Despite the prestige the name Rachel Pollack has in the comics world, she has surprisingly few titles to her name. In the mid-to-late ’90s, she wrote 11 issues of 1995’s “New Gods,” five issues of “Time Breakers” at the short-lived DC Imprint Helix, and two issues of “Vertigo Visions” (‘The Geek’ and ‘Tomahawk.’) In more recent years, thanks in no small part to Joe Corallo, she penned five issues of “The Never-Ending Party,” and a few shorts in anthologies like “Mine!,” “Dead Beats” and “Edgar Allen Poe’s Snifter of Blood.”
And then, of course, there are the 25 and a half issues – how else am I to count the 10-ish page “Vertigo Jam” story – of “Doom Patrol.” We’ll come back to that. First, some biography.
Rachel Pollack was born in 1945 in Brooklyn into an Orthodox Jewish community. After a couple decades in the US, she transitioned and moved to the UK, then Amsterdam, before making her way back to the US in 1992, if my back of the napkin math is correct. She remained ever since, writing and teaching and living with her wife Zoe, until her death at age 77 of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in April of last year.
During her time in the UK and Amsterdam, she was a professor, a trans activist with the Gay Liberation Front, and a writer of award-winning fiction and seminal, influential non-fiction, specifically in the field of tarot, transforming it from a stodgy, gender-rigid field to the open, spiritual, queer one it has become. Her website, a lovely bit of archaea, states that she taught and lectured on four continents.
To say she lived a full, rich and passionate – both in the way you think and the way life would be, I believe, true. To say it still ended too soon would be as well.
There are precious few Jewish writers whose work feels spiritually Jewish yet rarely explicitly, religiously Jewish. Rachel was one of those. Even when writing about pagan gods with the aforementioned Joe Corallo and Eva Cabrera, or when reinterpreting tarot, one can see that spirituality come through. Gaiman expressed it best in The Guardian’s obit:
“Rachel and I bonded over many, many things, one of which was Jewishness, and despite being a bastion of the new age she was also incredibly Jewish. There’s an orthodox prayer that begins ‘Thank you, G-d, for not making me a woman.’
“I remember her telling me that after she came to following her surgery she said, ‘Blessed to you G-d for not making me a woman, but thrice-blessed to the doctor who did.’”
It’s why I rankled when TCJ italicized shul whilst talking about her Orthodox upbringing. I find that obnoxious. Consistent with non-English stylization practices but obnoxious. It felt othering to see, and Rachel’s work never did. It’s a minor thing, and a petty thing, so let me bring us back to the point.
As I said, and Neil too, her Jewishness was suffused into all she did, perceptibly or not. It drew me in without consciously realizing it and I suspect the same is true for others. When one writes passionately, it is hard not to take notice.
There’s a phrase Neil Gaiman uses, again, in The Guardian’s obit to describe what she did best: concretising metaphor. I think that’s a beautiful way of describing Rachel’s approach to the world: she concretised metaphors. She brought them to life and solidified them for all to see, to examine, to experience, and to embody. She did it in fiction, in non-fiction. She did it in prose, and she did it in comics.
Despite her all too short tenure in the field, Rachel’s impact remains indelible, in part because Rachel loved “thinking visually like that, seeing and pulling things together… doing things you can do in comics that you can’t do in any other medium.” In the intro to her “Doom Patrol” omnibus – I told you we’d be back – Rachel talks about how the title had “always been one of [her] favorites in all [her] writings.”
It showed.
Under her pen, “Doom Patrol” became weirder, more melancholic than Morrison’s run before her, never dour but always thinking; a book always in the process of becoming; a passionate book; a book she was shocked to learn, many many years later, had not only inspired a generation of transgender comics creators, but was remembered at all.
Continued belowTo anyone who has read her run, uncollected as it was until very recently, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. Beyond creating the first trans superhero, Coagula aka Kate Godwin, her work crackles with the spiritual, the Jewish, and the queer. It isn’t afraid to get heady and it isn’t afraid to get goofy, and it certainly isn’t afraid to do both at the same time – Codpiece, anyone?
Even the story of how she got the job is a wonderfully topsy-turvy bit of goofballery. Introduced to Tom Peyer, then “Doom Patrol” editor, at a Science Fiction Writers of America party by Neil Gaiman, she talked up the book which she was loving under Grant’s pen, and said it was the only one she could imagine herself writing. To her surprise, Peyer said Grant was leaving in a few months, and asked her to submit a test script. Needless to say, she got the job, and got to work getting those official scripts in.
Here’s where the goofballery comes in. Pollack decided to play a prank on Peyer, and wrote into one of the remaining issues, pretending to be a kid who read the book but thought she could do a better job of writing it. Then she waited for Peyer to see it. Apparently, he found it hilarious and asked her to write letters for every remaining issue of Grant’s run and at the end, he’d be so charmed he’d give the book to her, announcing Rachel as the new writer. It worked so well, for many years this was erroneously told as the actual story, despite Rachel being a long-accomplished writer and, by that point, in her late 40s.
Stories like these seem to flow from all who knew her and all who talked to her. She was generous and kind, warm and inviting, impish, thoughtful and, yes, passionate.
She was a light unto the world, even if not everyone saw it then. Her memory will continue to be a blessing, and may she be partying it up in heaven, joined now or one day with her thrice-blessed doctor and the first trans lesbian on the Supreme Court.
Rachel Pollack: 1945 – 2023
