One of the Doom Patrol's oldest foes is Madame Rouge, a firm member of the Brotherhood of Evil. This master of disguise uses her transforming powers to vex the Doom Patrol and sometimes her own team members, making her morality as fluid as her form. Having already appeared outside of the comics in the Teen Titans cartoon, Rouge recently made her live-action debut in the Doom Patrol HBO Max show.
The show seems to be taking her in a very different story direction so far, but she's had quite a comic book history of changing her appearance and her ambitions whenever the mood strikes. And in the same way that Doom Patrol and the X-Mne share several foundational similarities, this makes Rouge somewhat similar to Marvel's Mystique, another slippery villain who's been associated with another Brotherhood of Evil.
Who Is Madam Rouge?
Madame Rouge, a.k.a. Laura De Mille, debuted in 1964's Doom Patrol #86, by Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani. She was initially just an actress who had developed another, far more evil persona after a traumatic car accident. This made the Brain, the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil, notice the woman, and he brought her in and making her evil personality the dominant one through experimentation.
She would become the Brotherhood of Evil's sole female member, operating as a master of disguise before a subsequent surgery gave her outright shapeshifting powers. Beyond simply changing her appearance, she usually used this skill to stretch herself and contort in an almost snake-like fashion. What made her most dangerous, however, was her ever-shifting allegiances. Her more benign persona would occasionally take over, and she even struck up a romance with Niles Caulder of the Doom Patrol in this persona.
The Devolution of Madame Rouge
Madame Rouge's personality disorder would eventually come back to bite both the Doom Patrol and the Brotherhood of Evil, with Rouge's evil side swearing revenge against both groups for their supposed mutual manipulation of her. Teaming with General Zahl, she seemingly destroyed both groups, with the Teen Titan Beast Boy later killing her in his own bid for vengeance.
Madame Rouge did have a daughter named Gemini, however, who had inherited her mother's shapeshifting powers. The temporary resurrection of Rouge was revealed as a continuity blip caused by Superboy-Prime, with Rouge still dead and Gemini taking her place as the female shapeshifter of the Brotherhood of Evil. These powers would be utilized to an even greater extent by Rouge on the 2003 Teen Titans cartoon.
The Doom Patrol, due to being a group of outcasts led by a man in a wheelchair, have frequently been compared to the earliest incarnations of Marvel's X-Men, with the Brotherhood of Evil being synonymous with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Thus, Madame Rouge essentially functions as the DC Brotherhood's equivalent to Mystique. Though this blue-skinned shapeshifter wasn't one of Marvel's original Brotherhood members, Mystique would later become quite well-known on the group, namely in the various adaptations of X-Men outside of the comics.
The similarities between Mystique and Madame Rouge are stronger given their mutually ambiguous alignments. Mystique has waxed and waned, especially in the movies, between being a villain and an anti-hero, and Rouge's mental instability has occasionally made her heroic. And now that she's entered the world of the live-action Doom Patrol. there's no telling what kind of character she'll shift into next.