So what's the deal with the Doom Patrol, anyway? OK, I *know* what their deal is, "doomed" people who came together to turn their misfortune into something positive - a real feel-good story except for the time they all died for a while. But what I mean here is why are all their adventures always something either completely ridiculous, utterly horrifying or both?
Even by superhero standards, the stuff they get up to is odd: their arch-nemeses are a disembodied brain and his on-again-off-again gorilla boyfriend, they raised a founding member of the Titans after finding him in the middle of the jungle and they're besties with trans icon Danny the Street (as the name implies, a literal street). The guy from My Chemical Romance is a huge fan of them for some reason.
That's not even getting into their adventures! There was the whole mess with the scissor people from another dimension, them saving Paris from being eaten by an evil painting and whatever the hell was up with Animal Vegetable Mineral Man. Don't get me started on the Milkman Man incident.
And the thing is none of them come across as especially weird: Elasti-Girl and Rebis are both iconic, Robot Man is a big metal teddy bear and the Chief... Okay the Chief is a little bit off-putting sometimes, but I'm sure he's a perfectly fine guy. Do you guys have any theories on why the Doom Patrol, specifically, keeps attracting otherworldly horrors and surreal mind-bending anomalies?
You forgot to mention the fact that the Teen Titan they adopted (before he was a Titan, mind you) is also beloved genre television actor Gar Logan. Really the answer to your question about why the Doom Patrol always ends up in such ridiculous scenarios is down to their personal philosophy as a group: They are a shelter for those whom the extranormal or the impossible has become more burden than blessing. A support group for those whose metahumanity is more along the lines of exotic disability than superpowered blessing and that leads them to the edges, fringed and folds of our world where the outcomes aren't sparkling and heroic, they're closer to the bizarre and even the grotesque.
(A "glamour shot" of the Patrol that they put out when they officially opened their doors as a metahuman assistance clinic)
We in the wider population view metahumanity mostly from afar. As far as genetic "conditions" go it is VERY rare and most other forms of paranormality are equally as rare. Unless you happen to know a metahuman or paranormal person directly then you probably don't interact with their world much if at all. But the more you think about it, the less appealing it sounds. Imagine if, instead of being faster than a speeding bullet, the top layer of your skin vibrated so fast that everything you touched caught fire? If instead of being able to generate energy constructs with your will, every errant image in your mind was projected on the nearest wall like graffiti? Imagine if instead of being a rippling, perfect adonis who happens to be bald and green you have shoulders that can't fit through a door and growing pains that make you want to rip off your legs at the knee. That's the world the Doom Patrol works within. A man whose mind was saved in a body stronger and more durable than steel...who can't touch, taste, smell or even sleep. A man merged with a second self that can fly and phase through walls, who must every day wrap himself in lead bandages to avoid becoming a walking biohazard. It's the other side of the absurd, when the impossible hits and you're left with the reality of something you can't change and can only possibly control. That's when you call the Doom Patrol. And they will help you. It leads to a punk rock, underground ethos. Helping the unseen and defending the unloved, doing the work that only makes the papers when its to point and laugh at the circus freaks. And when you get into the freaky shit, it tends to keep coming. There is no one, no trouble, no problem, no trauma that the Doom Patrol won't face head on if asked. They've seen the worst of the fantastical and come out on the other side so it doesn't faze them an instant anymore. In short, the Doom Patrol faces the weird and the worrying better than anybody else because they see a scared kid on the other side of wonderland and they're telling the psychadelic demons to fucking bring it on.
