Doom Patrol Rachel Pollack Omnibus featured News 

Rachel Pollack, “Doom Patrol” Writer, Dead at 77

By | April 7th, 2023
Posted in News | % Comments

Featured image taken from the 2022 “Doom Patrol by Rachel Pollack Omnibus.”

Rachel Pollack in 2013
Portrait by Rubi Rose

Per a statement on Facebook, shared publicly by Neil Gaiman, writer and tarot expert Rachel Pollack passed away today, following a lengthy battle with cancer. Pollack was a sci-fi novelist, short story and comic book writer, and a trans woman, whose credits included DC’s “Doom Patrol,” which she penned from 1993 to 1995. She is survived by her second wife, Zoe.

Rachel Grace Pollack was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, on August 17, 1945. She studied English at New York University, and Claremont Graduate School in California. She became a teacher at SUNY Plattsburgh, and married a cis woman named Edith Katz. She became interested in tarot cards in 1970, and came out as a trans lesbian the year after. She and Katz moved to Europe (where they eventually settled in Amsterdam), teaching tarot. They became involved in the UK Gay Liberation Front, although they left after the organization’s attitudes towards trans women turned hostile, and Pollack was assaulted at a conference.

Her first short story, “Pandora’s Bust,” was published in 1971, while her first novel, Golden Vanity, was released in 1980. She also made her non-fiction debut that year with 78 Degrees of Wisdom, a book that eventually became known as the modern tarot Bible, and the first of many published works and essays on tarot and fortune telling. She returned to the United States in 1990, and became a tarot lecturer at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in New York, as well as Goddard College on the West Coast. She was a member of various tarot guilds and associations across the globe, and was named a Grand Master by Las Vegas’s Tarot Certification Board.

She made her comics debut in 1993, taking over from Grant Morrison as the writer of the Vertigo imprint’s “Doom Patrol” series, which she penned until its conclusion in 1995. Her run saw the introduction of DC’s first transgender superhero, Coagula/Kate Godwin, the autobiographical couple known as the Bandage People, and Codpiece, a villain with a serious inferiority complex. Her other DC work included co-writing (with editor/writer Tom Peyer) the first 11 issues of 1995’s “New Gods” run; the Helix imprint series “Time Breakers;” and The Vertigo Tarot, a guide to 78 cards designed by Dave McKean.

Art by Brian Bolland

After a lengthy hiatus, Pollack returned to comics by contributing to several crowdfunded anthologies, including 2017’s Planned Parenthood fundraiser “Mine!,” and 2019’s music horror anthology “Dead Beats,” which reunited her with “Doom Patrol” artist Richard Case and letterer John Workman. In June 2022, she launched a whole new series on comiXology, the Greek myth-inspired “The Never Ending Party,” written with Joe Corallo, who was an editor on the aforementioned projects, and drawn by Eva Cabrera and Cons Oroza.

Pollack commented last year, “It was just very thrilling for me to come back to writing comics. I tell Joe, he’s my hero for having done this, having brought me back, because I just love the form. I love thinking that way, thinking visually like that, seeing and pulling things together. And I love doing things you can do in comics that you can’t do in any other medium.”

Pollack was recognized during her lifetime with an Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1988’s novel Unquenchable Fire, and a World Fantasy Award for 1996’s Godmother Night; she was also nominated for the Nebula Award for 1994’s Temporary Agency. Her other credits included The Body of the Goddess (1997), a book about feminine power past and present, and The Kabbalah Tree (2004), a non-denominational explainer of the religious concept.

Pollack battled Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that affects the immune system, in 2015. Her illness returned in 2022, necessitating crowdfunding for 24 hr live-in care. Gaiman announced she had entered end-of-life care in March 2023, a month before she passed away. Her family’s statement thanked the various communities she was part of for the subsequent outpouring of sympathy, saying, “We are One.”


//TAGS | obit

Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can't speak Cantonese or Arabic.

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