I just got a new computer. A new mac desktop with a twenty inch screen and with the Adobe Creative Suite. It was thus that I made the above graphic in the style of the first Doom Patrol trade, Crawling from the Wreckage.
I'm starting over with Morrison's Doom Patrol, and loving ever page of it. It's weird, don't get me wrong, but how can you go wrong with lines like these. "All I want is the answer to one simple question before I run screaming back to the bughouse. Is this real of isn't it?" and "I can feel them. A strange mass absence of being. They're out there."
The comics world is full of books playing with the classic superhero archetype, but Doom Patrol does it in a very different way--almost incomparable to, say, Watchmen or The Filth, or, fuck, I don't know pick your own anti-superhero superhero book. It isn't that Morrison's characters are anti-heroes, rather they are the mistreated and maladjusted, the mentally ill and the isolated.
To quote The Secret History of the Doom Patrol:
They look at you and call you and are revulsed.They call you freaks,and they think your handicaps are all there is to who you are!We can prove them wrong. We can turn their scorn into grudging admiration.Join with me, my friends. Together we can make a difference.
The story resonates so well with me, and, I imagine, well to many who spent their adolescence somewhat isolated: a team of mentally and physically handicapped superheroes fighting the bizarre and incomprehensible, trying to overcome both their myriad personality and bodily flaws while dealing with things that would send the average person "to the bughouse". Brilliant.
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