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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic, classic, classic - now publish the whole run, May 29, 2000
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.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The beginning of the best there is, January 3, 2002
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.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely brilliant!, March 18, 2005
It's a toss-up who is the best comic-book/graphic novel writer of all time, Grant Morrison or Alan Moore. With "Crawling From The Wreckage", Morrison began staking his claim as #1.
It would be pointless to begin a plot dissection of this trade paperback, which collects the first four issues of Morrison's run on the Doom Patrol comic (issues #19-22). There is a frenetic, stream-of-consciousness quality to all of Morrison's work on DP, and he was just getting started at this point (his last issue was #63).
Everyone, from casual fans to comic-book junkies, should own this collection. It's required reading from one of the living masters of the genre. Five stars!
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