A review by 600bars
Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Brick by Brick by Gerard Way

2.0

I read this bc I love Gerard Way and have never read any of his comic work. I am sad to say this but I had no fucking clue what was going on and therefore wasn’t having a great time. I think that you’re supposed to already be familiar with the characters but I have no idea what the Doom Patrol is. I do read a fair amount of comics/ graphic novels but I’m not a “comics person” as in I’m not very into superhero stuff. Although this seems a bit like anti-superhero similar to Watchmen, and I loved Watchmen, but I think with Watchmen I was familiar enough with the general conventions of superhero tropes to understand what it was against while here I just don't know what’s happening. There are a million plot elements happening. I typically am fine with not knowing completely what’s happening and simply letting it wash over me and plowing through. In these situations after I’m about halfway through I will start over again with the knowledge I have gained thus far. I did that but it didn’t really help. I am sure that if I continued this series I would be able to go back and make sense of this volume, but it didn’t hook me enough to where I even wanted to continue. There is an entity named Danny that is a street, an ambulance, a brick, a cabana. There’s some sort of soylent green-esque scheme about making burgers out of people. There are a lot of meta-comic stuff where some of the characters are actually comic characters created by the mind of Danny within this world. There’s time travel. There’s a mad scientist type guy. There are alien creatures. There is a cult trying to reach a singularity and become Jane. Who is Jane? I don’t know. There’s friendly EMTs with personal problems. The ambulance, which is also the entity Danny, has a nyan-cat esque trip through space. It comes off as frenetic and random because I can’t tell how these disparate elements are related to each other. I am sure they do connect eventually but I’m not going to stick around to find out.

The art, color, and lettering are visually appealing. I still want to check out the Umbrella Academy. I still love Gerard Way