Creation Story
Beast Boy’s first appearance is the one most people get wrong. Ask a fan where the green shapeshifter of the Teen Titans debuted and the answer comes back “the Titans,” and it is off by fifteen years and an entire team. Garfield Logan started out with the Doom Patrol, a Silver Age supporting character in a book about a very different set of misfits, long before anyone thought to make him a teen idol.
Writer Arnold Drake and artist Bob Brown built him as a kid with a monstrous problem. As a child, Garfield caught a rare, lethal illness, and his scientist father saved his life with an experimental serum that temporarily turned him into a green monkey immune to the disease. It worked, at a price: his skin, hair, and eyes stayed green for good, and he came out of it able to shapeshift into any animal. The powers were a bonus; the green was a life sentence. He would never again look like anyone else in the room.
That is what tied him to the Doom Patrol, DC’s team of heroes defined by what had been done to them. Garfield, orphaned and unmistakable, was taken in by Rita Farr (Elasti-Girl) and her husband Steve Dayton (Mento), and grew up around a group of people who also could not go back to normal. For a decade he was a Doom Patrol footnote, a powerful kid with a hard look and no real spotlight.
The spotlight came in 1980. When Marv Wolfman and George Pérez relaunched the Teen Titans, they brought Garfield in as a founding member under a new name, Changeling, chosen to sound less like a children’s-book character. The New Teen Titans is where he finally clicked, as the team’s wisecracker and its heart, and it is why most people know him at all. He eventually went back to “Beast Boy,” the name the cartoons made famous, but the character they were all drawing on was the one who started in 1965.
First Appearance: The Doom Patrol #99
The first appearance (1st app) of Beast Boy is The Doom Patrol #99, cover-dated November 1965, written by Arnold Drake and drawn by Bob Brown. He arrives as a green-skinned kid who can turn into animals, a supporting player in the Doom Patrol’s corner of the DC Universe rather than a headliner.
As a collector book, Doom Patrol #99 is a quiet key, and its value runs entirely backward from the character’s later fame. Nobody bought it in 1965 for Beast Boy; the issue mattered to the plot around the Doom Patrol, and Garfield was a new face in the cast. It only became a first-appearance target once the Teen Titans cartoons and the live-action Titans turned him into a name, at which point the Silver Age issue that started him became a genuine key. For a first-appearance archive, it is a clean example of a debut whose importance was assigned decades after the fact.
For collectors
The collector story has one issue and one common mistake. The Doom Patrol #99 (1965) is the key, the first Garfield Logan, and the pages where the green and the shapeshifting first appear. The mistake is reaching for a Teen Titans book instead, usually The New Teen Titans #1 or DC Comics Presents #26, both of which are important for the team and for Cyborg, Raven, and Starfire, but neither of which is Beast Boy’s first appearance. His debut sits fifteen years earlier, in a Doom Patrol issue most collectors have to be told about. #99 is the real first appearance; the Titans keys are for the team, not for him.
