I had forgotten exactly how Cliff and Rita traveled back in time during the
series, and how touching the end of that particular story arc is. I had also
forgotten about Void's crush on Mi-Sun. And though Nudge and Grunt
were not members of the original Doom Patrol, my favorite issues remain
the ones that give that odd duo the most panel time. Reading about how
the Chief ended up in a wheelchair made my bones ache... again! Larry is
the only member who didn't have a story that grabbed me.

Also, in another thread there was a discussion of accents in comics. JB did
a good job putting accented words into the mouth of Elihu, the dead
Confederate soldier. I could "hear" his voice in my head, and I was never
confused by anything he said.

I'm still disappointed that the series didn't last longer.

••

Me too!

Also disappointed that, since it didn't, there wasn't some way for me to take Nudge and Grunt with me. There was a lot more I would have like to explore with those two!

I just read that for the first time about 6 months ago. Most fun I'd had reading a comics series in a long time. The Doom Patrol was, for the most part, new to me as I'd never read any of their previous series. Good stuff, and I agree that Nudge and Grunt were great.

I actually read Doom Patrol and XMHY in the same two-day stretch, catching up on stuff I'd missed. Both were excellent and way, way, way too short.

Wallace, I don't know if any creator has ever been given a character, but a couple of creators have tried to sneak them out the back door.

Steve Gerber used the excuse of a crossover between Spider-Man, Howard the Duck, and Savage Dragon to slip in a bit where Spidey returns to the Marvel Universe proper with a Howard clone while the real deal changes his look and takes off on his own.

Steve Englehart renamed the Avengers' Mantis and changed her appearance so that she could guest-star in an issue of the Justice League of America, and then did so again so she could appear in Scorpio Rose, herself a rewritten version of DC's Madame Xanadu.

Marvel's Devil-Slayer and Dominic Fortune were both originally 70's Atlas Comics characters brought over with permission of the Atlas publishers who allowed creators to retain some rights to their characters.

DC in a sense "gave" Sandman to Neil Gaiman by promising that the series and character would not be written by anyone else following his departure from the book. Gaiman responded by ending his version and giving DC "Daniel," a Sandman they could continue to publish should they wish to do so. Watchmen has, to some degree, enjoyed similar protection from other writers to this point. Nonetheless, the rights to both series remain with DC.

- The "pseudo"-reboot: there was something that bothered me about
this Doom Patrol. If the book was starting anew with a new team, why
did it already come with a back history? This bugged me with MoS, too.
I think the book would've been more enjoyable if we got to meet
Madame Rouge for the first time together with the new team, in real
time. To see that they had already tussled and that she was
incarcerated at Key Mordaz (love that HQ) was disappointing. The
sensation that you're in ground zero with the team and that you're
going together on adventures is one of the biggest pleasures of
comics.

- Robotman's redesign: didn't work for me.

- Who was that girl? : I mean the character who crossed over from JLA
and acted as teacher to Nudge for a while...some strange powers...she
made no sense to me whatsoever.

Edited by Flavio Sapha on 13 March 2011 at 6:50pm

There was also a Nudge character in XMHY. Very different but darn
interesting all the same.

Flavio, as much as I would have loved to have seen JB's version of Madame Rouge fight the Doom Patrol in the opening issue, I think it was for the better that she didn't show...  That would have meant trying to reconcile Beast Boy's place in the continuity, along with Madame Rouge's "daughter" Gemini... 

BTW, the pink stretchy girl was called "Snake".

    I actually prefer the JB version a bit these days, if nothing else because Robotman looks more functionally durable. At the same time, I miss the little 1960s chest camera.

I heard someone somewhere complain about the little groin cup on JB's version. Which I didn't think about from the psychology of the character, but it is something of a chaste "covering", like the black trunks Cliff wears in the 1960s, even though Cliff has no genitals. He's "naked" though, so the covering makes sense. Or it also comes back to the Ken Barbie Doll thing, a reminder of how much Cliff's really lost.

At any rate, I'd probably go with JB's robot body if I was Cliff, because if you have to be a robot you might as well look tough and cool. I kind of wish JB had "Box"ed Cliff up a little, made him wider and brutish. Which is the direction the BRAVE AND THE BOLD cartoon went in.