Brian Madigan liked my piece on the first issues of X-Men and The Avengers and he has a follow-up question. It's about the extent to which X-Men resembled the new DC strip, The Doom Patrol, which came out the same year…
I've always thought X-Men looked a bit rushed (Jack could never remember if Beast had gloves or not). If DC had come out with the X-Men everyone would have seen it as a Fantastic Four copy. Let's see, Flame guy? Ice guy. Monster Hero? Beastly hero. Female hero with weak girly power? Let's do telekinesis. Thing and Johnny tease each other? Replicate that with the Beast and Bobby.
My big question is who came first? Professor X [leader of the X-Men] or Dr. Niles Caulder [leader of the Doom Patrol]? Or is this one of those coincidences?
The Doom Patrol debuted in DC's My Greatest Adventure #80 which went on sale in mid-April, 1963. The first issue of the X-Men came out the following July, probably the first week. Given the timing, it is theoretically possible that someone at Marvel saw the first Doom Patrol issue, decided to rip it off and hustled their imitation out post-haste. That's pretty unlikely, though. Neither Stan Lee nor Jack Kirby usually looked at competitors' comics. (Jack didn't even read the Marvels he didn't work on unless he had to for an assignment.)
Actually, if Stan and Jack had seen Doom Patrol before they did X-Men (or at least before they finished #1), it more likely would have had the opposite effect: They would have steered clear of any similarities so as not to look like they were copying…for legal reasons and also simple pride. Who wants to be accused of plagiarism? After all, if you're going to steal, you steal from a proven hit, not from a new comic which, frankly, looked at first like a feeble attempt by DC to compete with Fantastic Four. Later on, Doom Patrol evolved into a pretty good feature but I don't think the first few would cause any competitor to gasp, "Damn, why didn't we think of a group of misfit super-heroes led by a guy in a wheelchair? Let's plagiarize it right away!"
But yeah, there were similarities. In Doom Patrol, the wheelchair-bound genius Dr. Caulder gathered together "freaks" to get them to use their powers for good. In X-Men, the wheel-chair bound genius Professor X gathered together mutants to get them to use their powers for good. And there were other similarities. In the March, 1964 Doom Patrol story, they battled a group known as The Brotherhood of Evil. In the March, 1964 X-Men story, those heroes battled a group known as The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. There were a few other points like that as well and personally, I think they're all a matter of coincidence.
The Doom Patrol was launched by writers Arnold Drake and Bob Haney, with Bruno Premiani handling the art. Drake actually came up with the basic premise and got the assignment, then tapped Haney to help him. Here is a link to Arnold's account of how it all happened. Later, they were all written by Arnold until he got himself fired at DC. There was a little uprising of writers demanding better rates, health insurance and payment for reprints of their work, and Drake was among the more vocal rousers of rabble so he was shown the door. He then went to work for Marvel where he wrote among other assignments, X-Men.
When asked about similarities between the two groups, Arnold for a long time said it was just a fluke and quipped, "Great minds think alike." Then in 1999, he was reunited with Haney at Comic-Con in San Diego — maybe even the same day the above photo was taken — and Haney convinced him to at least say otherwise. Bob, who was well aware of the success of X-Men, had somewhat more anger towards the comic book field than Arnold. I'm not sure if he really believed the X-Men was a swipe of Doom Patrol or if he just thought there might be recognition and/or money to be reaped from saying so…but he said so and he persuaded Arnold to at least say he was suspicious. Haney died in 2004 and Drake passed in 2007…and that's about all there is to say on this topic.
However, I do have a slight correction to make on the piece I posted about the simultaneous births of The X-Men and The Avengers. In it, I wrote the following…
[Publisher Martin] Goodman had long discussed the idea of doing a Marvel book that would ape DC's popular Justice League of America and gather together heroes from different titles. The Fantastic Four had, in fact, started with Goodman's request for a book like J.L.A. This seemed like the time for that so in a matter of very few days, Lee and Kirby whipped out the first issue of The Avengers and it went to press along with X-Men #1…
I recently discussed this whole matter with a friend and as I did, I recalled another detail that I was told by Sol Brodsky, who had been Marvel's production manager at the time these comics went to press. I would have been more accurate if I'd written that section as follows…
Goodman had long discussed the idea of doing a Marvel book that would ape DC's popular Justice League of America and gather together heroes from different titles. The Fantastic Four had, in fact, started with Goodman's request for a book like J.L.A. and a few months earlier, Lee and Kirby had briefly done some work on such a concept. It is not known how far they took it before putting it aside in favor of more pressing work. When a new comic was suddenly needed to replace Daredevil on the production schedule, they went back to that project. In a matter of very few days, Lee and Kirby whipped out the first issue of The Avengers and it went to press along with X-Men #1…
That better describes my understanding of what happened and I should have written it that way in the first place. Sorry I didn't.