Doom Patrol (Prime Earth)

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The Doom Patrol is a team formed by Doctor Niles Caulder, ostensibly to help metahumans whose powers posed a danger to themselves and others.

History

The Not-Too-Distant Past

The Doom Patrol was formed by Niles Caulder, a scientist who believed that metahumans' abilities arose from exposure to catastrophic events. To test his "Catastrophe Theory," Caulder engineered apparent accidents that transformed Cliff Steele into the metal-bodied Robotman, Larry Trainor into the spirit-inhabited Negative Man, and Rita Farr into the shape-changing Elasti-Girl and brought them together as a team of superheroes under his leadership as the Chief. The psychic Mento^[2] also joined the Patrol,^[3] and with Farr, raised Garfield Logan as his son.^[4]

The Doom Patrol operated from Caulder Manor, where their Chief kept tabs on other members of the superhuman community.^[5] They fought villains such as the Brain—a scientist who blamed Caulder for the destruction of his body—and his superintelligent gorilla assistant Monsieur Mallah,^[6] and the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man,^[7] whose transmutational abilities they developed an anti-decay ray gun to counteract.^[8] The Patrol also encountered Garguax, the emperor of the Earth's Moon.^[9]

Shortly after recovering an ancient sword from their foe General Zahl and uncovering the history of the immortal Chinese warlord the Devil Nezha,^[5] the Doom Patrol were summoned by Batman to treat an out-of-control Red Kryptonite-exposed Superman. Negative Man first used his radiation-manipulating abilities to simulate the light of a red sun, robbing the Kryptonian of his powers,^[10] and then to transmute the Kryptonite's radiation into a harmless form. Realizing that Nezha was behind the attack on Superman,^[5] the Doom Patrol sought out another immortal, their enemy General Immortus, and learned from him the location of Nezha's tomb,^[11] in which the warlord could be sealed. Fighting Nezha at his tomb, Negative Man, Elasti-Girl, and Superman fell under their enemy's sway, though Robotman and Batman were able to break his grip by exploiting his weakness to modern technology. When Superman entombed himself to contain Nezha, the Doom Patrol, Batman, and Supergirl were able to create an escape route for their ally through the Phantom Zone.^[12]

The Doom Patrol later fought against the robotic Justice Society enemy Mekanique, only for Robotman, like the villain, to fall under the control of the android NewMazo.^[13] Cliff Steele and the puppetized robots were later freed from his influence by Batman and Will Magnus and turned on NewMazo. After the android's defeat, Caulder worked with Magnus to repair any mechanicals damaged in the robot uprising, including Robotman.^[14] Caulder, Steele, Trainor, and Farr laid down their lives to save Codsville, a Maine fishing town with a population of fourteen, though they ultimately survived the ordeal. In their honor, the town was renamed Four Heroes and was the site of annual celebration on the anniversary of the Doom Patrol's sacrifice.^[4]

Rebis, a gestalt being composed of Trainor, his Negative Spirit, and Doctor Eleanor Poole,^[7] and Crazy Jane, whose body is shared by 64 superpowered alters,^[15] joined Cliff Steele in a new version of the group. They fought against Mister Nobody's Brotherhood of Dada^[16] inside a painting that had absorbed the city of Paris and threatened to destroy the world,^[7] leaving the Brotherhood trapped within.^[17] The Patrol protected Danny the sentient street from an attack by the false Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E., faced the Scissormen,^[18] and suffered the loss of team member Josh Clay at the hands of the Chief,^[4] who plotted to create a global catastrophe in an extension of the theory that had led him to create the Doom Patrol.^[2] They defeated the Candlemaker, an egregore borne of nuclear anxiety and incarnate through the mind of young psychic Dorothy Spinner, saving the world from annihilation.^[17] With new member Kate Godwin, they encountered Foxfur, Crowdark, the False Memory, S.U.R.E., a group which sought to replicate Robotman. Steele and Godwin were merged to become Tereisias, and though they were later split apart, a piece of her consciousness remained in his even after her eventual death.^[19] The team saw many further additions— and casualties,^[4] eventually relocating to Oolong Island.^[18]

