Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero by Morrison Grant

Author:Morrison, Grant [Morrison, Grant]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781409040262
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

The Doom Patrol feature had been launched in 1963 in the pages of My Greatest Adventure as the brainchild of writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Premiani. A group of outcast, freakish superheroes, led by a genius in a wheelchair, they debuted almost exactly and quite coincidentally at the same time as the similar X-Men and had been revived in 1990 as a pallid imitation of the Claremont school. I went back to first principles in an attempt to define an alternative to the dominant X-Men superteam model.

Originally billed as “the World’s Strangest Heroes,” the Doom Patrol had always been played as misunderstood outsiders, so I gave them a new purpose as the only superheroes disturbed enough to deal with the kind of menaces to sanity and reality that not even Superman could hope to confront. With artist Richard Case and some design assistance from Brendan McCarthy, the spiritual father of my take on the book, Doom Patrol cornered the market in “strange” and picked up the baton Steve Gerber had passed in the form of The Defenders.

Carefully composed pastiches of Thomas De Quincey, Sylvia Plath, Italo Calvino, and F. T. Marinetti jostled for attention alongside fight scenes, wild action, and quotes from avant-garde art or the wilder frontiers of philosophy and the occult. Doom Patrol stories took childhood fairy tales (most of them from the gruesome school readers I’d had forced on me when I was six and too young to defend myself: monsters like the Scissor Man or the Hobyahs) and transformed them into grown-up nightmares for my disturbed heroes to fight.

I kept dream diaries, and made characters of the imaginary friends with whom my real friend Emma had shared her own childhood. Emma had imaginary friends called Darling-Come-Home and Damn-All, and when she got old enough to tire of them, she took them both outside and shot them. “What did you shoot your imaginary friends with?” I asked her. “An imaginary gun,” said Emma, and it went straight into Doom Patrol.

I used material from fairy stories, and discovered the weird, paranoid fairy tales of Lucy Lane Clifford, whose cosmic horror tale “The New Mother” was written as a bedtime story for her children. After I brought the piece to Neil Gaiman’s attention, it went on to influence his Coraline and the movie that was based on it. I was using surrealist methods: automatic writing, found ideas, and even my word processor’s spell-check functions to create random word strings with syntax. I’d type in strings of nonsense words, which the computer would dutifully correct to the nearest equivalent, giving my dream horrors dialogue exchanges like this: “DEFEATING BREADFRUIT IN ADUMBRATE.” “CRASHLAND FOR AWARD PRIMATE.” “YUCCA OR PRIORITY?” “LEMUR NEVER HIBERNATE.”

The Brotherhood of Evil from the sixties Doom Patrol stories were recreated as Mr. Nobody and the Brotherhood of Dada, a group of absurdist supervillains who began their war on reason with the following words:

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