Welcome to Dear Watchers in Omniversal Comic Boat podcast, where we do a deep dive into the multiverse.
We are traveling with you through the stories and the worlds that make up an omniverse of fictional realities we all love. And your watchers on this journey are me Negative Geeto, and Me rob at.
Uh, man.
I thought maybe you were going to go with Alaska Rob, but all right.
That one works better, of course. And Gito, what's new with us in our little segment of the multiverse?
Well, we might have some new special episodes coming your way soon. We've been planning a slightly different format we can present, so stay tuned for some fun changes. Uh, occasionally, not regularly, we're sticking with the same old format you've known to come to love. Otherwise, same old, same old this week. So please just keep thinking of those people that you can tell to listen so we can keep growing in 2023.
And if please consider joining us on Coffee as a patron where our Promethea Book Club is growing. Say it's a promethean. One of today's issues, I have to say. And if you could take a moment to leave us a review on Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts, that would be amazing. But if you are joining us for the first time, we have three sections of our travels today. Origins of the story, what inspired this other reality? Exploring multiversity. We dive deeper into our alternate universe and pondering possibilities. We examine the impact and what's followed or coming in the future. And with that, dear Watchers, welcome to episode 82, and let's check out what's happening in the Omniverse with today's alternate universe. Today, we are asking the very unusual question what if the Doom Patrol was recreated in name only on a tangent, whatever the heck that means?
Well, the tangent a little play on words our, uh, listeners will find out. This was Earth 97, though it later became known as Earth Nine. It's from a full run of comics set on this Earth that this is our first trip to and we'll give you the background on in just a moment, though this is the only Earth appearance of that Doom Patrol. So let's find out more about the Doom Patrol and this run of comics before we start our trip.
Yes. So the Doom Patrol was created in June 1963 for DC by Arnold Drake, Bruno Promyani, and Bob Hainey. Drake was writing and had Haney's help in developing the characters for Promyani's art. The team was announced as the Legion of the Strange and debuted great name. And debuted in this anthology series before being renamed into their own title and continuing until 1968.
And the anthology My Greatest Adventure mhm.
Mhm and controversially Drake went after a little gentleman named Stan Lee when The Uncanny X Men debuted just a few months later with a bunch of freaks and mutants led by a wheelchair bound team. Smart guy coincidence. What do you think?
I don't know. It's a fascinating story. I actually wish there was more out there about this. Yeah, I'll share a bit about my history with Doom Patrol when we get to that question, but I have to say it is uncanny, these similarities. And it's interesting when you read Drake, there's a point where he's really aggressive. There's a point where you can find quotes from him talking about how it just had to be intentional. There's just no way he could imagine it being a coincidence. I think there's rumors I mean, it's so hard to find details. There's rumors that he threatened a lawsuit and then gave up on it. So it's a really fascinating thing. And then later in life, he does seem to soften and say, like, maybe he uses some metaphor, like they're both in the same vineyard and so they're going to end up with the same product, uh, at the end. So I don't know. It's a really interesting thing to and Doom Patrol is a few months before X Men. So unlike some other odd coincidences that have happened over the years between the two companies, there's time here, I think that the X Men could have been inspired, but who knows? So it is a cool controversy and I do wish we got more information about some of the behind the scenes stuff, um, with any potential lawsuit and all that.
Yeah, I guess we'll never know. And the characters other than the Chief and Professor Rex are pretty different. Yes, they do.
There's a lot of similarities that I'll mention.
Okay.
Uh, because I was surprised by how many similarities as a lifelong X Men Die Hard, I was surprised by how much similarity there was.
Well, controversy or not, the Doom Patrol was relaunched in 1977 and then again in the 1980s. And finally the most iconic runs were in the 1990s by some heavyweights, Grant Morrison, who relaunched it for Vertigo Comics and then was succeeded by Rachel Pollock. So they tried to reboot Doom Patrol many different volumes, some totally unrelated and out of continuity practically until my Chemical Romance Umbrella Academy icon Gerard Way, his line for DC's Young animal imprint. And then that wrapped up and then it's finally this March, 20 years ago too.
So it's really been out of print, which is interesting.
Yeah. So finally this this March in 2023, there's going to be a new miniseries out, which is a little odd considering that there has been, of course, a television show version of the Doom Patrol that has been out for four seasons and counting on DC Universe and then HBO Max. And of course, we're going to touch on that TV show too.
