Doom Patrol #44

From the Ramdom stack of unread comics.

Title: Doom Patrol
Issue: 44
Date: May 1991
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Grant Morrison
Penciller: Richard Case
Inker: Mark McKenna
Colorist: Dan Vozzo
Letterer: Jay Workman
Editor: Art Young, Tom Peyer

Who runs America? Who runs the world? Why is the Pentagon the shape it is?

Dorothy and Flex Mentallo are prisoners of the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. in a secret chamber beneath the Pentagon, and the machine known as the Ant Farm is about to exterminate imagination and strangeness from the world.

Well, there is no lack of strangeness in this story. I read this issue in isolation, and it has a lot going on, so I'm sure I missed quite a bit. But what I did get was excellent: the wild telephone-company conspiracy theories, the dropped references to everything from the Principia Discordia to Apocalypse Now, and the surreal final confrontation in which Dorothy has to make a dangerous bargain for the power to save her friends.

This was a visual spectacle and a total trip down the rabbit-hole in terms of storytelling. It tried a bit too hard to juggle too many characters, but it had so much delicious strangeness, that I can forgive the somewhat scattered focus.

Rating: 7.5/10