Punchlines
Father McGarry has long since ceased to believe in miracles. Saturdays, he
trudges out to the dump, looking for God among the debris. Saturdays are
always the longest days and, in the winter, chilly. He asks for very little.
Some trace, some evidence, some spoor of the divine. Some sign. It begins to
rain fish. Mackerel. Herring. Sea bass. Pike. Sturgeon. Tench. Plaice. Salmon.
From a clear sky. Trout. No cod.
FATHER McGARRY. Ha. [Crushed to death
by a falling refrigerator]
CLIFF. We were up the creek this time, that was for sure. And you know me; I’m
not a sophisticated kind of guy. I couldn’t think of one clever way to stop this
guy, so I just trusted to mindless violence. And I flattened the ugly
bastard.
RED JACK. Oh, the dark comes on in waves… I… I thought I was part of the
grand story… The story that… That would give meaning to this senseless
trajectory… The loop and spin of being… Instead… Instead I have learned a
horrible truth of… Existence… Some stories have no meaning. Oh,
bugger…
The rider requires ideas and meaning to give it power, but Dada is the
anti-idea! Dada destroys meaning! Dada strips away all sense! All
significance! Dada is the kingdom of no, where even language fails! Where words
become futile! Blago bung blago bung wulubi ssbudu dada.
CLIFF. Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?
ALIEN. Smoke dogs smell through time. It must have smelled me before I
applied the disguise. A minor design flaw.
ALIEN. Because we have entered the zone of words that kill. Now, where’s my
dictionary?
ERNEST. Light. What’s that light? Shit! Beards! Beards! I forgot He has a
beard. My gun! Where’s my gun? Where’s…
Characterization
CAULDER. Larry? Larry, do you know me?
REBIS. Nothing pure… My race
is mixed, I am woman and man and light with darkness, mixed. Mixed. I am
nothing special, nothing pure. I am mud and flame.
Was enamored by the gender fluidity, which I’m encountering more of in popular fiction. Rebis is the divine hermaphrodite, a reconciliation of spirit and matter, a being of both male and female qualities, the alchemical magnum opus.
notes that the Rebis is a central element in Castlevania’s 4th season, but I don’t remember that. Black Butler, a 2008 anime, also features an angelic antagonist who is a Rebis. Maybe rewatch Castlevania with a keener eye, and start Black Butler?
RED JACK. It’s an old story. The original story, in fact. I created the
universe and they told me I had to be punished. Punished! And all because I
had stained the beauty of nothingness with gross matter. I was cast out. Set
to wander endlessly through this endless prison.
CLIFF. Who are
“they?"
RED JACK. I beg your pardon?
CLIFF. If you created
everything, who imprisoned you?
RED JACK. Oh, don’t try to confuse the
issue! I imprisoned myself. And if I’m God, this must be heaven!
I initially thought Red Jack was shooting for the gnostic story of the fallen-from-grace Sophia. Turns out Red Jack borders on delusion.
REBIS. Is that? … Yes… Quiz. The Quiz. Afraid of dirt. So much.
Contamination. So much power. She. She has every super-power you haven’t thought
of.
DRIVER 8. It still works that way; we all have our own specific functions and
we evidence ourselves in response to the woman’s needs. If she wants to express
her artistic nature, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter will manifest herself.
If hostility is required, Hammerhead takes over. Some of the selves exist
only to bear pain. They live away from the mainline, so that we can’t hear
them screaming. Their sacrifice enables the rest of us to maintain the
smooth running of the underground.
RINGMASTER. Romulus and Remus, the siamese aerialists! So dedicated are they
and so perfect is their concentration that their act as been refined down to an
essence. Their skills have been honed so finely that their performance is now
entirely conceptual! They soar and swoop, wizards of the trapeze, without ever
leaving the ground!
RINGMASTER. See there! Cesarina, the beautiful albino somnambulist, who
converses with angels in her ceaseless sleep.
CESARINA. …and God
takes the blindfolds off all the people who’ve died in firing squads and he sews
them into the Holy Ghost? Is that true?
GEOMANCER. The penultimate plague was the silence plague. This destroyed all
words. Words make the world and without words, we had us no world. Without
words to name and identify them, the objectivity of things in our world
became… compromised. First they weakens space by erasing the words which
define it, then they eradicates it totally with their plague. They
annihilates space and leaves us with nothing to occupy. Without space,
without word, however, us was elevated to pure mind. Space no longer
fettered us.
RHEA. It was one of several angels sent to watch over man after the fall and one
of its tasks was to transform Eden from a physical reality into an abstract
idea. The thing is, Balzizras thought God had made a mess of the earth and
it decided to try its own experiment. It stole a cutting from the original
tree of knowledge and then fled from earth. Balzizras only wanted to create
its own perfect world, but this planet was the result. The problem was that it
had no imagination. The only working dynamic it could think of was
conflict. Haven’t you ever wondered why your societies are so
simplistic, your struggles so meaningless?
