Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Crawling From The Wreckage by Grant Morrison (graphic novel review)
I pulled this graphic novel, ‘Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Crawling From The Wreckage’, and the run of Grant Morrison written books late last year but got distracted by reading the ‘Secret Six’ graphic novels for research. They have reprinted since in a collected edition with over 1000 pages, but this way is cheaper and easier to handle. This opening volume contains Doom Patrol # 19-26. I did read the original for a couple years before dropping out of comicbooks for lack of money. Morrison’s take on the Doom Patrol not only shook things up but became surreal very quickly.
The second version of the Doom Patrol were mostly killed off. Cliff Steele recovering in Alamance Memorial Hospital with Dr. Will Magnus his only visitor, promising him a new body and points to Crazy Jane as someone worse off than himself, a multi-personality with different abilities. Larry Trainor’s there, too, and back to normal. Thing is, Negative Man returns and he merges them both with his medic, Dr. Eleanor Poole, and they become the mixed sex Rebus. Who knows what’s really under the bandages. Joshua Clay is with the Chief, Niles Caulder, not wanting to rejoin the team but prepared to offer medical aid. They all find themselves taking on the Scissormen. Literally, a cut above all others. Oh, they also have a new base, the original Justice League’s cave headquarters, that they are moving into.
The following stories are at most, two-part, but they do introduce Dorothy Spinner, the ape-faced girl. If you’re starting to draw comparisons to the TV series, then you’re right. All new characters were Morrison’s creations, which he wasn’t credited with there.
The new villains are incoming increasingly bizarre and are not what you would think are typical DC villains. At this point in the early 1990s, the Doom Patrol had been moved to its Vertigo imprint, allowing a lot more liberal freedom for an intended adult audience.
At the back of this volume, writer Grant Morrison points out that he always found the original Doom Patrol odd and wanted to return to that format, pointing out that the second team were a little bit too ‘normal’. Objectively, I thought the original team were oddly normal, but maybe that’s just me, although they did act more like a team. Things can only get more bizarre.
GF Willmetts
July 2026
(pub: Vertigo/DC Comics, 1992. Page softcover graphic novel. Price: varies. ISBN: 1-56389-034-8)
check out website: www.dc.com
