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.

Doom Patrol

John Arcudi, Tan Eng Huat & others Doom Patrol (2003)
Not a collected edition or an - ugh - graphic novel, but a big old stack of comic books just as nature intended. I don't think this one did very well judging by the fact of it never having been reprinted. In fact I wasn't even aware of its existence until someone pointed out that DC had attempted to revive Doom Patrol a couple of times prior to the current version written by Gerard Way; and thusly intrigued I've been hunting them down, issue by issue.

John Arcudi's version of the Doom Patrol began back in 2001 and lasted twenty-two issues. I've no doubt it was a tough act to follow the Grant Morrison and Rachel Pollack versions of the comic, but Arcudi managed it fairly well by acknowledging the weirdness without necessarily duplicating it. It's probably closer to the caped mainstream than the book had been since Kupperberg, but it's still pretty odd. John Arcudi wrote The Mask for Dark Horse and you can sort of see his stamp, not least in the ongoing saga of the Doom Patrol menaced by the spirits of ancient Chinese demons trapped in a suit of armour, although admittedly my experience of The Mask is based exclusively on having seen the film with Jim Carrey a couple of times. Arcudi replaces whoever was left standing at the end of Rachel Pollack's run with neurotic superpowered teenagers, much like those we saw in New Mutants I suppose, but with the twist being that they really are a bunch of useless, whining emo fuckers, and as such are actually quite likeable - as distinct from teens who successfully fight crime whilst agonising over whether they'll pass their exams. It's initially difficult to see why this was even called Doom Patrol, but the book really comes into its own after a few issues, feeling very much a legitimate continuation of the mythology.

This is greatly aided by Tan Eng Huat, artist on all but three issues of the run. His figures are sometimes a little awkward, as are his faces, but the overall effect wrought with all those sleek little lines tidily splayed across the page is wonderful, and much, much greater than the sum of its parts. His art resembles that of some of those people taken on board 2000AD during the early nineties, sort of raw and untutored but otherwise working in spite of shortcomings - like the late John Hicklenton with a vague manga influence sent to a couple of life drawing classes; and I wouldn't ordinarily even notice the work of letterers or colouring people, but Bob Lappan and Dave Stewart really made this thing what it was. The lettering in particular somehow reminds me of both Glenn Baxter and Windsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, very much enhancing the peculiar, haunting atmosphere of the enterprise.

In all honesty, I picked this up expecting it to be awful, Doom Patrol restored to wholesome mainstream tedium with all of the strangeness sanded down so as to facilitate sales boosting guest appearances by Superman, but it's as good a sequel to the Pollack run as anyone had a right to expect, and it's a real pity it didn't last.