Anatomy of a Doom Patrol Villain

"Anatomy of a Doom Patrol Villain" from Doom Patrol vol.2 #47 (DC, 1991) by Grant Morrison, Richard Case and Mark McKenna

Sure, I read Paul Kupperberg's DP in the late 80s, at first partnered with Steve Lightle and later Erik Larsen, but it was just an okay comic. Then, my small town newsstand stopped getting it. When I moved to Moncton, I checked out what happened to the book and OMG it had become this wonderful and bizarre thing and I had to have all the issues IMMEDIATELY. More than anything else in my life at the time - including college courses - Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol was responsible for getting me into libraries and bookstores and digging into all manner of strange texts. It was an amazing run, filled with nightmare creatures and all kinds of oddities. Villains would speak in anagrams, acronyms and exquisite corpses. Beautifully surreal. Morrison reinvented the Squad's members and added new ones, like Crazy Jane and Danny the (transvestite) Street, the latter of which would play a role in bringing the story to a transcendent finish.

Of course, the book continued afterwards, jumping to the nascent Vertigo imprint, with relative newbie Rachel Pollack at the helm. I appreciated much of what she tried to do with the book, but the team, or indeed, my brain, would never again be the same.