Elizabeth Sandifer

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The conspiracy theories about the Pentagon that Morrison engaged with in Doom Patrol owed an obvious debt to the foundational text of Discordianism, the Principia Discordia.

“Then I was cast down. Back to a world of killers, rapists, psychos, perverts. A brand new evil every minute, spewed out as fast as men can think them up. A world where pitching a criminal dwarf off a skyscraper to tell his fellow scum you’re back is a sane and rational act.” – Garth Ennis, The Punisher

As the dates suggest, this was a work that emerged out of 1960s counterculture, beginning in the post-Beat tradition and fully blossoming in the wake of the hippies. (It will not escape attention that the 1970 edition was printed in San Francisco.) The whole business with the number twenty-three emerges from the former influence, specifically and inevitably from Burroughs. Robert Anton Wilson, writing in the Fortean Times in 1977, recalls talking to Burroughs and hearing a story about “a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.” This led both Burroughs and Wilson (more about whom shortly) to begin collecting instances of the number twenty-three. This was, within the Principia Discordia, reframed as the Law of Fives, explained thusly: 

POEE subscribes to the Law of Fives of Omar’s sect. And POEE also recognizes the Holy 23 (2+3=5) that is incorporated by Episkopos Dr. Mordecai Malignatius, KNS, into his Discordian sect, The Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria.

The Law of Fives states simply that:

ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE,

OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO 5.

The Law of Fives is never wrong.

In the Erisian Archives is an old memo from Omar to Mal-2: “I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look.”

Obviously there is no small quantity of joke here, especially in the final comment, which all but admits that all of this is a case of deliberately engineered apophenia. But this is in keeping with Discordianism, which is very much a satire of religion, albeit one that is typically engaged with in utter sincerity, both because that’s funnier and because a joke taken sincerely is an entirely credible vector for mystical experiences. And perhaps more to the point, because a religion based on the worship of Eris, the Grecian goddess of strife best known for kicking off the Trojan War cannot be entirely serious. Discordianism at its core is an emphatic and wholesale embrace of the trickster god, and its followers act precisely how you’d expect a bunch of post-hippie trickster god worshippers to act.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Doom Patrol marked an ethical low in Morrison’s career as they drew excessively from the life and trauma of a real life woman, Truddi Chase, to create the character of Crazy Jane.

“I remember some nutter once told me about the government training psychic UFO pilots to beam advertising directly into our brains.” – Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

Although the overt plagiarism of Truddi Chase’s life is by far the moment of Morrison’s Doom Patrol that most clearly goes too far, it is of a piece with a larger aesthetic of “more is more” throughout the work. And this aesthetic had other risks that, while less harmful than Morrison’s treatment of Chase, were nevertheless familiar from the failures of Arkham Asylum. When Doom Patrol worked it was a heady concoction that offered the implicit promise of new ideas. But it could just as easily end up as a pile of arbitrary strangeness that doesn’t really provide a satisfying whole. Morrison complains often in interviews about the way in which their work is dismissed as “incomprehensible,” and their irritation at this is entirely understandable, but the truth is that their stories can trend into, if not incomprehensibility, at least a kind of lazy sense of being weird for the sake of it, without any larger point to it.

This flaw made its first major appearance in Doom Patrol in  three-issue arc beginning with issue #31. This arc contained a number of broadly interesting ideas. Most obvious is Willoughby Kipling, a hard-drinking and chainsmoking occult detective who serves as a cheeky parody of John Constantine. (The book was apparently denied permission to use Constantine himself—an impressive slight given that Morrison had done a fill-in arc on Hellblazer just two months prior, although one potentially explained by the fact that Doom Patrol would not join Hellblazer in having the “Suggested for Mature Readers” tag for six more months.) Kipling—an ex Knight Templar—draws the Doom Patrol into battle against the many-faceted Cult of the Unwritten Book, which seeks to summon the Decreator to unmake the universe. The Cult consists of various subgroups such as the Pale Police, who speak exclusively in anagrams, the Mystery Kites, which are kites made from the skins of murder victims, and the Never-Never Boys, three gas-masked boys on tricycles, and rooted in the mysterious city of Nurnheim, which can be entered through a wound on people’s bodies and which, in the denouement, turns out to be inside a snow globe. 

This isn’t all completely arbitrary and unconnected—you can draw connections between the focus on wounds, for instance, and the larger Christian esoteric tradition that included the Knights Templar. But very much unlike the Brotherhood of Dada story, which was endlessly inventive but kept itself focused on riffs on art history and the avant garde, there’s not a clear reason why all of these elements go together in one story. Many of the ideas are clever, even outright good, but they fail to cohere as a story.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Morrison’s take on Doom Patrol interpolated avant garde influences such as experimental film and Dada, the latter in an arc in which the Doom Patrol confronts the Brotherhood of Dada and the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.