New 52

During the invasion of the Crime Syndicate from Earth 3, the current, covert team of the Doom Patrol, lead by Niles Caulder, attempted to stop the Crime Syndicate and restore order. This team was comprised of Scorch, Karma, Negative Woman, Celsius, and Tempest^[20]—a returned Josh Clay. However, the team was no match for the evil versions of the Justice League,^[4] who slaughtered most of the team. After learning of this roster's demise, the Chief decided to start over once again.^[20]

Shortly after the defeat of the Crime Syndicate, the new Doom Patrol debuted. This new incarnation of the team consisted of former members Robotman, Elasti-Girl, Negative Man and former Justice League member Element Woman, whom the Chief recruited by convincing her that she was abandoned and left for dead by the League.^[21]

The team attempted to capture Jessica Cruz, the new Power Ring, in order to recruit her to the team against her will. During their attempt to capture her, Caulder demanded the team refuse to save civilians in a collapsing building to allow him to lobotomize Cruz and force her to serve him. The Justice League saved the people in the building, and Lex Luthor managed to hold Caulder back.^[21]

During their fight, Luthor revealed that Caulder was responsible for causing the "accidents" that gave the Doom Patrol their powers, and that former members Celsius and Joshua Clay both faked their deaths to escape from Caulder. With their morale broken, the team once again disbanded.^[22]

Rebirth

Brick by Brick

When Danny the Street accidentally brought a comic book character he created called Casey Brinke to life, he became targeted by an alien corporation named Vectra, who sought to take advantage of Danny's powers to create unlimited meat for their fast food restaurants. Danny, in his tortured pain, attempted to get his original creation Casey to reform the Doom Patrol and save him.^[18]

After the rude awakening that her entire life was a lie - and multiple members ending up on her door step, Casey fought back against Vectra to free Danny with a new Doom Patrol consisting of her, Robotman, Negative Man, Flex Mentallo and Jane.

With Danny freed and a new team assembled, the new Doom Patrol would go on to fight the Brotherhood of Nada as they tried to nada-fy the world into a surrealist nothingness and the Disappointment, a character that was unhinged from any reality because his comic book series was discontinued in a higher dimension. By the end of these journeys, the team had picked up teenage magician Lucius Reynolds, Casey's talking cat Lotion and former Doom Patrol member Rita Farr.

The Doom Patrol would team up with the JLA against Retconn and Milkman Man in what would be known as the Milk Wars, leading to a climax that would alter all of reality.

Weight of the Worlds

Though they seemed to take a little time off, the most recent version of the team reassembled when Robotman, who had become human again in the reality tomfoolery of the Milk Wars, drove off a cliff and was restored to his old steel body.

Along with much of Earth's superhuman community, Caulder, Steele, Trainor, Farr, Jane, and Mentallo traveled to Mars to confront Doctor Manhattan.^[23] After Gar Logan was critically injured during an attack orchestrated by Deathstroke and his Secret Society. Niles, Rita, Cliff, and Larry sent him a bouquet of flowers with a note while he recovered.^[24] The Doom Patrol later faced part of Deathstroke's army, with Rita, Larry and Cliff fighting against Gizmo, Mammoth, Psimon and a few other villains.^[25]

Dawn of DC

The team, now led by a new alter of Jane's known as 'The Chief' resumed operations in the aftermath of the Lazarus Eruption, seeking out those mutated by the planet-spanning mutagenic rains and offering them safe harbor. The new Doom Patrol field team was composed of the Chief, Steele, Trainor, and Farr,^[15] while psychic metahuman locator Mento,^[2] team physical therapist Mentallo, consultant Caulder, and Fifth Dimension-linked psychologist Doctor Syncho operated from an underground Kansas headquarters known as the Shelter that served as a new home for the metahuman rescues. The Chief established a supernatural division known as the Grave Minders, with her alter Lady Purple, Caulder, Reynolds, and Lotion under the leadership of Willoughby Kipling.^[26]

