The Doom Patrol and the Heroism of Strangeness

“The Doom Patrol and the Heroism of Strangeness”

This event is part of the Oxford Comics Network Seminar Series.

Thursday 20 October (Week 2), 5.30pm-6.45pm GMT 

Online – registration required

Register via EventBrite. 

The seminar will be held online on Zoom. Registration is required, either through EventBrite or by emailing the Network at comics@torch.ox.ac.uk. A link to join the seminars on Zoom will be sent out ahead of each event.

Drake and Premiani’s original Doom Patrol were, as their magazine’s subtitle had it, “the world’s strangest heroes.” This strangeness was not, however, a merely stylistic aspect of the group, but its core identity and ethic. The embracing of strangeness as an expression of self lay at the core of the comic, and was as often contrasted with both the seductive trap of normalcy as with more standard monstrous villainy. The most striking example of this contrast is in the character of Rita, the one who was often rejected or radically reimagined by later writers of the comic as insufficiently strange to fit in; a reconsideration of her character, however, demonstrates a more subtle understanding of what the strange might be, and how it might be valuable.

Chester Scoville is Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He teaches and has published on comics, fantasy literature, medieval literature and drama, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

This talk is part of the Oxford Comics Network Seminar Series. The seminar will be held online on Zoom. Registration is required, either through EventBrite or by emailing the Network at comics@torch.ox.ac.uk. A link to join the seminars on Zoom will be sent out ahead of each event.

Find our more about the Oxford Comics Network here.