The question of who should get credit for comics is one that has always plagued the industry, even before characters started making their way onto the big and little screens. Just look at the controversy surrounding Bill Finger’s contributions being left out of common conversation about the creation of Batman and many key aspects of his mythos until very recently, with legal recognition only occurring in 2015, over two decades after his death. The issue has only been raised further since superhero movies and TV shows started popping up left and right, from the 90s Flash show to 2021’s Superman and Lois. Who gets credited at the end of episodes and in a flicker before the latest Marvel movie’s second post-credits scene? More importantly, who gets paid for these characters? So often, it isn’t the original writer and artist (or artists, plural), and if they are, it’s only the smallest sliver of what these movies and shows may generate. And when writers like William Messner-Loebs struggle with poverty despite creating and redefining several iconic characters and award-winners like Ed Brubaker say that they’ve made more on residuals for film cameos than they have for creating the characters making Marvel millions upon millions of dollars, this becomes a huge problem.

To the credit of the 2019-through-present Doom Patrol show currently releasing its fourth season on HBO Max, they do make an effort to credit character creators properly. Every episode opens thanking the creators of the team and several of its most iconic characters, Arnold Drake, Bruno Premiani, and Bob Haney, although there’s some contention about that last name being on that list that we don’t have time to delve into right now. Originally, previews for upcoming episodes would include a list of people being specially thanked for their contributions, and while I have been sadly unable to find the majority of that list, the end of certain episodes attempts to give credit where credit is due. The most complete list of those names I’ve been able to find includes writers for various runs (Grant Morrison, Paul Kupperberg, and Gerard Way), illustrators for those runs, event comics that the team has appeared in, or other crossovers (Richard Case, Nick Derington, Vince Giarrano, Steve Lightle, Erik Larsen, Ivan Reis, and Joe Staton), and other individuals who have influenced or created characters that feature on the show to varying degrees (George Peréz, Marv Wolfman, and Neil Gaiman). To me, while I firmly believe that all of these people should be credited for the aspects of the Doom Patrol show they are responsible for, there are some notable names missing from this list like Keith Giffen and Matthew Clark. For the purposes of this article, however, we’re going to be focusing on just a few—Rachel Pollack, the writer of the Doom Patrol run following Grant Morrison’s critically acclaimed take on the team, and the creative team that worked with her.

Even among Doom Patrol fans, Pollack’s run isn’t typically discussed, especially not with people just dipping their toes into the team. Usually, people start with Grant Morrison’s take on the character, if they don’t decide to jump all the way back to 1963 and begin at the team’s inception. While more of a cult classic when it was originally written, Morrison’s run is now easily the most famous version of the team, and after that I notice people talking about Gerard Way’s run (although it is also the most recent and more spiritually in-tone with Morrison’s work than its immediate predecessors) and sometimes Keith Giffen’s. Canonically, John Byrne’s has been all but wiped from existence, but his name being on so many famous characters like Superman and the Fantastic Four means that his Doom Patrol issues occasionally pop up in conversation. John Arcudi, Paul Kupperberg, and especially Rachel Pollack’s runs barely even make the footnote. While it’s received more recognition in recent years, especially since an omnibus of her run (an absolutely gorgeous one at that, thanks to the loving restoration of the work of the various colorists on the run) was just released a few months ago, it was practically doomed (hah) from the start as it followed hot on the heels of Morrison’s supposed masterpiece. However, Pollack’s run being relatively obscure doesn’t mean the show hasn’t directly adapted aspects of it.

Of course, comics are a collaborative medium by nature, whether that collaboration is between writer, penciller, inker, colorist, and letterer, or between one writer and the next. Often, one person gets credit above all else where a team should. For a Doom Patrol-related example, Nick Derington is often solely credited as the artist for Gerard Way’s take on the team, when Tamra Bonvillain is equally responsible for bringing his lines to life with stunning colors. The show certainly features things that were a collaboration between Pollack and the people that came before her. Grant Morrison may have decapitated Niles Caulder, the team’s abusive, controlling paternal figure, but it was Pollack who breathed more life into that head and took us on a journey through his mindscape that, in my opinion, puts Danny the Street’s Fantastic Four-inspired dream to shame. Dorothy Spinner was created by Paul Kupperberg and his art team including Erik Larsen and Michele Wolfman, but she featured extremely heavily in Morrison’s run and took on a runaway life of her own in Pollack’s, including overcoming and accepting herself in ways mirrored by the Doom Patrol show years later. But there are absolutely things they depict where the credit should fall squarely on Pollack and her team’s shoulders.

