Product Description

One of the most innovative comics ever, "Doom Patrol" - a super-team comprised of freaks, misfits, and madmen - took the superhero world into a new age of strangeness!Meet Robotman, trapped inside his robot body; Negative Man, possessed by an alien energy being; monkey-faced Dorothy Spinner, who can bring her imaginary friends to life, and Crazy Jane, with over forty different super-powered split personalities. Triumph and tragedy await them as they take on the fearsome, reality-altering Scissormen...but how do you fight against fictional enemies?The astonishing US debut of writer Grant Morrison ("Final Crisis"), with artists including Richard Case ("Shade"), "Doom Patrol" is a comics classic!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #353054 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
"* "[A] mind-melting, super-arty psychohero series... Superheroics for the narcotics brigade. Brilliant." - ComicsBulletin.com * "Freakin' excellent... the best run by a specific creative team in comic book history." - Comics Should Be Good!"

About the Author
Grant Morrison is one of comics' most innovative writers. His long list of credits includes JLA, Animal Man, Judge Dredd and New X-Men, He is also the author of the award-winning Batman: Arkham Asylum, and is currently writing Final Crisis. Richard Case's other work includes Shade, the Changing Man and Ghostdancing. Doug Braithwaite is a British comics artist best known for his work on Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight and Justice.

Customer Reviews

Intelligent, Funny, Surreal Comic Book Treat
Every once in a while, a comic book series comes along that helps redefine the genre and move it onto another level. One such series is Grant Morrison's brilliantly eccentric run on the DC title, Doom Patrol. English writer, Morrison, took what had been a typically-dull, uninspired superhero saga and turned it into one of the most weirdly-warped and witty explorations of life, the universe and everything ever committed to four-colour print. Previously bland characters suddenly had vivid internal landscapes, 'real' relationships, and believable responses to the increasingly bizarre circumstances in which they found themselves and the even odder characters they met.
This volume collects the first issues (#19-25) of Morrison's run, during which he establishes his own take on the Doom Patrol, a disparate group of more or less dysfunctional 'heroes,' one of whom is a trans-gender being, one a human brain in a robotic body, another a woman with hundreds of multiple personalities called Crazy Jane.
The second volume (issues #26-34), Doom Patrol: The Painting That Ate Paris, is where things get really strange. The title actually does represent what happens in the story. I kid you not. This story-line introduces the Brotherhood of Dada, easily among the most gloriously absurd group of 'super-villains' in the history of comics.
Volume three (#35-41), Doom Patrol: Down Paradise Way, introduces a new member of the Patrol, a transvestite, sentient roadway called Danny the Street who is able to teleport and speaks (via radios, TVs, graffiti, fridge notes, etc.) in the gay slang known as Polari. Danny quickly became a favourite amongst this quirky comic's equally quirky readership.
The fourth volume, Doom Patrol: Musclebound (#42-50), introduces the shapely form of muscle-man Flex Mentallo, whose origin story is based on the famous Charles Atlas comic-book adverts in which a 'puny weakling' gets sand kicked in his face by the 'bully of the beach,' takes the Atlas course and wreaks his revenge. The story involves, among other things, sinister goings-on in the sub-basement of the Pentagon. Can our heroes turn the Pentagon into a circle before things get too far out of hand (and mind)?
Volume five, Doom Patrol: Magic Bus (#51-57), sees the return of the Brotherhood of Dada, whose leader runs for US president, campaigning across America in a psychedelic bus that harnesses the power of Albert Hoffman's bicycle to produce hallucinations in the public at large. Hoffman was the discoverer of LSD.
Morrison's glorious reign comes to an end with the sixth collection, Doom Patrol: Planet Love (#58-63), in which we find the team pitted against the Candlemaker, a nightmarish creature that may or may not be a product of the disturbed mind of Doom Patrol member, Dorothy Spinner, a young girl with an ape-like face and the ability to make imagined things real.
If you like quirks, strangeness and charm in abundance then this series is definitely for you. How many comic books are there that reference Dada, magical realism, William Burroughs and 60s counter-culture, and still find time to offer a Marvellous spoof of Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four? The whole series is so far off the wall, it's amazing it ever got published at all and even more amazing that it proved popular. Kudos to DC for giving Morrison's creative talent its head. The artwork occasionally struggles to keep up with Morrison's boundless imagination, otherwise there'd be a full five stars. The quality of the writing is such that I'm tempted to give it five anyway.