“He’s not mine, is he? His madness… his madness keeps him sane.” – Neil Gaiman, Sandman

The resolution of the Brotherhood of Dada arc saw Jane rendered comatose following her confrontation with the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, setting up a one-off called “Going Underground” in which Cliff enters her mind to try to bring her back. This sets up Morrison’s first substantial exploration of Jane’s psychology, with her inner landscape given an elaborate depiction as a subway system with stops for the each of her alters, with a repeated motif of puzzle pieces throughout. As he travels through this landscape, guided by Driver 8, the system’s conductor, he comes to understand how Jane got to be this way, discovering things like the station for Miranda, who had been the front personality before Jane, working as a graphic designer in Metropolis before encountering some trauma and destroying herself at “the well” within the Underground. Driver 8 fears that Jane has gone to the well to do the same, which would leave the entire system trapped in a body nobody feels able to manage full time. Eventually Cliff makes his way to the well and is able to rescue Jane from what dwells within, which turns out to be Daddy, an alter representing Jane’s terrified memories of her abusive father, which Cliff helps her fight off and restore herself.

More than perhaps any other moment of Morrison’s early career, this is an issue full of both exhilarating triumphs and appalling failures, a statement that by and large applies to their handling of Crazy Jane in general. On one level, Morrison’s handling of Jane is careful, nuanced, and well-researched. In the late 80s and early 90s the trend when talking about what was then clinically called multiple personalities disorder, but would soon be renamed dissociative identity disorder, was largely exploitative and sensationalistic. Plural systems were generally treated as something to stare at on talk shows, or to allow actresses (and it was always actresses) to win awards for playing “difficult” roles in enthusiastically lurid films like The Three Faces of Eve or Sybil. In contrast, as her first scene demonstrates, Morrison starts from a position of compassion and empathy for Crazy Jane, generally treating her not as an exotic object to put on display, but as a human being, albeit a very unusual one. In many ways the clearest manifestation of this is “Going Underground” itself, which, for all that it’s long on fantastical imagery, is first and foremost an attempt to depict Crazy Jane’s interiority on its own terms, a remarkable goal and approach to the subject matter.

And Morrison’s treatment of multiplicity has a lot to recommend it, especially in the context of the time it was published.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s early issues of Doom Patrol showed a clear debt to avant garde art of many kinds.

“They would die for art in any case. Killing for art was far easier.” -Kieron Gillen, The Wicked + The Divine

Morrison, however, embraced strangeness for its own sake, turning to these techniques simply because in their view Doom Patrol should be weird and these were the weird things they liked. This was not quite the same thing, and would be an approach that came with perils. Equally, when it worked it was spectacular. Their second major arc, beginning in issue #26, was a tour de force that served in many ways to exemplify the appeal of their take on the book. At the heart of it was their reworking of the Brotherhood of Evil, a recurring set of Doom Patrol villains dating back to Doom Patrol #86 in 1964, the first issue after the title renamed itself from My Greatest Adventure. As with much of Arnold Drake’s run, this group had an endearing strangeness to them—its first appearance offered the rare supervillain team that had a disembodied brain in a vat, a talking gorilla, and a giant robot. The latter of these was named Rog, and was stolen by a man named Eric Morden as part of his efforts to join the group. The Brotherhood of Evil made a second attempt to destroy the Doom Patrol in the very next issue, and continued to appear throughout the original run of Doom Patrol with an ever-shifting membership (Madame Rouge, who eventually killed the Doom Patrol, was one of its original members, and General Immortus eventually joined), but Eric Morden vanished after that first appearance without further mention.

In issue #26, however, Morrison revealed that the mysterious figure who had been lurking around the edges of the previous few issues in a series of one and two page scenes was none other than Eric Morden, who explains, in a gloriously unreconstructed supervillain monologue, that he went into hiding in Paraguay after enraging the talking gorilla Monsieur Mallah and the disembodied brain The Brain. There he took up an offer from a Nazi scientist to make him a new man, a process that involved paralyzing him and leaving him in a sensory depravation tank for three days, where he went gradually insane and then, in a climactic moment, found himself reborn as “the spirit of the twenty-first century, the abstract man. The virtual man. The notional man.” Or, as he ultimately decided on. Mr. Nobody—a strange and cartoonish abstraction of a human figure shown only in two dimensional silhouette. And having recruited a new team he dubbed them not the Brotherhood of Evil but the Brotherhood of Dada.

Dada was part of the modernist rush of new and radical artistic movements—a cousin of Futurism and Cubism. But more than any of these, its approach was one that saw forward and anticipated the postmodern turn. Its best known practitioner is probably Marcel Duchamp, who rebranded his existing practice of “anti-art” to Dada after moving to New York City in the wake of World War I.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: After finding success with Animal Man, Morrison was brought on to revitalize the floundering Doom Patrol comic, which they began by leaning hard into themes of trauma and mental illness.

