Doom Patrol: Another World, A Better World

I finished my reread of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol yesterday, and my feelings about the run as a whole pretty much echo my initial impressions on the reread, there’s some moments that are absolutely amazing and among the best stuff Morrison has done, however there’s also some run of the mill storylines that just throw out weird concepts, but don’t really click emotionally. However, he ends on a superlative high note, with one of the best single issues he’s ever written, the beautiful “Empire of Chairs.”

“Empire of Chairs” synthesizes all of the series’ major themes in one issue, in which the Doom Patrol faces their most troubling enemy of all, the real world! Crazy Jane was sent to hell by the Candlemaker, and it turns out that hell is a world that’s pretty much our own. Colored in flat sepia tones, Jane is treated as she would be in real life, her multiple personalities are a problem, the adventures she thinks she had delusions.

It’s notable that this issue on the surface undermines the reality of everything Morrison’s ever done. He appears to reduce all the stories of the series to the delusions of a mentally ill woman, and deconstructs them, pointing out the similarities between the series’ villains and the simple underlying meaning of everything. He makes us realize how absurd and unbelievable everything that’s come before seems.

But, the central message of the series is that it’s okay to be different, that normality is boring and the crazy lives of the Doom Patrol are far more interesting than the lives of traditional superheroes. The Mr. Nobody arc is all about Cliff confronting this fact. Cliff clings to normality, he may be a brain in a robot body, but when Jane presents herself in the Scarlet Harlot outfit, you can sense how embarrassed he is by the attention she’s drawing to herself. However, his innate caring for Jane makes him realize that he’s more worried about her getting hurt than what people think of her.

In the ‘Magic Bus’ arc, Rebis and Jane realize that there’s nothing particularly worth protecting about the world they live in, so they’re not worried about Mr. Nobody disrupting it. Cliff decides that people should have the right to choose their own world, ignoring the fact that maybe they’d rather have Mr. Nobody’s world than the one they’re in. Cliff, at the beginning of the series, is a pretty conservative guy, he clings to authority figures, like the Chief, and longs to have a normal life. However, as the series goes on, he learns to change, and accept who he is.

As the series ends, Rebis and Dorothy float off to uncertain futures in the magical Danny the World. However, Cliff stays behind, he’s not quite ready to disconnect yet. He’s still got to decide whether or not he wants to leave the regular world behind. He’s been through so much awful stuff, but he clings to that normalcy. One of the most important issues of the series is the secret history of the Doom Patrol, as revealed by the Chief. On the one hand, it’s a really courageous story structure because Morrison reveals the villain behind the whole series, sets up this huge confrontation, then completely subverts it when the Candlemaker rips Caulder’s head off.

But, on an emotional level, it’s really significant because it tells us a lot about both the old Cliff and present day Cliff. As the chief tells us, old Cliff was not a particularly nice guy, he was someone who lived mainly for himself. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, in a lot of ways it’s normal, but that Cliff had little of the soul that Robot Man Cliff develops over the course of the series. It’s notable that Cliff has to lose his body and virtually everything that previously defined himself to finally learn who he is. Cliff clings to the Chief because the Chief saved him, made him the body he has and let him live. But, it turns out that Cliff is a victim of abuse that’s not too dissimilar from what Jane went through. His father figure betrayed and used him, and left him a broken shell. It’s not as bad as the explicit sexual abuse Jane suffered, but both of them went through the experience of having their worlds shattered, and their minds left in disarray.

Both of them shut themselves off from the world to deal with the trauma. Jane creates the elaborate network of alternate personalities, while Cliff throws himself into his work, into preserving the Doom Patrol and saving the world. Only after plunging into the world of the nanobots and saving the world does depression really set in, does he realize that Jane is gone, as is his best hope of ever feeling more. But, there is a better world.

Much of the series centers on the Doom Patrol’s nebulous relation to order and chaos. Sometimes they’ll find themselves fighting on the side of chaos, trying to prevent things like the Pentagon horror from destroying the world, other times, they fight for order, trying to stop the Candlemaker or Mr. Nobody from disrupting everything. Through it all, the constant remains a desire to stop people from getting hurt, a desire to make lives better and end destructive conflict. The Invisibles makes a big deal of there being no sides, so it’s appropriate that the allegiance of the Doom Patrol should shift so often.

