Crazy Painting

Doom Patrol, the Painting That Ate Paris by Grant Morrison
Reviewed by Grady

Doom Patrol is strange and thought provoking. The Doom Patrol are a group of superheroes whose powers have great negative impact on their lives. For example, Crazy Jane is a woman with countless split personalities and each personality has its own power. She can call upon fantastic abilities when the time is right but she's totally unstable and insane. The Painting That Ate Paris is about a group of super villains called the Brotherhood of Dada who conspire to steal a magical painting that will trap Paris in another dimension. Grant Morrison's writing is comical and zany. This story is more of a satire of superheroes than Morrison's first Doom Patrol graphic novel which, with a somewhat dark tone, dealt with the problems of the Doom Patrol's super powers and what it meant for them as people. The directions Morrison takes are interesting and I enjoyed this story the most when it diverted away from the plot. In one subplot Robot Man explores the mind of Crazy Jane and sees a grid made up of her split personalities and rides a train through them. I found the idea of the magical painting quite cool as it's an "infinite recursive structure" with infinite layers and the Brotherhood of Dada uses this to separate the Doom Patrol putting each one on a different layer. This is Grant Morrison nearly at his strangest, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a story that's out of the ordinary