[The umbrella-title I've bestowed upon these four issues is taken from the solo title of issue #29.]
I analyzed the second appearance of Grant Morrison's absurdist "Brotherhood of Dada" in this 2019 post, because I liked it better. But the Brotherhood's first appearance is a well-crafted mythcomic as well, though the absurdity takes a different form.
The two Brotherhood stories summon to my mind a dichotomy I explored in a 2009 post, THE UNBEARABLE FULLNESS OF EMPTINESS. In this post, I commented upon an essay by literary critic David Sandner, who suggested a hermeneutic approach to the super-genre of fantasy, depending on whether the author utilized his fantasy-concepts to stress the emptiness of existence (Lewis Carroll) or its fullness (J,R.R. Tolkien). I won't take the time to expatiate on any notion that Morrison's TALES OF HOFMANN belongs to the hermeneutic of fullness. But a story with the title THE KINGDOM OF NO fairly broadcasts its indebtedness to a philosophical penchant for absence.
Following a prologue introducing a couple of the master villain's hench-persons, Morrison and Richard Case give their readers their first look at Mister Nobody, a cubist distortion of a human figure standing in a cluttered room in Paris. Nobody descants to his newly formed band of nutzoid supervillains on the room: "All the toys, all the comic books, all the silly, useless things that people lose or throw away: they all end up with me." It's perhaps counter-intuitive for Morrison's character to blather about easily abandoned commodities, given that he's writing a comic book aimed largely at a readership of hardcore comics-collectors. Still, the metaphor passes muster, since comic books were originally conceived as throwaway entertainment.
Nobody takes six pages to detail his origin, or rather, his rebirth. He had been an ordinary henchman to the original Brotherhood of Evil, foes of the original Doom Patrol, but he decided to subject himself to an experiment designed to give him superhuman powers. For "three days and three nights, the traditional Celtic period of mystical trial," he endures sensory isolation, and the result is that he transforms into Mister Nobody, taking his new cognomen from the famous if anonymous children's poem. He then rejects the original Brotherhood's acceptance of the meaningless terms of good and evil by bestowing on his five henchmen the title of "The Brotherhood of Dada," referencing the Dadaist movement of the early 20th century.
Nobody's doctrine of meaninglessness doesn't keep him from expounding on such luminaries as the writer Thomas DeQuincey and the artist Piranesi, who are clues leading to Nobody's absurdist Holy Grail: a painting that devours the reality within which said artwork was created. The villains find and steal the painting from its owner, and then unleash its power, which begins by swallowing up the whole city of Paris.
The new Doom Patrol, however, is well suited for combating such esoteric threats. While Robotman remains the one "normie" link to the original group, the new version of Negative Man discourses on humanity's occupation of a "virtual universe recursion," while new member Crazy Jane derives her powers from her plethora of multiple personalities. The three of them invade the painting, where they find that their foes can now confound with purely artistic principles, derived from such movements as impressionism and futurism.
However, the over-confident super-crooks don't realize that their presence calls forth an apocalyptic menace, "The Fifth Horseman," who apparently got left out of the New Testament like, well, someone's discarded comic book.
Yet, although Crazy Jane is integral to staving off the Horseman's power for a time, it's nonsense-meister Nobody who triumphs in the end. Since Jane says the Horseman feeds on "ideas," Nobody, his henchmen and the Patrol manage to steer the monster into the artistic realm of Dada, "the kingdom of no, where even language fails" (and thus the perfect place for a Lewis Carroll hootenanny). The threat is nullified, the heroes escape the painting, and the capricious criminals are left inside the recursive art-universe, though Nobody alone will manage to break free for his second outing by Morrison and Case. And so the world of normality is apparently preserved, though the reader is more than a little persuaded that the only true presence is actually an absence.
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