Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Omnibus

Doom Patrol Omnibi #1

by Arnold Drake, Bob Haney, Bruno Premiani (Ilustrator)

Gathering all of the original, offbeat adventures from the 1960s in one massive omnibus collection!

One of the strangest superhero teams of all time, The Doom Patrol starred in a very successful Vertigo series in the 1980s, written by Grant Morrison.

This fast-paced volume introduces The Doom Patrol, led by their wheelchair-bound chief, Niles Calder, three outcasts of society--Negative Man, Elasti-Girl and Robotman--take the qualities that make them freaks and become heroes. Together, the trio would take on bizarre menaces including General Immortus, the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man and the Brotherhood of Evil!

Collects MY GREATEST ADVENTURE #80-85, THE DOOM PATROL #86-121 and THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #65.

Genres: Comics, Dc Comics, Science Fiction, Adventure, Superheroes

1080 pages, Hardcover

First published June 27, 2017

About the author

Arnold Drake was an American comic book writer and screenwriter best known for co-creating the DC Comics characters Deadman and the Doom Patrol, and the Marvel Comics characters the Guardians of the Galaxy, among others.
Drake was posthumously inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2008.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guided by the wheelchair bound Chief, Negative Man, Robotman, and Elasti-Girl fight crime as... The Doom Patrol!

Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Omnibus collects My Greatest Adventure #80-85, Doom Patrol #86-121, Challengers of the Unknown #48, and The Brave and the Bold #65.

The Doom Patrol have been interesting to me since I first discovered them in Who's Who 30-something years ago. I had my eye on this collection for a long time and finally pounced on it when I saw it for $50.

Much like the Marvel's Fantastic Four was born out of the success of DC's Justice League of America, The Doom Patrol was begat by the Fantastic Four. Written by Arnold Drake in a style similar to the Marvel style, this was like no other book DC was putting out during the time period. Over the course of these 1000+ pages, the Doom Patrol battle their arch enemies, the Brotherhood of Evil, in addition to the aliens and monsters common to comics during the Silver Age. I'd say an easy 70% of the stories involve the Brain and his Brotherhood of Evil.

Arnold Drake was channeling aspects of Stan Lee in his writing but I think he was actually a better writer than Stan The Man. His dialogue is not nearly as cringe-inducing and Robotman's wisecracks are actually funny. The dynamic of the Fantastic Four is in full effect with The Chief as the father figure and Elastic-Girl as the mother figure, with Negative Man and Robotman as the petulant children. And it works! Adding Mento and Beast Boy to the cast later on only enhanced things.

Bruno Premiani's art is slick and doesn't resemble a lot of what was going on in American comcis at the time. Premiani got his start doing political cartoons in Argentina and his style evolved from there. I'd read years ago that Mike Allred cited Premiani as his biggest influence. It only took a few pages of this omnibus for me to see why. Premiani's style definitely lives on in Allred's work.

The plots themselves are unspectacular but the interplay of the Doom Patrol makes them work very well. They may have gone up against the Brotherhood of Evil a little too often but not any more often than the Fantastic Four fought Doctor Doom in their first few years.

There's just the right amount of Silver Age goofiness in Doom Patrol, like Robotman throwing his own leg at people and wisecracking, but Drake knew how to stop the bullshit when things got serious. Speaking of serious, it's pretty well known that the Doom Patrol die in the final issue of their series but I still wasn't completely prepared for their enemies to get the best of them like that.

Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Omnibus is 1000 pages of fun. This run is easily one of the best of the Silver Age. Five out of five stars.

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over a thousand pages of '60s comix goofiness, and good stuff it is (within the limits of "'60s comix"): the complete run of the original series, from the team's formation to its (apparent) death. The Doom Patrol was a small group that was promoted as "The World's Strangest Heroes!" - and they were, in their way, pretty strange, though not as strange as their villains.

