‘Doom Patrol: Planet Love’ Review
And so we come to the end. It’s taken DC Comics sixteen years to collect all of Grant Morrison’s classic run on Doom Patrol, but it’s complete now. I don’t know if new readers coming to Morrison’s Doom Patrol in 2008 can understand how different that series was in the early ‘90s – the era of million-copy runs, of the Image founders becoming Marvel superstars and then packing up to become “Image,” the biggest boom that superhero comics have ever seen.
There was bombast in the air, then, on all sides. Superheroes were long past their days of stopping bank robberies and foiling minor criminals. The era of cosmic threats all the time had been inspired by Secret Wars II and the first Crisis, and had grown through Marvel’s summer crossovers and everyone’s monthly gimmicks. You couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a would-be world conqueror, or a megalomaniac with an anti-life formula, or some other unlikely threat to everything.
You have to remember that background when you read Morrison’s Doom Patrol, just as you have to remember the stolid seriousness of ‘80s superheroism when you read his Animal Man of the same era. Morrison wasn’t parodying what everyone else was doing – he’s only very rarely been one to specifically poke fun at other creators – but he was pushing it further, in the direction of his own obsessions and ideas, than anyone else was willing to do. (Take a look at his Arkham Asylum for another example; it’s the epitome of the “crazy Batman” idea that percolated all through that time — the concept that Batman attracted so many damaged and insane villains because he was inherently damaged himself.)
Doom Patrol was always explicitly a group of misfits, back to its original incarnation in the ‘60s. But to make a team that really were misfits in the comics world of the late ‘80s – after a dozen teams of odd mutants, after the Legion of Substitute Heroes, after Justice League Antarctica – Morrison had to go really weird.
He took over Doom Patrol after another one of the group’s periodic catastrophes, in which most of the pre-existing group had died or quit. He kept the quaintly named “Robot Man” (ex-racecar driver Cliff Steele – how terribly ‘60s that all seems now!) as the core of the group, made the wheelchair-bound Chief even more irascible and undependable, stuck two other survivors as supporting cast, and brought in two “new” heroes.
One of them wasn’t particularly new – Larry Trainor had been Negative Man back in the ‘60s, but he’d died and gotten better since then. Morrison trendily stuffed him into one glowing, bandage-clad body with a black female doctor – dualities were very “in” for British comics-writers in those days – and called the resulting creature Rebis. Rebis was the most superhero-esque of the Morrison Doom Patrol – a flyer who shot energy beams – but was also the least knowable.
And then there was Crazy Jane, one of the quintessentially Morrisonian creations. A young woman with many, many multiple personalities, and a backstory tied loosely to one of DC’s least memorable crossover events, Jane had superpowers for each of her selves. She could have easily become a deus ex machina, but Morrison played her MPD basically straight, so she couldn’t call up personalities to deal with problems. (And those of us who remember those days still wonder what debt she owes to Mike Baron’s Badger, an earlier hero with various personalities and abilities.)
Cliff was the audience stand-in, the man who asked the obvious questions so that everyone else – Jane, Rebis, the Chief, various secondary characters and villains – could explain what everything meant. He was also the necessary brick, the strong man whose role in any battle was to run into the middle and hit things.
But Morrison’s Doom Patrol villains often didn’t have anything obvious to hit — they were typically shadowy groups, or beings from other dimensions, bent on destroying the universe in odd and unlikely ways. In this volume, the main such villain is The Candlemaker, a Lovecraftian horror seen through a mainstream comics lens, who came out of the psyche of a minor Doom Patrol member to threaten the soul of the world with destruction. (There’s also a gray goo problem later on – runaway nanomachines that threaten to eat the Earth, yet again – but that’s more traditional, and more easily solved.)
Before that, there was the Brotherhood of Dada, which wanted to make the world meaningless, and The Men From N.O.W.H.E.R.E., a secret group deep beneath the Pentagon, and the alternate world of the Kaleidoscape. They had started to seem very similar by the end of Morrison’s run, because they all were similar: they were all existential threats with intellectual/spiritual underpinnings, and could only be explained in multi-panel strings of really long, complicated words.
Doom Patrol was a very wordy comic, even for its day – and its day was one of very talky comics, a peak of talkiness just as the pendulum was about to swing the other way, to full-page splashes of characters who couldn’t even spell “existential.” Everyone explained everything at great length in Morrison’s Doom Patrol, talking about literary movements, magical theory, and personal mythologies. It was all individually plausible, in a superhero universe, but the weight of all of it was getting to be a bit much by this point.
It’s clear that Morrison knew that; he can’t have missed the fact that he was repeating himself. So he ended his run on Doom Patrol, not in the traditional Doom Patrol way by killing most of the characters, but by giving them what superheroes rarely get: a happy ending. I’ll leave you all to discover what that was for yourselves, if you haven’t read these issues already.
Planet Love also contains Morrison’s single-issue piss-take on the Image creators, the Doom Force Special. It’s a parody of early ‘90s bombast played almost completely straight – one could almost take it for a naturally bad comic, and not one that was made bad for effect. It also functioned as Morrison’s bad example of what Doom Patrol could have become after he left – as if he was saying “If this is what the book looks like in six months, don’t blame me – I warned you!”
As I said up top, I’m not sure how Morrison’s Doom Patrol will read to someone who wasn’t there at the time – the threats to the universe are inventive and thoughtful, and the characters are reasonably plausible, for early ‘90s superheroes, but it is basically a philosophy major’s version of the team comics of its day. I enjoyed it, reading it again, but it was an odd kind of nostalgia for the early days of Vertigo, when that was the line for quirky takes on the standard DC universe (Hellblazer, Shade the Changing Man, Swamp Thing), and not for…whatever it is these days. (And I’m not sure what that is.)
