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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