People Like Us Postmodernism and Otherness in Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol

Abstract

Since its inception, sequential art has been struggling to be recognized asan independent art form and not a mere product derived from the amalgamation of text and images. Under postmodernity, and particularly after the publication of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's seminal work Watchmen (1986), several comic-book authors have sought to inject the medium with new ideas, incorporating philosophical and intertextual elements to their works, while simultaneously widening the scope of representation and giving voice to peripheral, marginal and liminal identities previously underrepresented in literature and the arts. Departing from these premises, the present thesis intends to examine Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol (1989-1993) both as a work that partakes in the postmodern valorization of intertextuality and as a text that puts "otherness" at the centre by presenting a panoply of characters that embody a wide range of liminal and peripheral identities. To this end, the study will be structured into two main parts that are nonetheless closely related. In the first part, I shall lay bare the main theorical concepts informing the study, engaging, inter alia, with postmodernism and the notion of otherness. This will be followed by a close reading of Morrison's work in which I shall examine its postmodern elements and, most importantly, its attempt to blur the lines between the margins and the putative centre.