Deepening the coincidence, in January 1964’s X-Men #4 Lee and Kirby introduced the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, while the same month’s issue of Doom Patrol featured the debut of the Brotherhood of Evil. (It will not escape notice that all of this is markedly similar to the setup of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men, which debuted three months after the Doom Patrol with the tagline “The Strangest Superheroes of All” with a team of superheroes led by a man in a wheelchair. Figure 1448: The X-Men, plausibly a Doom Patrol knockoff. Niles Caulder, these were the Doom Patrol, sold under the Murray Boltinoff-created tagline “The World’s Strangest Heroes!”, and the book was quickly renamed after them. Under the leadership of eccentric genius Dr. What I want is a new feature that might save it.’” He came up with the idea of a man in a wheelchair leading a team of superheroes, but was stuck at two superhero ideas-the size-changing Elasti-Girl, aka ex actress Rita Farr, and the self-explanatory Roboman, aka former racecar driver Cliff Steele, whose brain has been put in a robotic body following a catastrophic accident-and so asked his friend and occasional writer partner Bob Haney for an assist, the bandaged Negative Man, aka former pilot Larry Trainor, who could project an energy entity, but only for sixty seconds at a time lest he die. My Greatest Adventure is dying and they’re probably going to kill it, but I’d like one more shot at it. As Arnold Drake recalls, “AI came in one morning, a Monday or a Tuesday morning, and I’d brought some scripts with me and some plot ideas and Boltinoff said to me, ‘I’ve got a problem. (Written by Arnold Drake and Bob Haney, art by Bruno Premiani, from My Greatest Adventure #80, 1963)īut by the 1960s, as DC pivoted increasingly to a superhero based lineup it became necessary to revamp the comic. Figure 1447: The Doom Patrol was created in a desperate (and broadly successful) effort to save the comic in the age of superheroes. The first issue, for instance, offered a cover feature called “My Cargo Was Death” (a man driving explosives through South America) along with “I Was King of Dagger Island” (a soldier washing up on a tropical island and convincing the natives he’s a god) and “I Hunted a Flying Saucer” (pretty much what you’d expect), and the comic continued for the better part of six years with this same basic mix of gonzo sci-fi and colonialist fantasy. This was yet another instance of DC’s stable consolidating around superhero books My Greatest Adventure had previously been an anthology of generic adventure stories with the vague hook of being told in the first person. The Doom Patrol was created in 1963 by Arnold Drake, Bob Hanley, and Bruno Premiani in My Greatest Adventure #80. In many ways, this followed the default British invasion pattern, with Morrison revamping a longstanding DC property for a new era. (Writer unknown, art by Leonard Starr, from My Greatest Adventure #1, 1954) Figure 1446: In the beginning, My Greatest Adventure focused on adventure fiction in the classical imperialist tradition. By the time Shade the Changing Man #1 debuted in May of 1990 Morrison was well over a year into their run on Doom Patrol, an absolutely iconic run that was in many ways the crown jewel of their early reputation. Perhaps the biggest problem facing Milligan was that the basic framework he was offering-a stranger and more surreal take on superhero dynamics-was already being done. It’s because we’re young and it’s our right.” -Grant Morrison, New X-Men It’s true we want to tear down everything you’ve created and replace it. Previously in Last War in Albion: Peter Milligan made the jump to American comics around the same time as Morrison, but never had as seminal a career, with the highlight being the sometimes brilliant, often frustrating Shade the Changing Man.
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