5 out of 5

I recently dug out Morrison’s Doom Patrol trades for their zillionth reread after being dismissive of Gerard Way’s recent – and clearly Morrison-inspired – reboot; while Grant’s word is no longer gospel to me, I still have high regard for plenty of his work, and so I was brought to ask regarding his Patrol: Rose-colored nostalgia, or as good as I remember?

A few pages in suggested the latter, but seeing as how I zipped through the trade in a day – versus wanting to quit Way’s book after an issue of interminably sigh-laden reading time – and can’t wait to get at the next volume, I’m comfortable labeling my memory of the series as legit.  It’s all about agenda, baby, and whether I’m on the same page as Grant’s m.o. Or not, he almost always comes prepared with something that reaches beyond the frame of what he’s writing.  Some genre experiments aside, that Something is very often the exploration / celebration / exploitation of the line between fact and fiction; reality and creativity; the influences that zip back and forth across the line.  This concept has been very personal at points (The Filth), or ritualistic (Invisibles), but Doom Patrol just seems to want to look at it, obsessively and gleefully.  The DaDa influence, meshed with dense references to literature and psychology, underline that, in a way that Way’s random-for-random’s-sake DP can’t hold a match to.

What’s also key here, though (and another consistent aspect to Grant’s writing) is the appreciation of his medium.  It’s bot just presenting this philosophical stuff, its joyfully using Tue comic book experience to do so.  This is what will forever be the divide in that eternal Morrison vs Moore debate, god bless ’em both: Moore sort of hates comics, while Morrison unabashedly loves them.  And Doom Patrol is an outlet to embrace all their excesses while simultaneously getting his unifying-theory groove on.

Previous DP writer Paul Kupperberg nicely set Grant up by putting his team in a state of shake up (helped along by the Invasion! crossover event) so that Morrison’s run could institute a new team.  In keeping with his appreciation of comic history, Grant does that, but reinstates Doom Patrol’s freak factor: This isn’t an all-smiles team up, it’s called ‘crawling from the wreckage’ and we get several broken people coming together out of shared tragedy or trauma: Cliff the robotman; multi-personalities Crazy Jane; spirit-housing hermaphrodite Rebis…  Led by the wheelchair-bound chief, with a constantly insouciant huff, the new DP Burroughs-cut-ups their way through enemies borne of thought experiments, gods reveling in pain, and imaginary friends gone awry.

 Richard Case’s art is a bit underwhelming at points for Grant’s grand ideas, but he proves game enough, and turns in something of consistent quality (which he couldn’t manage on the occasionally equally-deranged Shade the Changing Man during Milligan’s run).  The 2000 trade edition has a glowing intro from Tom Peyer and a wonderfully forthwith afterword from Morrison, culled from issue 20 of the original publication.

25+ years on, this is still the template for weird comics done right.