The team consisted of:

o Professor Niles "The Chief" Caulder, a genius in multiple fields of science, surgeon, and tactical mastermind. He's bound to a wheelchair, but has devised it as an "action chair" with gadgets to let him occasionally partake in the general mayhem.

o Cliff "Robotman" Steele, a race car driver whose body had been destroyed in a crash, leaving only his brain undamaged. Caulder built him a new body from "metal ceramic," and part of the fun of this character is the frequency with which his body gets destroyed and replaced - a feature that would be taken to extremes in Grant Morrison's '80s/'90s DP.

o Larry "Negative Man" Trainor, test pilot who crashed after being irradiated. His body is so radioactive that you can see his bones(?). He lives covered with radiation-proof bandages (designed by Caulder) to keep the radiation from killing everything around him. He is inhabited by the actual Negative Man, a being of pure energy who will leave his body and do his will - but if it is out for more than 60 seconds, he will die.

o Rita "Elasti-Girl" Farr, a nactress who, inhaling some "strange" volcanic vapors, gained the ability to grow and shrink at will, with her strength varying to match. Later, she learns to grow/shrink individual body parts (mostly arms) to serve special purposes.

The Chief gathers them together because they all feel like freaks; he wants them to Do Good and show that "freaks" can be a valuable part of society. (At least, that is his stated motive...) Over forty-two issues, two crossovers, and slightly over five years, the DP fought some truly strange battles, even for '60s DC comix. (To be fair, they never fell prey to the common-in-DC trend of regressing them to babies.)

Who were their villains? Their first and possibly best would be General Immortus, who is, apparently, very very old. He always had a gimmick up his sleeve and regarded the Chief as his only worthy rival.

Mr. 103 (later 104) had the power to change his body to any element - later, also compounds.

Their most frequent foes, though, would be the Brotherhood Of Evil, led by a Brain in a jar. The Brain's chief hench, uh, critter was Monsieur Mallah - a superintelligent gorilla. (Intelligent gorillas were also a DC thing in the '60s.) Then there was Madame Rouge, a shapechanger who eventually falls in love with, yes, the Chief.

Drake wrote weird stories, but he also wrote very human characters, with gripes and flaws, and their own indvidual way of speaking (though Rita's was a bit stilted and "girl-ish," and his villains often over-the-top maniacal). Bruno Premiani matched his style beautifully, with characters better and more "realistically" rendered than 90% of the comix artists of the time.

The series sold well at first. When it dropped to a "mere" quarter of a million circulation (a number most modern comix would kill to get to), DC decided to pull the plug - but they gave Drake the unique opportunity to let the Doom Patrol go out in a bang of glory, giving their lives for a good cause, and, as Drake says in his forward, "us[ing] the opportunity to tell the readers 'even superheroes die.'"

The Doom Patrol would be back, notably in the astonishingly surreal run by writers Grant Morrison and then Rachel Pollack. But for a time they stayed dead, a tribute to a comic where heroes lived, died, got married, and generally lived like _people_, even while fighting weird-ass supervillians.

[Siona Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a huge fan of the Doom Patrol, but I am not a fan of silver age comics. I think they’re a product of their time, and for a lot of people that doesn’t bother them. But I just don’t like the dialogue or narration style. If it were a cartoon from the area, it wouldn’t bother me, but just read it is difficult for me for some reason.

[Prof. Purple · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Beautiful Misfits of Mid-Century Madness: A Review of The Silver Age Doom Patrol Omnibus

America, despite its embrace of rugged individualism, has always harbored a soft spot for the underdog. Ours is a nation that lionizes the self-made man, yet it is the misfits, the outsiders, and the noble eccentrics who so often capture the imagination. Enter Doom Patrol, perhaps the strangest and most wonderful testament to that American contradiction—a superhero team that is neither super nor, at times, particularly heroic, but who nonetheless endure because they must.

In an era when comic books had settled into their predictable rhythms—gallant men in primary-colored tights punching villains in the name of truth, justice, and stable sales figures—Doom Patrol emerged in 1963 as something altogether different. Here was a team of heroes who did not seek out the noble cause but had it thrust upon them. They did not leap tall buildings; they were, in many ways, lucky to get out of bed in the morning. They were broken, both physically and psychologically. They were unwanted, unloved, and frequently unsuccessful. And yet, against all odds, they fought.

The Silver Age Doom Patrol Omnibus collects the original Doom Patrol run from My Greatest Adventure #80-85 and Doom Patrol #86-121, a body of work that remains one of the most fascinating, subversive, and exhilarating chapters in the history of superhero comics. This volume is not merely a collection of stories; it is a testament to the power of creative risk-taking, a mid-century experiment in comic book surrealism that holds up astonishingly well, even in the shadow of the more famous misfit teams (X-Men, Fantastic Four) that would follow in its wake.
Doom Patrol: The Misfits’ Misfits

In their 1963 debut, penned by Arnold Drake and Bob Haney and brought to gloriously weird life by artist Bruno Premiani, the Doom Patrol were the anti-Justice League. Led by Dr. Niles Caulder, a genius confined to a wheelchair, the team consisted of three heroes whose very abilities were, in truth, curses.