We're not going to touch on it. We're going to dive right into it. But before we get there so this story, what if the Doom Patrol was recreated and named only on a tangent, comes from a whole initiative at DC, I guess. An initiative, a, uh, moment called Tangent Comics. And this is our first trip to the alternate universe of Tangent Comics. This is a world developed by Dan Jurgens, who led the event. It's 18 original issues in two waves from 1997 to 1998, all one shots and then 112 issue Maxi series follow up in 2008. So ten years later, called Tangent, Superman's reign. This is not an else worlds, though it is an alternate universe. It's quite fascinating. So during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the atom shows up and ends up destroying Florida. And all this stuff happens to create new Atlantis and that moment happens. And from M then on, the history of the world is completely altered by the presence of superheroes. Though Richard Nixon exists and all these things exist, but the world is different. So it's a little almost Watchmen esque in that way. And Jurgen said that one of the goals of Tangent. Now, there's two goals, uh, with this project, but one is that the Earth Tangent was meant to be less like our Earth. Uh, in Dan's mind, the DCU Earth was more like our Earth just with the superheroes in it. So it was very much meant to be our reality. But Superman is in it, Batman's in it, Wonder Woman's in it, Emma Sky is in it, et cetera. This is supposed to be a world that has been totally transformed, different world because the superheroes are in it. Then the other piece of this project, the Tangent Comics universe, is that these are characters in name only. So there's no backstory to the Deets universe. We know there are no connections, there is no canon, there's nothing that is pulling from the world people are familiar with in DC other than the names. So in that way, it's actually a little bit like the just imagined Stanley created the DC Universe that we just started covering pieces of last month. And it's interesting to me that these two projects existed at DC within a few years of each other. These attempts to just give someone the chance to redo the universe a name only. So, little odd of a project, but yeah, we'll see if this was successful. All of the Tangent Comics were dedicated to Julie Schwartz, of course, classic DC Comics editor, architect, writer, who laid a lot of the groundwork for the Silver Age and beyond DC Universe. And just to put a pin in Tangent Comics, which we'll certainly revisit on many future episodes, there has been barely any crossover into the DC Universe except Green Lantern. As the Tangent, Green Lantern has had little bits of crossover. I think there was a desire at some point to pull her in to the DC universe. But otherwise, most of these characters and this world haven't been seen. And that's it. So Tangent Comics, our first trip to what was Earth 97 and then reestablished during the Infinite Crisis final crisis era as Earth Nine.
So we're talking about two things that we've never covered on the podcast before doom Patrol and Tangent comics. So, Gito, what was your background first with Doom Patrol?
All right, so Doom Patrol, this is an interesting one because I always sort of flirted with the Grant Morrison run as a big Morrison fan. But I never sat down and read it start to finish because it's pretty impenetrable. And I had no history with the team. And I would say there's probably a large chunk of my life where I thought they were a take on X Men. I thought that they were copying X Men. I hadn't realized the order of things, really. The TV show comes out, we watch it, and I think it is just to die for. And we'll talk so much about it because I absolutely love it. I think it's one of the most fun, best executed comic book superhero TV shows. And that inspired me to read more Doom Patrol, and I love Rachel Pollock and started collecting those single issues whenever I could, mostly out of dollar bins. And just this year, the last few months, actually, I have started to do an entire Doom Patrol start to finish read. So I started in the Silver Age, and I am now right at the tail end of Rachel Pollock's run. And I've read everything Doom Patrol there is. Sometimes I've skimmed because sometimes they're not that good. But the Silver Age was really good. And what surprised me when I revisited it or visited it for the first time, for me, actually, was how much of the Silver Age DNA is in the show, even though the show also is using a lot of the Morrison Pollock weirdness and absurdness and surreality and mysticism. To a certain extent. The everything else about the show is there in the Silver Age. The Silver Age issues are really fun, and they are remarkably like X Men to me, other than they're not as soapy, which X Men doesn't become until later, but iconically. They're not as soapy and they're not as grounded in the real world. They're a little pulpier. But otherwise, like every issue in the Silver Age, Doom Patrol, they're struggling with being freaks and outcasts, and they're struggling with the world's knowing who they are and knowing that they're freaks and can freaks also be heroes. So it's really amazing to me. And then there's the Brotherhood of Evil, which, of course, in the fourth issue of Xmen is the Brotherhood of Evil mutants. Like, uh, there are really remarkable things where I'm like I think they're sort of aping each other in this doesn't matter because they're both now extraordinary properties that are quite different, even though they share a lot of DNA. But I was surprised how much DNA Doom Patrol shared. So, recent fan, but now really becoming a very big fan of this series. What about you for doom patrol?
Trying to think if I don't think I ever read any Doom Patrol comics. Where I did always see them was being a big reader of DC Who's Who and just constantly reading those. They always had such a striking look, especially Robot Man with that bronze skin. And I think even in the DC Who's Who, they're wearing uniforms that are very early X Men esque, which you don't really have in the issue that we're just going to discuss today. But they're wearing kind of matching uniforms color.
