Bruno Premiani

On this day in 1963, a new kind of super-team was born. They weren't the clean-cut, respected heroes of the Justice League. They weren't a close-knit family unit like the Fantastic Four. They were a collection of misfits, shunned by the world at large, assembled by a wheelchair-using benefactor to protect the very citizenry that had rejected them. No, not the X-Men — they debuted later that year. We're talking about the Doom Patrol.

Welcome to Cast Party, the feature that imagines a world with even more live action comic book adaptations than we currently have, and comes up with arguably the best casting suggestions you’re ever going to find for the movies and shows we wish could exist. This week we’re imagining a movie I'd really like to see: an adaptation of the Doom Patrol, specifically the classic Silver Age team created by Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani.

The Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing is an annual award given to two comic book writers — one living and one deceased — who are judged not to have received their rightful recognition, and when it was established in 2005, the inaugural award for living writer was given to Arnold Drake. Despite this official acknowledgment of his achievement in writing, you may still not recognize his name. But I guarantee, whether through comics, the small screen, or the big screen, you know the characters he created: the Doom Patrol, Deadman, Havok, Polaris, Beast Boy, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and more.