When I first got into comics in the mid-80s, I was fascinated by the revamp of The Doom Patrol, featuring my first look at the art of Steve Lightle (who is now numbered among my all-time favorite artists.) That was volume two of the book, which led into Grant Morrison’s Vertigo take with Flex Mentallo and Danny The Street and all that, and it led me to pick up a run of the original DP series going back to ‘My Greatest Adventure.’ (Working in the back-issue department of a comic store has its perks, Faithful Spoilerites.) With the multiple takes, retakes, revamps and relaunches, though, the Patrol has had dozens of members including a four-armed ape, two or three different iterations of Elasti-Girl, the world-famous Titan known as Beast Boy and Mento, the superhero also known as The Freshmaker, leading to today’s atypical query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) has always had an inexplicable fondness for Arani Desai, the hardcase-who-turned-out-to-possibly-be-a-crazy-stalker known as Celsius, asking: Which of the outcasts and weirdos of the Doom Patrol is your favorite character?
3 Comments
Probably Robotman. A bit obvious, but he was in most teams, as far as I know and was easiest to get attached to.
That’s fair. Cliff is one of those great characters, almost the DC version of Ben Grimm….
Ditto on Robotman. It has been a very, very long time since I followed any incarnation of Doom Patrol (outside of appearances in other works, the last series I really had was the bulk of Vol. 2 I inherited from a cousin who got rid of his comics after getting married around 1996), but he’s the one I can most easily recognize across most other incarnations of the team, as well as being a concept I’m utterly fascinated with (human brain in an artificial body).