URGENT who wants a NEW DP monthly comic,

[choptop]

URGENT POLL: who wants to see a NEW DP monthly comic, and by whom?


issue 18 of the Doom Patrol will be the last. as I AND MANY OTHERS REALLY, WANT THEIR TO BE AN ONGOING DOOM PATROL COMIC BOOK.
The Doom Patrol is FAR TOO IMPORTANT A PART OF DC'S HISTORY AND LEGACY NOT TO HAVE A BOOK OUT!!

We DO want to see Cliff, Larry and Rita on the team. We DO NOT want all prior continuity wiped out. We DO NOT want to see boring X-Men ripoffs like Nudge, Grunt and Vortex. We DO want to see interesting past members like Joshua Clay and Crazy Jane (and maybe Metamorpho and the Vertigo Black Orchid, Suzy, who would so fit the team).

Well, we all have our favorites. But my URGENT call to ALL Doom Patrol fans is this: PLEASE let the editors at DC know if you want a new series:
*with Cliff, Rita and Larry;
*all past continuity explained and maintained;
*some other favorite past members
*some (ANY!) favorite past villains like Madame Rogue (or her daughter Gemini), the Brain, Mallah, The Brotherhood of Evil (or of Dada), Mr. Nobody, Scissormen, General Immortus, etc.
*and WHO would you want to have as the writer and artist?
My votes in that area:
**anyone GOOD who is willing and has a following
**ideal writers: James Robinson, Mark Waid, Tom and Mary Biernbaum, Scott Lobdell
**ideal artists: John Byrne (doubt he'd do it under another writer BUT HE SHOULD), Tom Raney, Phil Jimenez, Gary Frank

READERS: LET YOUR FEELINGS BE HEARD SO THAT THE DOOM PATROL CAN LIVE YET AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!

[SUPERECWFAN1]

As long as they hire someone creative and fun then yeah. I'm all for it. Just keep Byrne as far from this as possible in any future revamps.

[JLarson]

The only person who I can think of who I'd like to see write Doom Patrol right now (who hasn't already done it, ruling out Morrison) is Joe Casey. Pair him with Ashley Wood, or maybe Bachalo, and you'd have a fantasticly strange book that I'll love.

[The Mirrorball Man]

I don't want a new Doom Patrol book. The concept and the characters have been harmed, give them a couple of years to recover.

Now if you're offering a Challengers of the Unknown book written by Grant Morrison, I'm buying!

[Samurai]

Well, I like DP, and I do want to see villains like Rogue and Zahl, the Brain, Brotherhood of Evil, Gen Immortus, etc. I don't care for Nudge and Grunt, but Vortex is kind of interesting to me... I'll make a final decision on him when his secret is revealed. I would like to see the history explained... I thought the time travel story would do it, but it didn't have any lasting effects. (I thought the group would travel back in time, have all their silver age adventures, and then at the last second before death, be pulled back into the present day... that would have worked fine.)

What I do NOT want to see is all the stupid crack-pipe weirdness that ruined the title last time. No Crazy Jane, scissor-men, Rebus, or other junk like that. The Steve Lightle series was utterly ruined by that junk, and it'd be better if everything after about issue 18 were retconned out of existance... good riddance.

[The Mirrorball Man]

What I do NOT want to see is all the stupid crack-pipe weirdness that ruined the title last time.
Yeah, right. Who wants crazy things in Doom Patrol, right? :p

[JLarson]

Yeah, right. Who wants crazy things in Doom Patrol, right? :p

Duh. X-Men rip offs are much cooler.

[Zeta]

I always thought DP was closer to the DC version of the Fantastic Four, myself.

[The Mirrorball Man]

I always thought DP was closer to the DC version of the Fantastic Four, myself.
The DC version of the Fantastic Four is the Challengers of the Unknown, in my opinion. There are so many similarities between Doom Patrol and X-Men that it's hard not to draw a parallel.

[GremlinClr]

Why is this so urgent, exactly? Does DC have some crazy deal that if the DP don't have their own book Marvel gets to steal them?

