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Those comparisons sprang from the often shallow perceptions of many fans. Both teams were led by guys in wheelchairs, so they must be basically the same, right?

Fact is, as noted, the points of comparison between the Doom Patrol and the FF are much more numerous. Heck, their big strong guys are even both orange!!

One of the best covers since the heyday of the Bronze Age:

Also, that whole Robotman arc really intrigued me. I felt DP was getting solid ground under it at that point.

About Cliff Steele's strength:

I never worry too much about how strong a character is, in scale. I like what he can't do. Like Superman should have trouble lifting a battleship. I mean, the ship should at least be somewhat heavy to Superman.

In that Superman story JB did prior to leaving the title, which crossed over with Kupperberg and Larsen's DP of that time, Robotman could hit the Man of Steel hard enough to be felt, but not really hurt him. Cliff is probably strong enough to pick up a car and toss it. He was shown bending a tank's main gun in the 1960s. I never got the idea Cliff is Thing-level strong, or Blockbuster or any super heavyweights.

One of the advantages of Robotman is that he's pretty damn strong, but he's also not clumsily bulky. Which flies in the face of my "Box-up" Cliff argument, but Cliff is pretty much the size of a tall man, and probably pretty fast given his robotic enhancement. I'd think Robotman could box rings around a lot of big heavyweight characters. Of course they only need one good shot to destroy him, but whatever.

Even bulked up, a robot body probably doesn't have the same stress points as a human body. There's so much you could do with Robotman. You could make him double-jointed. Four arms. Give him a weapons system for the really big jobs.

I find Robotman to be my favorite character these days, very interesting from a concept standpoint. He gets me thinking.

Recently I read the issues of Mark Waid's JLA: YEAR ONE where the DP show up. At one point, the Chief is building a robotic arm for Hal Jordan (who had his, well, removed by The Brain), and Hal complains he can't feel the arm. The Chief remarks that he once hooked Cliff's robotic sensors to his brain's nerve receptors or whatever they're called, and that Cliff had never asked for that to be done again.

But I wonder: could Cliff have a "sensory" robot body, with some kind of synth-skin, just for relaxation. A body which would look like Cliff as a man, with a human face, connected to his brain to allow him to feel pleasure, sexual and otherwise?

...connected to his brain to allow him to feel pleasure---I think Cliff got
that in the final issue of JB's DOOMPATROL run, but I may have
misunderstood our host's intent.

Edited by Wallace Sellars on 16 March 2011 at 8:00pm

...connected to his brain to allow him to feel pleasure---I think Cliff got
that in the final issue of JB's DOOMPATROL run, but I may have
misunderstood our host's intent.

***

I thought the same thing. In fact, I read  a little too much into the fact that Cliff wore shorts with his new body in that last issue. Our host corrected that assumption in a thread about DP a while back.

Sweet overview of the DP! I haven't seen the episode yet.

Right, the Teen Titans bulky Robotman kind of appealed to me. It was a product of the animation style, but I sometimes think Cliff in the comics doesn't stand out enough physically. Plus, it gave him more of a Ben Grimm appearance.

Also, having Robotman in a bulkier robot-gorilla body makes him more unique within the DCU. There aren't too many bulky heroes at DC, if you'll note. Whenever there is a bruiser, they're usually a villain or monster of some sort.

Most definitely the best Waid writing on JLA was in that YEAR ONE series, I think. The Doom Patrol crossover was the best issues of the series, I think, with the JLA suffering horrific crippling (Martian Manhunter eyes are removed, Hal's arm, Flash's legs, ect). It's a very Silver Age type story with modern grotesquerie, which I wish had its own sub-genre in today's books. Darwyn Cooke famously brought such a non-existent sub-genre to its apex with NEW FRONTIER.