Travel Foreman posted these pieces to his blog overnight, explaining that he and Jeff Lemire were agitating for a Doom Patrol reboot around the time the artist left DC Comics' Animal Man. He fleshes out the proposal's premise, which was a ground-up reimagining of the concept, owing little to previous iterations of the characters.

"I’ve expressed my interest in doing the book to DC several times," Foreman writes, noting that 2013 is the team's 50th anniversary, "but it doesn’t seem to be something that's ever going to happen."

He offers a bit of detail about the pitch on his blog -- there's a catastrophe on a space station, with the lone "survivor" a Rover that developed into a sentient robot -- and indicates he plans to develop the idea into his own Doom Patrol "simulacrum."

It sounds and looks like a smart, hard-SF, take on the concept.I'm generally not one for commenting much on the internal politics of DC, but I might guess the project was rejected because of the Doom Patrol name having a certain"'radioactivity." There have been how many relaunches of that series, and how many reboots of the DC Universe, since the last version to actually hold an audiences attention? That said, I wonder how DC passed on this, and then whenever the Doom Patrol does show up in the New 52, in Justice League, it's in the form of the generally unloved mid-'70s line-up of characters like Celsius and Tempest.