They have the red and white ones, whereas the Xmen have the blue and.
Yellow has that kind of X Men feel. So I remember always seeing them in there but never read them. So they were definitely always in the back of my mind. And as we've talked about on the podcast before, so much of my introduction to these characters, any of the characters we're discussing came from Saturday morning cartoons and things like that. And certainly they were never featured there. So really my first real introduction to them was on the TV show, which I like, you really enjoy a lot. So that was really my main introduction for this episode.
Was probably your first comic read of them.
Totally. Yeah, probably done.
Exciting.
I might have had them in like a dollar bin. They were probably definitely someone I might have had and just picked up randomly growing up. Because I feel like you would constantly see the Robot Man, Negative Man popping up in a dollar bin. But if I did read them, I definitely forgot them.
Yeah, I doubt it. And Tangent Comics, it's one of the few alternate universes that I never, ever explored. I had two or three of the issues just because I was buying them. I was like, what is this? But I was never a big fan of the design of them. And I never fully wrapped my head around even what Deep Jurgens in DC were trying to do with it. So I never got into it. I never really read them. So this is my first reading, sitting down reading and absorbing a Tangent Comics issue and understanding the world. So that's pretty new to me. I was very familiar with it, but it's new to me in terms of reading. And I'd imagine the same is true for you.
I had never even heard of it until you mentioned it. Um, to do this episode, we got to meet briefly at this last year's New York Comic Con, Dan Jurgens. So that was a lot of fun. He was super.
Time we see him, we can ask him about Tangent Comics. Uh, I don't know if we'll want to. We'll see.
I was just slightly too young for the whole death of Superman I had when Superman came back. But the big thing that I read over and over again and heavily ingrained in my brain, where I even bought it, was Zero hour. That dan Jerkins wrote that was the comic comics architect. Yeah, I was camping and they had a little store where you could buy comics at the campground. I don't know why. And of course, I was just sitting there in a sleeping bag, just devouring zero hour. And it definitely helped fuel my love of the JSA and some of those early golden age heroes and how they mixed in that kind of world building sense. I guess he was DC's event guy for a while, it seems.
Yeah. Well, one day we'll probably get to the crisis in time. But for now, let's deal with this other actually, this is a time crisis too, but we'll get to that.
Yes. So speaking of time, let's travel back to the 1960s for our origins of the story.
Right now on ah, this very show, you're going to get the answer to all your questions.
Our amazing story begins a few years ago. Fitting that there was stan with some X Men connotations with these, uh, this issue. So our first issue today is the not very well named My Greatest Adventure number 80 from June 1963, DC Comics. And this is entitled the Doom Patrol.
This is written by Arnold Drake with Bob Haney, penciled and inked by Bruno Permiani and edited by Murray Boltonoff. We read it because it is the introduction to The Doom Patrol, their first appearance, their first issue, and their origin. So first impressions, what do you think?
It's very much an origin story. We get definitely kind of going back to what you were saying about the TV show. Wow. You can see the TV show exactly.
In her so surprised by as I read these Silver Age books. Yeah, because I really again, because the show is from m the beginning, also weaving in like, the Mr. Nobody and the really surreal wacky stuff. I thought it was going to be more of that, but no. Um, it is.
Yeah.
So pulling from this Silver Age, I love this issue. I I'm biased. Having read the run, I think if you got deeper into the run, you'd probably appreciate the Silver Age pulpiness of it. This issue on its own maybe isn't anything special.
But yeah, it felt a little stilted to me. But a lot of that is the 1960 style writing.
Well, they get a little weirder even, um, by the second and third appearance. Like, they start to just get this one. I mean, they keep saying that they're weird even on the COVID I love that. They're called the Legion of the World's Strangest Heroes So they're really clearly trying to position them as being these strange freaks. But this issue plus Immortals gets a lot more fun. This one, he is just like some evil mustache.
You don't even really know too much about him.
Little old guy. No, I kind of wanted to at the end. So clearly they didn't intend to bring him back and have this whole back story that he's literally immortal. But yeah, they do, and it's cool.
Yeah, I definitely wanted it to be a bit more weird in that way, and I think in that way, when I have read early X Men M M, as you said, maybe it sounds like Doom Patrol gets into that, but I feel like in the X Men, they're dealing a little bit more with them. And maybe because also in the X Men, they're supposed to be younger teenagers, and here they do seem like adults. Adults. Even though they have these strange powers, they seem a little bit more well adjusted to their powers than, say, the super early X Men are.
Yeah, I think that's true. I think the tension comes in again with, are they going to be accepted by the world as freaks? And then the Negative Man here is different. You probably noticed he can only leave his Larry Trainer's body for 60 seconds. So that creates a lot of the tension in these early books. It's like, is he going to get back in time? They even do these countdowns, which is kind of fun. There's actually a whole issue in the Silver Age where each page has a little tighter, uh, and you're like watching it unfold to see if he'll get back into his body.
