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Last War in Albion

Enigmatic (Book Three, Part 47: Fear and Loathing, The Simple Art of Murder)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis was eventually joined on Hellblazer by Steve Dillon, whose simple expressiveness was a perfect fit for Ennis’s style, and who would go on to be the most significant collaborator of Ennis’s career.

“Yeah, well, that’s me, ennit? Enigmatic.” – Grant Morrison, Hellblazer

This arc wrapped in November of 1992, and with the arrival of Vertigo on the horizon Ennis wisely decided to do a pair of one-offs. The first of these saw him return to Constantine’s family with a story about his niece Gemma unwisely deciding to begin playing with the occult. This mostly served as a small showcase for Kit, who gets a four page scene in which she tries to talk Gemma out of continuing with the occult, noting her firm rule that Constantine keep his occult life away from hers, pointing out how “he’s been all over the world, he’s seen incredible stuff, he’s had the time of his life, and he’s cause a terrible, terrible lot of pain while he’s been at it,” and finally suggesting that the next time someone messes with Gemma she should just “chin the wee bitch,” It’s a succinct demonstration of the character, perfectly capturing why she’s an interesting counterpart to Constantine.

For his first Vertigo issue, meanwhile, Ennis penned a comedy issue about John Constantine’s surprise fortieth birthday party, thrown for him by the Lord of the Dance with a cross-section of Constantine’s supporting cast attending. This allows Ennis a change of gears, demonstrating the basic fact that he can do comedy. And indeed, the issue is tremendously funny, taking advantage of the oddity of the transition to use the permissiveness of Vertigo, which would soon become a siloed entity, to comment on the DC Universe it was in the midst of parting from. And so Ennis pulls gags like having the Phantom Stranger visit Constantine while he’s outside taking a piss, causing Constantine to surprisedly turn and pee on the Stranger’s shoes. “I had hoped we could ignore the cold facade that our kind deems so necessary, if only at this time of celebration. But I see there will be no hands clasped against the dark this night. I see I must remain a stranger,” he intones with sublime pretension before vanishing into the night. The issue is a charming bit of irreverence, if a stange sales pitch for Ennis’s run. Nevertheless, it worked; as Ennis describes it, the Vertigo launch meant that “The sales tripled… Just for one issue because there was a massive publicity push, which died away instantly the next issue, but it did us a lot of good. Even when the sales died down again they were still not quite double what they had been, so that was pretty good. A bigger audience got into Vertigo, and into that kind of comic.”

The first proper arc to take advantage of the book’s newfound readership was Fear and Loathing, which saw Ennis return to one of Jamie Delano’s best tricks, albeit with his own distinct spin on it.…

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The Blue Sparks Smell of Ozone (Book Three, Part 46: Charley’s War, Steve Dillon)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Ennis wrote a blistering satire of the Royal Family featuring Prince Charles being possessed by Jack the Ripper.

“There was a smell of magic somewhere, like the blue sparks smell of ozone at a funfair.”  – Neil Gaiman, Sandman

The climactic realization—that the guy who asked for Constantine’s help had in fact summoned the demon into Prince Charles—is framed in blunt and power-mad terms. “I wanted to restore the monarchy of this country to its rightful power. I wanted a king who would have the iron will to rule absolutely. And believe me, he was willing. He would be backed by the military and advised by me. There would be no parliament. No opposition. Nor radicals. No liberals. No thinkers. No immigrants. There would simply be the rulers and the ruled.” When Constantine raises the obvious objection to putting Jack the Ripper on the throne as absolute monarch, namely that “the bastard eats people, you headcase,” the reply is blunt and incisive: “What has our royal family ever done except feed on the blood of the people?” It’s brilliantly incendiary stuff, aggressive and angry and to the point—the political fury of the Delano era crystalized into brutal and clarifying effectiveness.

Perhaps the most crucial thing to understand about Ennis is the way in which he both clearly fits into the larger British Invasion scene and feels fundamentally different from all of his peers. Were one to create an aesthetic geneology the bulk of the British Invasion scene would branch off from Alan Moore. Some of these branches imitated and built on Moore—most obviously Neil Gaiman, of the early crowd—while others like Morrison and Milligan had more complex and contested relationships. Nevertheless, all of them arrived in the US market ready-made to be compared to Moore. Ennis did not. Instead, Ennis was a parallel branch from the generation before Moore, branching off from a common influence in a direction as distinct from Moore as Gaiman and Morrison were from each other. This common parent was Pat Mills, and nowhere is that influence clearer than in Royal Blood.

