Customer Reviews

Doom Patrol, The: Crawling Wreckage - VOL 01

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Morrison's Doom Patrol ranks among one of the best-loved runs in comic book history. The writer's playfully weird style hits a happy medium between the preachiness of the otherwise excellent Animal Man and the detatched nature of the self-referential Invisibles. Morrison really seems to care about these characters - for the first time, someone actually wrote a comic book about broken people trying to save the world, not cool-looking mutants or angst-ridden strongmen with movie-star looks, and Grant Morrison was just the man to do it. Sadly, DC hasn't bothered to collect the rest of the run into trade paperback...and Red Jack is the least interesting of what eventually became the best rogues' gallery in comics. The heroes are still wonderful, though, and Morrison's deft sense of pacing really shines here. Also on its way to noticeable improvement in Richard Case's excellent artwork. By the end of Morrison's run, Case had perfected his style and gave the entire book a distinctive, slightly disturbed feel - here, you can see the evolution firsthand. So read this, anyway, if for no other reason than to be properly introduced to Comics The Way They Should Be Done. But keep in mind that it's only the first chapter of a longer, better story; this is one of the few books that actually begins (with Crawling from the Wreckage), middles, and ends, and by the time you've read about the Painting that Ate Paris, you'll be in for the long haul.

Collected here are the earliest issues of Grant Morrisons Doom Patrol-run (#19-25). A series about a team of enhanced persons, but not like anything you've seen before. The members of Doom Patrol have special abilities. The difference between them and most 'superheroes' though, they are not to be envied. Their powers are more burdens than blessings. And the cases they take on are not ordinary either. Reality-crossing beings, occult groups and magic is their field of operation.

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.

Doom Patrol was the most brilliant, imaginative, innovative comic of the Eighties and early Nineties. Much as I love the work of Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, the Hernandez Bros. and countless other major players, Doom Patrol is the one I really hold to my heart.

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.

I am not dealing in hyperbole when I say that Grant Morrison's run on the Doom Patrol is one of the greatest runs in comic book history.

Morrison took a b-movie equivalent of a superhero group and turned it into the ultimate playground for hallucinogenic fantasies about things you have never ever thought of or about before. The Doom Patrol, if you don't know, are a group of deformed and disfigured superheros who are outcasts from regular superhero society. They're the black sheep, and therefore, the evil they battle is not conventional and predictable, but things that come from theories, philosophies and world history.

This book is truly epic and visionary in its scope and it is fresh every single time you pick it up. And thankfully they've gathered together a small tip of the iceberg in an easily acquired book. After reading this, which is only a small peek into a infinitely detailed world, you should put it down, put on your jacket (unless it's warm, then don't) get your keys and drive to the comic book store (don't be ashamed) and get every issue of this you can get.

Get the whole thing. This is the book that brought me back to comics. This is the run I will keep long after I've sold or burned all my other comics. Grant Morrison is golden, shining savior who is here to save comics from their past. Witness his work in the Invisibles, Animal Man, JLA, and Hellblazer and understand that you are dealing with greatness and grandiloquence.

If you want to understand why grown human beings read these funnybooks, pick this up. If you want to read a comic smarter than every book on the bestseller fiction list, pick this up.

Knowledge will come.

The Doom Patrol have always been about freakishness. But with Grant Morrison at the helm, it became more about living as a freak and in the face of freakishness. Extraordinary, traumatic, intelligent and witty.

Anyone who thought comics were just Batman, Superman and American Escapism should have a second look.
Ironically, this IS a superhero book, but not one which you likely to have seen before. Grant Morrison
is a Scottish writer who has turned the genre on its head. It features characters like Crazy Jane, an
abuse survivor with ninety-odd personalities, all with their own powers; Rebis a polysexual symphony and
Dorothy the Monkey Girl (who can externalise her subconscious). This is the start of Morrison's inventive
run on the series and highlights are Orqwith (a hyperreal city constructed by postmodern philosophers), Red
Jack (a man who may be god, jack the ripper or both) and the red-legged scissor-men. It has a fairy tale/
fairy nightmare ambience.