The Doom Patrol returns in Justice League #32

[icon_uk]

From CBR's preview of Justice League #32


After a couple of creepy, if incredibly cliché, pages of the pregnant Super-Woman singing a lullaby to offspring to be, we get this scene.







Well, technically this is the second appearance of the Doom Patrol, since we saw Karma, Blaze and (off panel) Tempest get killed in a random “ramp up the death count” attempt to make the “Forever Evil” event more interesting....

Niles Caulder is still creepily creepy and skeevily manipulative, Cliff Steele is robot-y, Larry Trainor is Negative and this take on Elasti-Girl is just… unsettling... IIRC in the last iteration she was creepily happy because of a near psychotic obsession with remaining perfect, this seems to be somewhere between Meggan of Excalibur's "empathic metamorph" powers and Odo from Deep Space 9

Dunno about you folks, but if I were Element Woman, I’d turn into whatever element could get me the hell out of there the fastest!

Comments

[icon_uk]

Grant Morrison introduced the concept that the (presumed dead for many years) Caulder hadn't just "rescued" the people who became the Doom Patrol, he'd actually caused the events that led to them being "freaks" in the first place (sabotaging Cliff's car, Larry's plane and arranging for the chemicals that changed Rita to be dumped where they were).

He went from amoral scientist, coldly carrying out horrible social experiments in metahuman triggering to deeply creepy psychological manipulator, constantly undermining the the DP's self confidence so they would remain dependent on him and view him as their saviour when the whole team was rebooted by John Byrne and when John's used them in the Teen Titans in the "One Year Later" thing.

[cainofdreaming]

His time as a disembodied head didn't help with the creepiness factor either.

[jlroberson]

Which Morrison did well. Because it was a reveal. And it made sense. It gave the characters' full story an arc.

This on the other hand is him being obviously evil from the start.