But the suspense isn't really there because, of course, they're not going to be killing the character. And it reminded me a lot. There's no mistakes, but what they did with Thor early on, where that ah, Thor will turn back into a human if he doesn't have Mjolnir in his hands after a little bit. So they're they're constantly I feel like in those early Thor comics that we've read, oh my gosh, is he going to get back in time? Because otherwise he's going to transform and people will know his identity. And of course, it always reaches there. So maybe the comics of the 60s were definitely obsessed with, oh, let's add on this bit of tension, but especially to a modern reader, it doesn't feel tense. It kind of starts to feel a little tedious, actually.
Well, I think what it does, too, is it creates a limit. At a time when so much of this storytelling was new, they, I think, didn't want total omnipotence, and they didn't know how to deal with total omnipotence, which, of course, storytellers and creators have become much more adept at handling how not to have someone like Thor just feel omnipotent all the time. Why can't he just do anything? So I think that's probably the case here, instead of because ultimately, Negative Man, if he could stay out of Larry's body, would probably succeed at every mission that they have in these early pages. So they're like, okay, we need a limit to this. And you'll note, Rita, what's fun is the powers develop a little. So even though DC is not into serialized storytelling at this point, they do a little bit of character building. So like Rita's Powers here are that she can get bigger and smaller, but she can't yet, uh, expand or contract only certain parts of her body. And so later in the Silver Age run, she starts to develop that she realizes like, oh, wait, I can make my hand bigger and I don't have to make my whole body bigger. And so there's some cool development.
It definitely feels characters also of the movies that were happening where you had Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and the Amazing Colossal Man and the Amazing Shrinking Man and all those things where oh, now she can go into something. Now she can diffuse the bomb because she can grow small here or then she can grow big and grab something that's flying through the air again. Uh, very convenient to often where the power come into.
I mean, this issue doesn't on purpose. They do a good job of the team interplay being useful, which is fun, right? In this one, yeah, the bomb is like Larry's negative man goes and retrieves the bomb. And then Rita uh, shrinks and can go inside the bomb and dismantle it. And then Robot, uh, man can contain it because he's metal. And so they each have a role to play, which is fun. And I really appreciate and many other.
Comics from this era also use this structure that this issue uses where there's these chapters and there's three chapters, but really it's half and half, where the first half is their origin stories. And we see the origins of Rita and Larry and Cliff and kind of the Chief as kind of explaining it all. Then the second half is them facing immortis. And I think we've seen that structure in a lot of other Silver Age comics as well.
Yeah, and the point of it is that, uh, the reason for it, I'd imagine, is that these are all anthology books. So just like Superman and Flash and Wonder Woman and Batman, they're all debuting in what most comics are at this point, if not all comics at this point are anthology books. So my greatest adventure would have different stories in it. And so they probably when they would have an extended story, it took up more than one part of a book that usually the story would only be one part of. And like those other books, flash, Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman, this anthology book then just becomes dedicated to Doom Patrol and gets renamed Doom Patrol. So there is no Doom Patrol volume one, number one, because they just retitle it, which was very common with the DC books. And and actually the pre Marvel like Atlas Timely books did the same thing. So yeah, but I like, you know, there's two quotes I just want to mention because they speak to why I liked this so much and the way it resonates for me as an x Men fan. Like, toward the end of the first part, chief is saying, our greatest test awaits us, our first official mission. And it's the way we'll know if four outcasts of the world can still find their place. And then at the end of the whole issue, they're quoting from the newspaper which names them Doom Patrol and talks about how these three exiles from the human race. So I like that idea that the three of them, even though they all started as human, they are all now no longer seen as human. They saved a world that had rejected them. So again, that X Men tension of like, do we save this world even though they're not treating us equally?
Mhm. And it's funny, I was thinking of those movies, the Giant and Tiny movies. But there's also harkenings back to the classic Mad Scientist old Dark house kind of set up here.
Well, and obviously Negative Man is meant to look like Invisible Man.
And the Frankenstein monster with Robot Man as well. And the chief is this kind of well, he doesn't quite seem mad here, but kind of a mad scientist type. So you can definitely see them pulling from those movies that really were at this point, already 30 to 30 years before this was even being rented, but probably the kind of movies that Arnold Drake grew up watching.
Yeah, definitely. And Drake, of course, did go on to write some Silver Age X Men briefly and created characters like Polaris and Havoc. Just wanted to, uh before we move on.
So let us have our negative spirit travel to another dimension. 60 Seconds is exploring multiversity.
