Highway 62

I bet I’ve used that title line before, actually. Oh well, the classics never lose their lustre.

There was indeed a time, before Vertigo was a twinkle in Karen Berger’s eye, that most of the (good) weird, crazy stuff we associate with the imprint was actually part and parcel of the post-Crisis DC Universe. Animal Man talking deus ex machina with Grant Morrison? DCU. Morpheus putting the whammy on Martian Manhunter? DCU. Okay, a lot of the best of Hellblazer really took place outside the DCU. I’ll give you that one. But Swamp Thing facing off with Woodrue over the fate of animal life on the planet? DCU, baby.

And how about the now-retconned Doom Patrol? You know, the really loopy stuff. Oh yeah, the best of it took place before Vertigo happened (actually, I’d have to go back and look to see if Grant Morrison wrote any of the issues of DP that came out under the imprint. My impression is that he didn’t.) Of course, nobody told Geoff Johns that he shouldn’t use the Morrisonized Monsieur Mallah and The Brain in The Flash. At least, I’ve heard he has; I don’t read The Flash, but I understand the pair made an appearance in a recent issue. Yes, I’m passing on hearsay and not even bothering to research salient points. I’m a lousy journalist. I won’t deny it.

If you’re expecting me to dis the current Doom Patrol, you know, the all new same as it ever was version by John Byrne, then you should just stop reading now. Mr. Byrne’s assertions that his is the TRUE VISION aside, DC’s somehow seen fit to reprint the (rightly-dubbed) classic Grant Morrison/Richard Case/John Nyberg run just as Byrne’s debuts. I don’t take it as a coincidence. Short of coming into our homes in the dead of night and spiriting away our copies (not to mention all the digitized copies of the books floating around), Mr. Byrne can do nothing to supplant that vision with his own. Continuity exists to be changed. Retcons happen. As a friend of mine says “Life’s rough. Buy a helmet.” Besides, John Byrne can’t wipe the memory of Morrison’s take on the Doom Patrol from our minds. So hey, let him have his fun with the team (and by some reports, it’s a decent superhero romp, but I haven’t seen anything that really has convinced me to give it a look.)

Of course, people who haven’t read the Morrison run of Doom Patrol are probably asking “Just what makes this run so special, anyways? It’s all just weird for weird’s sake, right?” Not exactly. Don’t get me wrong. It’s damn weird. Consciously weird, even. Though I think it’s unfair to call the stories in the first two collections (Crawling from the Wreckage and The Painting That Ate Paris) obscure or obdurate or (as I’ve heard some call ‘em) mental masturbation. They, much like Animal Man, which preceeded these books, are superhero stories. All the elements are there: larger-than-life characters, flamboyant and gaudy villains, worlds hanging in the balance, and plans that are so crazy they just have to work. The elements are all there, just that they sometimes get…turned around a bit. If I were writing this for a term paper, I’d say something like:
“Morrison subverts the conventions of the super-hero genre masterfully, yet never pushes things so far that his actions can be dismissed as mere parody or attack. He playfully tosses expectations aside, the result of which is a celebration of those battling to maintain a status quo that sees them marginalized as freaks.”

I know. That would become kinda tedious, wouldn’t it…

Morrison, however, did indeed take the “hated and feared by a world they’ve sworn to protect” archetype to heart when writing Doom Patrol. Cliff Steele is hardly human (or is he?) having been reduced to a brain in a walking vat. Crazy Jane isn’t one person or even five, but something like sixty-four people walking around in one body. And Rebis, once Larry Trainor… Well, he’s not human any longer, either. Like Crazy Jane, he’s a composite entity, formed of the union of man, woman and the unknown quantity of the Negative Spirit. Compared to them, Niles Calder’s handicap of being confined to a wheelchair seems positively benign.

