Doom Patrol, Vol.1: Crawling From the Wreckage

I do like Grant Morrison's brand of weirdness. The first half of this graphic novel is essentially the famous Borges story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' with superheroes. My only quibble is with the art style, which is very 1990s and gives every character an absurdly small head.

This is fucking fantastic. I don't know why it took me so long to get into it - it's my main problem with comic books; it's always really hard to read the first twenty pages or so because you have to get into this completely new world, and I suppose I'm just not used to reading comics, or not enough. Anyway, once I got past that, this one grabbed me - *completely*. The characters are great, damaged, just like I like them. I've come to love Grant Morrison a lot in the last eight weeks, and this comic gave me yet another reason. Absolutely wonderful and highly recommend.

I surprised myself by loving this. The art and the text were truly weird, but also had clear storytelling and bizarre characters that I somehow could relate to. I especially like Crazy Jane, the woman with 64 different personalities, each with a different superpower. You never know who is going to show up.

Being the start of Grant Morrison's run, Crawling from the Wreckage steered this series from a X-Men rip-off to a proposal that was totally original to its time (and between us, still now).

The story is localized after Invasion (one of the company events of the summer) in which a gene-bomb exploded by aliens released super-powers for some common humans. This was a springboard for DC to create new super-humans and it takes effects on the creation of Crazy Jane, the 1st original character from Morrison for the series (since Rebis is a remodel of Negative Man).

While it is a super-hero book, it has dramatic tension, pop culture references, original character developments and the clear use of story arcs which were not seem in other show more comtemporary books and it was often cited as the template for the Vertigo standard.

Highly recommendable. show less

A little slow to get started, and I'm not really a huge fan of the Butterfly Collector story, but this is still a perfect match for Morrison's style, and the art, while looking like a lot of other DC books from around this time period, still manages to feel weird and creepy. Definitely looking forward to continuing, as it seems that the best stuff is loaded towards the back of the book.

As a fan of the new show, I wanted to read a graphic novel. This one is definitely not at the beginning. I was not impressed with the comic. Way too much going on in all three stories. And Mr. Nobody who has the best lines shows up at the end? Ugh. I'll stick with the show.

This is a wonderful balance between Grant Morrison's odder comics and his more mainstream superhero work. The characters are interesting, the threats are weird, but not imcomprehensible.