For Gerard Way, the third installment of his comic Doom Patrol couldn’t have dropped at a more opportune time. Set in a world where misfits are superheroes and everything is just a little bit sideways, his take on the DC Comics series started hitting shelves right as America’s highly divisive election was dominating news feeds in late 2016. Then, on Election Day itself, issue #3 came out. The title? “It’s a Doomed World After All.”

For the members of the Doom Patrol fanbase troubled by the election’s results, the comic's sympathetic heroes offered a bit of comfort—even if it was accidental. "Obviously it was written three months or so in advance," Way says. “It’s almost as if I psychically knew this and [Doom Patrol artist] Nick [Derington] knew this before we even started making the book. But this is the book we set out to make—something uplifting and positive as well as strange and deep. It ended up being relevant without even talking about what's happening in the world."

It’s also turning out to be quite relevant to what’s happening right now in comics. Doom Patrol is far from the traditional superhero series. As the just-released first collection, Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Brick By Brick, makes clear, it's something more interested in the people wearing the costumes than the powers they have or the villains they fight. Those tropes are now the stuff of summer blockbusters, and Doom Patrol aims to do something different. In line with series like Marvel’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Hannah Blumenreich’s Spider-Man fan comics, Way’s take on the Doom Patrol imagines the kinder, gentler hero of the future.

In Way’s world, characters say things like “healing is a collaborative act” and "it may get a little uncomfortable, but I'm here for you" with full sincerity. This is true in one way or another in most of the books in DC’s Young Animal imprint. (Way, the one-time frontman of My Chemical Romance, is the creative mind behind the imprint, responsible for choosing the creators for each title and co-creating many of the core concepts.) In Mother Panic, for example, Gotham City’s latest hero isn’t a Batman-esque loner—she’s a vigilante who also takes care of her ailing mom. And Cave Carson focuses on a man trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter while everything gets weird and superheroic around them. Making the heroes more humanist wasn’t expressly the goal, but that’s what happened anyway.

"Maybe I wanted it, and that's why it's in there," Way says when asked about why his heroes are helpers rather than all-purpose saviors. "Maybe I just want everybody to be kind to each other. I wanted that in my entertainment, because we weren't getting it anywhere else."

And instilling kindness in superhero entertainment is catching on right now. One of the things that comes up frequently in the praise being lavished on the new Wonder Woman film is its refreshing take on hero motivation. Diana Prince isn’t out to fight bad guys because of a tragedy in her past à la Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker. She’s also not trying to impress a father figure, or doing what she believes is her patriotic duty. What she does, she does mostly out of kindness; she sees suffering and seeks to end it. If she were more of an outcast, Wonder Woman would probably fit in better with the Doom Patrol than the Justice League.

And if Doom Patrol-type heroes are the superheroes of tomorrow, so be it. There’s a lot to be gained from some genuineness and vulnerability—the kind that extends beyond the snark of the big-screen Marvel Studios crusaders and most of their grim, clench-jawed DC counterparts. And Way, at least, is optimistic about Doom Patrol's potential to launch a new wave of heroes with that kind of sincerity. "I do think it's a new place comics can go,” he says. “It could be a mini-movement, and hopefully that will make people want to put out more human material. That would be awesome." Maybe doom doesn’t have to come with gloom after all.