Monday, October 14, 2019

Doom Patrol, Volume 1: Crawling from the Wreckage by Grant Morrison, Doug Braithwaite, Richard Case, Scott Hanna, John Nyberg and Carlos Garzón

(2016: graphic novel, collects issues 19-34 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, unsettling and intriguing characters, and 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. Worth owning and re-reading, this. Followed by the 2016 graphic novel Doom Patrol, Volume 2: The Painting That Ate Paris.

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