ShakespeareZombie

ShakespeareZombie

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Brick by Brick by Gerard Way, Nick Derington, and Tamra Bonvillain

"The world is hard and unforgiving, it can change you. Because we're made up of all the things that happen to us. The good things fill your heart. But the bad things, and what we choose to do with them, really make us who we are..."

Okay, so this was a weird one and I'm not sure I grasped everything that went down. I'm not at all familiar with Doom Patrol, so I don't have any prior knowledge coming into this. I liked My Chemical Romance, so the Gerard Way factor was a positive, and it did look intriguingly weird.

Casey is a semi-weird ambulance driver. She lives with her cat Lotion (Which is like both the best and worst name at the same time somehow). Then, one night, a strange new dispatcher sends Casey and her partner to help someone. The person isn't there, but they witness a robot man getting run over by a truck. Casey takes the robot parts back to her apartment. Soon after, her roommate gets exploded by a singing telegraph girl, who becomes Casey's new roommate. Then things get weirder...

The new dispatcher is actually not a dispatcher, but Danny. Who is Danny? Well, Danny is technically a where. Dannyland is this place where a bunch of people live who are also Danny and Danny is also technically in the back of Casey's ambulance. It's complicated. Also, Casey is a comic book character in Dannyland and Danny brought her to life and sent her into the real world. Now, it needs her help because these creepy dudes, the Vectra, want to use Danny to generate more people so they can turn them into meat for their alien/robot/whatever fast food restaurants. (I know, so cliche, right?) Danny needs Casey to gather the Doom Patrol!

The other members of Doom Patrol are the robot man, who is called...Robot Man, Pilot Larry Trainor, who is possessed by a negative spirit and turns into Negative Man, Flex Mentallo, a strongman who Casey meets in Dannyland, and Jane, who is busy forming a cult because one of her personalities has taken over. Oh, there are also these little asides featuring Niles Caulder, AKA the Chief, who originally founded the Doom Patrol. Thank you to the DC Wiki for filling in some of my blanks. Anyways, from what I understood, it was pretty good.