerard Way's run]]. |
| 385 | * TomatoInTheMirror: [[spoiler: The Cliff]] we've known for the first few issues of Arcudi's run isn't actually the real one at all. [[spoiler: He's one of Dorothy's imaginary friends.]] |
| 386 | * TonightSomeoneDies: Parodied in the ''Doom Force'' one-shot, where the cover has an arrow labeled "Which one of these heroes will die?" pointed directly at the face of Shasta the Living Mountain, who indeed turned out to be the sole casualty of the team in the story. |
| 387 | * TookALevelInJerkass: The False Memory in Pollack's run. She started as just one of the many personas belonging to the chameleon-like Identity Addict. When she came back in #83, she spends her time walking around giving people fake memories, eventually trying to insert herself in the Doom Patrol by manipulating their memories to her favor, such as making Coagula think she was raped as a teenager by her husband. Only Dorothy rejects the fake memories immediately and manages to snap her teammates back to their senses. |
| 388 | * TranslationConvention: The Quiz's debut in Grant Morrison's run shows some Japanese people speaking English so the reader can understand what they're saying without knowing Japanese. |
| 389 | * {{Transvestite}}: Danny the Street (his male-geared stores, like gun shops, are covered in pink lace and the like), and several people who live on him. Overlaps with WholesomeCrossdresser as Danny is possibly the [[NiceGuy kindest, nicest fellow]] in the entire DCU. |
| 390 | ** Lt. Washington becomes this after the destruction of the Avatar. This is a BrickJoke from something he previously mentioned. |
| 391 | * TwoGirlsToATeam: Several rosters of the team only had two female members. |
| 392 | ** Counting the genderfluid being Rebis who was created from Larry Trainor/Negative Man and Eleanor Poole merging into a single entity, the roster in Grant Morrison's run had Crazy Jane and Dorothy Spinner as the only two female members, with the alternate future one-shot ''Doom Force'' focusing on a future incarnation of the team that had an adult Dorothy Spinner as the only female on it besides Flux. |
| 393 | ** Fever and Freak are the only two females in the roster of John Arcudi's run. |
| 394 | ** John Byrne's run initially had a third female on the team named Faith, but she was phased out early on, leaving Elasti-Girl and Nudge as the only two females on that iteration of the team. |
| 395 | * TwoGuysAndAGirl: The original team, with Robotman and Negative Man as the two guys and Elasti-Girl as the girl. Keith Giffen's run also had this dynamic by having the roster stick to the classic formation of Robotman, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl. |
| 396 | * UnbuiltTrope: The original team - a group of superheroes (with the exception of Elasti-girl) whose powers don't just set them apart from society, but are actually severely detrimental to their health, and are nothing that any of them are proud of. They're not just [[RubberForeheadAliens rubber forehead mutants]] who have superpowers and maybe one distinguishing feature or two but otherwise [[InformedDeformity look normal]], they're all deformed. In addition, the team's kindly, wheelchair-bound leader [[spoiler: is a ManipulativeBastard responsible for all of their current conditions]], and they end up all getting killed off to save one tiny fishing town from a [[BadassNormal powerless]], [[EvilCripple disabled]] [[EvilOldFolks old man]] from a [[ThoseWackyNazis war that ended decades ago.]] Sounds like a {{Deconstruction}} of the ''ComicBook/XMen'', right? Except it came out [[OlderThanTheyThink a few months earlier]] than the esteemed competition. |
| 397 | * UnholyMatrimony: The Brain and Monsieur Mallah are a couple. Okay, so The Brain is a BrainInAJar evil genius and Monsieur Mallah is a [[DirtyCommies Communist gorilla]], and they're leading the Patrol's enemies. It doesn't mean that they aren't a devoted, loving pair. |
| 398 | * UnseenNoMore: Dorothy Spinner's parents never appeared physically when she was introduced in Paul Kupperberg's run, nor did we ever see them when she talked about her experiences growing up in Grant Morrison and Rachel Pollack's runs, but her mother Margaret Spinner is at least shown in John Arcudi's run (which retroactively established the Spinners to be Dorothy's ''adoptive'' parents and revealed that Dorothy's still unnamed foster father died shortly before Dorothy learned the Spinners were not her biological parents). |