Mills has come up several times already. This is inevitable—he was, after all, the star of the British comics scene prior to the great Moore-led explosion. And he was a star with a long-lived career, producing major works in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. These later works such as Marshal Law and World War III, written after Moore had revolutionized the industry, revealed a writer wholly capable of thriving in the auteur-driven world of post-Moore comics. His best attributes in that period were a sense of utterly uncompromising political ferocity—a willingness to just go for it that led to comics with a sense of purity of vision entirely unmatched by his peers. But the bulk of his career had existed in a world where British comics were aggressively low-rent and grubby things.

Even in this period, however, Mills stood out. He was at the forefront of three separate magazines that could fairly be described as transforming the landscape of British comics, beginning with Battle Picture Weekly in 1975 and continuing with Action and 2000 AD, where he co-created the flagship Judge Dredd.…

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An Underwater Man (Book Three, Part 45: Elmore Leonard, Royal Blood)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis tore onto the American comics scene with an arc in which John Constantine gets lung cancer and pisses off the Devil.

“Day after fugitive day; footstep after shuffling footstep; heartbeat after anxious heartbeat, my enemies hunt me down. Down to the rocky bottom of this sunken city’s ruined heart. I am an underwater man.” – Jamie Delano, Hellblazer

This provides the cliffhanger into the final part of Dangerous Habits proper, in which Constantine’s scheme is revealed: he’s sold his soul to two other demons with whom the Devil (now named as “First of the Three,” eventually to simply become First of the Fallen in an effort to reconcile Ennis’s take on hell with what Gaiman had been doing in Sandman) is endlessly feuding, kept from open warfare by an extremely tenuous alliance, meaning that for anyone to claim it would start a war that would destabilize hell completely. And so the demons are left with no choice other than to keep him from dying. The issue ends with a splash page of Constantine gleefully showing all three of them the middle finger, wholly cured of cancer at their expense.

It is difficult to seriously contest the claim that this is the single most definitive moment for John Constantine as a character. It takes the core pleasure of the character—that he’s a cunning bastard one step ahead of everybody else—and puts it in a context that’s at once audacious and simple. “Selling your soul three times so the demons fight over it” is an eminently straightforward concept that explains itself, but cheating the Devil to cure your cancer is staggeringly gutsy. To pull off both at once while he flicks the demons off and says “up yours” is utterly perfect—a plot beat that literally anybody who is inclined to like John Constantine will enjoy.

Ennis followed the conclusion of Dangerous Habits with an epilogue issue in which Constantine runs into Kit, Brendan’s ex-girlfriend who he’d spent time setting up a few issues before. The effect of this is to set up a new and unusual status quo for Constantine, in which his life both has a bigger source of instability (in that he’s made a mortal enemy of the Devil) and a newfound anchor that made that instability more of a threat. Perhaps more to the point, however, it established a fundamentally delightful character; Kit was a no nonsense character who was at once unimpressed by Constantine and sympathetic to him. (As she explains over coffee following their reunion, “I used to watch you bullshitting loads of people and I had to admit, you were bloody good. I think you could have foxed me completely if you wanted to, but you didn’t. You always came to us because you wanted a break from all that, didn’t you?”)

It is clear, looking at Dangerous Habits, that Ennis was not merely a singular talent within the British Invasion but that he was operating from a fundamentally different set of influences than those more directly caught in the escalating Moore/Morrison dichotomy.…

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A Nasty Piece of Work (Book Three, Part 44: Dangerous Habits)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol concluded at the end of 1992, and was followed by a run by Rachel Pollack published under the new Vertigo imprint.

