Short reviews of pretty much whatever. Finally, you can discover if Frosted Flakes Gold has more social worth than Illmatic or Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare.
Oh, Grant Morrison, you so crazy! Mr. Nobody of the Brotherhood of Dada runs for president, so Robotman stomps around like a big crankypuss. Meanwhile, Dorothy, the ape-faced little girl he lives with on Danny The Street, a sentient city block, starts having terrifying hallucinations. I don't think you could call the Doom Patrol "heroes" at this point in Morrison's storyline, but you also probably couldn't call it a "story" by any stretch of the word either.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Grant Morrison is a great writer/psychopath. A good idea for comic book companies is to let Grant Morrison write comics, because he comes up with some great shit, but to never ever let him anywhere near mainstream continuity (Final Crisis). Doom Patrol is Morrison's playground, and probably the best place he could showcase his talents. In this volume, the Doom Patrol, a bizarre set of reject heroes, goes up against the Brotherhood Of Dada, who have obtained a painting capable of swallowing cities. Richard Case gets a great chance to demonstrate his artistic prowess as our heroes navigate the painting's various art movements, and later gets to make up all kinds of bizarre creatures when AntiGod is destroying the world. It's a lot of fun and probably the weirdest book to ever feature a love tryst between a giant superintelligent French gorilla and a disembodied brain.
Last time I reviewed a volume of Grant Morrison's terrific and bizarre Doom Patrol, I forgot to mention the art by Richard Case. Well, it's great, because if you're going to write a story in which a girl's head turns into a sun that shoots little suns or floating miniature castles suddenly appear in a monastery you need an artist who can make it come to life. Case's art is "realistic," in that it isn't very stylized and when it's just people walking or talking it looks like a lot of the standard hero books of the 80s and 90s. But that average style really helps make the surreal stuff stand out when it happens. I wonder whatever happened to Richard Case, anyway? Oh yeah, the plot of this is the Doom Patrol reassembles to fight some scissor guys who were conjured by accident from some people's imagination to cut people out of reality.
The problem with Grant Morrison as a writer is that although he is great, he usually only goes about 10 issues on a book tops before everything stops making sense. New X-Men is the longest run he's ever done and stayed coherent, but by the last three storylines (Fantomex, Xorn/Magneto, weird future I don't even know what???) the book was far out there. His current run on Batman didn't even go three issues before it stopped making sense. Anyway, he's a great writer, and I pretty much pick up anything he writes without thinking about it, but I think in all of history the best book ever for Grant Morrison was Doom Patrol. Doom Patrol is a group of weird outcast superheroes, and when Grant Morrison picked up the book in the late 80s he made them even weirder, including Robotman (just a dude's brain in a robot body, but he was always there), an ape face little girl with powerful imaginary friends, Crazy Jane, a woman whose multiple personalities each have a different power, and Danny The Street, a living street who could take them anywhere. From issue one of his run it was just totally bizarre, and this trade is no different. The thing is that the bizarreness was always expected, and is part of the allure of the book even, which makes Morrison's writing perfect. In this collection there are two main stories - the first involves a secret government plot to rid the world of imagination which is thwarted when guest star Flex Mentallo turns the pentagon into a circle, and the second story has the evil (?) Brotherhood Of Dada stealing Albert Hoffman's bicycle which has the power to send everybody on an acid trip, which the Doom Patrol must stop. Well, this review stopped making sense I think and also is way long, which probably gives you a good idea of Grant Morrison as a writer, so check it out if you like to be totally freaked.
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