Doom Patrol, The: Crawling Wreckage - Vol 01

It's a toss-up who is the best comic-book/graphic novel writer of all time, Grant Morrison or Alan Moore. With "Crawling From The Wreckage", Morrison began staking his claim as #1. It would be pointless to begin a plot dissection of this trade paperback, which collects the first four issues of Morrison's run on the Doom Patrol comic (issues #19-22). There is a frenetic, stream-of-consciousness quality to all of Morrison's work on DP, and he was just getting started at this point (his last issue was #63). Everyone, from casual fans to comic-book junkies, should own this collection. It's required reading from one of the living masters of the genre. Five stars!

While Grant Morrison is a mostly great comic book writer, it's not unheard of for him write comics that are so abstract as to be nearly incomprehensible. I suspect that is because Morrison understands his ideas so well, that when he finally writes them down, he forgets that we the readers don't understand them. Consequently, he leaves pieces out, and leaves us to our own devices. However, in his early work, that tendency isn't quite present. These stories have a full beginning, middle, and end, and so are completely comprehensible. Such is the case with this "Doom Patrol", collecting his first issues on this series, in which he deconstructed a basic super-hero team, attempting to take it back to its quirky 1960s roots, but at the same time looking forward to the then-distant 21st century. The great strength of the series is that Morrison knew which characters to keep, which to change, and which to jettison. Thus, team mainstay Cliff Steele, Robotman, a human brain in a robot body, and team founder Nile Cauler, the Chief, are here. So is Larry Trainor, Negative Man, a pilot possessed by a parasite composed of negative energy. But in Morrison's first signal that things are changing, that energy being forces the combination of Trainor and a woman, creating Rebis. And new characters include the ingenious Crazy Jane, a woman with multiple personality disorder, whose every personality has some super-power, and the sympathetic Dorothy Spinner, your average teenage girl, who has an ape-like physique and the ability to create creatures out of whole cloth with her mind. Further, the plots are strange, unusual, but make perfect sense, like a fictional city intruding on reality, inhabited by Scissormen, or Red Jack, a nearly omnipotent being who believes himself to be God, but was also Jack the Ripper. The tragedy of this series is that, thanks to a questionable editorial decision earlier this year, these stories are no longer part of continuity, as the Doom Patrol has been started from scratch. A shame, since this series really changed a lot abut the medium. Comics were never the same, for no other reason that Grant Morrison still writes.

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.