‘She’s practically normal!’: Disability, gender and image in Doom Patrol

The portrayal of disability in superhero comics has often been problematic. Frequently, disabled characters in superhero comics, when not merely marginal, are portrayed as pitiable or villainous, or, if they are disabled heroes like Daredevil or Professor Xavier of the X-Men, as examples of the super-crip, that is, given powers as compensation for their disability. An arguable exception to this tendency is Drake and Premiani’s Doom Patrol of the 1960s, especially the character of Rita Farr a.k.a Elasti-Girl. Examining this character through gender and disability theories we can see a sophisticated portrayal of marginalization as it pertains to image, spectacle and social norms. Though Rita has sometimes been left out of later iterations of the Doom Patrol on the grounds of seeming too ‘normal’, the character can be read as an exploration of how disability operates as a category of power, in a medium that has often used that category too simply. Reading the character via such concepts as Davis’s dismodernism and Wendell’s feminist disability, seeing her both as a member of this team of outcasts and as one who is frequently lured into a life in the mainstream, we can see how in Drake and Premiani’s series the categories of disability and gender interact with each other, and reflect and respond to societal expectations of power.