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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