The title of this article comes from one of them, the primary example of something from Pollack’s work that has been used on the show without credit—the sex ghosts. On the Doom Patrol show, they first appear in season two, manifesting randomly around the house during a wild party running rampant with sexual magic and sporadically popping up since then. These ghosts are not only the creation of Rachel Pollack but of Linda Medley, Graham Higgins, and Daniel Vozzo, debuting in Doom Patrol vol. 2 #67. 

From their very first appearance, these ghosts tie themselves to two of the most overt themes in Pollack’s Doom Patrol, sexuality (though perhaps it would be better to phrase it as sensuality) and gender. They’re referred to as Sexually Remaindered Spirits, or “SRS,” living their un-life in pursuit of joy and pleasure with each other and occasionally with other consenting parties, such as when they run a phone sex hotline out of the basement of the Doom Patrol’s headquarters. Their name is a joke based on the other thing SRS is an acronym for, sexual reassignment surgery, and transgender superhero and member of the Doom Patrol Kate Godwin, who we’ll discuss more shortly, is both confused and amused upon first hearing the acronym because of this. Doom Patrol had dealt with gender before, of course—Morrison’s run famously had Rebis, a being of three composite parts, who struggled with having hir gender validated by those around hir and, quite frankly, by the narrative—and Kate herself is much more intended to be both representative of aspects of the transgender experience and a realistic depiction of someone living within it. But the SRS are nonetheless a wink and a nudge to a transgender and otherwise queer audience. To divorce them from the context of being created by DC’s first openly transgender writer is to make them no longer what they are, no longer SRS. The show seems to acknowledge this, to an extent. The name is gone. The sex ghosts are simply… sex ghosts. Rachel Pollack’s vision is gone, right alongside Linda Medley and Graham Higgins’ visual gymnastics and Daniel Vozzo’s ethereal echoes that put the sexually remaindered spirits as neither human nor inhuman but simply masters of their own sexual desires and an open doorway to the desires of others. 

The other primary example is Codpiece, who makes his television debut in the recently-released premiere of Doom Patrol season four, and his comic book one in Doom Patrol vol. 2 #70, created by Rachel Pollack, Scot Eaton, Tom Sutton, and Tom Ziuko. Codpiece is an interesting case, and not just because he’s a man with a gun strapped to his dick. He pops up scantly in-name-only as a joke, such as when supervillain Snowflame auctioned off his “codpiece cannon” in the pages of Catwoman vol. 5. The point of his character is to be an embodiment of toxic cisgender masculinity and insecurity. He has a complex about the size of his penis that drives him to abuse others around him including random women in his life and sex workers he hires. It is incredibly important that the person who defeats him, in her debut appearance, is transgender woman and former sex worker Kate Godwin. To bring Codpiece up as a bit character in modern comics isn’t necessarily problematic, but it does rub me the wrong way to know that the borderline joke villain created for one issue was referenced before Kate was after John Arcudi unceremoniously killed her off in a flashback in 2002 (thankfully, she has since been returned to life, something else we’ll extremely briefly touch on shortly). I am, however, willing to jump the gap and call adapting Codpiece to a Doom Patrol television show without adapting Kate problematic. The reason Kate defeats Codpiece is because she is a part of the groups that he has intentionally harmed through verbal and physical harassment and stalking. She doesn’t do it alone—she’s assisted by George and Marion, a pair of “bandage people,” and a small group of SRS called “the insects,” because the Sexually Remaindered Spirits are characters in their own right and because, well, it’s funny for a transgender writer to have a post-op transgender superhero be assisted by some spirits named after sexual reassignment surgery—but she is the catalyst for his downfall. To adapt Codpiece is to adapt Kate; she can exist without him, but he cannot be foiled by anyone other than the people he has spent his life resenting. Unless, of course, the show decides he can be.

