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…”Crawling From The Wreckage” and making its way to the #5 spot on our Christmas Countdown!
Doom Patrol: Crawling From the Wreckage
Written by Grant Morrison
Pencils by Richard Case
Inks by Carlos Garzon
Published by DC Comics
Robotman: The brain of a human trapped in the body of a robot; Crazy Jane: A woman with multiple personality syndrome wherein each personality has a different superpower; Dorothy Spinner: an ape-faced woman with powerful “imaginary friends”; Danny The Street: a sentient roadway that can teleport anywhere in the world. These are not the world’s greatest –but they are World’s Strangest Superheroes! This, the cast of Grant Morrison’s avant garde masterpiece, The Doom Patrol.
Doom Patrol was originally a team of odd-ball superheroes from the 1960s with a powerless leader bound to a wheelchair (it actually predated X-men by 3 months). It was revived unsuccessfully twice before author, Grant Morrison took over, starting with Issue 19 of Doom Patrol in February of 1989. Building upon a precedent created by Alan Moore on Swamp Thing, and appearing only one month after Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN, Grant Morrison helped pioneer the the line of DC comics that would soon become the VERTIGO imprint. (Ed’s Note: Which DC has spent the past year doing its best to drive into the ground).
Beyond the bizarre cast of ‘heroes’, Morrison and artist Richard Case also introduced a weird cast of villains as well. Villains like The Scissormen who attack non-fictional beings in the real world (the world of the Doom Patrol); They use their scissor hand to cut people out of reality. Not only was this a strong concept for a scary villain, but the characters themselves were a message from the author himself.
So, what does it all mean?
Doom Patrol is Morrison’s grand statement against the ‘realistic’ fad in comic books. A trend that began with Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. Where comics became more ‘gritty’, violent, and ‘real’, Morrison took his characters in the opposite extreme direction that Moore and Miller did, plunging them farther into the fantastic.
They asked: “What would happen if superheroes were real?”. Morrison asked: “What if that didn’t matter?”
Grant Morrison remained until Issue 63, and luckily every issue of his run is collected in nifty volumes! Crawling From the Wreckage is the first and collects Issues #19-25.
Buy Doom Patrol: Crawling From the Wreckage here: http://amzn.to/TZlo3h
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