Doom Patrol, The: Crawling Wreckage - VOL 01 [Paperback]

Someone named Caulder has decided to form a superhuman team. Among the ones he selected to be in this team are Cliff Steele (locked in an unbreakable body-suit), Crazy Jane (with 64 different uncontrollable personalities) and an ape-faced girl named Dorothy ... to give a sense of what this team consists of. Little over half of the book is about the team forming, plucking them from their current situations (plenty is explained about each of them on the way, so no prior knowledge of the title is required). Meanwhile, a mysterious group quickly labeled 'scissormen' are causing disappearances all over the world. They literally cut people out of reality. It turns out the fight must be fought philosophically, instead of psychically (it WILL become clear during the story-line). Further there is the story-arc "Butterfly Collector" about a creature calling himself Red Jack. He claims himself to be God and our world to be just a room in his house. Concluding, there is a single-issue arc where a machine is found which materializes thoughts, not a good thing in the premises of the Doom Patrol.

A typical Vertigo title which especially those who're into things like Shade and Hellblazer will appreciate. Good clear art (comparable to the art in 'Animal Man' and 'Shade: The Changing Man') and weird but original, interesting story-lines.

Grant Morrison, a Scotsman, took a fading rerun of a once-classic series and turned it around, reinventing comics in the process. He managed to arrange for the previous writer to kill off the characters he didn't want to have to use, so that he could introduce a whole bunch of new ones. His most inspired creations include Crazy Jane, cursed with a split personality but blessed in that each personality had its own superpower (and Morrison didn't pull a single punch when he traced the appalling history of sexual abuse that had led to Jane's psychosis in the first place). He also brought us Danny the Street, the Doom Patrol's roving HQ, a sentient street that happened to be a transvestite. Then there was the Brotherhood of Dada, an unlikely bunch of supervillains in that they did hardly anything wrong apart from behaving in a very silly manner indeed; their leader was Mr. Nobody, perhaps the only cartoon supervillain who was drawn in a Cubist manner.

This book contains the first six or seven Doom Patrol stories that Morrison wrote, and while they're extremely good, they don't quite catch the series at its peak. Richard Case, artist for most of the run, was still learning his craft here, and his work is effective but not as good as he later became. Later issues took wilder flights of graphic (in every sense of the word) insanity than any other comic has attempted; the stories got sharper and funnier and also more involving, the characters developed much further, and the series as a whole built to a fantastic climax. Then Morrison handed it on to somebody else and the quality plummeted.

His recent work, such as The Invisibles, is a bit too self-consciously counter-cultural for me. (Although he did write a splendid one-off called "Kill Your Boyfriend", setting the Dionysus story amongst suburban English teen delinquents.) Doom Patrol was less thought-out, more improvisatory, and far wilder and more liberating in spirit. It's a scandal that the whole Morrison run isn't available in book form. I still lack a good dozen or so issues of the comic. Get thee indeed to the comic book store and seek them out; Miller may have been harder, Gaiman may have been more literary, Moore may have been more intellectual, but the Morrison "Doom Patrol" was the wildest shooting star that comics have seen for decades. Brilliant.