History ComicBook / DoomPatrol

** 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 the previous ''Doom Patrol'' series to continuity, this presumably included restoring General Immortus to being the one who crippled the Chief.

* 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.

* 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....

* CanonDiscontinuity: As far as Gerard Way's ''Doom Patrol'' is concerned, the team that appeared in the New 52-era ''ComicBook/JusticeLeague'' 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]].

** Gerard Way's run re-establishes the previous ''Doom Patrol'' series as having happened, and implicitly throws aside their New 52 -era ''ComicBook/JusticeLeague'' appearances.

As part of [[Music/MyChemicalRomance Gerard Way]]'s Creator/YoungAnimal imprint at DC during the ''ComicBook/DCRebirth'' era, a new ongoing title 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.

!!Tropes in this comic book:

* BadFuture: It's implied that ''Doom Force'' takes place in one in which [[spoiler:the Chief's global catastrophe occurred]].
** Another one occurs in ''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.]]

** At the beginning of the final arc of Rachel Pollack's run, Dorothy Spinner attempts to make a more libidinous use of her powers 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.

** 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 and the severity of her ape-like deformities (with 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).

* 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]]), 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).

* BadFuture: It's implied that ''Doom Force'' takes place in one in which [[spoiler:the Chief's global catastrophe occurred]].
** Another one occurs in ''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.]]

* WitchWithACapitalB: Paul Kupperberg's run frequently had characters call females who pissed them off "witch".

* TwoGuysAndAGirl: The original team, with Robotman and Negative Man as the two guys and Elasti-Girl as the girl.

* TranslationConvection: 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.

''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 scissored from imaginary worlds, the Brotherhood of Dada, the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E, and a [[GeniusLoci friendly transgender street]] named, well... Danny the Street. Just in case you were wondering, he dresses like a boulevard. No, really. And then it got even weirder. Morrison left and, with the switchover of the book to Creator/VertigoComics, Rachel Pollack, more well known as a tarot expert and prose fiction writer, took over. She had much the same approach, but the book did not retain its popularity and it got canceled. The title ended with issue #87 (February 1995).

* 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 an occultist, 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...

** 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).

* BrainUploading: 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.

* ChekhovsBoomerang: In one of the earliest scenes in Gerard Way's Doom Patrol, 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 - 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 Retco so that they can take the stories of the Trinity and corrupt them.

** 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 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.

* 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. Arcudi's run reveals that she even created her own version of Robotman, one that would never leave her.
* CreativeSterility: During the Morrison run, the Department of Defence kidnapped a young reality warper named Wally Sage 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.

* CuckooNest: Creator/GrantMorrison's final issue centers on Crazy Jane in a mental hospital, 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, [[spoiler:in the end, teammate Cliff Steele saves her from suicide by taking her "home" to the utopian [[GeniusLoci Danny the World]].]]

** Subverted in Rachel Pollack's run. In #83, False Memory gave Coagula fake memories 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. 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.

* DroppedABridgeOnHim: 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.

** The 22nd issue of Keith Giffen's run had the battle end prematurely when 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.
* EndOfTheWorldSpecial: This seems to be what happens at the end of Morrison's run, with Danny the Street expanding to become the magical Danny the World for Cliff and Jane.

* KnightOfCerebus: 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''.

* LateArrivalSpoiler: The fact that 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.

* 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.

** The Chief spends Rachel Pollack's series as a head on a tray of ice.

** 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. The story he told Elasti-Girl is the one that gets leaked, and it turns out none of these origins are true.

* MyGreatestFailure: For Cliff, it was for not being able to help Dorothy and having to take her off life support. When a Scissorman appears masquerading as Dorothy, Cliff is not happy, to say the least.

** 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 germ phobia kept her from using her powers. [[/note]]

* 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 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.

** Larry has changed from the Negative Man into the Positive Man, and Keeg the Negative Spirit can exist independently of him,
** Casey Brink has reverted into a comic book and Danny has been reduced to a call box,
** Robotman, after realizes he has gone insane with power, rebuilds himself as a cyborg baby.

* OutlivingOnesOffspring: Flex Mentallo's creator 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.
* OutOfCharacterAlert: In volume one issue 90, Larry figured out that the putty-like Madame Rouge was impersonating the Chief when "he" called Rita Elasti-Girl -- "the Chief would NEVER call Rita by that freak name!"

* 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 (which was made worse in hindsight when John Arcudi's run later established that the Spinners were Dorothy's ''adoptive'' parents).

* 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. It turns out he was one of Dorothy's imaginary friends -- her idealized version of Cliff.

* RapeAsBackstory: Crazy Jane was sexually abused twice in her lifetime by two different men. Her father, when she was 5 years old and before her personalities manifested (at which point she was still Kay Challis). 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.

** 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 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.

* SuicidalSadisticChoice: The first incarnation [[spoiler: 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!"]]]]

* TheseusShipParadox: 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.

* 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. While initially a good experience, it leads to Larry becoming depressed due to his multiple deaths in each dream lifetime.

* CentralTheme: Although Morrison insists they didn't intend for it, almost every arc of their run can be summed with [[AnAesop the aesop]] "It's better to live in a weird world than a boring world".

* 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.

** 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 transwoman 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.

* PeriodShaming: 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 (which was made worse in hindsight when John Arcudi's run later established that the Spinners were Dorothy's ''adoptive'' parents).

* PeriodShaming: 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!"