Today in Comics History, August 17: Happy birthday, Rachel Pollack!

Towards the middle of 1992, as Grant Morrison began to wind down their groundbreaking run on Doom Patrol, a curious set of missives began to appear on its letters page:



from letter columns in Doom Patrol (1987 series) #57 and 60 (DC, July and October 1992)



Imagine your surprise then, when you opened issue #64 and saw


from letter column in Doom Patrol (1987 series) #64 (DC/Vertigo, March 1993)
The writer is, of course, Rachel Pollack, born today in 1945, who took over scripting of Doom Patrol with issue #64, the very first Vertigo issue (Yes! Grant Morrison has never written a Doom Patrol Vertigo issue!). The letter-writing bit was of course the work of Doom Patrol editor Tom Peyer:


Tom Peyer on Twitter, February 3, 2022
Rachel finished out this volume of Doom Patrol through 1995 (it ended with issue #87) and brought even more bizarre and intriguing storylines to DC's oddest team. She greatly expanded the role of Dorothy Spinner to evolve her into a fan favorite, and created Coagula, DC's first transgender superhero. Grant's last issue included a homage to him and the series by Rachel, which gave us an little clue at the wonderful, weird ways the series was going to progress:




from Doom Patrol (1987 series) #63 (DC, January 1993)
As mentioned above, Rachel Pollack comes with an impressive c.v. of novels (Unquenchable Fire, Godmother Night, The Fissure King and more), a great number of short stories, essays published in The New York Review of Science Fiction, and many, many books of her expert field: the Tarot. She was a primary consultant on Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman's The Vertigo Tarot Deck, and wrote the accompanying book.



I checked it out to see if it worked. Hey, whaddaya know?



Rachel Pollack passed away earlier this year from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. She was 77.

Here's the first page of a lovely tribute and homage to Rachel in this year's DC PRide anthology. Pick up the whole book to read the entire set of essays: they're sweet and sad and touching and incisive.


from DC Pride 2023 #1 one-shot (DC, July 2023)
Happy birthday, Rachel Pollack. You are much missed.


from Time Breakers #1 (DC/Helix, January 1997), text by Rachel Pollack