A brain placed inside an unfeeling robotic body. A man forced to share his body with a creature from a negative dimension. A woman with split personalities, each with their own metahuman power. And a manipulative bastard in a wheelchair who guides them all. They are the Doom Patrol, and when the world gets strange, these strange heroes step up to keep us safe from things you can’t even imagine.
Grant Morrison’s a nut. If you’ve read any of his stuff before, you know that’s true. But back before he was a household name, he took over a little book called Doom Patrol and wrote a run of comics that have gone down in history as some of the weirdest and most out-there books ever to be published. I’ve read some Grant Morrison, from the easily understood to the totally incomprehensible, so I thought I’d be prepared for this. Boy, was I wrong.
Things start off fairly tame, with Crawling From The Wreckage, a four part story that has Morrison pick up the pieces of the previous writer’s run on the book as he assembles his team, introduces some new characters, and gets the ball rolling on the weirdness with the arrival of the Scissormen, creepy monsters from an imaginary reality that is trying to force itself into existence. God, the sentences that this book is making me write. This arc is a solid introduction, although it did remind me of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing in that Morrison’s building on things from before that we’re not privy to; I don’t know a lot about Invasion!, but it seems kind of important here.
Then we just dive right off the cliff of insanity as the Doom Patrol battle a being that could possibly be God, could possibly be Jack The Ripper, or both, or neither. It’s not exactly high concept stuff, but the vagueness and subtleties of Morrison’s writing makes you question literally everything you see in his comics – you can’t trust anything you read at all.
The focus shifts to Joshua Clay and Dorothy Spinner for an issue then, as they cope with the disappearance of the Patrol and end up fighting Dorothy’s imaginary friends. This little one-and-done reminds us that the Doom Patrol are part of the same world as the Justice League, even indirectly, and that’s almost as worrying as if they were the only heroes on the planet – if these guys are saving us from threats like this, then would the Justice League even stand a chance?
For those of you who have been reading Gerard Way’s Doom Patrol, you’ll be familiar with the villain of the next four issues – Mister Nobody and the Brotherhood of Dada attempt to destroy the world using a painting that eats people, only to run afoul of the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. It doesn’t get any more surreal than this (he says, not having finished the run yet and fully prepared to eat his words). The Doom Patrol are almost incidental in this arc, and there’s a certain irony seeing two Justice Leagues standing around unable to do anything about the painting or even aware of the danger it poses.
We then get a deep dive into Crazy Jane’s split psyche as Robotman attempts to bring her back to the land of the living with some very interesting imagery, before the Doom Patrol are swept up into a battle against the Cult Of The Unwritten Book to save all of existence from the Anti-God. This is where things get really weird (as if they weren’t already) with Morrison throwing out super odd concepts in nearly every panel and never explaining any of them. It reminds me of the old Milestone Xombi book; you just have to accept the weird and get on with it.
Oh, and the final issue has Robotman’s body achieve sentience and then fight The Brain and Monsieur Mallah while Cliff’s brain sits in a jar on the side and talks to itself in one of the most absurdly wonderful single issue tales I’ve ever read. You just can’t make this stuff up (but Grant Morrison sure can).
The majority of these issues are pencilled by Richard Case, in what seems like an 80s DC house-style. But honestly, that just makes things even more creepy. If you had weird panel arrangements or out-there art styles like Dave McKean or something on this kind of book, it might be a little less creepy – seeing the weirdness drawn as if it’s just an everyday occurrence heightens the impact considerably, despite what you might think. There are fill-in issues by Doug Braithwaite, but he’s nowhere near his current style at this point, so it’s easy to mistake him for Case if you’re not looking closely.
I went into this volume thinking I’d get totally confused, but despite all of the insanity and strange concepts that Morrison chucks at the reader, it’s actually not that hard to follow what’s going on. Some of the nuances or the references that he’s drawing on to tell his story may have been lost, but that didn’t stop me from really enjoying all of this. The Doom Patrol and their adventures aren’t for the faint of heart, but if you like your stories completely balls to the wall insane, you’re in the right place.