Doom Patrol, Book 1: Crawling From the Wreckage [Paperback]

Grant Morrison (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vertigo (April 17, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1563890348
• ISBN-13: 978-1563890345
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 0.4 x 10.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #126,017 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Grant Morrison is one of comics' greatest innovators. His long list of credits includes Batman: Arkham Asylum, JLA, Seven Soldiers, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, The Invisibles and The Filth. He is currently writing Batman and All-Star Superman.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic, classic, classic - now publish the whole run, May 29, 2000

By 

"lexo-2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Doom Patrol, Book 1: Crawling From the Wreckage (Paperback)

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.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The beginning of the best there is, January 3, 2002

By 

Sam Thursday (APO, AE United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Doom Patrol, Book 1: Crawling From the Wreckage (Paperback)

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.

EDIT: DC has, wonder of wonders, realized how many people loved this series and has released the second trade paperback in what will hopefully be a long series: "The Painting That Ate Paris." It's even better than the first one, which has been released with a better cover and missing pages re-included.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Early Morrison - - It makes sense!, September 22, 2004

By 

Ian Fowler (Denver, CO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Doom Patrol, Book 1: Crawling From the Wreckage (Paperback)

While Grant Morrison is a mostly great comic book writer, it's not unheard of for him write comics that are so abstract as to be nearly incomprehensible. I suspect that is because Morrison understands his ideas so well, that when he finally writes them down, he forgets that we the readers don't understand them. Consequently, he leaves pieces out, and leaves us to our own devices.

However, in his early work, that tendency isn't quite present. These stories have a full beginning, middle, and end, and so are completely comprehensible. Such is the case with this "Doom Patrol", collecting his first issues on this series, in which he deconstructed a basic super-hero team, attempting to take it back to its quirky 1960s roots, but at the same time looking forward to the then-distant 21st century.

The great strength of the series is that Morrison knew which characters to keep, which to change, and which to jettison. Thus, team mainstay Cliff Steele, Robotman, a human brain in a robot body, and team founder Nile Cauler, the Chief, are here. So is Larry Trainor, Negative Man, a pilot possessed by a parasite composed of negative energy. But in Morrison's first signal that things are changing, that energy being forces the combination of Trainor and a woman, creating Rebis. And new characters include the ingenious Crazy Jane, a woman with multiple personality disorder, whose every personality has some super-power, and the sympathetic Dorothy Spinner, your average teenage girl, who has an ape-like physique and the ability to create creatures out of whole cloth with her mind.

Further, the plots are strange, unusual, but make perfect sense, like a fictional city intruding on reality, inhabited by Scissormen, or Red Jack, a nearly omnipotent being who believes himself to be God, but was also Jack the Ripper.

The tragedy of this series is that, thanks to a questionable editorial decision earlier this year, these stories are no longer part of continuity, as the Doom Patrol has been started from scratch. A shame, since this series really changed a lot abut the medium. Comics were never the same, for no other reason that Grant Morrison still writes.