Sadly I haven't yet read the Vertigo DP but I wouldn't say no to a revamped book with the original characters, make it a good sci-fi theme with perhaps the Metal Men thrown in and written by Warren Ellis!!!! Then you've got yourself a good thing.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

Why is this so urgent, exactly? Does DC have some crazy deal that if the DP don't have their own book Marvel gets to steal them?

Sadly I haven't yet read the Vertigo DP but I wouldn't say no to a revamped book with the original characters, make it a good sci-fi theme with perhaps the Metal Men thrown in and written by Warren Ellis!!!! Then you've got yourself a good thing.


(snaps finger) Ellis would be perfect for this. Thats a guy who should get Doom Patrol. ;)

[Viking Bastard]

Of the top of my head...

Joe Casey
Mark Millar
Warren Ellis
Kyle Baker

[titanfan]

I personally think that this Doom Patrol reboot was doomed from the beginning unless the stories were absolutely phenomenal. Yes, nostalgia is in, but the original Doom Patrol have been out of action for so long that even today's average comic book reader didn't read the original stories. This was basically like introducing a new team that the readers had never met yet. Then there was a lot of attention paid to the new members, Nudge/Grunt/Vortex, which infuriated the readers that came to see the old gang reunited.

If they were going to go for nostalgia factor, then the Doom Patrol they should have rebooted was the Morrison one. That's the Patrol most comic book readers today remember while they were growing up.

That said, they've tried launching Doom Patrol so many times over the past several decades (most of them failures) that I don't think that it's a franchise necessarily worth saving anymore. Just wait until a hot writer/artist team wants to work on the book and comes up with a killer concept for it.

[Babylon23]

I'm one of the biggest Doom Patrol fans in the world. I love the original series, and Morrison's run was excellent. I think Byrne's series failed to capture the inherent wierdness of the original series. He played it more as an FF-style book, which didn't really grab me.

I'd like to see a quirkier version of DP, something that captures the flavour of the original series more. Let's have more Scissormen, more Brotherhood of Da-Da. I'd also like to see a book that acknowledges the history of the team, rather than retconning everything.

Ideal artist would be someone like Chris Bachelo.

[JeffreyWKramer]

What I do NOT want to see is all the stupid crack-pipe weirdness that ruined the title last time. No Crazy Jane, scissor-men, Rebus, or other junk like that. The Steve Lightle series was utterly ruined by that junk, and it'd be better if everything after about issue 18 were retconned out of existance... good riddance.


Psst. The Steve Lightle series was utterly ruined by the fact that it sucked beyond words.

[Bat-Mite]

Joe Casey. Pair him with Ashley Wood

They already worked on Doom Patrol. They just called it Automatic Kafka to fool the enemy.

Psst. The Steve Lightle series was utterly ruined by the fact that it sucked beyond words.


Steve Lightle? I thought the guy who did the 18 issues of DP before Morrison was Krupperberg.

Duh. X-Men rip offs are much cooler.


Certainly! Weirdness in superhero comics? Don't they know they should be all realistic and crap?

[JeffreyWKramer]

Steve Lightle? I thought the guy who did the 18 issues of DP before Morrison was Krupperberg.

Lightle did the art, or at least he was the artist when it started. I can't recall if he stayed on it. But yeah, Kupperberg wrote it. It still sucked, though.

[Babylon23]

Steve Lightle? I thought the guy who did the 18 issues of DP before Morrison was Krupperberg.

Paul Kupperberg wrote the first 18 issues of DP before Morrison took over. Steve Lightle drew the first few issues before Erik Larson took over. The problem with these issues is that they were trying too hard to be like other titles, most notably X-Ten and Teen Titans. Unfortunately, this meant that there was nothing to distinguish the title from those books.

Morrison was able to create a book that was 80's weird, in the same way that Drake created a book that was 60's weird.

