Essential Comicbooks: Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol
Wonderfully weird and unusual things happened to me this past month. I witnessed a fictional city parasitically implant itself on our reality. I saw a deity who feeds on pain. I watched as a group of lovable magic-whackos, dedicated to the absurd and the bizarre, sought to make Dadaism a way of life eradicating the idea of there being a status-quo. A painting ate Paris and I realized that secret societies are operating everywhere; hiding in plain sight. Fortunately, the Doom Patrol is here to keep things from getting too insane.
The Doom Patrol is a team of outcasts and oddballs from DC Comics, originally appearing in the 1960s. While Doom Patrol has been written and drawn by a number of creative teams throughout the years, comic fandom mostly agrees that the definitive run on the title is Grant Morrison’s. You are probably sick of superheroes and superhero teams given their overabundance on both the cinema and TV screens. I am too, even with my love for the genre. Have no fear, for what I’m about to recommend to you is far from a traditional superhero comic. It’s far more offbeat, outré, zany, psychedelic, and surreal. Big ideas on every page, nay, in every panel. And it’s got a lot of heart too.
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| Brian Bolland's cover for the omnibus collecting Morrison's run, published by Vertigo; an imprint of DC Comics. Image credit: Amazon |
Suffering and Alienation
This comicbook has a very psychological and emotional focus, it examines themes of dealing with suffering and dealing with feelings of alienation. The members of Doom Patrol have all experienced horrible events which altered them and made them incapable of regaining any sense of normalcy or were just born different or born into a shitty life so they were shunned and cast out of regular society.
Morrison gives us a fascinating exploration of the characters’ psyches. For example, Cliff Steele (a man whose brain was placed in a robot after losing his body in a racing crash) yearns to have his human body back along with the feelings and sensations that a normal human body brings; once smashing his steel head against a wall in an attempt to feel something. Cliff laments in a brilliant piece of dialogue in issue #19: “Can you imagine how crude robot senses are, compared to human ones, huh? All I have are memories of the way things used to feel or taste. You know they say that amputees feel phantom pains where their limbs used to be. Well, I’m a total amputee. I’m haunted by the ghost of my entire body! I get headaches, you know, and I want to crap until I realize I don’t have any bowels. And… when I look at a woman, sometimes I…”.
Morrison does not always stick to soliloquies such as the one above. He fully utilizes the nature of the comicbook medium and presents us with very imaginative ways of character exploration that amazed me. I will not describe what he does here, because I will most certainly fail to. You won’t know what hit you when you come across these otherworldly instances. Each and every character gets their chance to shine.
This is a series with a lot of warmth. With all the craziness of the ideas in this comic, there are always touching moments, moments to breathe and connect, which is a testament to Morrison’s love for superheroes and the comicbook medium. Morrison does not want to deconstruct superheroes or expose what is wrong with them and the genre. He is not a part of that trend he just wants to take them in fresh new directions, he wants to take us to their world instead of bringing them into ours and that does not negate or oppose a superhero comic possessing emotional and intellectual complexity as some people think.
Dadaist LSD trips
The best thing about this comic though is definitely the Brotherhood of Dada. The Dada in the group’s name for those who might not be aware refers to an art movement that started during the first World War, which is characterized by the destruction of logic and the celebration of nonsense and irrationality; utilizing techniques such as cut-up writing and collages. Within the comic the Brotherhood of Dada seeks to remove all status-quos and constantly reinvent reality. They are not evil; for them good and evil are “outmoded concepts for an antique age”; they just want to “celebrate the absurdity of life” and “let unreason reign”.
They are some of the coolest characters ever. I am not going to spoil what their powers are and what they do; but I assure you that you will be in awe at the sheer imaginative power of Morrison. I wish Morrison would do a mini-series about the Brotherhood of Dada because the untapped potential really hurts. You are in for the wildest LSD trips whenever these guys appear; and we are talking about a series known for having a big psychedelic and surreal idea on every page; the comic turns even more bonkers when they show up; each new appearance of theirs more bonkers than their last. I really want new readers to experience the Brotherhood of Dada with no previous knowledge of their coolness (the same way I experienced them), that is why I am going to shut up now and finish this piece.
Final Words
I hope I got you sufficiently excited to read this comicbook, my review definitely falls short of capturing its greatness, and that is my fault alone. I would argue that most reviews fail to do it justice. This is a comic that you have to experience yourself. Morrison’s writing is consistently mind-blowing and Case’s art is consistently strong, with the only weak point of their run being issues #37-41, that’s just five weak issues out of a forty-five-issue run that is otherwise perfect. If you are a comicbook fan, you either finished it already or it’s on your reading list. If you are not, you can jump in without any knowledge of the characters’ histories, it’s a fairly self-contained run that can be enjoyed on its own. What are you waiting for? Go read it right now.
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