Robotman (Cliff Steele): A race car driver whose body was destroyed in a crash, leaving only his brain intact, encased in a hulking, robotic shell that made him more machine than man—a Frankenstein’s monster with existential dread.
Negative Man (Larry Trainor): A test pilot exposed to radiation, whose new powers allowed him to release a shadowy energy being from his body—but only for 60 seconds at a time, or else he would die. A hero on a leash.
Elasti-Girl (Rita Farr): A Hollywood actress exposed to toxic gas, cursed with the ability to shrink or grow at will, making her less a glamorous leading lady than a walking special effects accident.

These were not the flawless titans of myth; they were people whose abilities had made them outcasts. The world saw them as freaks, and for much of the early run, they saw themselves the same way. It was a dynamic that was radical for its time—the idea that superheroes might resent their powers, that they might struggle not only against supervillains but against themselves.
Arnold Drake and the Birth of Weird Superheroism

To say that Arnold Drake was ahead of his time is to engage in understatement. While Marvel’s X-Men (which debuted mere months after Doom Patrol) would later be credited as the definitive “misfit superhero” title, Drake’s work on Doom Patrol was, if anything, even stranger, even bolder. These stories are not about heroes fighting to be accepted by the world; they are about heroes who, deep down, suspect the world might be right to reject them.

Drake’s scripts hum with a kind of wisecracking fatalism. Robotman, in particular, is a walking existential crisis, cracking sardonic jokes about his own inhumanity even as he hurls cars at bad guys. Negative Man is permanently haunted by his own instability, a man both powerful and helpless in the same breath. And Rita, the most outwardly “normal” of the group, is burdened with the knowledge that, at any moment, she might grow to the size of a skyscraper and crush everything in sight.

This, one realizes, is not the world of Superman. There is no comforting certainty here, no unshakable moral high ground. Doom Patrol does not ask, “What does it mean to be a hero?” but rather, “What happens when you don’t have a choice?”
The Villains: Dadaists in Crime

If the heroes of Doom Patrol were unconventional, their villains were positively surreal.

The Brotherhood of Evil—led by the magnificently named Monsieur Mallah, a super-intelligent, machine-gun-wielding gorilla, and his disembodied brain-in-a-jar superior, The Brain—set the standard early on: Doom Patrol was not going to engage in conventional heroics. These were not mob bosses or mad scientists in lab coats. These were existential threats wrapped in absurdity.

And then, of course, there was The Brotherhood of Dada—a group of villains who rejected logic itself, committing crimes not for personal gain but as anti-artistic statements. Their leader, Mr. Nobody, was a man who had been reduced to a two-dimensional conceptual being, an abstract figure of pure contradiction.

Where other superhero comics engaged in moral battles, Doom Patrol was engaging in philosophical ones. What is sanity? What is normalcy? What, ultimately, is the difference between the Doom Patrol and the people they fight?
Bruno Premiani’s Art: The Elegance of the Bizarre

Visually, Doom Patrol was every bit as unique as its storytelling. Bruno Premiani, an Italian-born artist whose style carried the refinement of illustrative classicism, brought an unusual sense of realism to the book.

His characters were expressive, his action sequences fluid and believable, and his Gothic, shadow-drenched cityscapes gave Doom Patrol a noir-meets-science-fiction aesthetic. Unlike Jack Kirby’s bombastic, cosmic storytelling over at Marvel, Premiani’s work was grounded, detailed, and wonderfully strange—a fusion of Silver Age dynamism with the texture of European comic art.
Final Verdict: A Glorious Monument to the Outsider Hero

What makes The Silver Age Doom Patrol Omnibus so electrifying, even today, is that it dares to be different.

These stories could have been footnotes, a strange little experiment that time forgot. Instead, they endure—because they matter. Because they speak to something fundamental about heroism, identity, and survival in a world that does not want you.

Where the Justice League saves the world, the Doom Patrol questions it.

Where Superman stands for truth, justice, and the American way, the Doom Patrol stands for the beautiful absurdity of existing at all.

They are not perfect. They are not easy. They are complicated.

