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Readers have seen this moment play out thousands of times before; a moment of expositional conversation, a brief respite between periods of combat or investigation. These are the quiet times, when readers get to know characters. But for Grant Morrison writing Doom Patrol, this is another opportunity to underline the inherent strangeness of both the team, and the comicbook. For Morrison, this is an opportunity to emphasize the new kinds of relations constituted by the team, especially the nonchalant uncaring of an irascible team leader.
Dr. Joshua Clay, no longer able to deal with the strangeness the Doom Patrol perpetually confronts, and wheelchair-bound team leader Dr. Niles Caulder walk through a Doom Patrol HQ hangar towards a helicopter. Niles Caulder is en route to see the President, while Joshua ponders on recent occurrences. In a surprise twist, Caulder offers no indication of concern for his missing team. Readers find themselves thrown into confusion. Could a team leader be this uncaring? What of the genre benevolence established by such well-loved team leaders as Professor X of the X-Men? And yet, the belief Dr. Caulder expresses in his team’s resilience seems to sway him from being viewed simply as a coldhearted manipulator the likes of Magneto or Doctor Doom. The ostensible normalcy of the panel, of two characters, their backs to readers, moving toward a vanishing point that appears to the right of the panel, only adds to the complexity and to readers’ confusion.
‘I wanted to break away from the massive influence that the Claremont/Byrne era X-Men continue to exert over the whole concept of the comic book super-team’, Morrison writes in his Author’s Note that concludes Crawling From the Wreckage, the volume in which ‘Imaginary Friends’ is collected. What Morrison proposed was a return to ‘the spirit of the Arnold Drake/Bruno Premiani stories of days gone by’. The kind of stories where ‘the Doom Patrol slouched into town like a pack of junkyard dogs with a grudge against mankind’. In the most usual of settings, in the most ordinary of encounters, this panel shows, Morrison achieves this objective admirably.
