DC'S YOUNG ANIMAL: DOOM PATROL #1 RANT/REVIEW (no spoilers)

First thing first: Gerard Way is the frontman of My Chemical Romance.  I've never followed or cared about the band beyond the fact that a song by them ran over the end credits of the Watchmen movie and it really felt like a final stab of just how much Zack Snyder did not get a single thing about Watchmen... but I'm not going to hold that against them, it's just not my kind of sound and it was poorly placed.  I just want to be clear I'm not coming from any preconception against Way himself.

Now, as for my prejudice on Doom Patrol, well...

Grant Morrison became my favorite comic writer when I was in high school and Doom Patrol and the Invisibles were the two apexes of his work as far as I was concerned... The Invisibles was better, so much so that it was almost ridiculous... but I always liked the Doom Patrol better.  The world and characters were so diverse and insane and darkly comedic.  A lot of it admittedly has aged a little stiffy... I thought "Beard Hunter" was the funniest thing in world but it really was a product of the time... but by in large it is a true masterpiece and completely deserving of its company among Sandman and Moore's Swamp Thing.  They worked with the times the way the new original 60s Doom Patrol worked with the 60s comics.

Arnold's Doom Patrol took the color and strangeness of the early Marvel books and exploded the oddness of them.  The team fought brains in jars and heavily armed French gorillas and a man that is half dinosaur and has trees for arms and legs... It was a comment on the books that were coming out at the time, but it was also completely straight-faced with its absurdity and it also wasn't afraid to go a little darker... google the last issue if want to see what I mean.  I've scanned other takes on the book, but most of them seemed to miss the point and go from more standard superhero material.

Second, this is the flagship of DC's new "Young Animal" line.  Way is 39 and it's intentionally aping a book from 25 years ago... so it's kind of a confusing label. My guess is that it's meant to be a Young Adult line, but it also has a Mature Readers label, which... I was in middle school when I started reading Mature books, I think most of us were, but it's a vague enough label that I can see a retailer warning off parents... Especially since the label on DC's Vertigo books has traditionally been roughly equivalent to the R rating.  Also, the central character is in her early 20s, which hurts the YA classification further... I don't know.

Anyway, on the actual book:

First off, the book looks great.  The art by Nick Derington and especially the color by Tamra Bonvillan are fantastic and vibrant, but also change beautifully to match the tone of different scenes... It represents the ideal for this era just as well as the Richard Case artwork represents Richard Case artwork did the Morrison series.  It's worth picking up for the art alone.

Now, onto the story:

We're introduced Casey Brinke, a cute young EMT with freckles and boundless optimism.  Casey starts the story racing her ambulance to save an old man while giving her plucky hero speech about how she'll do everything she can to save lives and hinting at past alien experiences.   Later, her partner tries to set her up with son while she plays old school arcade games and engages in dialogue that is explicitly referred to as "perky/quirky" with the text itself.  Basically, Casey seems, at least so far, like a pretty stock Manic Pixie Dream Girl heroine... but she's well done and I was genuinely won over by her... although admittedly this character is right in my wheelhouse (my favorite Marvel character has pink hair and wings and is literally named Pixie, so... if it's not your thing, be warned).

I do have one issue with Casey, however.  Avoiding spoilers, at one point a character is killed in front of her and she doesn't seem to care too much.  This especially bothered me because she knew the character fairly well and isn't depicted as overly sad, upset, or angry at the person who did it... and she's an EMT!  I can kind of excuse it as her just being in shock as it's about the third insane thing to her in the space of few hours and she does seem baffled, but once again... she's an EMT!  Her job calls her to be able to stay cool in emergency situations, frequently violent ones piled one after another AND she said she has a history with bizarre events.  It's a little odd, especially since the death is essentially played for laughs which... death was always played seriously in Drake or Morrison... it was always disturbing.

The traditional leads Cliff "Robotman" Steele and Niles "Chief" Caulder make minor appearances, mostly to set up later plot.  Cliff is subtly epic, we meet him in the middle of a mission, and this is where the color and art really have a chance to shine: the world of Cliff's mission looks radically different than Casey's world, and I hope we get to see more artistic diversity like this.  Other recurring characters are hinted at.  At least part of the plot seems to focus on Morrison's character Danny the Street, with a new threat trying to harvest Danny for an attempt at satire which I'm going to have to reserve judgment on... the villains so far feel a little oddly Space Quest... which is a dated comparison, I know, but Way is the right age to grow up with those games... or maybe it's just on my mind because I watched a Let's Play by Yahtzee19.

Our other new character (so far) is Terry None.  She also seems to be kind of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl... but a different kind, I guess.  She wears cosplay telegram outfit with a black eye mask painted on, which... again, I approve of.  Some of her dialogue puts me in the mind of Mr. Nobody from the old series although I suppose she's meant to be a Harley Quinn or a spacier Zatanna.  She's a cute and fun character that has powers she doesn't seem to fully understand, but she seems to have more relevance to the developing plot. She hasn't gotten much space yet, but I like her character so far... even if so far her role seems to be the Other Quirky Girl in a singularly quirky book.

And tone is definitely quirky.  This is kind of a problem, since the tone of both the original Arnold Drake and the Morrison Doom Patrol is "strange."  Drake went for taking the strangeness inherent in the superhero genre while Morrison used it (often satirically) to comment on the horror tone of the proto-Vertigo books.  Also, in both the Drake and Morrison books, the Doom Patrol were emphasized as being disabled, physically, mentally or both.  Drake took the idea of Silver Age heroes as victims of industrial accidents and ran with it and Morrison took up the baton by adding the late 80s fixation with mental illness.  They are extremely damaged, to the point that Crazy Jane's origin story was built around her being sexually abused by her father... back when such things were unheard of in mainstream comics.  Cliff was the Everyman character and he was literally a brain in a jar.  Casey and Terry are cute girls with whimsical dispositions.  They're the kind of girls that, frankly, you might introduce your son to.  You could never do that with Crazy Jane.  Basically, if Arnold Drake's Doom Patrol was Carnival of Souls and Morrison's was Eraserhead, this is a later Tim Burton movie: you can see where it came from, but it's too bright and it kind of stole the visuals and missed the point.

That said, I really enjoyed this book and I can't wait for the next issue.  I really came to like Casey and Terry and I'm glad to have Cliff back.  I want to see where Way goes with the book and if he can make his Doom Patrol function as a new and worthy take on the team.  I can't say that about a single new series from DC in the last five years and there were several I approached with greater enthusiasm.  I hope this book has a good, long run and the ideas as fully developed and the characters have time to grow.  But at the very least, I want to see how Cliff is going to look when they put him back together.