Last War in Albion

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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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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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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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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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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