I am your guide through these vast new realities. Follow me and ponder the question, what if?
So this is Tangent Comics Doom Patrol number One from December 97 from DC Comics.
So this is written by Dan Jurgens, pencilled by Sean Chen, inked by Kevin Conrad and Ray Krising, colored by Jason Wright, lettered by Comiccraft, edited by Eddie Vergonza, um, Frank Barrios and Dana Curtin. Jurgens, of course, is the architect of Tangent Comics, as mentioned, and a DC legend who, as you mentioned a few years prior, did the death and return of Superman with a lot of collaborators. Sean Chen, meanwhile, worked mostly at Valiant at this point. This is very early in his career, went on to Marvel and is still doing work for Marvel. So, yeah, before our summary of the issue, what's the question we are calling for?
So today's question is, what if the Doom Patrol was recreated in name only on a tangent? And this is, as you said earlier, Earth Nine.
Earth Nine. All right. I don't know how to do a summary of this, and I didn't bother trying to write one, so I'm going to try to make it so fast. We are in 2030, and the world is ending October 1, 2030 to be precise. And this group of characters we find out, or, I guess, kind of superheroes unclear what's going on. They decide they need to travel back to stop what's happening, and they come back to 1997, the present time in the Tangent Earth, the Earth altered by the atoms presence at the Cuban Missile Crisis. But now, 30 years after that, and they're trying to stop what ends up destroying the world, and they end up realizing it's their presence that leads to the destruction of the world. But then I think they kind of avoid it. And it is okay jumping to impressions. It's a mess, and I didn't like it. Um, and so that's where my summary, uh, gets stuck. But there's a lot more I'll point out about the mess. Is there anything in the summary vein that you want to add?
Yeah, I was just going to say who the team is. So we have Dr. D day.
I do like that they start calling her Doomsday.
Yes. And then they call our Doomsday. Nice little also Dan Jurgen, uh, interreference there, maybe.
And they call them I should add before you continue, the characters doomsday. They call them Doom Patrol because they've come to 90 97 and announced that they're there to stop the world ending. So they they get called Doom Patrol. So that's the connection to the name in the Tangent world.
Yeah.
So moving on to all she's like.
Yeah, she she's like the chief character, the scientist, and she's got, like, a Louise Brooks bang, heavy bang haircut there. Then she's got her daughter Lords, who has powers, but it's never really defined what those powers are.
She thinks they're known as fire hawk.
Right, yes, something like that.
Flamehawk or firewall.
But yet she doesn't seem to have flame powers. It's confusing. And she thinks they're genetic, but they maybe not.
No, she thinks they're experimental. But then I get the sense that there's some incest stuff going on.
Yeah, there is some incest stuff going on because of this issue. Oh, yeah.
She starts flirting with who you think the earlier Adam when they go back in time, and her mother's like, no, stop it. So I think we're led to believe maybe it's confirmed, and it's just confusing that, in fact, the Adam Two or whatever is her father huh. Where her power has come from. And so her mother's like, no, stop flirting with him, please.
Then we get Star Sapphire. But she's not like the Star Sapphire we know. She has every power under the sun, so she's got a crazy backstory.
Uh uh, uh.
Uh. Or even I was thinking Rita far too, like, everything's, like, darling, and she.
Seems very I heard it as rogue.
Oh. I heard it as very, like, rich.
Lady, which is like Hepburn.
Yes, exactly. Because her back story is that I guess she lived just for money, and men were told she's like Blanche Devereaux. And then she, I guess, was dying, so they froze. Her in one of the first, like, cryo freezes, but then she was buried with she was frozen with her jewelry, and the freezing bonded with her jewelry, and it gave her powers, and then she was brought back. So her body is ice, but her powers are like fourth fields, and she can make people float and she can fly. It's like she's got one of those weird things. She can shoot beams. Very weird.
She does look cool.
She looks cool, yes. She's got a pink.
She's the only one who has, like, a design where I'm like, oh, okay, I'm interested.
Yes, because everyone else is in just black and gray and she's in, like.
Yeah, they look like shield ages. Everyone else.
Yeah. And then the last guy is just a sexy cyborg named or sexy android named Rampage, who I guess super strong.
That they sort of allude to here is that he's like a descendant of a prototype that to us seems like, even though it's not the DC universe at all, seems Robot Man esque because we have that Robot Man. Like in 1997, we discover that there's these just robot men who do all this stuff, including work at a hot dog stand who looks just like Cliff, Robot Man from Patrol. And then this android is like, oh, that might be an earlier version of me, or something like that.
Yeah, it was giving me, like, hot 90s version of Ian Holm and Alien, that kind of fully functional android synthetic kind of creature. But, yeah, none of them, really just.
A few Atom versions who show up.
Yes, a few different versions.
