Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Crawling From The Wreckage (DC/Vertigo)
Written by Grant Morrison, drawn by Richard Case & Doug Braithwaite
Collects Doom Patrol #19-25

While reading Grant Morrison’s three volume run on Animal Man I remembered that I had another book of his from that era and figured it made sense to give it a look. Morrison took over Doom Patrol with #19 in 1989. He’d go on to have a much longer run on this book than Animal Man. And, I think it’s safe to say that this is one of his weirdest books right up there with Invisibles which I need to give another shot, though not in regards to the current mission of reading Morrison’s DCU-set comics.

In fact, I wasn’t even sure if Doom Patrol would count and, frankly, after giving this first collection of his run a read, I’d say it doesn’t. Sure these characters are part of the DCU, but aside from an appearance by Will Magnus, these issues are almost completely self contained. Of course, this does go back to one of the things I liked about Animal Man in that Morrison was able to tell his own story while also using pieces from the larger DC sandbox.

Before getting into the details of this particular comic, I must admit that I have very little experience with Doom Patrol. I’ve never read the original run that people seem to love so much and have only seen a few guest spots here and there and tried reading a few of the relaunches that came later on down the line, but never really had much to latch onto. Much like The Metal Men, they seemed like a team that writers were more interested in being nostalgic for than making great new stories for new readers. The key to the team always just seemed that these characters are WEEEEEEEEEIRD. I’ve since read that part of the appeal to the original run was basically the same as X-Men when it launched: shining the spotlight on people who feel out of synch with society and turning them into heroes.

Some of that comes across in these first issues from Morrison, but I’ve got to admit that, as a Doom Patrol newbie, I went through these issues mostly confused. I don’t even need to know what kind of wreckage these characters crawled through, but a simple run down of who’s who in the beginning of the collection would have been nice. As a longtime comic reader I knew who Robotman and The Chief were. I even have a tenuous handle on what’s up with Negative Man, but who are Joshua and Dorothy Spinner? This book won’t help you find out. In other words, it might be a little too in medias res for its own good. Part of the fault here lies on Morrison’s shoulders, but another part falls on the people who made this collection who should have done a better job of making it readable for anybody.

So, on to the actual story. Something bad happened to the team and now The Chief, their wheelchair-bound leader, is rebuilding the team, kinda. Robotman meets a woman called Crazy Jane who not only has multiple personalities, but a different power to go along with each of them. They wind up getting together with the rest of the group which now includes a Negative Man/Woman combo called Rebis and facing off against the truly terrifying Scissormen as well as Red Jack who both look they came out of the collective unconscious shared by Clive Barker and Tim Burton. They’re super creepy bad guys who help set the tone of this collection of issues if not the whole series.

Were I to judge this entire Doom Patrol run based on just this collection and nothing else, I’d probably say it’s not for me. In addition to the confusing story, the art is in that messy vein that comes to mind when I think of Vertigo books of this era. But, knowing that it’s Morrison and having just read through Animal Man which did a lot of interesting things with high concepts and long-form comic book storytelling I’m in for the rest of the run. I just need to get my hands on the books! In the meantime, I’m going to keep on keeping on with my more DCU-set Morrison comics. Up next we’ve got Aztek which he co-wrote with Mark Millar.