[Shellhead]

The DC version of the Fantastic Four is the Challengers of the Unknown, in my opinion. There are so many similarities between Doom Patrol and X-Men that it's hard not to draw a parallel.

**Bzzzt** Wrong answer! Thank you for playing!!

Doom Patrol and X-Men have two things in common, a smart guy in a wheelchair and angst about being freaks.

What do Doom Patrol and Fantastic Four have in common?

1. Team leader is a brilliant scientist.
2. Team muscle man is a down-to-earth, blue collar kind of guy who has become nonchalant about weird situations. One of these guys was a test pilot, and the other was a race car driver, both professions that would attract thrillseeker personalities.
3. Both teams had a guy who manifested an anthropomorphic energy form that could fly.
4. Both teams had a woman who made a living off her good looks (actress or model) but gave up her career after gaining superpowers that in no way made her less attractive.

There were differences. The FF became famous and popular both with fans and within the Marvel Universe, while the Doom Patrol have always been more on the fringe both with fans and within the DCU. And, with the exception of the Thing, members have the FF have been able to maintain normal appearance and relatively normal lives, aside from their public identities. Members of the Doom Patrol are often so bizarre that there is no point in maintaining a secret ID or anything resembling a normal social life.

It's an odd coincidence that Doom Patrol and X-Men were both created and published at almost the exact same time, but I believe that the Doom Patrol was initially sort of an attempt by DC to imitate the Fantastic Four.

I enjoyed every incarnation of the Doom Patrol (including the Lightle run, though it was my least favorite) up until *late* in the Morrison run, when the uncontrolled creativity resulted in incoherent and uninteresting random incidents. I've never tried Doom Patrol since then, except to the extent that I bought the first four issues of that dreadful collaboration between Claremont and Byrne in JLA, when Byrne retconned the entire history of Doom Patrol out of existence.

Although I voted "yes" in this poll, I do agree with Mirrorball Man that about a two-year wait would be a good idea. Give the fans time to forget completely about Byrne's forgettable run, then retcon the Byrne issues (and the JLA lead-in) out of existence, and build on the bizarre history of this team.

I would love to see Steve Gerber take a shot at writing Doom Patrol, because his run on Defenders displayed a sensibility that would be very compatible with Doom Patrol. And while I like Geoff Johns, he needs to be kept away from Doom Patrol... it's really not his style.

[Bat-Mite]

Oh... the artist. Most people don't reference it as Lightle's Doom Patrol, since he was there for only a few issues. To be fair, Lightle's was pretty neat. Too bad the story was generic 80's soap opera superheros.

[Bat-Mite]

Doom Patrol and X-Men have two things in common

THREE. They both have a group of enemies called the Brotherhood of Evil.

[Shellhead]

Oh... the artist. Most people don't reference it as Lightle's Doom Patrol, since he was there for only a few issues. To be fair, Lightle's was pretty neat. Too bad the story was generic 80's soap opera superheros.

Good point. I liked the Lightle pencils, but Kupperburg's writing was just mediocre. He's not bad, he just lacked the weird imagination that Doom Patrol needs.

[Samurai]

Good point. I liked the Lightle pencils, but Kupperburg's writing was just mediocre. He's not bad, he just lacked the weird imagination that Doom Patrol needs.
As an artist myself, I very often identify with the art more than the story... I think of the X-Men reboot as "Byrne's run", more than "Claremont's". In DP, I loved Lightle's art in the first several issues. The story... eh, ok, but not outstanding. When Larson took over, the title went downhill pretty quickly, though I still bought it. When Morrison and Richard Case took over, it went over the deep end, with lousy art and terrible, psychodelic stories that made no sense at all. I dropped it pretty quickly.

The Doom Patrol should have interesting stories that make you think, and that examine moral quandries. "Would you sacrifice your life for 14 people you don't know?" "Are you still the same person if all that is left of you is your brain, transplanted into a robotic body?" Stuff like that. Not walking scissor-men and drug-induced insanity without any decipherable rhyme or reason. It was simply weird for the sake of being weird.