The show has already cast its lot in with transgender people by making Danny the Street (a character originally conceived of as a drag queen by Grant Morrison, repeatedly called a “transvestite” in all manner of official material, and then slightly more favorably labeled as “transgendered” in the New 52) officially nonbinary, as they’re now explicitly genderqueer, and by having scenes where drag queens pummel the hell out of the tyrannical hand of the homophobic government. Where is the issue in presenting a positive portrayal of a transgender character who has meant a great deal to many people and in perhaps giving some money to a transgender actress? To watch Doom Patrol trip over its own feet as it covers its ears so it won’t hear the commentary the original comics are explicitly making is frustrating. And to do it all without crediting the team responsible for the characters they’re using to ignore that commentary is practically offensive. What is there to gain by ignoring the contributions of Rachel Pollack? Of Linda Medley, of Graham Higgins, Tom Sutton, of Scot Eaton, of Tom Ziuko? 

Of course, this is a precedent set by comics. I already mentioned that Kate was killed off by John Arcudi and his creative team in 2002. Dorothy Spinner took a few more months, but her end didn’t come much later. Niles Caulder’s body was restored when John Byrne’s reboot rolled around in 2004. George, Marion, and the Sexually Remaindered Spirits haven’t been mentioned in decades. Comics are used to always resetting to a status quo, and it hurts to see Doom Patrol follow that trend. Kate and Dorothy making their reappearances in DC’s Pride Month Special 2022 was a dream come true for me and many other Doom Patrol fans, and seeing the show’s official twitter account tweet a cropped panel of just Dorothy and Danny from that issue was salt in the wound that I still haven’t forgiven. Doom Patrol has always been a haven for the oppressed and the underdogs. To not credit a transgender woman and her creative team for their achievements in writing for the comics that this show is based on feels like a slap in the face to everything the team is supposed to represent. 

In August of 2022, Rachel Pollack was admitted to the ICU for emergency medical treatment after it was announced that, following a battle with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma around 2015, a different kind of lymphoma had recently been discovered in her body and she was receiving chemotherapy. While she lived to see her omnibus published after several months of delays and is currently recovering, it eats me alive to think that there is credit that she could be receiving but isn’t. To be clear, I don’t know if she’s been paid for her characters appearing on the show, and if she has but this hasn’t been made public I don’t blame her or the executives responsible for that decision—in fact, the reason I have been somewhat scarce about discussing potential monetary compensation for character usage beyond the examples in my opening is because I would like to assume that she has been. But imagining that she could pass without her work being introduced to an even wider audience beyond just comic fans, lovers of mysticism and tarot, and science fiction books is upsetting to say the least. I don’t know what I hope to accomplish by writing this. I certainly don’t think I expect to accomplish anything. I just want someone else to think that this is wrong. I want someone else to see that these characters and stories were made by people who haven’t gotten the credit or respect they deserve. I want the following people to be highlighted for everything they’ve done for the Doom Patrol as a team and as individual characters:

Ted McKeever, whose abstract and incredible illustrations certainly aren’t for everyone but who I can’t imagine Rachel Pollack’s run without. Linda Medley, who picked up where Richard Case left off and made the Doom Patrol her own. Scot Eaton, who filled in for her but contributed no less than stunning artwork that includes his work on Kate Godwin’s debut issue. Vertigo editor Tom Peyer, who made the imprint what it was at the time, and editor Lou Stathis who succeeded him and kept the fire burning bright and passionate. Jamie Tolagson and the Pander brothers, who illustrated only one issue apiece and still left their marks. Tom Taggart, whose cover work for Doom Patrol makes the run stand out in any spread, and Kyle Baker, whose covers contain such vivid colors and deep emotions they’re almost overwhelming to look at. Graham Higgins, Mark Wheatley, Eric Shanower, Alex Sinclair, Debbie McKeever, and Gene Fama, who helped make the insides of those issues live up to expectations. John Workman and Ellie de Ville, because letterers are the key that keeps comics of all kinds moving forward. And, of course, Rachel Pollack, for everything she’s done for the Doom Patrol.

Maybe one day these people will get the credit they deserve from the Doom Patrol show. And if they don’t, I hope you’ll join me in still standing up to applaud them. 

[The edit I never wanted to make: Rachel Pollack passed away today, on April 7th, 2023. She touched the lives of so many people, even those she had never met. Her writing for Doom Patrol remains a standout and many consider her to have been one of the world’s foremost experts on tarot. Her memory is a blessing.]