“I’m a nasty piece of work, chief. Ask anybody.”-Alan Moore, Swamp Thing

The conclusion of Morrison’s Doom Patrol run and the concurrent creation of the Vertigo line marks a clear transition point in the War—an endpoint to the initial wave of British comics writers making their name in the American market, and the de facto establishment of a core of books that make up that wave’s canon. Among those books, of course, was Hellblazer, the spin-off of Moore’s Swamp Thing run. Like Swamp Thing, the book spent an initial period after the job of being Alan Moore freed up in a nebulous transition towards the British Invasion, written by Moore’s friend Jamie Delano in a run that is iconic but deeply uneven. By the time of the transition to Vertigo, however, the book was in the hands of the person who was effectively the final person to get in as part of that initial wave, Garth Ennis. Ennis serves in many ways as the transitional figure between the wave that Morrison inaugurated and what came after. He is notable as the only figure whose American debut wasn’t edited by Karen Berger, although she was involved in his hiring to replace Jamie Delano on Hellblazer. He’s also notable as the only one whose professional debut came after the British Invasion had started; Crisis #15, which featured the first installment of Troubled Souls, came out in April 1989, more than a year after Morrison had made their debut in the American market.

That Ennis should be a liminal figure within the chronology is fitting, however, as he is also a liminal figure in terms of the larger aesthetic of the British Invasion writers. For one, as mentioned, he is not actually from Britain, but rather from Northern Ireland. More to the point, however, the sorts of comics he writes were vividly unlike those being written by Morrison, Gaiman, or Milligan at the same time. The differences were not so stark as to render classification within the tradition impossible, but they always made Ennis be an odd man out—a frequent exception to any generalizations one might draw. 

Another way of putting this is that Ennis stood out as having a clear style that was distinct from writers who more straightforwardly followed in the Moore tradition. This was clear from his first issue, Hellblazer #41, which began the six-part Dangerous Habits arc. In an era of comics where the shockingly bold reinvention of titles was the coin of the realm, Dangerous Habits stood out. For one thing, this was not a reinvention of some crusty old relic of a concept, nor of a derelict title on the brink of cancellation. John Constantine had only debuted six years earlier, and while Delano as a writer could be obscurantist and undisciplined his Hellblazer run was a beloved classic in its own right.…

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Play Seriously (Book Three, Part 43: Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison triumphantly ended their run on Doom Patrol.

“To learn to play seriously is one of the great secrets of spiritual exploration.” – Rachel Pollack, The Forest of Souls

Grant Morrison stepped off of Doom Patrol at the end of 1992, just before the launch of Vertigo. Taking over the title for the new imprint was Rachel Pollack, a novelist and Tarot scholar, who recounts that she got the job when “At a party I met the editor, Tom Peyer, and after gushing about it confessed it was (then) the only monthly comic I really wished I might someday have a chance to write. Tom told me that Grant was ending his run, and if I wanted to send him a sample script he’d consider it. So I did, and it became my first issue.” This account is at least slightly improbable, given that Pollack’s first arc, cheekily titled Sliding Through the Wreckage, is heavily rooted in the status quo that Morrison left, which, much like the stati quo Drake and Kupperberg had left, basically amounted to the entire team being out of commission, with Dorothy the team’s sole representative in the real world and thus Pollack’s initial focus character, quickly pulling Cliff back from Danny the World, with a pointed lack of clarification over what happened between him and Jane. (Eventually, well into her run, Pollack establishes that they broke up, although in practice this was forced by Morrison’s request that Jane be left alone.)

Pollack’s early run suffered the fate that most follow-ups to tremendously successful and iconic runs do, namely comparison. Obviously, given that she was writing the ongoing Doom Patrol book for Vertigo, a line that was centered on the post-Moore British Invasion that Morrison was a key part of, there was good reason for her to follow in their footsteps. And Pollack’s first six issues read in many ways like a toned down and accessible Morrison, with enemies who speak in indecipherable dialogue like “Backwards glances like dead trees? Tradition valued with new sprouts” and a fetus-headed entity that steals things from the world and replaces them with pieces of paper with the names of the thing written on them. It’s not bad, and indeed to a reader who finds the excesses and occasional incoherences of Morrison’s weaker efforts particularly intolerable could even be argued to be the stronger work, although most would be forced to admit that Pollack’s version lacks the vital spark of urgent and visionary weirdness that animated Morrison’s work, instead contenting itself to rearrange the pieces of their run in a series of capable imitations.

