DC's Doom Patrol has always been a team of metahuman misfits but their strangest stories took place during Grant Morrison's early-90s run on the title

Grant Morrison's 4-year run on Doom Patrol is widely considered the peak of the eponymous superhero team's publication history. The Doom Patrol, originally conceived by Arnold Drake, Bob Haney, and Bruno Premiani, stood out by focusing on transgressive misfits with shared traumas, who went on exceptionally bizarre adventures.

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Morrison and their collaborators, including the main penciller Richard Case, embraced the series' exploration of absurdity and alienation and then spectacularly upped the ante. Abandoning the constraints of the Comics Code Authority and mainstream superhero comics, Morrison's run introduced several characters and concepts that represented a progressive cross-section of identities and life experiences, leading to countless strange stories.

In Doom Patrol #24, inked by Scott Hannah and colored by Daniel Vozzo, the gang found themselves in a strange dimension containing a kooky labyrinthian mansion and a kookier homeowner. The figure in question identified himself as Red Jack and embodied a design trope that Morrison and their team would use later, possessing a human body and a surreal head, in this case, a floating theatrical mask.

Red Jack had a lot of strangeness in him. He collected stll-living butterflies, was fueled by pain, he wanted to marry a comatose Rhea Jones, and insisted that he was both Jack The Ripper and God. Jack was powerful but also vulnerable and couldn't survive in the absence of suffering. If he was any kind of deity he'd lost himself long before he met the Doom Patrol.

Morrison and company made little use of the Doom Patrol's classic rogues' gallery, but issue #34, inked by John Nyberg and colored by Daniel Vozzo, served as a delightful exception to the rule. In this comic, the original masterminds from the Brotherhood of Evil, The Brain and Monsieur Mallah, break into Doom Patrol HQ and transfer The Brain's well, brain into Robotman's new metal body.

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This leads to a particularly inspired moment when The Brain takes advantage of his new form to declare his love for Monsieur Mallah. Romantic as it is, the sight of a shiny black robot and a red beret-wearing gorilla locking lips looks explosively goofy. The robotic body actually exploding, mid-embrace, made the scene even stranger.

It's a testament to Doom Patrol's celebration of outsiders that its most traditional-looking couple is also its most disturbing. On the surface, Mr. and Mrs. Jones represented the ideal heterosexual marriage, accompanied by a sitcom laugh track and maddeningly mundane domestic concerns while Jones tried to eradicate the very concept of "weird" from the world.

Unsurprisingly, Darren Jones is blind to his own foibles and his incredibly baroque spousal abuse that includes removing his wife's eyes and forcing her to wear "drooping eye" gag glasses. Jones represents an early incarnation of the idea that the people who are obsessed with normalcy are in denial about their own oddities, a theme Morrison returned to in their cult classic The Invisibles.

Throughout much of the Silver Age, issues of DC Comics ran full-page ads advertising Charles Atlas's bodybuilding program. The Charles Atlas campaign promised that its users could transform themselves from scrawny to herculean. Doom Patrol #42, by Grant Morrison, Mike Dringenberg, Doug Hazelwood, and Daniel Vozzo, deconstructs the male fantasies underlying this messaging as it recounts the secret origin of Flex Mentallo.

There are lots of strange moments here, from the earth-shattering effects of Mentallo flexing his muscles to the "hero halo" of floating letters that appear whenever he does. However, the moment Flex abruptly discards his girlfriend after getting his physical upgrade is probably the funniest, and darkest, moment in the story.

Doom Patrol villains are often characterized by random and absurd motivations, but no one's stranger than The Beard Hunter. A vigilante serial killer and parody of the Punisher, he collects beards as trophies. Naturally, this put him on the trail of Niles Caulder and his undeniably glorious facial hair.

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The saga of the Beard Hunter is a bizarre metaphor for a cultural rift that occurred in the west, during the counterculture era, the divide between clean-shaven men and men with shaggy beards. And as Morrison and artists Vince Giarrano and Malcolm Jones III suggest, those bald-faced squares were probably just jealous.

This is a very short pinch point that highlights the strangeness surrounding the apparently straightlaced Major Main, who leads forces within the U.S. military on a secret crusade to maintain the status quo. However, like Darren Jones, the military turns out to have some truly bizarre secrets.

Jones journeys down into the secret city beneath the Pentagon several times in the series, with each trip stranger than the last. The only way to arrive in this supervillain lair involves rooms that the human mind can't comprehend and... bouncing around on space hoppers. This story culminates in a confrontation with the Telephone Avatar, the spirit Alexander Graham Bell accidentally summoned when he said "come here, I need you" into the first phone, demonstrating Morrison's commitment to surreal villainy at every turn.

In the climax of Doom Patrol's "Magic Bus" storyline, the team's iconic villain, Mister Nobody, assembled a new Brotherhood of Dada and ran for president. This turned into a messianic pitch to everyday Americans, asking them to embrace chaos and disorder, and culminating is a religious reenactment from a villain who believes in nothing.

Morrison and Case made some appropriately zany revisions to Davinci's scene. Using an American flag as a tablecloth, the Brotherhood gather to drink ink and eat paper while seated in chairs adorned with cartoon animals. However, this represents a turn for Nobody himself, as his current crusade actually seems like a sincere attempt at improving people's lives, and he seems to know he'll be betrayed by his followers and turned back into boring Mister Morden..

When Crazy Jane's sexual repression, and ultimate release, started to have global effects, Rebis locked themself in their room with a "do not disturb" sign on the doorknob. Rebis, a supernatural hybrid of Eleanore Poole, Larry Trainor, and an other-dimensional spirit, spent a fair amount of time assertin that they were the ultimate human being.

RELATED: 10 DC Characters Who Guest Starred In Alan Moore's Swamp Thing Rebis's self-adulation reached its climax when Rebis consummated their internal relationship, ultimately leading to their giving birth to a new body for them to inhabit. It's a kind of psychedelic, supernatural sex that gives Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing some competition for comics' trippiest sex scene.

During the final months of their Doom Patrol run, Grant Morrison introduced the Doom Force in a precisely calibrated parody of Rob Liefeld's X-Force. Focusing on the action comics tropes that were still emerging in the 1990s, the standalone story pretended it was joining its weirdly-proportioned and largely unfamiliar heroes at the climax of their story.

It was a sharp satire that embodied the Doom Patrol's central message. No matter how strange and disconnected Morrison's protagonists seem, they're never as odd as the supposed forces of normalcy who are determined to extinguish them.

Morrison's run on Doom Patrol culminated as multiple apocalypses threatened to destroy the world. The Candlemaker, a kind of evil genie living inside of a young girl's head, had been teased as the team's most dangerous villain for some time.

However, no one expected the Doom Patrol's leader, Niles Caulder, to emerge as a villain. In an early iteration of the now-familiar "nanobots end the world" trope, Caulder confessed that he had caused every crisis that had transformed the Doom Patrol, from Cliff Steel's car crash to Larry Trainor's test flight disaster. The Chief now planned to subject the world to similar trauma, just to see what would happen. The team saved the world, of course, but only by facing down their two strangest foes.NEXT: 10 Unreleased Grant Morrison Comics We Really Want To Read

Anish Fonseka is little more than an organic vessel for Superman and Beatles trivia. He is a graduate of New York University and currently resides in Sri Lanka, where he hopelessly fantasizes about disrupting the medium of comics.

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