There are several curious facts concerning Agent “!”, but the most curious of all, surely, is that he does, indeed, come as no surprise. Those who see him smile and nod and walk away, but never, ever react with anything like surprise, despite his outlandish appearance. Only when he has passed by does Agent “!” elicit the conventional response to one so distinctive. “Why, what a curious man…” they say, wondering why they missed it first time around.
World-Building
In Stuttgart, all clocks chime fifteen. Simultaneously. In Kyoto, four stainless steel pyramids are found rotating five feet above ground. In Patagonia, a library is discovered. The books it contains are unknown, unreadable. In Johannesburg, a little girl named Harriet inexplicably catches fire. In Reykjavik, three shadows come to life and murder their owners. In London, Madame Tussaud’s wax figure of John Lennon begins to bleed from bullet wound stigmata.
JANE / MAMA PENTECOST. Well, the whole book is a kind of metafiction; a
self-referring text. Basically, it tells the story of a group of philosophers
who decide to create a book which will radically alter human thought. They
propose to fill the book with parasite ideas which will enter human
consciousness and transform it.
CLIFF. Oh, well, that explains
everything!
The Ossuary maintains a devout silence, the very air of worn thin by continuous
prayer. In the serious light of stained glass, two priests meditate. One is a
liar, the other, an honest man. And they are waiting to answer the Question that
will unmake the world.
Reminds me of Ted Chiang’s Understand ’s which also features dissolution at the power of a profound utterance.
REINMANN. It was a game really, just an intellectual joke. We got together
and created Orqwith – its language, its religion… You know… And then
somehow Orqwith… crossed over. The Scissormen took Pollock first, then
Schrader tried to destroy the book… It’s too late now. Our fiction is
eating into the real world. Soon the whole world will be Orqwith…
CAULDER. How do we stop Orqwith?
REINMANN. Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t
know! It shouldn’t exist at all! We… We built a logical inconsistency into the
fiction, a basic contradiction, upon which the entire world is founded. It’s
the fundamental problem of philosophy – “Why is there something instead of
nothing?” The most basic of all questions. Orqwith can be destroyed. It just
has to be made to confront its own unreality, that’s all. Hah! That’s all…
That’s all…
DARLING-COME HOME. Remember the shoe song? “I wish I were an angry shoe, a bodiless balloon. Cut off my covenant with God the pain of orthopedic glue. Heels and nails on dancing shoes the odors of hammers, of pretty knives. She danced again, again and again though every step cost her excessive pain!”
He spoke of a great many things and I do not wish to bore the reader with
details… But one aspect of our conversation has remained fixed in my thoughts
for many years – viz., that there exists in Italy a certain painting: a
painting which, it is said, possesses the power to physically devour those who
behold it.
At 11:30, there was an outbreak of spirit skywriting which continued for an hour and a half. At midnight, the word “harmony” disappeared from the vocabulary of everyone in the city. And the boy kept on running. At 12:30, the embryo stains invaded the marrow of a nightclub owner and forced him to compose terrifying poetry. And everything blue became briefly invisible. And the rain forgot how to fall. And strong men wept. And the boy kept running.
ALIEN. While waiting for you, I have invented a new kind of clock. It doesn’t
measure time, it collects it.
REBIS. “Potlatch” is a Chinook word used by the Kwakiutl and Tlingit tribes
back on earth. The potlatch ceremony involved an exchange of gifts; one
tribe would offer something and the other tribe had to respond with an item of
greater value. This often continued until one tribe was forced to destroy its
own town, thus raising the obligation of the opposing tribe to an
intolerable level. The loser was the tribe that ultimately had to admit that it
valued property and possessions above honor and ideology.
Some say that if there were no mirrors in the world, we would never grow old; that mirrors eat time and excrete images.
Style
SCISSORMAN #1. Defensibility! In the flowery hiatus! Brushing for abscised
fever!
SCISSORMAN #2. Virtuous! Virtuous! Virtuous deadfall!
The Scissormen talk weirdly. The metaphors sound like they’re talking through a different authors' voice, and not Morrison’s.
The music comes in waves. Freakbeat Vivaldi sampled and spliced together with the screams of murdered women and butterflies. And wedding bells. The clamor of wedding bells.
Reviews
Part of the function of a super-hero is to give us refuge from our normalcy, an identification with something wonderful, a secret airborne headquarters from which we can look down at our friends, families and authority figures – especially authority figures – and feel pity for their tragic lack of special gifts. Disguised as a regular comic book, DOOM PATROL subverted this drive. Compared to the omniplegic Cliff and the infected Larry, normal people were to be envied, not pitied.
Maybe this is also what made Gaiman’s Sandman captivating for me? I did not envy Dream, but was invested in his journey.
