How the Doom Patrol Was 'Wrecked' to Set Up Grant Morrison's Run

This is "In The Spotlight So Clear," a feature where we spotlight times in comics where characters need to be cleared out of the way to make room for a new status quo. Like, for instance, you want to introduce a new Captain Superhero, you might want to first get rid of the previous Captain Superhero. Stuff like that.

Readers Thom H. and Brian M. both suggested that I spotlight the transition from Paul Kupperberg's Doom Patrol to Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol.

In case you are unfamiliar with his brilliant run on the series, Grant Morrison debuted on the book with issue #19, which was titled "Crawling From the Wreckage," and referenced the fact that Robotman, Cliff Steele, had to pick up the pieces of the broken Doom Patrol to rebuild a new team.

The reason that he HAD to rebuild the team in the first place is because Morrison really did not want anything to do with the previous version of the team. Meanwhile, outgoing writer Paul Kupperberg was about the most gracious that a comic book writer could possibly be in getting rid of characters that Morrison did not want before Morrison took over the title. This is especially cool of Kupperberg because he was the one who created pretty much ALL of these characters!

You see, about a decade after the original Doom Patrol were killed, Paul Kupperberg pitched DC Comics on doing a brand-new version of the team, with Robotman coming back from the dead (which makes sense, right, since the dude was a robot, ya know?) and the other members being Celsius, the secret superpowered widow of the Chief, a new Negative WOMAN plus Joshua Clay, the hero known as Tempest...

Kupperberg was clearly influenced by the then-recent All-New, All-Different X-Men, who were international heroes just like the new Doom Patrol (well, Celsius and Negative Woman were, at least).

Another decade later, Kupperberg launched a new version of the series with artist Steve Lightle. However, Lightle had been promised some things from editorial that was not delivered, so he left the book early on and Erik Larsen joined. Kupperberg had been planning on introducing a new generation of the Doom Patrol, younger heroes presumably intended to play off of the success of the X-Men, Teen Titans and the Legion of Super-Heroes (all the biggest books of the 1980s seemeed to star teenagers). Plus, Celsius teaching this new generation made it sort of like an X-Men riff, as well....

Okay, so Morrison essentially wanted NO ONE from the book outside of Robotman and the Chief (who had turned up alive, as well). Naturally, the whole point of this column is the idea that it is easier to wrap stuff up BEFORE the new writer takes over, and so Kupperberg truly went above and beyond by doing whatever he could do to help Morrison out in clearing the deck for the new take on the book.

The main way that this was accomplished was the superhero crossover, Invasion!

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I believe the punk member of the team, Karma, was written off before Kupperberg knew for sure that he was going to be replaced on the series, as he was written out in Doom Patrol #13, but hey, maybe I'm wrong...

Invasion, though, was really where it was at.

The Earth was, well, invaded by an alien alliance who feared the fact that Earth seemed to pump out an extraordinary amount of superheroes.

In Doom Patrol #17 (by Kupperberg, Graham Nolan and Tim Dzon), the Doom Patrol team up with some other heroes to stop an alien attack and Celsius sacrifices herself for the team (the newly alive Chief had denied being married to her and she was having a hard time with that)...

In the next issue, Negative Woman loses her powers...

Then, at Celsius' funeral (after the alien invasion was repelled), we saw what the aliens were planning as their "Plan B," a Gene Bomb that threatened to kill every Earth being with powers...

We see the effects in the final issue of Invasion...

The heroes all slip into comas...

Lodestone remained in one, while her teammate, who had not yet even officially got his codename, died...

By the way, Kupperberg had introduced a one-off character named Dorothy Spinner in Doom Patrol #14. Morrison planned on using her, so in a clever twist, look back at that page from Doom Patrol #18...