Adam in 2030, Adam in 1997, and they're all descendants of the Adam who started this universe.
And then we get a few kind of mysterious government figures. One kind of looks like Two Face, but he's dead.
He is. In another Tangent comic, he refers to Night Wing, which is an organization in so it's a shared Earth, but Jurgens is not telling one story. In the second wave of Tangents, he starts to set up all the stuff with Russia that's in here. That becomes an ongoing plot. And there's the ultra humanite that exists in Russia. They have to fight him, and then that gets dealt with in the 2008 return to the universe because he never finished, I think, the story he wanted to tell. But they are meant to stand alone, just in a shared universe. So a character like yeah, uh, that person who's clearly meant to be a Two Face and refers to Night Wing. I like that. The reporter is Laurie Lamaris, of course, Superman's girlfriend, the mermaid.
Oh, I was just thinking Lois Lane with the two L's, and she works.
For no, Lori Lamaris. Um, the mermaid in the Silver Age.
No, I didn't even know that. I was just thinking the Lois Lane kind of thing.
And the newspaper is the world's finest, so there's lots of again, they stick pretty close to the mission where they're using all these names that we know, but they're not pulling in any of the backstory that we know, which I think worked well. And just imagine stan Lee I don't think it worked well here.
Yeah, there's a lot going on, as probably evidenced by our very jumbled summary of this. But at the same time it feels very little rote because we've kind of seen this story so many times. Time travelers go back to the past to save the world, only to find out that they are actually the cause.
Of, uh, destruction actually caused it.
And I guess here they eventually save it, but it seems like their ship is damaged. So they're kind of stuck, I guess, in the past. But yeah, just so much of this is that we've seen before. And instantly, when we're back in 2030, the current Adam is going to destroy their ship before they can get to the past because he knows that they are the ones responsible. And he sees, he looks at Lords in the eyes and I guess as we were kind of alluding to earlier senses that oh, he is her father, that kind of situation. So it all feels like, oh, we've seen this in many different varieties before, so it just doesn't really pop here.
Yeah, it's also convoluted. It required a ton of caption boxes and narration that I think just makes it uh, hard to read. It drops the pacing. It affects the pacing of it. I love the art. I think Sean Chen's art here is real great classic look comic book.
Well, it's so 90s too, with clean.
Lines, but not the exaggerated 90s. It's more of a, like really comic, uh, bookie action zero 90s.
Definitely. As soon as you open it, you go, oh my gosh, this could not have been done. I don't know if he's still drawing in this style, but you just go, oh my gosh. It had to be from the 90s. But you're right, real people. Mhm. Uh.
Huh. Uh, m just not a fan. I think what went wrong here to me is I appreciate that the concept was in name only. What do we do? But what the just imagined Stanley universe does is it says, okay, Inname only, but let's keep the essence of the character as we talked about in the two, uh, issues of that world we've covered already a few weeks ago, batman and Wonder Woman. Go, listen, if you haven't what Stan was able to do with his collaborators was figure out what made that character that character and then pull that through in ah, a completely different way with completely different name and a completely different origin in this. To adhere to that mission of truly in name only, it's like, well, then this could have been some Dan Jurgen's creator own story. It means nothing. The fact that they're called the Doom Patrol it's a clever concept, the Doom Patrol being, of course, this team that shows up to prevent doomsday. The name is a clever concept, but beyond that, there's nothing in this. They're not freaks, they're not weirdos. There's nothing interesting about the team dynamic. Uh, it's a totally self contained story, so it doesn't work for me.
Yeah, we talked a lot about that. Stan's Batman and Stan's Wonder Woman could be brought back now. Just rename them, and they exist as part of the Bat family, the Wonder Family, because, as you just said, they share enough of the DNA. But at the same time, they're completely different backstories and really different characters here. It really is true to the name in name only. Even then, I think we don't get enough of these characters personalities because there's so much plot that is in this issue, in these 30 something pages that we don't really get to live with Lordis and these other characters. We hear her voice because she's the narrator, so we get that she's like the kind of sarcastic Jubilee kind of voice, but we don't really get to sit with her and really know, okay, what is she all about? And I think that would have benefited, maybe, if he had pulled back on the plot a little bit and really focused a little bit more on the character building, on the world building there.
Yeah. So I don't need to go back to this to see these characters, do you?
No. Uh, the only other thing I was going to say is, uh, I mentioned that, uh, I was getting a little bit of shades of Promethean. You were mentioning, uh, shades of of Watchmen. So maybe it's really just shades of Alan more, because when we go back to especially into the 90s there, we kind of get all that. And that's what I wanted to live in a little bit more, which Alan does so great in his works, is really living in that. I mean, I think my favorite thing was that, uh, the Jean company is called Grundy.
