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Rating: 
Summary: Defence Against Weird Threats
Review: Collected here are the earliest issues of Grant Morrisons Doom Patrol-run (#19-25). A series about a team of enhanced persons, but not like anything you've seen before. The members of Doom Patrol have special abilities. The difference between them and most 'superheroes' though, they are not to be envied. Their powers are more burdens than blessings. And the cases they take on are not ordinary either. Reality-crossing beings, occult groups and magic is their field of operation. Someone named Caulder has decided to form a superhuman team. Among the ones he selected to be in this team are Cliff Steele (locked in an unbreakable body-suit), Crazy Jane (with 64 different uncontrollable personalities) and an ape-faced girl named Dorothy ... to give a sense of what this team consists of. Little over half of the book is about the team forming, plucking them from their current situations (plenty is explained about each of them on the way, so no prior knowledge of the title is required). Meanwhile, a mysterious group quickly labeled 'scissormen' are causing disappearances all over the world. They literally cut people out of reality. It turns out the fight must be fought philosophically, instead of psychically (it WILL become clear during the story-line). Further there is the story-arc "Butterfly Collector" about a creature calling himself Red Jack. He claims himself to be God and our world to be just a room in his house. Concluding, there is a single-issue arc where a machine is found which materializes thoughts, not a good thing in the premises of the Doom Patrol. A typical Vertigo title which especially those who're into things like Shade and Hellblazer will appreciate. Good clear art (comparable to the art in 'Animal Man' and 'Shade: The Changing Man') and weird but original, interesting story-lines.
Rating: 
Summary: Classic, classic, classic - now publish the whole run
Review: Doom Patrol was the most brilliant, imaginative, innovative comic of the Eighties and early Nineties. Much as I love the work of Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, the Hernandez Bros. and countless other major players, Doom Patrol is the one I really hold to my heart. Grant Morrison, a Scotsman, took a fading rerun of a once-classic series and turned it around, reinventing comics in the process. He managed to arrange for the previous writer to kill off the characters he didn't want to have to use, so that he could introduce a whole bunch of new ones. His most inspired creations include Crazy Jane, cursed with a split personality but blessed in that each personality had its own superpower (and Morrison didn't pull a single punch when he traced the appalling history of sexual abuse that had led to Jane's psychosis in the first place). He also brought us Danny the Street, the Doom Patrol's roving HQ, a sentient street that happened to be a transvestite. Then there was the Brotherhood of Dada, an unlikely bunch of supervillains in that they did hardly anything wrong apart from behaving in a very silly manner indeed; their leader was Mr. Nobody, perhaps the only cartoon supervillain who was drawn in a Cubist manner. This book contains the first six or seven Doom Patrol stories that Morrison wrote, and while they're extremely good, they don't quite catch the series at its peak. Richard Case, artist for most of the run, was still learning his craft here, and his work is effective but not as good as he later became. Later issues took wilder flights of graphic (in every sense of the word) insanity than any other comic has attempted; the stories got sharper and funnier and also more involving, the characters developed much further, and the series as a whole built to a fantastic climax. Then Morrison handed it on to somebody else and the quality plummeted. His recent work, such as The Invisibles, is a bit too self-consciously counter-cultural for me. (Although he did write a splendid one-off called "Kill Your Boyfriend", setting the Dionysus story amongst suburban English teen delinquents.) Doom Patrol was less thought-out, more improvisatory, and far wilder and more liberating in spirit. It's a scandal that the whole Morrison run isn't available in book form. I still lack a good dozen or so issues of the comic. Get thee indeed to the comic book store and seek them out; Miller may have been harder, Gaiman may have been more literary, Moore may have been more intellectual, but the Morrison "Doom Patrol" was the wildest shooting star that comics have seen for decades. Brilliant.
Rating:
Summary: The beginning of the best there is
Review: Morrison's Doom Patrol ranks among one of the best-loved runs in comic book history. The writer's playfully weird style hits a happy medium between the preachiness of the otherwise excellent Animal Man and the detatched nature of the self-referential Invisibles. Morrison really seems to care about these characters - for the first time, someone actually wrote a comic book about broken people trying to save the world, not cool-looking mutants or angst-ridden strongmen with movie-star looks, and Grant Morrison was just the man to do it. Sadly, DC hasn't bothered to collect the rest of the run into trade paperback...and Red Jack is the least interesting of what eventually became the best rogues' gallery in comics. The heroes are still wonderful, though, and Morrison's deft sense of pacing really shines here. Also on its way to noticeable improvement in Richard Case's excellent artwork. By the end of Morrison's run, Case had perfected his style and gave the entire book a distinctive, slightly disturbed feel - here, you can see the evolution firsthand. So read this, anyway, if for no other reason than to be properly introduced to Comics The Way They Should Be Done. But keep in mind that it's only the first chapter of a longer, better story; this is one of the few books that actually begins (with Crawling from the Wreckage), middles, and ends, and by the time you've read about the Painting that Ate Paris, you'll be in for the long haul.
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