| 399 | * TheUnreveal: While Jane has 64 personalities, each with their powers, most of those personalities and powers aren't revealed. Especially notable is that the "power" exhibited by Driver 8, the ability to navigate through Jane's mind and handle her other personalities, is a psychological mechanism, not a power at all. |
| 400 | * VitriolicBestBuds: In the original run, Cliff, Larry, Steve, and Gar. They all fought with each other like crazy but did care for each other. (Well... Cliff and Larry cared for each other and eventually for Gar. Steve... [[ButtMonkey not quite so much]].) |
| 401 | * WantedASonInstead: When the Beard-Hunter's mother is interviewed by the police, she remarks that she wishes she had a daughter instead of a son. |
| 402 | * WelcomeToTheRealWorld: It is heavily implied that the final issue of Grant Morrison's run takes place in the real world. Aside from the fact that this world has no superheroes, it also has the same palette as [[spoiler:the last issue of Morrison's ComicBook/AnimalMan]], which explicitly takes place in "our" world. (Unless the Animal Man story was just [[AllJustADream a peyote trip]].) |
| 403 | * WellIntentionedExtremist: Throughout ''[[ComicBook/DoomPatrol2016 Weight of the Worlds]]'' Cliff becomes this due to his fixation with heroics and upgrading his new body. It leads to him becoming a planet called Planet Cliff and trying to assimilate whole planets to "fix" them. |
| 404 | * WhamEpisode: Issue 57, "The Nature of the Catastrophe", in which the Chief explains [[spoiler:that he was responsible for the entire original Patrol's tragic backstories and has been controlling every major plot beat they've gone through since. He is then decapitated by the Candlemaker, who then goes on to destroy Cliff's brain.]] |
| 405 | * WhatHaveIBecome: Most of the leads experience this at one point or another after their transformations. |
| 406 | * WildChild: |
| 407 | ** One of the backup stories in the original 1960s series' later issues that expanded Beast Boy's past established that he briefly lived by himself in the wild shortly after he was orphaned. |
| 408 | ** One arc of Rachel Pollack's run had Crowdark form an army known as the Wild Girls, consisting of young girls who were convinced by her influence to abandon their homes and become feral brats clad in animal hides. |
| 409 | * WillTheyOrWontThey: Steve Dayton and Rita Far back in the sixties for a few issues is about as soap-operatic as it gets in the early Doom Patrol. At one point Rita leaves Steve standing at the altar. |
| 410 | * WitchWithACapitalB: |
| 411 | ** Paul Kupperberg's run frequently had characters call females who pissed them off "witch". |
| 412 | ** In the Annual of Rachel Pollack's run that tied in to ''ComicBook/TheChildrensCrusadeVertigo'', Junkin Buckley refers to Dorothy as a "goddamn ugly grown-up witch" when she punches him in retribution for groping her breasts. |
| 413 | * WolverineWannabe: The ''Doom Force'' one-shot that was part of Grant Morrison's run featured a satire of Wolverine called the Scratch, who in lieu of adamantium claws had various swiss army tools strapped to his knuckles. |
| 414 | * WordSaladHorror: Grant Morrison's run was full of this. Word salads are used as magical spells, as utterances from mad demonic creatures like the Scissormen, and so on. |
| 415 | * YearInsideHourOutside: After Keeg Bovo, the Negative Spirit, reunites with Larry, Larry is given the ability to experience an entire life whenever Keeg has to leave Larry's body. For example, being asleep for 32 minutes might feel like 32 years for Larry. [[spoiler: While initially a good experience, it leads to Larry becoming depressed due to his multiple deaths in each dream lifetime.]] |
| 416 | * YoungerThanTheyLook: Dorothy Spinner's age was initially ambiguous, with some artists drawing her in a way that she looked like an adult woman (particularly Erik Larsen in her debut during Paul Kupperberg's run and her depiction in the cover art by Glenn Fabry for the ''Vertigo Jam'' one-shot), but Rachel Pollack's run indicated she was a minor after showing her living by herself in an apartment by having Cliff tell Dorothy she was "too young" to know what the phone sex operators in George and Marion's home were doing in issue 68 as well as the recap page of issue 70 explicitly stating that Dorothy is 14 years old. It would not be until John Arcudi's run, where she was revealed to have become comatose and was ultimately TakenOffLifeSupport, that Dorothy would canonically reach adulthood, as it was stated that the incident that put her in a coma occurred four years prior to the events of Arcudi's run, indicating that Dorothy was most likely at least 18 years old when Cliff begrudgingly allowed her to die. |
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