Jean Grundy's.
I know. Nothing gets worried. Me and my Grundies, I would love to see. I want to spend more time with that. More time with the robot. As you said, there's a robot hot dog vendor, and they're called, like, robo dogs. And Dave was like, oh, I want to see more about that kind of thing and a little less of the actual plot.
Yeah, I agree, for sure. So let's keep going on our journey today.
Yes. Let's go to the world of television with today's pondering possibilities. Will the future you describe be averted? Averted, averted Sugito? What are we talking about for our pondering possibilities?
We are going to talk about the Doom Patrol show. And it's mainly that this is an excuse to talk about the show, but because they have been on this publishing hiatus where they really haven't done a lot of Doom patrol Publishing. This is a good way to look at another version of trying to launch the team. And it's the most recent version of trying to relaunch the team so we can see if Dan Jorge consists story had any influence, though. Spoiler the answer is going to be no. But let's talk about the TV show first.
Yes. So this is the Doom Patrol TV series. It has run for four seasons, 40 episodes so far from 2019 to 2023, still going on. That was originally airing on the DC Universe app website, whatever. And now it is on HBO Max.
And it was developed by Jeremy Carver. The executive producers have been Jeremy Carver, Jeff Johns, Greg Burlandti, Sarah Schechter, Chris Dingus, and Tamara Betra Wilkinson, who's done a lot of the writing and show running. And shout out to Ezra Clayton Daniels who's become a writer and showrunner story editor for the series the last few years and wrote the really awesome Upgrade Soul comic. So want to mention that. But the series also stars April Bolby, Brendan Frazier, Dian Guerrero, Jovian Wade, Matt Bomer, Timothy Dalton originally, and now Michelle Gomez, and a lot of other people who show up. But those are the core cast. We have watched the whole series. And while I don't think we'll really spoil the fourth season, we are going to talk about the whole series. But our focus is going to be the setup. We rewatched the pilot for this episode. So, uh, that was your first time rewatching the pilot. I've now seen it three times, four times. What did you think?
Rewatching it. It's a great pilot. It really gets the tone of the show right away, maybe a little bit more stayed in that first episode where it gets a little bit wackier and I think a little bit more vulgar. Not in a bad way, but as it kind of goes on. Maybe they didn't want to scare people too much with the very first episode, though.
They have enough stuff in there. I mean, there's enough genital humor, cursing, drug use. It's there. But I know it does go further, but I say all those elements are there. They gave you the mission statement upfront.
Yeah. And what, uh, Arnold Drake and his team didn't do really in the first issues here. But what they do do on this show is really explore the freak aspect of these characters, especially, uh, with Rita, who in the original comic just goes from a tiny person in the dress to a big person in a dress, but here becomes a whole blob, which deformed. And we never really, even in their first introduction, know why Larry is wearing the bandages. But here we know that he's horribly scarred. And for Cliff, we kind of see a perfect robot drawing in the original comic. But here he definitely feels like someone that was made in a garage. He has that kind of feel to it.
Yeah, I love this show so much. I think that if anyone's listening and hasn't watched the show, I think they should check it out. And I have to say there's something about the construction of the show and the pieces of the DNA from the comics Silver Age, Morrison and Pollock runs that it pulls from where even when there's a mediocre episode, which there are mediocre episodes, it doesn't hit every single time. It's not every single hour is riveting. The world is so interesting and the characters are so fun and the performances are so fun that I am in this world and interestingly. That's why I think it reminds me of comics. It feels like such a comic bookie show to me. When you're reading a run of a comic like the Silver Age Doom Patrol, you're going to get some issues where you're like whatever, that was fine. But you keep reading because you like the characters and then you're going to hit an issue where you're like oh that was cool, that was fun. So it feels very comic booky serialized storytelling in that way. I just love it and I think it really gets the team and wonder.
The other comic book thing that it does is put these characters together from all different times and just like tiny spoiler for this current season. It's only in this current fourth season that we really learn why all these characters from the so on are all looking the same and really starting with Niles the Chief, who has even been older than them. So that just feels comic booky to me where it's like, okay, we can keep Rita Ah as an actress in the 1950s and we can keep Cliff as a race car driver from the 80s because that's so inherent in who their characterizations are. Especially Rita, she can't be an actress from today because that's not how actresses today really speak. It just feels, oh, that's such a great comic book device and uh, it doesn't even explain here in these early seasons why they are able to all exist in 2019 and look ah the same. And I kind of love that just embracing of that comic bookness because so many other comic book things in other media we've seen have gone out of their way to kind of explain why this is all existing or updated or have them look a little bit more modern and this doesn't do any of that.
