Doom Patrol
"How must it feel to have saved a world you don't really believe is worth saving?" "Well, you're the shrink lady. you tell me." It's been a long, hard road for the Doom Patrol -- a winding path hugging the edges of madness, built with bricks of tears. And though the end is finally in sight, the hardships of the past will soon feel like refreshing idyll in a seaside resort compared to what they now must face! Born from the hideous strength of Dorothy's psychic powers, the unstoppable Candlemaker is hunting the team's tattered remains through every plane of existence, while the Chief's final experiment is threatening to reprogram reality itself. Catastrophe and annihilation seem to be the only choices of outcome -- unless the World's Strangest Heroes can pull one last figurative rabbit out of their collective hat! Comics visionary Grant Morrison concludes his paradigm shattering run on DOOM PATROL with PLANET LOVE, collecting issues 58-63 of DC's modern classic and the one-shot DOOM FORCE SPECIAL, featuring art from Richard Case, Sean Phillips, Stan Woch, Ken Steacy, Steve Pugh and many more!
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
2people
2014–2021years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- In Grant Morrison's seminal Doom Patrol run, he forwarded the idea that traditional children's stories and fairy tales were actually deliberately meant to traumatize children, to get them ready for harsh reality.
- For a second I thought this was going to be about the Scissormen[0] (whose name I misremembered), who are meta-fictional villains from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run that... well, it would take too long to explain, but luckily someone made a blog post[1][2].
I guess I could try to come up with some tenuous connection between the two, with erasure and censorship, and also with dadaism being, you know... French... but nah.
[0] https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Scissormen
[1] https://www.agonybooth.com/the-doom-patrol-19-and-20-crawlin...
[2] https://www.agonybooth.com/the-doom-patrol-21-and-22-crawlin...
- I believe telling small children scary stories so they would refrain from doing something particular damaging is quite common among many cultures.
In Grant Morrison's seminal "Doom Patrol" run, he talks about fairy tales as a means of traumatizing children to prepare them for life.
And when children once grow older or are particularly smart, they would mistrust it and everything adults had told them, clearly more damaging than beneficial.
A lot of this has been lost in modern sanitized re-tellings, but lots of traditional culture is rife with double meanings and subtexts. (I was in a trad fusion band, and I remember the moment when our lead singer started to realize this. Much good-natured ribbing was to be had that day and days after.) My take is that the smart ones are meant to realize that these things aren't to be taken literally. Rather, they are meant as cautionary tales and as a sort of map to the maze of inner feelings and impulses within all human beings. [1]
There is a scene in Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away where one wizard (Clubfoot) is talking about being one of many young apprentices taken up to a mountaintop by his master. The master wizard enchanted a cloud and let them play bouncing around on it, no warnings, no explanation given. Clubfoot speculated that it might be a sort of implicit test. Any apprentices stupid enough to go back up the mountain and try to jump on an unenchanted cloud would effectively take themselves out of the apprenticeship and the gene pool. This has a lot to do with how I think of traditional stories and myths.
Certainly, yelling at small children or even spanking them is not optimal and often not very helpful but anger is not the evil per se either. The key is to choose wisely how to act on this particular feeling. Suppressing or even disguising it under a friendly facade is not helpful, often even damaging for one’s mental health and relationships.
A lot of this has to do with the cultural environment. If a child is surrounded by people who implicitly enforce certain values and have a certain demeanor, the child will tend to pick that up. Inuit children are the way they are because they are in that particular culture. What US culture apparently does to children strikes me as horrifying. One thing I love my wife for, is that I can see that she's wonderfully nurturing, while I also very much see the "Tiger Mom" within her.
([1] Jordan Peterson's work in this regard is very interesting. Look up his take on Pinnochio.)