At least, for the first six issues. But with Doom Patrol #70 the picture begins to decisively change. This is not entirely a sudden shift—as soon as Pollack got past Sliding Through the Wreckage she began shaping the team into something that was her own, first by giving them a new headquarters—a rural house haunted by a bunch of ghosts who died in sex-related accidents that Caulder insists on calling sexually remaindered spirits, cheekily shortened to SRS.…

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Some Sort of Pulse of Accelerated Time (Book Three, Part 42: Catastrophe Theory, The Empire of Chairs)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s final arc of Doom Patrol was a massive, apocalyptic epic.

“Some sort of pulse of accelerated time, radiating out from the Worldshaper. Seasons are coming and going in seconds!” – Grant Morrison, Doctor Who Monthly

Underlying this entire arc is Niles Caulder and his plan, which he explains in terms of the mathematical notion of a catastrophe curve, which Morrison explains as a “topological model which represents the introduction of sudden, discontinuous change into a stable system.” In slightly more layman’s terms, it studies the way in which change within a system can suddenly move from a linear, sensible change to a sudden, rapid, and potentially destructive change—the way, for instance, a bridge will happily bear weight right up until the moment it dramatically stops doing so. 

Catastrophe theory was first developed in the 1960s by French mathematician René Thom, but was popularized in the 1970s by the British mathematician Christopher Zeeman, who talked about the subject in his Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution, televised on BBC Two in 1978. Its supposed applications were widespread—there was a vogue in trying to use it to model international relations and the way in which two nations could go from smoldering tensions to open warfare very suddenly, and for a while it was the hot scientific concept du jour in popular science articles. It is in this spirit that Morrison invokes the concept, with Caulder revealing that he caused the accidents that created the Doom Patrol out of a desire to study the results of catastrophes on people, and that he now plans to use catastrophe theory to enact mass social change in a manner reminiscent of what Vernor Vinge, following John von Neumann, called the technological singularity. 

Ultimately, however, Morrison turns his back on the idea of catastrophe curves, and not simply because Caulder’s scheme was, broadly speaking, some supervillain shit. The conclusion of the arc, which sees Cliff delve into Caulder’s computer and experience a form of ego death, suggests tat Morrison was aware of the common critique of catastrophe theory, which is that it required an aggressive simplifying of systems—international relations, for instance, had to be modeled entirely in terms of the variables of how threatened a nation felt and what the cost of action was, which is self-evidently an egregious oversimplification of how foreign relations take place. And in a book that had aggressively been about the value of the glorious and variable weirdness of the world, this simplification was enormously suspect. 

Although ultimately Morrison’s comment that they “made a conscious decision to be arty rather than scientific. Interestingly, I used to be fairly good at mathematics and physics, and then I became hopelessly inept at them overnight. I don’t understand science, but I’m interested in it in a poetic fashion. It’s not hard science, it’s science used as metaphor” suggests that they were not engaged in a critique of catastrophe theory per se, one can readily identify the competing trend within popular science that they were inclined to sympathize with by glancing back at the same essay in issue #20 where they cited the influence of experimental filmmaking and When Rabbit Howls.…

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The Reality Anchor (Book Three, Part 41: Aenigma Regis, The Candlemaker)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Late in Morrison’s run they brought back the Brotherhood of Dada, who were spectacularly killed off in an arc full of a bitter and angry cynicism that their run had not previously indulged in.

“It exists outside space and time, but is also technically in the same place as Earth, because of the reality anchor we dropped there.” – Warren Ellis, The Authority

Nothing about the arc overtly points to the end of Morrison’s tenure being near, but there’s a clear sense of finality here—a sense that the whimsical party that’s been rolling on for thirty-three issues now is coming to an end. To some extent, of course, this was an inevitable direction for Doom Patrol to go in. Morrison opened their run by making the book about trauma, and their subsequent focus on whimsy could only ever be borrowed time. Eventually the book would have to pay off the implicit promise of that first issue—the sad and mournful question of what you do when you just can’t be strong anymore. The party had to end, and had to end for the exact reason Mr. Nobody said in his dying words—that people don’t want a strange and magical world of madness and wonder. They want to get up, go to work, and vote for George fucking Bush. And so the sudden and violent turn into that, with John Dandy unleashed and everything going terribly and brutally wrong for the Brotherhood of Dada, was inevitable. Because that’s what normal people have: safety. In the end, this is what happens to the queers and the madmen of the world: the cops come and shoot them dead. 