“Religions are fictions that modify the world. It’s just that this fiction is more radical and aggressive.” – Alan Moore, Providence

Of course, Doom Patrol was at its core a superhero book, and it wouldn’t do to have it full entirely of fucked up people discussing their trauma. And so with the remainder of Crawling From the Wreckage, which transitions to a plot about the “Scissormen,” mysterious figures who speak in nonsense phrases like “The leaching will be novelistic for effacement! Curdle your pilgrimage! Curdle your pilgrimage!” and who cut people out of existence, leaving a white void where they’d been. This is inventive—a sly use of the two dimensional portrayal of comics, where cutting a character from the page makes obvious sense, that then gets extended to the imaginary third dimension that the characters occupy. These, it’s revealed, are creatures  who came into existence with the composition of The Book With No Title, a book that describes the composition of a book called The Book With No Title, which is designed to alter human thought by introducing parasitic ideas, describing a city called Orqwith full of glass labyrinths and bone towers, that infiltrates other realities and slowly takes them over. Ultimately Rebis, Jane, and Roboman go to Orqwith where Rebis destroys it by addressing two clock-faced entities, one of whom always lies and the other of whom tells the truth, asking them “why is there something instead of nothing?” 

This is a pleasant bevy of ideas, but astute and well-read readers will have recognized the central one as borrowed from Borges, specifically his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” This story is structured much like a classical Lovecraft story, with a protagonist who investigates a mystery that leads inexorably towards a vast and reality-warping horror that drives him mad. It begins with the narrator, who purports to be Borges, learns about an aberrant version of an encyclopedia containing a description of an ancient city called Uqbar. Slowly Borges investigates, finding more information on Uqbar and its own fictional world of Tlön. Eventually it emerges that Uqbar and Tlön were created by a 16th century secret society as part of an elaborate plot to transform the world into a better version of itself by having Tlön slowly take it over, which, it’s revealed at the story’s end, it is doing so. 

This is a clear swipe, though ultimately no more blatant than any number of swipes other writers have done. Crawling From the Wreckage is no clone of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which lacks a terrifying city of bone, the Scissormen, or the accompanying theme of mental illness and trauma. But what is interesting about it is in many ways what Morrison doesn’t do, which is leave any sort of breadcrumbs leading the reader back to Borges.…

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Peter Milligan made the jump to American comics around the same time as Morrison, but never had as seminal a career, with the highlight being the sometimes brilliant, often frustrating Shade the Changing Man.

“We’re not international criminals. We’re not famous super-terrorists. It’s true we want to tear down everything you’ve created and replace it. But it’s not because we’re monsters. It’s because we’re young and it’s our right.” -Grant Morrison, New X-Men

Perhaps the biggest problem facing Milligan was that the basic framework he was offering—a stranger and more surreal take on superhero dynamics—was already being done. By the time Shade the Changing Man #1 debuted in May of 1990 Morrison was well over a year into their run on Doom Patrol, an absolutely iconic run that was in many ways the crown jewel of their early reputation. 

In many ways, this followed the default British invasion pattern, with Morrison revamping a longstanding DC property for a new era. The Doom Patrol was created in 1963 by Arnold Drake, Bob Hanley, and Bruno Premiani in My Greatest Adventure #80. This was yet another instance of DC’s stable consolidating around superhero books; My Greatest Adventure had previously been an anthology of generic adventure stories with the vague hook of being told in the first person. The first issue, for instance, offered a cover feature called “My Cargo Was Death” (a man driving explosives through South America) along with “I Was King of Dagger Island” (a soldier washing up on a tropical island and convincing the natives he’s a god) and “I Hunted a Flying Saucer” (pretty much what you’d expect), and the comic continued for the better part of six years with this same basic mix of gonzo sci-fi and colonialist fantasy.

But by the 1960s, as DC pivoted increasingly to a superhero based lineup it became necessary to revamp the comic. As Arnold Drake recalls, “AI came in one morning, a Monday or a Tuesday morning, and I’d brought some scripts with me and some plot ideas and [Murray] Boltinoff said to me, ‘I’ve got a problem. My Greatest Adventure is dying and they’re probably going to kill it, but I’d like one more shot at it. What I want is a new feature that might save it.’” He came up with the idea of a man in a wheelchair leading a team of superheroes, but was stuck at two superhero ideas—the size-changing Elasti-Girl, aka ex actress Rita Farr, and the self-explanatory Roboman, aka former racecar driver Cliff Steele, whose brain has been put in a robotic body following a catastrophic accident—and so asked his friend and occasional writer partner Bob Haney for an assist, the bandaged Negative Man, aka former pilot Larry Trainor, who could project an energy entity, but only for sixty seconds at a time lest he die. Under the leadership of eccentric genius Dr. Niles Caulder, these were the Doom Patrol, sold under the Murray Boltinoff-created tagline “The World’s Strangest Heroes!”,…

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