Page 45 Review by Stephen
"What if God's reality... Heaven, if you like... what if it's so bad that he had to imagine us to help make His life bearable?"
Buddy Baker, former fifth-rate superhero, is in for a rude awakening.
He’s about to learn that not only is he not who he thought he was, he's not even what he thought he was. In fact, he's not even thinking. But we’ll get to that Brian Bolland cover in my penultimate paragraph.
Prior to his riotous DOOM PATROL, Grant Morrison's first major triumph still stands out as thoroughly fresh and thrilling –.not just because Morrison's likeness, flat and cat all became copyright DC.
Before then Buddy Baker endears himself as a thoroughly likeable though fallible husband and father of two, and it's this focus on the family unit which lodges the books firmly in one's heart. There's a haunting sequence halfway through where Maxine, his daughter, is playing gleefully in their back garden, only to find the shade her father will become staring down at her from under the shadow of a tree:
"Hello, Maxine. I had a dream the other night, Maxine. I dreamed you grew up and everything was okay. You can't even hear me, can you? I can't even warn you. Oh, Maxine. I miss you. I miss you all so much."
Towards the end you'll witness the sequence from Buddy's point of view and you will, I’m afraid, understand all too well why the poor man is in tears.
Interior artist Chaz Truog played no small part in maintaining the title’s domestic distance from all the pugilistic testosterone at DC Central for the family are all a bit gawky, including Buddy himself – both in or out of costume – and this is instead a series about family, animal rights, environment, construction, identity, reality and fiction.
It is, essentially, an exploration of agency – of self-determination – and as the book comes to its climax, Buddy gradually becomes aware that he and his brood have fallen victim to barely imaginable forces beyond their control; forces which are hinted at as early as the fifth chapter which are controlling his life in precisely the same way that I am currently controlling this online review.
With a keyboard.
