The X-Men’s Weirder and Queerer Older Brother

In 1963, a group of super-powered misfits, shunned by society, led by a wheel-chair bound genius leaped from the comic book pages into the hearts of readers all around the world. Now the leads of a multi-billion dollar franchise and off the heels of one of the biggest movies of all time, Deadpool and Wolv – wait, sorry, let’s run that back one time. In 1963, a group of super-powered misfits, shunned by society, led by a wheel-chair bound genius debuted to light murmurs. That’s not to say it was a complete unknown – Umbrella Academy largely owes its existence to My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way’s love of the team – but while the X-Men would go on to be household names, their slightly older siblings the so-called “Doom Patrol” sat in quiet obscurity. That is, until 2019 when they finally got their self-titled television show Doom Patrol, on the hit streaming platform DC Universe (wait, seriously?). After this great idea imploded on itself because a streaming service can’t survive off of four TV shows about obscure properties, Doom Patrol lived on for three more seasons on HBO Max. It fought tooth and nail every year to stay on the air before finally hanging up its hat last year. So, now looking back on the show, what made it so special? And why did it never get the recognition its younger siblings receive to this day?

The most obvious answer to that question is that Doom Patrol was too weird for its own good. Bryan Singer’s X-Men films toned down the silliness of those original Marvel comics, trading in blue and yellow spandex for black leather and focusing on the ideological conflicts of Magneto and Charles Xavier. The X-Men became an allegory for the fictional oppression of mutants and the real world oppression of marginalized groups. The closer to reality it got, the stronger the X-Men’s popularity became. Doom Patrol opted for the exact opposite approach. Largely influenced by legendary comic writer Grant Morrison’s run on the team, the show embraced the most absurdist elements of the comics, stretching its shoe-string budget to its limit. While the X-Men embraced cinematic realism, the Doom Patrol marinated in the weirdness. In the place of the Brotherhood of Mutants was the Sisterhood of Dada, named after the European surrealist art movement and dedicated to celebrating the absurdity of life, along with a farting donkey that’s a portal to another dimension, and a super-sized cockroach that’s the harbinger of the apocalypse who gets to first-base with a similarly super-sized rat. Just as absurd as their villains, the Doom Patrol was no well-oiled machine. Instead audiences got Robotman, a brain trapped in a deteriorating metal body; Elasti-Girl, a former Golden Age starlet turned blob monster; Negative Man, a bandaged and irradiated gay man from the 1960s with a creature of pure energy living inside him; and Crazy Jane, a woman with 64 personalities each with their own superpower. Held together by chewing gum and constantly on the verge of falling apart, the Doom Patrol’s biggest battle was with themselves and their trauma. Doom Patrol found in absurdity not a gimmick, but its central strength, taking every aspect of life to the extreme. In confronting their outlandish villains every week, the Doom Patrol weren’t out to save the world – even if they ended up doing just that. Rather, they were trying to crawl from the wreckage that had crashed down upon them and learn to coexist with every weird part of themselves they hated. Life can be weird, messy, and everything in between. The show explored the extreme ends of that messiness, delving into childhood abuse, the guilt of being a neglectful parent, the crushing weight of homophobic judgment, and more. By embracing being off-kilter and inaccessible, Doom Patrol found something profoundly honest at the heart of its weirdness. It dared to ask the question: what happens when being a superhero isn’t about saving others, but confronting the most painful, shameful parts of yourself?

What also didn’t help Doom Patrol was that it was profoundly queer in a way that couldn’t appeal to mass audiences. Comparisons have often been drawn with the X-Men and real gay rights movements, but these comparisons neglect how easy with the X-Men it is to obscure that queerness. The X-Men as a film franchise allows its queerness to be implied, diluted, or reframed in ways that maintain broad appeal. Audiences can easily interpret its themes through safer lenses or simply ignore them entirely. And for canonically pansexual characters like Deadpool, it’s framed as a joke (because it’s super funny that the aggressively straight Ryan Reynolds could possibly be attracted to Hugh Jackman). But queerness is baked into the very DNA of Doom Patrol. Its most popular stories were penned by comics’ most famous nonbinary writer, Grant Morrison, and comics’ first openly transgender writer, Rachel Pollack, and that legacy has persisted into the show. Doom Patrol wasn’t about surface-level representation, but instead exploring deeply personal character arcs. Negative Man’s arc is defined by the pain of repressing his sexuality for most of his life, struggling to reconcile with his true self. Crazy Jane’s storyline in the final season tackles the intersection of trauma, queerness, and the desire to be loved despite feeling broken. And did I mention there’s a sentient teleporting non-binary genderqueer street that exists as a sanctuary for drag queens and the marginalized? More than anything Doom Patrol, beyond even the identity of its characters, embraces the concept of otherness, its characters constantly struggling with alienation, internalized shame, and a longing for self-acceptance. They had to learn to be normal, their normal, not the kind of normal dictated by the beliefs and judgements of the world. The Doom Patrol must survive in a world consistently trying to suppress their otherness, with a literal Bureau of Normalcy in the show seeking to snuff out everything that makes them unique. Rather than a superhero show with queer themes, it exists as a queer narrative in the form of a superhero story in such a resonant way that the X-Men can’t when having to exist within a multi-billion dollar industry and satisfy a boardroom of executives.

So, why does Doom Patrol matter if it was doomed to obscurity? To pull a quote from the final page of Grant Morrison’s run on the team:

“There is another world. There is a better world. Well…there must be…”

In carving out a space for stories that celebrate the weird, the broken, and the beautiful, Doom Patrol imagined that better world, a world where streets were more than just streets and where there was a home for every misplaced outcast. This offbeat little show proved that superhero stories don’t always have to be about punching the bad guy. Sometimes, they can be about making peace with yourself – or at least trying to. While it may never achieve the mainstream recognition of the X-Men, Doom Patrol, unapologetically itself, will likely endure as a cult classic, cherished by those who found something familiar in its weirdness. And that, perhaps, is its greatest triumph.