[The Mirrorball Man]

The Doom Patrol should have interesting stories that make you think, and that examine moral quandries. "Would you sacrifice your life for 14 people you don't know?" "Are you still the same person if all that is left of you is your brain, transplanted into a robotic body?" Stuff like that.
So basically what you're telling here is that you want every single superhero comic book to tell the same kind of Knight Rider adventure stories? Wouldn't it be better if different series told different kinds of stories?

Not walking scissor-men and drug-induced insanity without any decipherable rhyme or reason.
Maybe what these stories meant just didn't click with you. I know that Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol was much closer to my everyday experience than say, Spider-Man.

[Samurai]

So basically what you're telling here is that you want every single superhero comic book to tell the same kind of Knight Rider adventure stories? Wouldn't it be better if different series told different kinds of stories?


Maybe what these stories meant just didn't click with you. I know that Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol was much closer to my everyday experience than say, Spider-Man.
Not sure what you mean by "Knight Rider adventure stories", but yes, each book should be different. Moral quandries and introspective questions in DP are different from detective stories in Batman or a super-family exploring the universe in FF or super cop-on-the-beat stuff in Top 10, etc, etc. I suppose the comic book equivalent of abstract art may appeal to some readers, but like abstract art, that isn't me... I see no purpose to it IMO. If DP is determined to be abstract, then it'll gain some fans and lose others... and I'll be one current buyer that would leave.

Neither Doom Patrol nor Spider-man are anything like my real life (though Peter Parker's pre-Spidey life is not too far off...), but I don't read comics because they match real life. I want escapist stories, fantasy and high adventure, fun tales that sometimes make you think, and other times just go "wow, that was cool!"

[The Mirrorball Man]

Neither Doom Patrol nor Spider-man are anything like my real life (though Peter Parker's pre-Spidey life is not too far off...), but I don't read comics because they match real life. I want escapist stories, fantasy and high adventure, fun tales that sometimes make you think, and other times just go "wow, that was cool!"
Alright, I understand.

[hondobrode]

The failure of the latest version of the DP is that Byrne failed to build on the appeal of the DP : it's weirdness. He made it more traditional offbeat spandex, but failed to refer to Morrison's great run. Not only that, but it was Byrne picking up The Silver Age and ignoring other runs, which ultimately weakens continuity. With any other title, it is understandable to ignore big logic gaps and continuity gafs, but with the DP being so offbeat and weird, it can be incorporated into the craziness and successfully built upon ! I would LOVE to see Byrne strictly as an artist while following the scripts / plots of Warren Ellis, Joe Casey, Abnett & Lanning, Steve Gerber, Peter Milligan, Keith Giffen, Joe Kelly or Peter David. Other great artists include the aforementioned Chris Bachalo as well as Mike Allred, Pascual Ferry, Tom Scioli, Jim Starlin, Ryan Sook, John Paul Leon, Bernie Mireault, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jim Woodring or J. H. Williams III would all kick ass all over the place. Others like Paul Pope and Seth Fisher come to mind but I doubt very much would be able to maintain a monthly schedule.

DP could be a runaway cult hit like it was 20 years ago with the right team. Maybe putting it out as a WildStorm or Vertigo title would help it to attract its true audience.

[Babylon23]

The failure of the latest version of the DP is that Byrne failed to build on the appeal of the DP : it's weirdness.

Definitely have to agree with you here. Byrne's DP read more like Fantastic Four. I was reading the Waid/Weiringo FF at the time, and was looking for something different in DP. Unfortunately, it wasn't there.

I think the idea of a team dealing with the wierd outer fringe of the DCU is where DP's appeal lies. I understand Samurai's argument, but I think a title like DP needs something like the wierdness to distinguish it from other superhero team books.

[The Shadow]

I have the Morrison stuff and never cared for it... I did like the Byrne stuff because it went back to basics and told good oldfashioned SUPER HERO stories!

If Byrne does it then I would vote YES... but then why cancel it? I'm quite happy where it is.