It is not a surprise to anyone who has met me that I love comics and superheroes. It is also not a surprise to anyone that I tend to gravitate toward characters that are like me, whether that is because they are Jewish, members of the LGBT community, mentally ill, neurodivergent, or simply share similar life experiences to my own. Finally, it is not a surprise to anyone that comics have had a rocky history with representation for members of marginalized groups in general. This is not where I will be talking broadly about representation in comics, since I’m hoping to start a series specifically about that. But it’s inevitably very difficult to talk about the Doom Patrol (especially the volume written by science-fiction author Rachel Pollack) without talking about representation.

From the very start, the Doom Patrol comics have been about outsiders, whether you were an outsider for what amounts to a fantasy disability, because of your superpowers, because of your mental health struggles, because of your gender, and often because you were just plain weird. While many people draw comparisons between the Doom Patrol and the X-Men, since they were created around the same time (the Doom Patrol debuted in My Greatest Adventure in June of 1963, created by Arnold Drake, Bob Haney, and Bruno Premiani, while the X-Men debuted in September of 1963 in The X-Men, created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee) and have several superficial similarities, I’d argue that they represent two similar but distinctly things, as the X-Men are often used as an allegory for real-life minorities, while Doom Patrol tends to steer clear of that particular metaphor in favor of others, though they certainly aren’t above political satire.

I’m not here to talk about the Doom Patrol as a whole, though. Plenty of people smarter and more well-versed in the team and their history than me have. I’m here to talk about my personal favorite run of the Doom Patrol, which lasted for only twenty-four issues but managed to leave a lasting impression on me regardless. So let’s talk about the under-appreciated little sister of Grant Morrison’s famous run on the series. Let’s talk about Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol.

When Morrison ended his Doom Patrol run after forty-four issues full of weird art and even weirder stories, Pollack, a science-fiction author with a hand in the women’s spirituality movement who had already written several books of her own, took over. After an admittedly rocky start while trying to find her footing in the wake of Morrison’s beloved run and getting the story she wanted to tell set up, Pollack got everything straightened out and wrote several killer “bottle issues” (similar to bottle episodes, which use familiar settings and regular characters for budget reasons while going deep into the lore of the characters) as well as some smaller self-contained arcs before she began what is in my opinion one of the best arcs of all time in comic book history, titled “The Teiresias Wars.”

But even that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First, I’m going to (briefly) talk about my two favorite “bottle issues” of hers from before that arc began-Doom Patrol #70, titled “The Laughing Game,” and Doom Patrol #74, titled “Bootleg Steele.”

Two of the most common themes in Pollack’s run, identity and duality, are showcased excellently here. I may be a bit biased toward “The Laughing Game,” since it introduces my favorite Doom Patrol character of all time, Kate Godwin/Coagula, but even from the perspective of someone without any particular character attachment, it’s a very well done issue. In “The Laughing Game,” duality isn’t a huge focus, but identity is. The villain’s tragic backstory is that he has self-esteem issues about the size of his, well, package, and internalizes things which aren’t even actually directed at him, which only makes him feel worse even as he shoots down the people who try to help him with his problems. And at the end of the day, when he quite literally straps a gun to his crotch and tries to commit crimes out of an imagined feeling of victimization, he’s ultimately defeated by the aforementioned Coagula, a transgender woman and former sex worker turned computer programmer (her professions were chosen based off of Pollack’s observations of the most common jobs for transgender women at the time) with the ability to dissolve or coagulate things as well as a computer sensitivity. And hey, I’m always down to read something that involves embodiments of cishetero-masculinity being taken down by transgender people.

“Bootleg Steele,” on the other hand, while also being about identity, deals just as much with duality. The basic plot of the issue is that one of the few mainstays of the Doom Patrol team, Cliff Steele/Robotman, has to deal with a greedy businessman profiting off his image with video games and life-sized models of him that actually believe that they are him. The issue focuses Steele’s issues with his identity as a man and a robot as well as on his relationship with Kate, who’s obviously had her own identity issues in the past, while spotlighting the duality between man and machine. The issue ends with Steele staring down the man trying to profit off of his own perceived inhumanity and plainly stating that the difference between him and the life-sized toys he’s selling is that they’re machines, and he’s not. It’s a powerful statement for any character, but given Steele’s long in-universe history of questioning his own humanity, it holds even more weight.