And that, one suspects, is why they are unforgettable.
Final Thought: Why Doom Patrol Still Matters

One closes this omnibus with the realization that Doom Patrol was not just ahead of its time—it was outside of time altogether.

Before Watchmen, before The Dark Knight Returns, before the great deconstructions of the 1980s, Doom Patrol was already subverting the genre from the inside.

It did not reinvent superheroes.

It rejected the very idea of what superheroes were supposed to be.

And in doing so, it became something far greater: a legend of the beautifully broken.

[Norman Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

This omnibus collects Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 1 and Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 2, and what would have been Vol. 3, which was never published. Since I've previously read and reviewed the first two volumes, I'm reprinting those and adding the review for the final part.

Volume 1

This is a typical Silver Age title--nothing too serious or violent, but enough weird science fiction to keep it interesting. Having recently finished the Doom Patrol TV series, I was surprised at how much content of these early adventures made its way into the series, as it was my understanding that it was more based on Grant Morrison's run much later. But even in the first story, we have Immortus, and in later stories there is the Brotherhood of Evil and Madame Rouge, all important characters in the series. The origins of the Doom Patrol members is pretty close to what we saw on TV, too. One of the bigger deviations is that Larry Trainor's Negative Man can only survive for exactly 60 seconds outside of Larry's body--but how did they know this? Just one of many hand-waving mysteries that readers shouldn't think too hard about, I suppose. One of the silliest foes in this volume is Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, who somehow can transform at will into anything--too bad we didn't see him in the series! The art by Bruno Premiani is solid, if not too exciting.

Volume 2

This volume collects Doom Patrol #96-107, Challengers of the Unknown #48, and The Brave and the Bold #65 (featuring The Flash) from 1965-66. Negative Man (Larry Trainor), Elasti-Girl (Rita Farr), and Robotman (Cliff Steele) are led by The Chief, wheelchair-bound Niles Caulder. They are eventually joined by Mento (Steve Dayton) and Beast Boy (Gar Logan) (who is inexplicably called Craig in one of the stories). They go against a number of silly antagonists, such as Mr. 103 who can miraculously transform into any of the (then known) 103 elements, in any combination. There are some back-up stories that delve into each character's back-story (with Negative Man's cut short with a cliffhanger, presumably continued in the next collection). The science really doesn't make sense (for example, why does Elasti-Girl's costume grow and shrink with her?), but that's not why you read this sort of pulp fiction. The artwork by (primarily) Bruno Premiani is well done, with exciting action sequences. Like a lot of comics from this era, the dialog and exposition gets wordy and almost every sentence ends with an exclamation point! If you want to turn off your brain and have a little fun, this is a good book to read.

Volume 3

This volume collects Doom Patrol #108-121, the end of the original series in 1968 (there were three additional issues, #122-124, in 1973 that were reprints). As with the first two collected volumes, the stories are typical Silver Age superhero comics, entertaining enough, but filled with two-dimensional characters in silly situations, performing feats that break the laws of physics. We do get fleshed out origins of all the members by the end. It seems clear that the title was cancelled because the readers were getting tired of the repetitive soap opera-ish stories resulting in declining sales. There are some misguided attempts to modernize the stories with references to psychedelic-era slang and fashion, but these have not aged well (if they were even acceptable then). The final issue is bookended by a fourth-wall breaking plea by the artist and editor for readers to buy more copies, and the story ends with a semi-cliffhanger where the Doom Patrol members are seemingly killed. But, alas, the Doom Patrol was doomed to limbo for almost twenty years. The series was resurrected in 1987 with a new line-up, but didn't find an audience until Grant Morrison took over in 1988 with issue #19. That's where I plan to resume my reading.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a tome! All the 1960's Doom Patrol run, in color, in one hardback volume. I lost circulation in my legs while reading this bad boy.

What can I say? The characters have so much potential (and Morrison and others will appropriate them later for more engaging, more "mature" runs in the 70s and 80s), but the plotting here is childish. They fight the Brotherhood of Evil (evil French teacher! evil French gorilla! evil brain in a jar!) and help kittens from trees, all under the aegis of the wheelchair bound Chief. It's X-Men meets Johnny Quest, actually.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The early stories - and the last story- were my favorites. Definitely loved Premiani's art. It's a shame that outside of DP (and the Teen Titans) he didn't do so much work in the Silver Age.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

- wish my normy lil boy self has read this instead of wasting brain cells on stan lee