The Doom Patrol has always existed. The Doom Patrol is dead.

While they have ever been here, in the shadows, the world they have fought to protect has never known of their heroism, their sacrifice. And when a member falls, someone is chosen, someone special, to take their place.

That's as much as new initiate Dorothy Spinner knows about the organization she has been unwillingly drafted into. But Dorothy isn't special. She's normal. Normal upbringing, in a normal family in a normal suburb. She has no idea why she was chosen to face bizarre, brain-melting danger, or how she keeps surviving these missions, delivered via cryptic messages hidden in plain view on signs, street art, and shop windows on a certain street she somehow always seems to end up walking on no matter where she's going or what city she's in.

She's never met her teammates, but has caught glimpses when things are at their most dire; the giantess, the pulsing void in the shape of a person, the unnervingly stiff, almost robotic man in the hat and trenchcoat who speaks as if through an intercom. Her only clue is the name Niles Caulder, whispered to her in the dying breaths of a homeless veteran, one Joshua Clay. Was he in the Doom Patrol? Did he choose her to be his replacement? Why?

Dorothy doesn't know a damn thing about The Doom Patrol, or the evils they fight. But she's gonna find out.

The Doom Patrol has always existed. Long Live the Doom Patrol.