DC Finest: The Doom Patrol #3

Plot

Collects Doom Patrol #64–87; Vertigo Jam #1; and Doom Patrol Annual #2.

Reality breaks. The Patrol keeps walking. DC Finest: Doom Patrol: The End Sacrifices the Means collects Rachel Pollack’s complete, boundary-pushing Vertigo run—a fractured epic of shape-shifting magicians, sex ghosts, pirate robot brains, and a war over the very idea of identity itself.

The End Sacrifices the Means is the story of broken people trying to find wholeness in a world that keeps rewriting the rules of reality. Cliff Steele’s consciousness is pirated and sold. Dorothy Spinner’s powers and body change faster than she can understand. Coagula, a new hero born from chemical accident and rejection, fights for a place to belong. And Niles Caulder—the Head—dreams of Window Men and Doctors of Void as he questions what “healing” ever really means.

Picking up the remnants of Grant Morrison’s era, Rachel Pollack (Doom Patrol, Godmother Night, Vertigo Tarot) and collaborators Richard Case, Linda Medley, Ted McKeever, the Pander Brothers, Scot Eaton, and others use impossible images—identity addicts, sex ghosts, Wild Girls, messianic "Healers," and the Teiresias Wars—to explore gender, trauma, memory, and chosen family.

Through all of it, the Patrol keeps showing up for each other, even when they can’t tell what’s “real.” This is Doom Patrol as a story about survivors who refuse to let the world define who they are.