Doom Patrol #63

I hereby continue the reviews of my favorite Grant Morrison issues in anticipation of Action Comics #1. Last week, I reviewed Doom Patrol #62, “Planet Love.” Tonight, I thought why not cover the Doom Patrol finale while the last review is still fresh in my mind. “The Empire of Chairs” is the swan song of Grant’s run on Doom Patrol and it’s possibly the most beautiful single issue written by the man (possibly). We meet up again with Crazy Jane who had been sent to “Hell” by the Candlemaker a few issues back. Apparently, “Hell” for Jane is a mental institution. She’s under the care of an aging, lesbian therapist who genuinely wants to help her and she’s slipping in and out of a fantastic delusion. In the delusion, she and the rest of the Doom Patrol are tasked with protecting a nation of talking chairs from an army of men with keys on their heads called the Keysmiths. The emperor of the chair kingdom is an electric chair because he’s the only type of chair that decides between life and death (like most earthly kings). The therapist, Marcia, and her colleague, Bill, are convinced that the Doom Patrol and all the adventures Jane has had with them (so Grant’s entire run) are just wild fantasies Jane’s mind is creating to cope with her father’s sexual abuse. The fact that these doctors seem to know nothing about superheroes and the fact that all the scenes that take place in their world are colorless and dull convinces me that their world is the same as our own (much like how Animal Man stepped into a colorless environment when he met Grant in our world in issue #26 of his series).

Eventually, Bill becomes convinced that the only thing that will cure Jane is the controversial electroshock treatment. He administers it to Jane against Marcia’s wishes and inside Jane’s delusion the Doom Patrol, the Empire of Chairs, and all of her colorful personalities are destroyed by the Keysmiths. Jane herself comes out of it alive but almost completely blank. They are able to “mainstream” her after that. She gets a job bagging groceries and an apartment, but she never paints again. Soon, Jane gives in to her sorrow, packs a suitcase, and leaves a note in her apartment that says: “It’s not real.” She walks out onto the bridge and looks down to the black waters below. Now Marcia and the real world are convinced that Jane jumps and kills herself. Grant doesn’t leave us with that. No. In the end, Grant saves Jane from her real-world blues by sending Robotman to fetch her back to Danny the Street and the abstract Heaven. Robotman takes her hand and echoes the very first thing he said to her at the beginning of Grant’s run: “Come in out of the rain.”

I’ll be honest, after I finished this issue for the first time, I cried. I bawled my eyes out for a good ten minutes. It had been the first time I had a good cry in years and it took a comic book to bring it out of me. What happened to Jane hit pretty close to home for me. It got me thinking about what the “real world” actually does to bright, young artists they deem to “disturbed” for their own good. Instead of trying to actually help them, we just try and shock them into some kind of normalcy that allows them to be “useful to society.” It reminded me of Frances Farmer, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and an artist very close to me who suffered sexual abuse when she was young. Artists like these find their salvation in their art, in the abstract, and not in some pill or some lobotomy that only makes them good for minimum-wage slavery. If this sounds like an angry indictment of practicality: It is. Jane gets her Robotman to save the day, but there are hundreds if not thousands of real people out there whose emotional problems are being mishandled by a cynical western culture that only cares about people so long as they’re useful to them. Grant correctly points out that the only real saving grace for any of them, or for any of us for that matter, is art. Thanks for letting me rant. Five out of five.