Doom Patrol
Posted: Mon Jun 19, 2006 5:45 am
issue recaps
www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/Doom_Patrol/stories.html
Crazy Jane has 64 personalities of which about 40 are known:
Crazy Jane, Black Annis, Liza Radley, No One, Driver 8, Lucy Fugue, Baby Harlot, Penny Farthing, the Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, Rain Brain, Flit, Mama Pentecost, Hammerhead, Spinning Jenny, Flaming Katy, Lady Purple, Pepper's Ghost, Merry Andrew, Sun Daddy, Driller Bill, Pretty Polly, Snow Queen, the Sin-Eater, the Signalman, Stigmata, Jill-in-Irons, the Secretary, the Weird Sisters, the Engineer, Kit W'the Canstick, Jack Straw, Sex Bomb, the Pointman, K-5, Sylvia, Butterfly Baby, the Shapeless Children
Kay Challis is Crazy Jane (her name comes from a Richard Dadd painting)...Where to start? She’s got multiple personalities that were her way of coping with being abused as a child. 64 of them. Each personality has a different super power. Jane is, as you might guess, a very complicated woman. She’s prone to changing personalities at rapid rates, and a good number of them aren’t very friendly. Crazy Jane is trying hard to resolve her inner conflicts, and become at peace with who she is. Jane and Cliff Steele are best buddies, and together they’re trying to make sense of this crazy funhouse called life. It’s kind of touching actually. She’s beautiful, disturbed and full of a lot of interesting ideas.
Baby Doll: Sweet and innocent. She likes shiny things.
Black Annis: Man-hating psychopath. She has really scary teeth.
Driver 8: She manages the Underground where all Jane’s personalities live. Business-like and intelligent.
Flit: She teleports. That’s about it.
Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter: Somber and sensitive painter who brings art to life.
Lady Purple: The silent oracle.
Liza Radley: A personality that Cliff helped bring into existence. A nihilist artist who’s got some parts of life straightened out.
Rain Brain: Childlike and delusional. Her brain and body are just rain.
Scarlet Harlot: Unquenchable, unstoppable sexuality. Harlot smokes cigarettes and generally acts like a floozy.
Sylvia: She wants to be a poet, but all she can compose are word fragments. She doesn’t leave her room much.
Rebis
Larry Trainor, aka Negative Man, was a member of the original Doom Patrol. He was possessed by an alien entity, The Uroboros. The Uroboros is the last of it’s race left in the known universe. This helpful ET gave Larry the super-powers: flight, super strength, high invulnerability. The alien itself was indestructible, and could leave Larry’s body for brief periods. The only downside being that he became highly radioactive, and thus unfit for human society. To be honest, he was very relieved when Uroboros left his life after the 1st Doom Patrol crew was dismantled. . While spending time in a hospital, he again encountered it. It somehow joined Larry’s body with that of his doctor, Eleanor Poole, and attained a new hermaphroditic form. Rebis (an Alchemist term for a chymical wedding is ultrahip, cool and detached. The world’s first hermaphrodite hero!!! And s/he sports the bossest shades and trench coats.
Robotman/Cliff Steele
Hotshot racecar driver whose body was destroyed in a race. The Chief saved his brain, and made him into… da da da… Robotman! Cliff found this name kind of degrading (even though he really is a robot). His original body was constructed by a man named Dr. Magnus. As far as DP members go, he’s a pretty ordinary joe. He’s still coping with not having a body. His robot body has a bad tendency to malfunction or get destroyed but luckily Chief is always happy to build him a new one. Cliff is kind of moody, he often rotates between loveable jerk, and robot with a heart of gold. Cliff and Crazy Jane have an interesting pseudo relationship going, but it’ll never work. He’s a machine and she’s a psychopath.
Dorothy Spinner
Along with Joshua Clay, she’s the Doom Patrol B-Team. Dorothy spent most of her life on a farm, watching TV. She did receive excellent schooling; her imaginary family taught her to read and write. You see, Dorothy is a mutant who can bring her imaginary friends to life. Dorothy has a pretty overactive imagination so she has a real varied host of friends to call on in times of need.
Joshua Clay/Tempest
He used to be a superhero in Doom Patrol days of old.
The Chief
Niles Caulder is the fearless crippled leader of the Doom Patrol in all its incarnations. Most of the previous team members died a horrible death. The mysterious genius remains undaunted, he cares not for sacrifice or death. Caulder is always conducting secret research on scientific stuff and inventing stuff. He usually refuses to be questioned, and he often seems totally unconcerned about the welfare of his team. All in all, a cranky old bastard. He also really likes chocolate.