Unstoppable Doom Patrol

They were contacted by General Blanche, Trainor's former commanding officer, to eliminate the threat posed by Lazarus-mutated soldier Simon Choe, whose fungus-based metahuman abilities had consumed Blanche's installation. Despite the general's efforts to capture Choe for his powers' military application, the Doom Patrol were able to peacefully resolve the situation and offer the newly-emerged metahuman a home in their number.^[15] They gained another ally in the emotion-manipulating Beast Girl, who joined the field team and assisted in the recovery of Degenerate—a metahuman whose strength and size increases with his cruelty—from experimentation by Metagen Inc. in Gotham City, despite opposition from Metagen forces and Gotham guardians Batman and Robin.^[27]

The Doom Patrol had earned the enmity of General Blanche who therefore inserted worm-like Task Force X infiltrator Velvet, accompanied by humanoid construct Worm, into their number in the guise of a new rescue. Though Worm was discovered by the Doom Patrol and terminated by his handler Peacemaker, Velvet remained with the team.^[26] While Steele and Trainor rescued Starbro—a metahuman in symbiosis with a Starro spore—from the Green Lantern Corps, the rest of the patrol battled their long-time foe the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man,^[7] who infected others with his transmutational nature, triggering the metagene of a bystander who developed powers similar to his own. Though the new metahuman lacked control over her abilities, she was calmed and the situation defused by Elasti-Woman.^[28]

The Doom Patrol were forced into nightmarish sleep by the attack of Insomnia, with the exception of Robotman, who was summoned to assist the magician Zatanna in defending her Justice League colleagues from the Sleepless Queen and her Sleepless Knights. The Queen tormented Steele with visions of his fallen comrades Kate Godwin, Dorothy Spinner, and Joshua Clay, before drawing him into the ranks of her knights as the Rustbringer by running him through with her sword.^[3] Zatanna restored Robotman's mind by drawing out the blade, prompting the Queen and her Knights to flee. Dubbing themselves "Hex and Violence,"^[29] the pair joined the rest of the waking heroes in a final battle against Insomnia's forces, putting an end to the Sleepless Knights.^[30]

Believing he had uncovered a living metahuman weapon concealed by Metagen in the Illinois town of New Poplar, Mento advised the Doom Patrol to bring Caulder into the field for his surgical skill. Infiltrating the town, the Patrol found themselves in a trap set by Metagen CEO Brian McClane, an admirer of Caulder's "Catastrophe Theory". McClane sought to employ the former Chief in Metagen's latest venture, the creation of designer metahumans such as Metawoman, who demonstrated her abilities in combat with the Doom Patrol. However, her condition proved to be unstable and she collapsed into an immense, formless blob, while Caulder–regretful of his past actions–freed his captured teammates and fled, leaving the rampaging Metawoman to the corporation's government patrons.^[2]

Under the leadership of Flex Mentallo, several of the Doom Patrol's metahuman rescues formed Flex Force, a trainee team. A capture-the-flag exercise between the two groups was interrupted by the breaching of the Shelter by the new Brotherhood of Evil, an army gathered by General Immortus to wage war on the Patrol. They were reinforced by the Grave Minders, who revealed that the Brotherhood's attack was merely a distraction while Immortus disinterred Dorothy Spinner's body. Willoughby Kipling brought Robotman and Caulder to the graveyard, arriving too late to stop a Lazarus Resin-fueled voodoo ritual that transferred the Candlemaker entity that had once inhabited Spinner's mind into Immortus, revitalizing the general as the Eternal Flame.^[31]