After #74, the Teiresias arc immediately begins in #75, drawn by Ted McKeever and colored by Stuart Chaifetz. To put it in extremely simple terms, the plot is that an ancient race, called the Teiresiae after the Greek seer who was transformed into a woman, are trying to stop the construction of the Tower of Babel by another race, called the Builders. From the start, the arc focuses on Pollack’s main themes of duality and identity. When one of the Teiresiae is describing their history to the team, they say that the world was divided into categories such as master and slave, creator and created, and above and below, after the world was split into male and female. Even before this, two conversations on identity take place between Kate and Steele, first when he finds out she’s transgender and then while he’s waiting for a new body to be built for him after his old one was destroyed (destroying Steele’s body is something of a rite of passage for Doom Patrol authors). At first he reacts poorly and in confusion, and it’s only after Kate compares her experiences to his own that he understands that she’s a woman just like he’s a man. Pollack expertly paralleled two different experiences between two wildly different people in a way no writer before or since her has done quite as skillfully. Later, when Kate and Steele must fuse into one to become their own Teiresiae in order to awaken the other members of the lost race, their experiences are again shown as similar, the duality of man and woman shown as less important than two people bonding over a shared past crisis of identity.

In the end, the actual plot of the arc isn’t important, and honestly I’d rather not spoil key events since I genuinely believe that everyone who’s alright with some of the touchier content within it should read it. What’s important is that its themes of duality and identity, particularly shifting identity, are handled with care and respect by an author who truly understands what she’s writing about. Pollack covered several topics generally seen as uncomfortable or taboo in her run on Doom Patrol, especially gender and menstruation, using her background in the women’s spirituality movement to make things as realistic as possible as well as allowing her own personal experiences with gender and sexuality to guide her. (I will admit that the brief scene in issue #82 when Cerise, a woman who is the leader of a local women’s spiritual circle, welcomes Kate to participate in a women’s-only ritual surrounding menstrual blood that they believe will help Dorothy Spinner (the youngest member of the team) while saying that she brings with her an ancient and sacred power, is one of the handful of times a comic has made me openly cry.) While both Pollack and Morrison covered issues of religion and belief in God or gods, Pollack’s Jewish background clearly shines through in her writing of the final arc, which involves a predestined “end of the world” scenario. Again, there’s a level of nuance and sensitivity in her writing that feels refreshing.

So why is Pollack’s run so little-known? Why is a strong and provocative comic run that came right on the heels of an extremely famous one so under-appreciated? Why hasn’t this version of the Doom Patrol been given its due, when Morrison’s is well known and the team itself has recently been pushed into the spotlight by a DCUniverse original show?

Well, not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it probably has something to do with the fact that transgender women in general receive very little respect and attention in the comic book industry as a whole now, and they certainly received less in 1993, when the first issue of Pollack’s run was published. A lot of people in comic book circles hadn’t heard of Pollack, since while she’d already won an award for her original novel Unquenchable Fire in 1989 the overlap between the readers of novels and the readers of comics is often shockingly lacking. There’s also the inevitable drop in audience when you change from one writer, especially one as critically acclaimed as Morrison (yes, I have extremely strong feelings about him, but this isn’t the time or the place to discuss them), to the next, especially since Pollack’s first few issues are by far her weakest. The odds simply weren’t in her favor, and unfortunately it feels as though certain Doom Patrol writers that followed her actively attempted to undo the changes she made and the development she gave to her main characters.

Is Pollack’s run perfect? No, of course not. There are plenty of people who were put off by her heavily symbolic writing style, or found the first few issues where she was attempting to get things on track off-putting. Some people really dislike McKeever’s abstract and confusing art style, and that was specifically what put them off the run as a whole. I have criticisms of it myself, especially of the rocky first issues, and there are certainly some aspects of it that are now dated at best. No comic book run is perfect, not even my favorites, as much as I wish they were.

But Pollack created one of the first transgender superheroes, and certainly the first to be handled with the respect that she deserved as well as the first to be created by a transgender writer, basing her heavily off of her own experiences and the experiences of her friends. She wrote issues that tackled issues like menstruation and sexuality and gender and made houses filled with sex ghosts and bandage people and wrote villains naming themselves after codpieces and decapitated heads with dreams full of schemes and girls who ran wild in the woods with crow gods and let transgender people save the world through our own secret power. Pollack wrote something memorable and beautiful and genuinely special that touched me in ways other comics simply haven’t despite my enjoyment of them.

And I think it would be a shame for us to forget about that just because the name on the cover isn’t Grant Morrison.