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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