"Morrison used DC's Invasion crossover to restart the book. He took the Doom Patrol, and superhero comic books in general, to places they had rarely been, incorporating bizarre secret societies, elements of Dada, surrealism, and the cut-up technique pioneered by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. He also borrowed the ideas of Jorge Luis Borges and Heinrich Hoffmann. Morrison and artist Richard Case turned the title round and the series quickly gained a cult following, but some derided it as being incomprehensible. Those did not include Arnold Drake who maintained that Morrison's was the only subsequent run to reflect the intent of the original series"
The first parts of Morrison's run has been compiled into five Vertigo trade paperback editions:
Crawling from the Wreckage (collects Doom Patrol #19-25, 2000, ISBN 1-56389-034-8)
The Painting That Ate Paris (collects Doom Patrol #26-34, 2004, ISBN 1-4012-0342-6)
Down Paradise Way (collects Doom Patrol #35-41, 2005, ISBN 1-4012-0726-X)
Musclebound (collects Doom Patrol #42-50, August 2006 ISBN 1-4012-0999-8)
Magic Bus (collects Doom Patrol #51-57, January 2007, ISBN 1-4012-1202-6)
www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/Doom_Patrol/stories.html
Crazy Jane has 64 personalities of which about 40 are known:
Crazy Jane, Black Annis, Liza Radley, No One, Driver 8, Lucy Fugue, Baby Harlot, Penny Farthing, the Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, Rain Brain, Flit, Mama Pentecost, Hammerhead, Spinning Jenny, Flaming Katy, Lady Purple, Pepper's Ghost, Merry Andrew, Sun Daddy, Driller Bill, Pretty Polly, Snow Queen, the Sin-Eater, the Signalman, Stigmata, Jill-in-Irons, the Secretary, the Weird Sisters, the Engineer, Kit W'the Canstick, Jack Straw, Sex Bomb, the Pointman, K-5, Sylvia, Butterfly Baby, the Shapeless Children
Kay Challis is Crazy Jane (her name comes from a Richard Dadd painting)...Where to start? She’s got multiple personalities that were her way of coping with being abused as a child. 64 of them. Each personality has a different super power. Jane is, as you might guess, a very complicated woman. She’s prone to changing personalities at rapid rates, and a good number of them aren’t very friendly. Crazy Jane is trying hard to resolve her inner conflicts, and become at peace with who she is. Jane and Cliff Steele are best buddies, and together they’re trying to make sense of this crazy funhouse called life. It’s kind of touching actually. She’s beautiful, disturbed and full of a lot of interesting ideas.
Baby Doll: Sweet and innocent. She likes shiny things.
Black Annis: Man-hating psychopath. She has really scary teeth.
Driver 8: She manages the Underground where all Jane’s personalities live. Business-like and intelligent.
Flit: She teleports. That’s about it.
Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter: Somber and sensitive painter who brings art to life.
Lady Purple: The silent oracle.
Liza Radley: A personality that Cliff helped bring into existence. A nihilist artist who’s got some parts of life straightened out.
Rain Brain: Childlike and delusional. Her brain and body are just rain.
Scarlet Harlot: Unquenchable, unstoppable sexuality. Harlot smokes cigarettes and generally acts like a floozy.
Sylvia: She wants to be a poet, but all she can compose are word fragments. She doesn’t leave her room much.
Rebis
Larry Trainor, aka Negative Man, was a member of the original Doom Patrol. He was possessed by an alien entity, The Uroboros. The Uroboros is the last of it’s race left in the known universe. This helpful ET gave Larry the super-powers: flight, super strength, high invulnerability. The alien itself was indestructible, and could leave Larry’s body for brief periods. The only downside being that he became highly radioactive, and thus unfit for human society. To be honest, he was very relieved when Uroboros left his life after the 1st Doom Patrol crew was dismantled. . While spending time in a hospital, he again encountered it. It somehow joined Larry’s body with that of his doctor, Eleanor Poole, and attained a new hermaphroditic form. Rebis (an Alchemist term for a chymical wedding is ultrahip, cool and detached. The world’s first hermaphrodite hero!!! And s/he sports the bossest shades and trench coats.
Robotman/Cliff Steele
Hotshot racecar driver whose body was destroyed in a race. The Chief saved his brain, and made him into… da da da… Robotman! Cliff found this name kind of degrading (even though he really is a robot). His original body was constructed by a man named Dr. Magnus. As far as DP members go, he’s a pretty ordinary joe. He’s still coping with not having a body. His robot body has a bad tendency to malfunction or get destroyed but luckily Chief is always happy to build him a new one. Cliff is kind of moody, he often rotates between loveable jerk, and robot with a heart of gold. Cliff and Crazy Jane have an interesting pseudo relationship going, but it’ll never work. He’s a machine and she’s a psychopath.
Dorothy Spinner
Along with Joshua Clay, she’s the Doom Patrol B-Team. Dorothy spent most of her life on a farm, watching TV. She did receive excellent schooling; her imaginary family taught her to read and write. You see, Dorothy is a mutant who can bring her imaginary friends to life. Dorothy has a pretty overactive imagination so she has a real varied host of friends to call on in times of need.
Joshua Clay/Tempest
He used to be a superhero in Doom Patrol days of old.
The Chief
Niles Caulder is the fearless crippled leader of the Doom Patrol in all its incarnations. Most of the previous team members died a horrible death. The mysterious genius remains undaunted, he cares not for sacrifice or death. Caulder is always conducting secret research on scientific stuff and inventing stuff. He usually refuses to be questioned, and he often seems totally unconcerned about the welfare of his team. All in all, a cranky old bastard. He also really likes chocolate.
"Morrison used DC's Invasion crossover to restart the book. He took the Doom Patrol, and superhero comic books in general, to places they had rarely been, incorporating bizarre secret societies, elements of Dada, surrealism, and the cut-up technique pioneered by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. He also borrowed the ideas of Jorge Luis Borges and Heinrich Hoffmann. Morrison and artist Richard Case turned the title round and the series quickly gained a cult following, but some derided it as being incomprehensible. Those did not include Arnold Drake who maintained that Morrison's was the only subsequent run to reflect the intent of the original series"
The first parts of Morrison's run has been compiled into five Vertigo trade paperback editions:
Crawling from the Wreckage (collects Doom Patrol #19-25, 2000, ISBN 1-56389-034-8)
The Painting That Ate Paris (collects Doom Patrol #26-34, 2004, ISBN 1-4012-0342-6)
Down Paradise Way (collects Doom Patrol #35-41, 2005, ISBN 1-4012-0726-X)
Musclebound (collects Doom Patrol #42-50, August 2006 ISBN 1-4012-0999-8)
Magic Bus (collects Doom Patrol #51-57, January 2007, ISBN 1-4012-1202-6)