Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Doom Patrol, Volume 2: The Painting That Ate Paris by Grant Morrison, Doug Braithwaite, Richard Case, Scott Hanna, John Nyberg and Carlos Garzón

(2016: graphic novel, collects issues 35-50 of the rebooted-in-1989 comic book series)

From the back cover

“Originally conceived in the 1960s by the visionary team of writer Arnold Drakes and artist Bruno Premiani, the Doom Patrol was reborn a generation later through the singular imagination of a young Scottish author─and the result took American comics in a wholly unexpected direction.

“In forging their new path, the reborn World’s Strangest Heroes left behind almost every vestige of normality. Though they are super-powered beings, and though their foes are bent on world domination, all that is conventional ends there. Shunned as freaks and outcasts, and tempered by loss and insanity, this band of misfits faces threats so mystifying in nature and so corrupted in motive that reality itself threatens to fall apart around them─but it’s still al in a day’s work for the Doom Patrol.”


Review

Doom, with its sly humor, unique and unsettling characters and multiverses as well as its smarty pants, abstract notions/genre twists, is one of my all-time favorite comic book series. It does not hurt that the artwork is stellar, straddling the line between Golden Age and then-Modern Age illustrations and tones; it furthers my enjoyment of Doom that the storylines are unpredictable and, at times, mind-bending.

In this particular Doom volume, our unusual heroes further their acquaintance with Danny the Street. They also battle The Men From N.O.W.H.E.R.E. (fake and real), fangsome smoke dogs, and the chaotic Mr. Nobody─escaped from the “Painting That Ate Paris” he was trapped in, in Volume 1─and his new Brotherhood of Dada.

Followed by Doom Patrol, Volume 3: Down Paradise Way.

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