publisher, Irwin Donenfeld, about the new competition, they were frustrated by his curt dismissal of the rival, citing their current large revenues. In 1963, as Drake had warned, Marvel's increasingly profitable circulation increased enough to force Independent News to allow it to publish more titles. Meanwhile, editor Murray Boltinoff asked Drake to develop a feature to run in the anthology series My Greatest Adventure. Given the assignment on a Friday with a script due that Tuesday, and inspired to emulate Marvel's idea for superheroes with more character depth, Drake conceived of what would become the superhero team the Doom Patrol, and turned to another DC writer, Bob Haney, to co-plot and co-script the first adventure. Artist Bruno Premiani designed the characters. Drake would subsequently script every Doom Patrol story, with Premiani drawing virtually all, from the team's debut in My Greatest Adventure #80 (June 1963) through the series retitling to The Doom Patrol with issue #86 (March 1964), to the final issue of its initial run, #121 (Oct. 1968). Drake and Bob Brown introduced Beast Boy in Doom Patrol #99 (Nov. 1965). Meanwhile, Drake noticed that Marvel Comics published a series of their own, The Uncanny X-Men, barely a few months later that seemed to mirror his own series' concepts in many respects. These included the concept of a wheelchair-using mentor leading a team of outcast superheroes who often clashed with a team of villains called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants that seemed too close to the Doom Patrol's own enemies, the Brotherhood of Evil. However, Drake found no support for his complaints from National's editorial staff until Drake was forced to concede at that time that it could have been a coincidence. The Doom Patrol bears a strong resemblance to Marvel's older series about another super-powered quartet, the Fantastic Four: Elasti-Girl of the Doom Patrol has abilities similar to Mr Fantastic, Negative Man's powers are similar to those of the Human Torch, Robot-Man is like the Thing (an extraordinarily strong man bitter about being trapped in a freakish body), and the Chief is behind the scenes as the Invisible Girl is invisible. Premiani and Boltinoff appeared as themselves in the final story, discussing the impending demise of the team, but Drake, who had included himself in the script as well, did not. In 1981, Drake said that DC publisher Irwin Donenfeld had ordered him removed from the story because