Meanwhile, Crazy Jane convinced the Quiz, a many-powered and reluctant member of the Brotherhood, to switch sides, and Mento psychically dispatched the rest of the diversionary force. Joining the Doom Patrol and their allies at the graveyard, the Quiz opened a portal sending the Eternal Flame to the Bleed between worlds. However, before they could celebrate their victory, the Patrol were set upon by government forces led by Peacemaker. While Degenerate, his emotion-based strength heightened by Beast Girl's abilities, held off pursuit, the Doom Patrol fled with a promise to return.^[17] Investigating Cliff Steele's dreams of Kate Godwin and mysterious sightings of her by others, Caulder and Will Magnus concluded that she still lived within Steele's mind. Calling him to the Pentagon, Magnus sent Steele into his own psyche, where he located Godwin and brought her back with him into the real world.^[19]

Absolute Power

In Maine,^[32] while testing a submersible mode for their transport the Ambo off the coast, the Doom Patrol came upon the heroes Aquaman and Tempest in battle with Depth Charge, an Amazo android sent by Amanda Waller's Bureau of Sovereignty to steal their powers. Joining the battle, the Patrol were also targeted by Depth Charge, who proceeded to dispatch them with their own abilities before leaving for Atlantis with the powerless Aquaman. Coming to, they followed in the Ambo with Tempest, and when the interaction between Aquaman's aquatelepathy and Beast Girl's instinct-manipulation drove Depth Charge into a frenzy, the Patrol escaped with Aquaman to Superman's Fortress of Solitude, while the non-powered—and thus unaffected—Robotman joined the Atlanteans in battle against the Amazo. At the same time, unbeknownst to the team members in the field,^[33] the Shelter was burned to the ground by its neighbors in response to a wave of anti-superhero disinformation spread by the Bureau of Sovereignty^[32] and Mento was taken into custody. At the Fortress, the Patrollers put the Ambo to use gathering other fugitive heroes to organize a resistance movement.^[34]

After the fugitives fled to a new refuge, the island of Themyscira, the depowered Doom Patrol were armed with weaponry recovered from the Justice League's storage, and sent out to aid any heroes still in the field. They had returned to the island by the time of an unsuccessful assault by Waller's agent the Brainiac Queen,^[35] and aided in the recovery of heroes freed from Waller's prison on Gamorra Island, before going on the offensive in an assault on her headquarters. Though the heroes succeeded in releasing the stolen powers from the Amazos of Task Force VII, Beast Girl acquired shape-changing powers in place of her original abilities.^[36]

All In

After the crisis' conclusion, Robotman rejoined his teammates. Though he refused membership in the reformed Justice League Unlimited,^[37] he and the Doom Patrol were aboard their Watchtower satellite when Garfield Logan inadvertently caused a caged alien animal to break free and run amok.^[38] The Doom Patrol spent weeks chasing the Silent Knight, a medieval ghost with a lifeforce-draining sword, who Robotman was coincidentally summoned to fight against by Zatanna as part a group of heroes immune to the sword's magic.^[39] Robotman and Negative Man later returned to the Watchtower in the aftermath of a terrorist attack by the Inferno organization on the Amazon Rainforest.^[40]

Paraphernalia

Transportation:

• Flit, an alter of Jane's with the power of teleportation^[15]
• A black bus, used to maintain a low profile^[27]
• The Ambo,^[27] a vertical take-off/landing ambulance^[26]
• Cliff Steele's car, equipped with an intangible "Ghost Mode"^[7]
  

See Also

• 68 Appearances of Doom Patrol (Prime Earth)
• 39 Images that include Doom Patrol (Prime Earth)
• Team Gallery: Doom Patrol (Prime Earth)
  
  

Recommended Reading

• Justice League (Volume 2) #30-33
• Doom Patrol (Volume 6)
• Milk Wars
• Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds (Volume 1)
• Lazarus Planet: Dark Fate #1
• Batman/Superman: World's Finest #1-6
• Unstoppable Doom Patrol (Volume 1)

Links and References

Footnotes