Fans of Morrison's adventurous approach to superheroes in recent DC titles should see his earlier outre treatment of Doom Patrol. He recast a 1960s team of outcast heroes (DC's answer to Marvel's X-Men) as a volatile group of aberrant adventurers. One suffers from -multiple-personality disorder (64 distinct personas, no less, each with its own superpower); other members include an ape-faced adolescent girl who brings imaginary beings to life and a bandaged, radioactive hermaphrodite who contains a being made of negative energy. The sequences gathered here introduce Flex Mentallo, a Charles Atlas-derived bodybuilder whose muscle training imparted strange mental powers. He alerts the Doom Patrol to a menace lurking underneath the Pentagon, where the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. have based an effort to eliminate all eccentricities and irrationality. Later, the team visits once-quiet Happy Harbor, which has been overwhelmed by a dream transplant that unchains the townspeople's libidos. Mainstream comics have seen their share of experiments in the 15 years since these yarns emerged, but they remain freshly bizarre and impressively audacious.
