Rachel Pollack, Going Further
How she changed the comics world . . .
Today’s note is part of a series surveying the extraordinary legacy of Rachel Pollack. If you’re just joining, I hope you’ll catch up previous posts: Shining Tribe deck, Tarot books, and Rachel’s fantastic fiction.
For this post I had planned to focus on how she expanded the boundaries of super-hero comics. And that’s still the plan—but I’ve since realized what an enormous topic this is, and how little I’m equipped to do it justice.
The world of super-hero comics is complicated just as a general matter, and that’s on purpose. Characters and plot arcs are created and deconstructed unpredictably, often with a logic that is only apparent (if ever) in retrospect.
But the history of DC’s Doom Patrol is in a class by itself.
I won’t try to summarize! What’s important is the “Rachel Pollack era,” which began in 1993, and took a group of characters who were already out of the ordinary in wildly unexpected directions. Many story aspects that developed over the next two years displayed very obvious archetypal and mythological associations, as well as Rachel’s signature sense of humor.
Best known among Rachel’s contributions is the character Kate Godwin, a lesbian transgender woman whose superhero alter-ego Coagula has the power to dissolve and to conjoin—an echo of the alchemical process solve et coagula. Kate/Coagula was among the very first trans characters to appear in the comic world, and is still one of just a few.
Toward the end of Rachel’s two years as the creative force at Doom Patrol, other esoteric story elements became increasingly recognizable, including aspects of Jewish mysticism. All along, though, her work on the series had been marked not only by a dazzling inventiveness, but also by an awareness of how myth and archetype shape and energize story-telling.
With just a little exploration into Rachel’s vision of Doom Patrol, I’ve become completely mesmerized. I hope to explore further over the weekend—and I’ll share some of the (many!) resources discovered along the way.
Above all, though, there’s a long-awaited omnibus edition of her Doom Patrol run, published in 2022.
See you tomorrow for a look at Rachel the teacher. C