Doom Patrol

Once upon a time, there was a very large house at the end of a long driveway, and the house was called Caulder Manor, and it was the strangest, most remarkable home that Garfield Logan had ever lived in.

Garfield arrived there with green hair and a cautious expression and a bag with two changes of clothes and a collection of animal field guides his mother had given him, organized by continent.

He had come there quietly, after the sadness that had taken his parents. A boy does not arrive at a new home and feel immediately that it is his. He arrives and looks at new ceilings and unfamiliar smells and the sounds of people he does not yet know, and he waits to see if it might become safe.

Niles Caulder met him at the door. The Chief — everyone called him the Chief — was a compact, silver-haired man in a motorized wheelchair with brilliant eyes that saw everything in a room at once. He looked at Garfield for a moment and said: "I hear you can become any animal you've ever studied."

Garfield said, a little defensively, "I'm also quite funny."

The Chief said: "Good. We need both."

That was how it started.

Rita Farr was the one who made Caulder Manor feel like home. Before her accident she had been a famous film actor — graceful and precise, the kind of person who filled a room with calm authority. Now she was Elasti-Girl, able to grow as tall as a three-story building or shrink to the height of a teacup, and she navigated this with the same cool professionalism. She was the one who showed Garfield where the cereal was kept, which was the first and most important piece of information. She reminded him every few days that cereal was not actually a vegetable. She called him Gar and ruffled his green hair, which he pretended to find annoying and secretly didn't mind at all.

Cliff Steele — Robotman — was the sound of the house. His metal body clanked on the floorboards and his voice bounced off the stone walls when he was happy, which was often, and when he was grumbling, which was also often, because Cliff expressed both in exactly the same volume. His human brain ran inside a body that could walk through walls if necessary. He taught Garfield to spar in the long gallery on the ground floor, where the old portraits hung crooked from years of fights moving through it. Garfield tried bear, bull, and a small determined badger. Cliff took all of it and gave loud, affectionate criticism of each attempt.

The Doom Patrol faced enemies that were nothing like the cartoon villains in the films Garfield loved. General Immortus had been alive for centuries and had grown patient and complex in a way that was genuinely unsettling. The Brain — floating in his glass dome, directing the Brotherhood of Evil from a laboratory that moved every few weeks — was a problem they returned to again and again, never quite finished. These were not missions where everything wrapped up cleanly. They were long and careful, the wins sometimes small and the setbacks sometimes large. Garfield learned to measure courage differently out there. Courage was not always the elephant charge. Sometimes it was showing up for the next mission after the hard one.

There were nights when missions had been hard and the house was quiet and Garfield sat at the kitchen table at midnight eating cereal. Those were the nights Rita came downstairs in her dressing gown and sat across from him without asking how he was. She already knew. She brought her own tea and read her own book and was simply there.

He never said thank you for it. He wasn't sure, at the time, exactly what she was doing. But later — much later, after the Teen Titans and more years — he understood. She was saying: you are not alone.

When the time came to leave, he hugged Rita, bumped fists with Cliff, and shook the Chief's hand. The Chief held it a moment longer than a handshake required and said: "You're ready."

Garfield picked up his bag and walked down the long driveway. He looked back once. The house stood in the late afternoon light, full of extraordinary people.

He smiled, and waved, and turned toward what was next.