In the wake of the second Brotherhood of Dada arc Morrison followed with two one-offs—the Jack Kirby pastiche already mentioned, and an issue entitled “Aenigma Regis” that focused on Rebis, who had shed their bandages and gone through some sort of strange and inscrutable ascension back at the end of the sex arc. This issue was an oddity within Morrison’s tenure. Much of their run was “weird,” at times aggressively so, but “Aenigma Regis” tipped wholesale into symbolic narrative, providing a deeply inscrutable narrative that was by some margin the closest the comic came to actually mirroring the heavily associative storytelling of Kenneth Anger or Maya Deren. The result seems to have gone over a fair number of readers’ heads. Tom Peyer, when the letter column finally got to covering the issue, offered the laconic assessment that “Some of you recognized Grant’s exploration of alchemy in issue #54’s ‘Aenigma Regis’ Some of you were puzzled by it” before suggesting buying “a textbook on alchemy” and rereading the story. No letters representing the “recognized the alchemical themes” side of the ledger appeared, however, save for one by Rachel Pollack, a writer and Tarot scholar in the Hudson Valley of New York who had been engaging in a long-running joke of writing into the letter column asking to take the book over when Morrison left.…

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It Came True (Book Three, Part 40: The Beard Hunter, LSD and The 1992 US Presidential Election)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The one-off issue of Doom Patrol entitled “The Beard Hunter” satirized Marvel Comics’ popular character The Punisher.

“The country’s disintegrating. What’s happened to America? What’s happened to the American Dream?”
“It came true. You’re looking at it.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen

Satisfyingly. Morrison’s take on the character focuses intently on the toxic masculinity of the concept. This is implicit in the basic hook—the Beard Hunter, real name Ernest Franklin, does what it says on the tin, hunting men with beards down, killing them, and shaving off the beard as a trophy. This targeting of an overt symbol of masculinity is part of a larger pattern of intense sexual anxiety—at one point the Beard Hunter is hit on by a pair of women and is angry and uncomfortable, talking about how “I shouldn’t have worn those tight jeans and the ripped shirt,” and only not killing them because of their lack of beard. Subsequently it becomes clear that he’s nondescriptly mentally ill and off his medication, living with his mother (who has nothing but contempt for him), and, it’s suggested, is a self-closeted gay man. (His mother describes how he keeps ordering magazines with titles like Physique and Trunks, to which he sadly stammers, “That’s not fuh-fair! It’s… it’s huh-health and buh-body building! You’re just trying to make it sound dirty,” and subsequently retires to his room to sulk about how “I know a hundred ways to kill a man using a box of matches and a TV remote control. Who needs girls? All they ever want to do is go to the movies and play hard to get. The guys down at the gym talk about it all the time.”)

It is impossible not to notice the degree to which this is exploring the same terrain as Rorschach, an impression that is not lessened by a sight gag when Ernest visits the Bearded Gentlemen’s Club of Metropolis in which a portrait of “Our Founder” hangs that is very obviously none other than Alan Moore. Equally, there is no reason this has to be deliberate. It would, frankly, be quite a surprise if a 1991 Grant Morrison did a comic full of beard jokes that didn’t have an Alan Moore joke in it. And parodying the Punisher without ending up in the same basic territory as Rorschach would be a challenge. Rorschach, after all, is an acerbic commentary on the pathology of loner vigilante heroes, while the Punisher is more or less the most stereotypical rendition of that trope imaginable. Rorschach is such a thorough and comprehensive riff on the trope that any subsequent effort is either going to end up adjacent to it or end up being facile and toothless. And Morrison was never going to be facile and toothless.

Equally, the Beard Hunter is not the same sort of thing as Rorschach. Rorschach was a key component in a larger deconstruction and commentary upon the superhero genre. He existed to take certain lines of thought to a logical endpoint so as to observe and document the precise ways in which they broke down.…

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A Sane and Rational Act (Book Three, Part 39: Discordianism, The Punisher)

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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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Psychic UFO Pilots (Book Three, Part 38: Danny the Street, Flex Mentallo)

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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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