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.
Morrison created one fo the first openly gay couples in the DCU, Monsieur Mallah and the The Brain of the Brotherhood of Evil. They were just killed off in Salvation Run. So that's a hint as to how the DCU has been progressing since Grant came along…
I owned the first issues of Doom Patrol that Grant Morrison started writing (I think he began around #19, "Crawling From the Wreckage." (That was a good Dave Edmunds song!) They were strange, weird and wonderful stories. I remember trading those issues with a friend for the first five or ten issues of "Sandman." I'm not sure who got the better of that deal.The first two years of Animal Man were also a treat. It was an amazing example of "Meta-fiction," where the author puts himself and the creative process at the heart of the fictional story they are telling. I heard Stephen King did this with the last book "Dark Tower" series, wrote himself into the story. Shh, don't tell me how that ends. I'm still bogged down reading book six. One of those books I've meant to pick up again for years now. Oh well.Who here remembers Marv Wolfman and Cary Bates' experiments with Meta-fiction and comics? There were some OK Flash stories and a TERRIBLE Justice League story line. At one point they KILLED the entire Justice League. Oof! Then the Specter had to ask GOD for divine intervention and … holy deus ex machina, Batman!Doom Patrol also had elements of Meta-Fiction. I remember the team diving into paintings to save all of existence. The implication being, that if the heroes of the book had to dive into art to save all of everything, well then, diving into a comic book must be pretty important. There was that idea that the STORY could actually take on a life of it's own. This was similar to "Sandman." In a way the story became a story about stories. Maybe that kind of recursive/M.C. Escher/Ouroboros existential-head trip type of writing was a fad of the early nineties.
This was one of several attempts at reviving this series, as I recall, beginning in Showcase by Paul Kupperberg and Joe Staton, and the run that preceded Grant's by Kupperberg, Steve Lightle and then Erik Larsen. After Morrison, there was Rachel Pollack's run followed by several other attempts including one by John Byrne which involved a reboot and/or retcon, though my ignorqance of the specifics is apparent.
Rachael Pollack's run was, like Nancy Collins' run on Swamp Thing, an attempt to keep the weirdness/goodness factor of the books high, but ultimately came off as "last guy-lite".Doug Mankhe's run just before Byrne was kind of lost in the shuffle, but had its moments. Byrne's try was pretty good all told, but the Infinite Crisis "All stories really happened" concept crammed in at the end left a sour taste in the mouth.The DP was revamped again to a degree in Teen Titans recently. They were played much more as a dysfunctional family, with the Chief playing on their weaknesses to keep them emotional basket cases who would stay with him out of fear of their inability to survive in the real world with such freakish aberrations. A neat idea, but a far more sinister Chief than I cared for. That was pulled back a bit when they appeared last year in Brave and the Bold. I like the idea of the team being a support group for each other with the Chief at the helm, but not as such a passive-agressive manipulator as was suggested in Teen Titans. They'd be the ones to invenstigate the "science gone goofy" types of events, like the sort of things that are becoming commonplace in All New Atom's Ivy Town. Used in small doses, a great addition to the DCU; as a monthly book, it's been proven you run out of things to say.
Yeah, I remember Marv trying to bring them in to the Titans circle back in the day.And you're dead-on re: the parallel with Collins' Swamp Thing run.As much as I enjoy (most of) Grant's later stuff, his early DC work …along with Zenith… are my favorites.(Wonder if Richard Case and Chas Truog are drinking buddies.)
A new word: ignorqance, meaning "stupidity, as manifested in thick thumbs."
Thankfully, I was there when Morrison's DP was coming out and it's the main reason why I am still such a big comic book fan to this day. I discovered it when Simon Bisley's cover for issue #37 just grabbed me one day on the spinner rack and would not let go. I was hooked on this strange, eerie, wonderful comic that was the anathema to all the X and Bat-books on the stand at the time. This was around the time I was discovering all the pre-Vertigo Vertigo books like Sandman and Shade, but DP was easily my favorite. I can't believe it took DC this long to get the whole series in trade. My only minor gripe is that they didn't include Morrison's recap page from issue #37 and his essay that ran in the back of issue #20, where he explained his goals for the series, and his influences such as the stop-motion films of Jan Svankmajer and the Truddi Chase biography, "When Rabbit Howls" (the inspiration for Crazy Jane, still my all time favorite DC character.)As for the ending to this trade, issue #63 was perfect. It gave a wonderful sense of closure to the whole run of the book and as far as I'm concerned, that's where Doom Patrol ended and stayed. (I tried Pollack's run for awhile, as well as the later Arcudi series, but both just seemed poor imitations…)Now if only DC would get off their duff and give us that Flex Mentallo trade…
I'd sell my soul to see a second volume run by Morrison and Case.
I have to disagree with the readability/appeal idea in the final para. Morrison's reputation and popularity has only grown since 1990. The general audience for DP is the same as way back when: people looking or something a little different (i.e. Vertigo) genre-wise. As Alan Moore stated (paraphrase) " There are hundreds of comics about people hitting each other out there. There is one (Promethea) about magic and philosophy. I think that's ok." The same can be said for DOOM PATROL's loopiness, surreality, parody and philospohy, no matter how "wordy" it may seem. That mix will still have appeal to teens and 20somethings in search of alternatives to mainstream culture, which was probably the case when Vertigo was just blasting off.As a post script, I want to say how much I have enjoyed the DOOM PATROL Archives. Morrison frequently hailed Drake's series for being ahead of its time, bizarre, camp, mad, etc, so it has been an amazing experience finally finding that out for myself.