Here's a question I received from Jeff Wagner but also occasionally from other people. Oh, wait. First, let me put one of these here…
Okay. Now, here's what Jeff (and others) wanted to ask…
In 1963, DC Comics brought out a new super-hero team called The Doom Patrol in a comic called My Greatest Adventure. Shortly after, Marvel brought out the X-Men. The two comics had a lot of similarities. I've seen many people discuss whether one was a rip-off of the other. What do you think?
I think it's pretty close to impossible. Yes, there are similarities. The Doom Patrol was about a wheelchair-using genius gathering together a number of "freaks" with great powers to try and stop other "freaks" with great powers from wreaking havoc on the world, particularly a band called The Brotherhood of Evil. The X-Men was about a wheelchair-using genius gathering together a number of "mutants" with great powers to try and stop other "mutants" with great powers from wreaking havoc on the world, particularly a band called The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.
There were a few other parallels. Both comics had as a theme that the freaks/mutants felt like outcasts from society and there was a sense that they were bound together by the problems they had from being different. The Doom Patrol was billed as "The World's Strangest Heroes" and the X-Men were billed as "The Strangest Super-Heroes of All!"
In both groups, the heroes bickered a lot…but that was becoming pretty standard in super-hero groups at the time thanks to the success of Fantastic Four. In fact, writer Bob Haney, who was one of the creators of The Doom Patrol, told me and others that one of the ideas behind that comic was to give DC a super-hero group with the dynamic of the Fantastic Four, which was selling quite well for Marvel. And X-Men was reportedly started because Marvel publisher Martin Goodman had, for the same reason, asked for another super-team like the Fantastic Four. So there's one clear explanation for some similarities — both creative teams had the same goal: Imitating to some extent the F.F.
"Brotherhood of Evil" was also a phrase then turning up in the news, sometimes to describe organized crime; at other times to describe any alliance of Communist nations. In 1959, not long before, author Frederic Sondem Jr. published Brotherhood of Evil, a book about the Mafia.
I have seen several possible scenarios of theft floated over the years. One is that the team which came out second (The X-Men) was assembled after its creators — Stan Lee and Jack Kirby — saw the first story of the Doom Patrol on the newsstands and decided to copy it. The problem with that scenario is that My Greatest Adventure #80 which introduced The Doom Patrol went on sale April 18, 1963 and X-Men #1 went on sale July 2, 1963.
That's a gap of 75 days. This process got simpler in later years due to technological advances but in '63, it generally took at least 75 days — often more — to take a comic book from inception to on-sale. That was why letter pages didn't feature letters about the previous issue. More often, it was the issue from three or four months before.
Could Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have seen that first Doom Patrol story on the stands and whipped up the first issue of X-Men quickly enough to have had it hit newsstands on 7/2/63? I'm skeptical.
This was a first issue and those always take longer than books where all the characters are designed and named and everyone has agreed on what they'll be like and how they'll function and what color their outfits should be. Kirby was fast but even he had to cogitate a little before putting pencil to paper and on a new book, there would have to be a few meetings with Stan and maybe preliminary sketches.
Stan was pretty fast too but there were a lot of steps necessary to put out any issue of any comic book then — not just writing and penciling but also inking, lettering, coloring, editorial work, sending it over to the Comics Code for approval, etc. Then it had to go to the engravers to be photographed and then color guides were sent off to the engravers where the color separations were done by hand…and that might take a week or two.
Then film was made of the separations…then printing plates were made…then the comic was printed…then it was bound…then it was shipped all across the nation. This was in a time before FedEx or Dropbox or computers. Some of this trafficking was done via U.S. Mail. Also, the printers and engravers often charged extra for a "rush" job.
Why go through all that if you're going to be second on the newsstand no matter what you do?
Some people trying to make the case for theft have said, "Well, maybe someone visited the printer and saw what the other company was working on before it came out." The problem with that speculation is that, first of all, it's just speculation. Secondly, comic book writers, artists and editors almost never visited their printers…and besides, DC and Marvel had different printers then.
"Well then, maybe someone from one company's editorial offices visited the other company's office and saw or heard something." Slightly more possible but no one can name a single person who might have done that. Stan and Jack certainly never dropped by the DC offices during that period. I can't think of anyone who was then working for both companies.
Copying a competitor's book as soon as it came out strikes me as a "crime" that no one would have wanted to commit. People in this industry have imitated others' hits but they usually wait until those books are proven hits before they do. It was probably a good six months before any reliable sales figures on My Greatest Adventure #80 were known. No one even started tallying them until the issue went off-sale…in this case, two months later.
And when the numbers did come in on My Greatest Adventure #80, they weren't very impressive. DC waited six issues before they had gathered sufficient sales data to warrant changing the name of the comic to Doom Patrol. It lasted a few years but it was never a top seller.
One other thing. This is not evidence but I worked with both Stan and Jack, and I knew Arnold Drake and, to a lesser degree, Bob Haney. They all struck me as the kind of folks who, if they were working on a new idea and found out a competitor was coming out with something similar, would change their plans. I can imagine them inventing something like someone else's success at the insistence of their publisher. Stan certainly had in the past complied with his publisher's directives to ape what was selling for others…but, again, that's something that happens when a comic is a proven moneymaker over some period of time.
Again: Why go through all that if you're going to be second on the newsstand no matter what you do? You might as well wait and see how their book fares before you start whipping up something similar. Theirs could, after all, flop and you might then decide you didn't want to go that route.
When I first discussed the matter with Arnold Drake, he was immediately dismissive of the idea that X-Men had in any way copied his Doom Patrol. Many years later when X-Men was one of the hottest comics ever, he began suggesting that maybe there was a bit of plagiarism there…but even he couldn't explain how it could have been on the stands so soon after his.
Arnold was a lovely man and a fine writer. He was booted out of DC about time the original Doom Patrol comic was canceled and immediately went over to Marvel where he began writing — wait for it — X-Men. I was sorry when we lost him and even sorrier that he didn't live to see the Doom Patrol turned into a rather popular — and surprisingly faithful to his concept — TV series. He would have been very proud and a little wealthier.
As for Stan and Jack, both men said they never saw the Doom Patrol — before or after they started the X-Men. And when you think about it, did they really need to imitate a comic book that was kind of an imitation of what they were already doing?
