Doom Patrol #1

[informationgeek]

Writer: Gerard Way
Artist: Nick Derington

These four pages sum up my experience with Doom Patrol #1 in a nutshell.







But... but it's not my birthday.

Comments

[speedingtortoise]

Wait, did she just straight up murder that guy?

[cainofdreaming]

Probably just manslaughter. If you go by her words at least, that that had never happened before.

[nyadnar17]

This is terrifying.

[monsieur_safior]

Hope they have finally a successful book, Doom Patrol is such a cool heroes team they deserve it.

[mrstatham]

Definitely the kind of spirit the book needs; the previous run prior to the New52 was good, but bent over backwards a bit much to tie itself to a specific iteration of the group, to me.

This is definitely fun. If we're not getting Umbrella Academy V3 any time soon, then I'm glad to see Way clearly having fun on the book UA is a blatant homage to.

[alicemacher]

So they're playing this instance of Doom Patrol as a wacky comedy? That's the only sensible reason I can think of for Casey's rather nonchalant reaction to her roommate, y'know, blowing up. Even if he was kind of a jerk.

Also, I see one of my pet peeves here: overuse of bold italic fonts to artificially make the dialogue seem more exciting!

EDIT: On the plus side, I award the writer points for the R. Crumb allusion in Jerk Roomie's panel one dialogue.

[leoboiko]

Taking up Doom Patrol where it left is a tall order. The original was already kind of forced, with its "let's be artsy" spirit, but somehow it worked that in something worthy. For some reason, people use the word "pretentious" as an insult. I consider "unpretentious" to be an insult. The most interesting things happen when creators are daring and ambitious and proud of their vision. Doom Patrol pretended very high. and I loved them for it.

I'm liking the new one so far; it has the right mix of plot and nonsense to be intriguing. It has the potential of being a worthy successor.

[thehood]

I agree with all of this, though i think you might be misinterpreting why people see "pretentious" as a bad thing.

[kamino_neko]

Due to completely misunderstanding what it means. Pretension is not ambition. Completely the opposite, in fact. Pretension comes from the same root as pretend, and their meanings remain parallel - pretension isn't trying to do something artsy, it's wanting the work to appear artsier, or smarter than it really is. The difference between pretension and failed ambition is not always clear, but deciding it falls on side or the other doesn't imply this implicit hatred of ambition.

[leoboiko]

I'm a native Romance speaker. That root "pretend" is prae "before, in front of me" + tendō "stretch towards, strive for" = "strive for that which lies in front of me". You think of the word in this sense:

Much too good to hide away, so one wears it instead of an overcoat and pretends [=feign, affect] it's an amusing new fashion.

While I think of it in this sense:

Such as shall pretend [=intend] / Malicious practices against his state.

(King Henry VI)

But of course I know that the word, in modern days, has (symptomatically) come to be used as a derogative. The point isn't the meaning of the word; the point is how it's used, viz., what sort of work is it applied to. I find almost all works that I like (comics, music, games, novels) are consistently criticized as "pretentious" in the fandom (also "hipster", "overrated" and friends). Seldom does the critic clarify why they think the work is, you know, bad. There's no concrete criticism of the plot, or the characters, or the artwork or lyrics; they just say, "I hate this it's so pretentious". It has come to the point where, if people on the Internet rate something as "pretentious", I actually get more curious about it. If people think an author is trying too hard, or that they want to "appear artsy" or "smarter than it is", chances are they're doing something interesting and worthwhile.

Let's give some concrete examples. I typed "pretentious comic book" on Google; first hit was a Gamefaqs topic, "Most pretentious comic book writers?"; the names mentioned are: Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Hickman, Alan Moore, Will Eisner; of those, I dislike Hickman and adore all others; so "pretentious", as a criticism, is reverse information, as far as I'm concerned; in this case, it has a 4/5 chance of pointing me towards something I like.

I tried "most pretentious authors": Dickens, Joyce, Asimov, Styron, Stephen King, Russel Banks, George RR Martin, Ayn Rand, Palahniuk, Nietzsche: out of 10, I love 7, dislike 1 (Rand) and don't know 2 (Styron, Banks); what this tells me is that Styron and Banks are probably worth looking into.

And so on and so forth—whenever people complain that something is "pretentious", chances are I'll find it interestingly "ambitious" – oftentimes successfully ambitious, even.

[junipepper]

It's not 'strive for that which lies in front of me,' it's to put something forward, generally a claim.

[randyripoff]

I dunno...this reminded me a lot of the latter part of Morrison's run back in the day when things got weird just for the sake of getting weird--at least that's how it seemed. I felt that for the most part, it just didn't make any sense.

[silverhammerman]

I've very into this, but also can't help wishing that it was getting going a bit faster. It's got the style and tone I want to see, but this mainly just felt like scene setting.

Are we getting Rebis back though? Some of the variant covers seem to feature a pretty Rebis-y version of Negative Man, which excites me.

[remial]

people in the DC universe must be REALLY jaded...
"some loon in a costume just blew up my roommate and now she wants to move in? well she isn't the Joker, so I don't see how this could turn out badly."

[jeremyp]

I really dislike it when books introduce characters just to kill them off in irreverent and insensitive ways.

Sure, they portrayed him as unpleasant, but that doesn't mean his death has no consequences. What about his family? Friends? Job?

[vagabondprince]

I completely agree, and this seems like an especially egregious example since she's an EMT, and you'd think she'd be even more upset about the wanton loss of human life than the average person. Earlier in the issue she says "Every second behind the wheel stands in the way of the five words I hate saying: 'We tried everything we could.'" But then when she sees someone she knows blown up she reacts by saying she didn't like him. It just doesn't seem like consistent characterization to me.

[gtrout]

Yeah, this was the moment when I went from "Okay, surrealist fun, sure," to "No, now your POV character has stopped being a believable person, what is going on." The guy exploded. There are gobbets of his flesh dripping from the walls and ceiling. Neither witness finds this in any way remarkable or distressing. They don't even try to clean up the mess — they just move on to the cool robot parts Casey found.

The issue felt too compressed; we were jumping from weird to weird and I barely cared about any of it. I feel like Way was working so hard to establish his "Yes, crazy shit is happening, Doom Patrol, woo" bona fides that he neglected to make the issue coherent.

I'm going to hang around for a few issues, in hopes that this will all make more sense as we get off the ground, and because I'm a DP fan from way back. But the launch has me worried.

[doomedpatroller]

Being an old-school DP fan, I hated Rebis, and making the Chief an evil mastermind. He brings outcasts together and then screws them over? never made sense to me. The man is a hero. Quirky, but a hero.

[mrosa]

From what I've seen here, this new series has not an ounce of the heart Morrison injected in his run. To make it worse, it's massively afflicted by the current annoying trend of super-chippy young ladies - Gwen, Squirel Girl, Ms Marvel... why the hell is every woman in her 20s so zany and crazy and sweet and ebullient in comics now? It's becoming a cliché. It's like they all have a one-note personality.