In the last issue, Jane finds herself caught up in the conflict between the need for normalcy and the room for individual expression. In the Doom Patrol world, her psychological trauma turns her into a superhero, and her battles over the course of the series help her cure herself. But, in our world, we don’t process problems that way. We see something out of the norm and try to medicate it out of existence. There’s no room for Jane’s fanciful imaginings, here they just mark her as insane.

The real tragedy of the issue is that I think that most people in our world would want to ‘cure’ Jane if they knew her. They’d want to return her to our reality and give her a functioning life. But, is that desire motivated by helping her, or is it more about making ourselves feel okay. When someone’s in a psychological delusion, it’s not necessarily them who are being hurt, it’s us, unable to deal with something so out of the norm. Now, it’s not plausible for Jane to live in our world the way she was, but as the issue makes clear, that’s not her fault, it’s the fault of the world.

We live in a world where that which is outside the norm is treated as illness, and every attempt is made to bring people to the same mental place, with the same kind of feeling. Alan Moore has talked a lot about this, particularly in From Hell, where we see that mental illness used to be considered the intrusion of gods into this world, but now we view it is an anomaly to be cured.

The issue raises a lot of questions about the nature of reality vis a vis the rest of the series. Was everything simply the delusions of Kay Challis, an attempt to deal with the sexual abuse she’d suffered? Or is it the world she’s plunged into, our world, that’s the creation, born by the Candlemaker as the ultimate hell? That’s a bold call, to make our world hell, but it works in this story. In Morrison’s cosmology, it’s the boring, uninterrogated life that’s worst of all. In his reality based works, characters generally exist in relation to pieces of fiction, King Mob and Robin dream of being like characters in the books they grew up reading, and are excited when they find out that they grew up and became those characters. One of my favorite single issues of all time is The Invisibles 2.20, in which a young Robin (aka Kay) talks about reading The Invisibles and imagining herself into the story until it all became true. Similarly, Flex Mentallo’s Wallace Sage finds himself reflecting on the shitty comics he read, imagining an alternate world where they’re what’s real and he’s what’s fake.

Ultimately, Jane’s story here echoes those other stories. In each case, the character writes themselves out of the everyday world and into a fantasy world that’s more alive. It’s about moving beyond the real/not real dichotomy and choosing to live in the world we want. People want to minimize the struggles we go through, so called ‘realistic’ works are all about not much happening, but in my own perception of my life, the trials I go through are huge. And, that’s why I think superhero stories, like Doom Patrol, are important. Morrison understands that our own depression isn’t best depicted as a guy sitting alone in a dark room while it’s raining, it’s best depicted as a giant black hole that will engulf the entire universe if we don’t stop it because that’s how it feels in our own mind. If you die, your world ends. To the world at large, it may not matter, but to you, and the people around you, it’s a huge deal. Jane’s story is insignificant to the world at large, she was just the girl at a shop, ringing you up, going about life alone, but in her mind, she was involved in these huge, world changing struggles. You never know, the person you pass on the street might just have saved the world the night before.

And, in the end, she chooses to abandon the dull, boring ‘sane’ life and embrace the craziness of life with the Doom Patrol. Does Jane kill herself at the end, is that what we’re meant to perceive happened in the real world? Perhaps that’s what happens in the ‘real world,’ but it’s not what really happens to Jane. Jane moves into Danny the World, the other world, the better world that must be out there.

It’s a really beautiful story, and a perfect conclusion for the run as a whole. I think Morrison’s a bit more consistent today, works like New X-Men or Seven Soldiers are slicker and have fewer weak arcs, but there’s very little he’s done that has the emotional impact of that issue. Back then, Morrison was an outcast, struggling to find his place in the world, a feel that runs through his work until The Invisibles Volume II, when he decided to become King Mob, at which point everything became a lot slicker and cooler. I love that hypersigil pop period of work, but it’s occasionally nice to go back and read the stories of a bunch of ordinary, but incredibly strange people. That’s what the Doom Patrol is about, recognizing that no matter how strange someone appears on the outside, we ultimately all want the same thing.