Compared to the enemies they face, the Doom Patrol are positively mundane. Uniformly insane, illogical, and toxic to consensus reality, this is a rogue’s gallery unlike any other. The Scissormen or Orqwith (who literally snip their victims out of this reality), god (who may or may not be Jack the Ripper and has a thing for butterflies), the nameless figments of auxiliary Doom Patrol member Dorothy Spinner’s imagination (who aren’t as bad as they seem at first glance), the Brotherhood of the Dada (ditto, but more on that later), the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse (who eats imagination) and finally the Nameless Cult of the Decreator (who hire out a mini-rogue’s gallery of their own). Oh, did I mention Cliff Steele’s own body turns against him, and Crazy Jane’s mind turns against her?

There’s a lot of unbridled imagination here. But it’s not the same kind of overblown overmuscled, overpowered sort of thing that we usually get served up in superhero comics. These foes are often abstract, with undefined and undefinable powers, or powers that only work in a literary and not a literal sense. Take the Quiz, for instance, who can have any superpower, so long as her adversary hasn’t thought of it first. This runs the gamut from flight and invulnerability to the ability to turn policemen into commodes or make bullets grow to enormous size, spending their kinetic force far before they reach their target (or my favorite, making negative-spirit-proof glass jars. Never know when that’ll come in handy.)

Not only are the villains imaginative in scope and power, but also in terms of visual impact. When most artists were veering towards shoulderpads, spikes and GUNS GUNS GUNS, Morrison (and I’m fairly sure he was instrumental in the design of his characters) went in the other direction and just went nuts, putting his visual imagination to work in ways that may seem arbitrary and nonsensical, but that’s kinda the point. Morrison isn’t interested in making villains that would fit in the real world, nor even in previously existing comic book worlds. None of these characters would survive off the comic page, and that’s just fine. They look and read great just where they are. The villains don’t have human motivations or dimensions (for the most part), but then I don’t think they’re supposed to. They feel dreamlike, ruled by a subconscious logic ripe with implicit meaning and dodging the literal.

If you’re looking for a theme in Doom Patrol, one that jumps out pretty explicitly is the assault of illogic upon logic. Fantasy versus reality. Nonsense (but not necessarily chaos) versus the status quo. It’s freaks versus freakier freaks. Insane versus insaner. And like undergrad Matt said upstream, oddly enough the Doom Patrol fight hardest to keep things the way they are, even when that means they’re relegating themselves back to the freakshow. Not that they necessarily see it that way.

Is Morrison making comment on the superhero as enforcer of the status quo? Not quite, or at least if he’s doing so in these two volumes, it’s in a fairly subtle way. The Brotherhood of the Dada may indeed just want us to have a little more fun and loosen up a bit, but they’ve also managed to unwittingly unleash capital O Oblivion on the world. Of course, they also figure out how to shut it down (and in doing so, trap themselves in a “perfect” world of their own making, in what turns out to be one of the most bittersweet moments in the books.) Everywhere that illogic attempts to get a foothold in the Real World, the Doom Patrol manages to put it down (though sometimes resorting to illogic or deus ex machina moves in order to do so.) But for now, the Doom Patrol, as unbalanced as they may be, are enforcers of stability. Though those borders will become more porous and nebulous as time goes on (but don’t let me spoil it for you.)

Morrison dares to be artful, to embrace literary sources beyond Shakespeare or biblical themes. Whether it’s reference to Coleridge or de Quincey or the Fauves or Futurists, pop art or trash art or Impressionism, Doom Patrol is unafraid to run amok through culture (with such odd moments as the presaging of reality television or the issue-long meditation on the mind/body dichotomy that’s a hundred times more fun to read than I’ve just made it sound). Doom Patrol is smart and doesn’t talk down to its audience. Nor does it harangue the reader (though I’m sure that many will object to it’s deliberate and knowing cleverness) with its own depth. Morrison knows to keep things fun and light, particularly when dealing with meaty themes.

This stuff is regarded as classic for a reason. Kudos to DC for putting it out there again. I can only hope that they get the whole thing collected, even in the face of the whole Flex Mentallo court case fiasco. Because if you think these first two volumes are crazy fun, you’re in for a treat with the ones that follow. So get on the stick, DC. You’ve got our attention so far.