Doom Patrol

Gerard Way & Nick Derington Doom Patrol (2018)
It came back and it was mostly wonderful, and then it was cancelled because no-one bought it. This isn't one of those graphic novels you're always hearing about - which are actually just a bunch of comic books stuck together with selotape - but the twelve issues of the thing which came out one at a time before it went tits up. Having given up on comic books many, many years ago, then cautiously returned to the form more recently, it seemed like time to do the right thing, to support my local comic book store, to support the comic book industry, and to loyally buy the fucker right from the stands each month rather than wait a couple of years for the graphic novel.

It turns out that one aspect of getting old is that new things often tend to look shit, and this is how it has been for me and the comic book industry, generally speaking. I liked comics when they were a bit crap, when they were kind of cheap and wouldn't seem out of place mixed up with issues of Take-a-Break magazine in a dentist's waiting room. I liked comics before half the store came to resemble Chinese cartoons or European cinema, when they were printed on crappy paper, and when they were read by people who bought them because they liked to read comic books rather than through a desire to belong to some larger community of sad fucking wankers. These days - as I should probably get used to saying - the comic book seems to be the least important part of the store which is otherwise filled with memorabilia and box upon box of grotesque collectible bobble-headed caricatures which must surely have been designed with children under the age of two in mind. Assuming this is what the younger generation actually want, this is why I sometimes have difficulty not regarding the whole fucking lot of them as essentially ridiculous.

Anyway, I tried to buy Doom Patrol each month just like I would have done in the good old days when everything was much better than it is now, but half the time it was delayed, or it was sold out because they hadn't bothered to set a copy aside for me as they had said they would; or at the other extreme, I accidentally bought the same issue twice because a few of them had eight or nine variant covers - keeping the investors and collectors happy no doubt. I even tried buying a couple of other Young Animal titles just to be a sport but gave up because they just didn't seem like anything special. Thus did I accumulate a collection of about eight of the twelve issues of Way's Doom Patrol which came out before it got cancelled because no-one was reading, and which I didn't bother reading because I obviously only had two thirds of a story and was saving myself for when I'd found the missing issues; except the back issues weren't even turning up at my usual online comic book retailer, begging the question of what the full fucking print run had even been - fifty copies?

Anyway, I finally filled in the gaps so here we are at last.

This was mostly a great run. The influence of Grant Morrison is difficult to miss, but this Doom Patrol was more than just a well-played cover version, possibly equating to the stranger excesses of pop art in relation to Morrison's free form Dada, given Way's greater investment in disposable consumer culture and action figures. That said, it's a shame he seems to have ignored Rachel Pollack's run on the book given its spiritual compatibility with what we have here; and it's nothing like so shocking in 2018, or at least 2020, as was Morrison's Doom Patrol back in the nineties, possibly because for all the superior artwork, quality paper, and CGI effects, it's difficult to get past the variant covers, the collectibility, and the possibility of it having been bankrolled as something in which you invest rather than actually read, or enjoy, or which fuels your running around the back yard with your little pals with towels around your shoulders. Where this sort of comic book was once punctuated with adverts for chewing gum or model kits or Hostess Twinkies, now it's shaving products, graphic novels (mostly Batman) and bingeworthy television shows (also mostly Batman).

This was a great comic, and the fact of it falling on its arse probably tells you everything you need to know about mainstream comic book publishing as it stands in 2020.

I saw some knacker slagging this off as incomprehensible on Goodreads, illustrating his point - whatever it may have been - with references to something called Rick & Morty, which is apparently a cartoon like you see on the telly, one of those things beloved of all the really important YouTube people.

Prosecution rests, m'lud.