Yeah, for sure. I also think the mission statement of the team is really well portrayed in the show and in all of the comics, not in Jerkins because that's a totally different mission statement which is that they're not totally reluctant heroes. I mean you can definitely call them reluctant heroes but they're also not social justice warriors. The X Men are social justice warriors and I love them and that is not a problem for me at all in any way. But it's fun to have this team who is sort of and this is what the show does really well. They're sort of driven by a moral compass and a desire to make things better, but they're also still sort of driven by a selfish need and they're sort of hesitant to get involved and reluctant to take this on. So it's fun to have those layers and not have just a reluctant hero who gets convinced they need to save the world, but also not have a totally Superman like, I'm going to go save the world because I have to make it better. It's fun to stick them in this middle position and I think that's probably part of what makes them feel really human to readers or viewers.
Mhm and I think related to that too, another thing they have in common with the X Men that has only kind of come over time is the queerness of a lot of the characters, or either on the surface, either actual queerness or or beneath the surface. And I know, of course, over time, a lot of Xmen characters have come out. And here we definitely have we have the Larry character right in this first episode, establishing him as, uh, a gay character and played by an out gay actor as well. And over time, we see more sexuality and more queerness come into the TV show. And I know, uh, it also is reflected in the creators behind the scenes of the comics, where we have Grant Morrison and Rachel Pollock as queer creators. And even going back to I know you and I have talked about this, even Arnold Drake, we don't know if he was a queer creator.
But I tried really hard to find biographical information because there's a lot in it that reads mhm having read a lot of pulps over the years and found the writers and artists who always resonated with me and found that they were queer. And you in the same way with the horror pulps finding those people. There's a lot in there that feels like it is.
Yeah. And he wrote this movie to confirm, uh, who killed Teddy Bear. It's this kind of horror noir thriller and it stars Salminio and he's like, into muscles and there's like a lot of close ups of his oily muscles. And Sal mineo was a gay actor, and it has also Elaine Stritch playing an out lesbian character. So there's all this queerness in this movie from the so it's just interesting that he wrote that and wrote this. So maybe there's something there, but just so much in the TV show. And I think that's the one thing that you and I have talked about that while on the whole, I think a lot of what Marvel has done on, uh, TV and on film has been maybe better than some of the DC stuff. Maybe with this aside, DC has certainly been more progressive in terms of queer representation and this show at the top of that list, I would say.
Yeah. And the comics, too. We've talked about it and alluded to it, but the last few years, it's a remarkable shift. So I'm thrilled to see the forthcoming Doom Patrol comic because I think it'll be I mean, they never shied away since the Vertigo issues. That Doom Patrol has always been as queer as they come. I mean, it's even stranger in the Morrison and Pollock runs, of course, than what we see on screen, but yeah. So I love the show. I recommend the show. The first half of season four was amazing. I can't wait for the second half of season four. And I really hope it feels like a good James Gunn show. So even though Warner and James Gunn are sort of trying to start fresh with their vision for moving forward, I hope that this show has a place in it because, uh, I want another few years of it, at least. I want to see more stories. I want to see them go in different directions. Right now, they're building a big, amortise, uh, story, of course, which will pay off, I'm sure, in the second half of season four. But there's so much more they can do, and I just want to keep seeing what they have in store.
Yeah, it definitely fits. A world with peacemaker and some of the other things that James Gunn has said.
Yeah. Uh, James is listening, I'm sure. Um, there are zombie butts that is James Gunn trauma stuff if ever I.
Heard it very much. Yes, totally.
I think of all the DC things that exist, that's the most likely that he'll hold on to. I think everything else, Superman and Lois, I think they're all gone, sadly. But, uh, this, I hope, will stick around for a bit. So do you think Dan Jurgen's World had anything to do for the writers of the show?
No, I agree. Not at all.
I completely agree.
But that first Arnold Drake issue. Totally. Because we see each character's or our origin story in this first issue. Obviously, Crazy Jane hadn't been added until later, but we do see those origin stories and they're remarkably similar to the original story. So that certainly they were going back and revisiting. Yes.
So I can't wait to explore more Doom Patrol, find a way in the show to do that. Um, we're going to explore more tangent. I'm not looking forward to that quite as much, but we will get there.
This was the first issue, right, in tangent. So maybe like, as they no, it.
Was not the first issue.
Oh, it's the first one on, uh, just the app.
Uh, is it alphabetically the first issue or probably tangent? Comics.
D technology confusing me.
Again. Well, that is a wrap. Dear Watchers, thank you for listening. I have been what did I say.
I was negative geo and I have been Rob bot man. The reading list is in our show. You can follow us on social media at dear Watchers.
Leave a review wherever you listen. We'll be back soon for another trip through the multiverse.
In the meantime, in the words of OATU, keep pondering the.