I wanted to reconnect with the radical concept of the book – that here was a team composed of handicapped people. These were no clean-limbed, wish-fulfillment super-adolescents who could model Calvins in their spare time. This was a group of people with serious physical problems and, perhaps, one too many bats in the belfry.
The Doom Patrol has never been lucky enough to face mere jewel thieves who dress like playing cards, or masked kidnappers who messenger easy clues to their whereabouts to the commissioner’s office. Their rogues gallery is more likely to include the imaginary world that threatens to become real, supplanting our own reality; the unattended machine that could make dreams come true; the bloodthirsty omnipotent who claims to be God, and who’s to say for sure he’s lying?
A dimension on which to rate fiction. How interesting is the antagonist? What are their motivations? An unattended machine that grants dreams is unusual enough to be interesting in its own right. Not sure how the bloodthirsty omnipotent will differentiate himself from other conquer-the-world villains. The conquer-the-world trope plays out in Darkseid’s ambitions. I hope Mr. Miracle helps add texture to Darkseid.
For all these dangerous encounters, for all of our heroes' disorders and infirmities, for all of their fear and heartbreak, one of the best features of Grant’s DOOM PATROL scripts is what’s missing from them. Another writer working with the same ingredients might have inflated the stories with the familiar grim-and-gritty solemnity of the DARK KNIGHT/WATCHMEN imitators. Don’t bother looking for the (yawn) clipped, first-person angst, the (groan) balletic violence, the (sob) dead sidekicks, the (ah-chooo!) anguished resignation that worked so well in those projects and has seldom done the job since.
References
- Doom Patrol: Crawling from the Wreckage: Foreword. Tom Peyer. 1992.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #20. Crawling from the Wreckage, Part 2: Cautionary Tales. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Scott Hanna. dc.fandom.com . 1989. Accessed Dec 23, 2022.
- Rebis - Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Dec 23, 2022.
- Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan's backstory - YouTube. www.youtube.com . Accessed Dec 23, 2022.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #21. Crawling from the Wreckage, Part 3: Worlds in Collision. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Scott Hanna. dc.fandom.com . 1989. Accessed Dec 23, 2022.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #22. Crawling from the Wreckage, Part 4: The Ossuary. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Scott Hanna. dc.fandom.com . 1989. Accessed Dec 23, 2022.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #23. The Butterfly Collector. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Scott Hanna. dc.fandom.com . 1989. Accessed Jan 15, 2023.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #24. The House That Jack Built. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Scott Hanna. dc.fandom.com . 1989. Accessed Jan 15, 2023.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #25. Imaginary Friends. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Scott Hanna. dc.fandom.com . 1989. Accessed Jan 15, 2023.
- Doom Patrol Vol. 2: A Word from the Author. Grant Morrison. 1988.
- Snow White - Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Jan 15, 2023.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #27. The Painting That Ate Paris. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; John Nyberg. dc.fandom.com . 1989. Accessed Mar 5, 2023.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #28. Labyrinths. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; John Nyberg. dc.fandom.com . 1989. Accessed Mar 5, 2023.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #29. The Kingdom of No. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; John Nyberg. dc.fandom.com . 1990. Accessed Mar 5, 2023.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #30. Going Underground. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; John Nyberg. dc.fandom.com . 1990. Accessed Mar 5, 2023.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #31. The Word Made Flesh. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; John Nyberg. dc.fandom.com . 1990. Accessed Mar 5, 2023.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #36. Box of Delights. Grant Morrison; Kelley Jones; Mark McKenna. dc.fandom.com . 1990. Accessed Jan 28, 2024.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #37. Persephone. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Mark McKenna. dc.fandom.com . 1990. Accessed Jan 28, 2024.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #38. Lost in Space. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Mark McKenna. dc.fandom.com . 1990. Accessed Jan 28, 2024.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #40. Battlefield of Dreams. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Mark McKenna. dc.fandom.com . 1991. Accessed Jan 28, 2024.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #41. Fallen Angel. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Mark McKenna. dc.fandom.com . 1991. Accessed Jan 28, 2024.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #45. The Beard Hunter. Grant Morrison; Vince Giarrano; Malcolm Jones III. dc.fandom.com . 1991. Accessed Jan 28, 2024.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #49. Death in Venice. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Mark Badger. dc.fandom.com . 1991. Accessed Jan 28, 2024.
- Doom Patrol Vol 2 #50. Tales of Hofmann. Grant Morrison; Richard Case; Jamie Hewlett; Rian Hughes; Simon Bisley; Brian Bolland; Duncan Fegredo; Paul Grist; Shaky Kane; Steve Yeowell. dc.fandom.com . 1991. Accessed Jan 28, 2024.
- Bob Dylan – Ballad of a Thin Man Lyrics. genius.com . Accessed Jan 28, 2024.
Always falling for the doubting clergy. Similar arc in Outcast ’s Rev. Anderson.