Don't leave Doom Force behind

There's a long-running argument that satire doesn't work, and that it can even be harmful, because people who don't get it just end up taking it at face value. That a film like Wolf of Wall Street might be a searing indictment of toxic masculinity and the craziness of excessive capitalism, but has also inspired a whole new generation of amoral financial bros to further fuck up the world.

I don't know about all of that, but I do know that when I accidentally left a copy of Doom Force behind at a friend's house, I think I put them off comics forever.

Doom Force was a monumental piss-take of the Image era, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by some outrageous talents. Spinning out of Morrison's Doom Patrol - the biggest headfuck in mainstream comics at the time - it pushed all the worst excesses of Image comics over the top. It might all be in Dorthy's head, and it's for the best if it stays there.

When I got a copy of it a year or so after it was published, I thought it was funny as fuck, because I read all the comic press, and was getting heavily into fanzines, and knew all the background behind the thing.

It was also a time when I was desperately trying to get my friends to read more comics, with sincere promises that they were more serious and. more artistic. It was the biggest cliche in the world, but it was also true - comics just weren't for kids anymore.

At least, that's what I told my friend Sarah*, and she sounded genuinely interested when she asked about Sandman or Strangers in Paradise. I had already learned to ease people into Love and Rockets, clearly the greatest comic in the world, because it was one where a lot of people just could not get past the tits, so I was taking it easy with things. And then I accidentally left my copy of Doom Force behind at her house. 

I got it back a few days later and she said she had read it, and made an interesting face, and said it wasn't really her thing. 

But I think I accidentally killed any hope she had for the medium, and I don't blame her - without knowing any of the context, Doom Force is a horrifically awful book, with absolutely terrible art and ridiculously overwritten captions.

It was a full-on satire of all the excesses of the time, and I knew the joke, because I'd been following the whole Image thing right from the start. I knew what Liefeld and Lee and McFarlane were doing, and knew it was ripe to be ripped into. All that promise of comics glory of the 80s took a massive hit when  all the pouches started showing on costumes, and there is a quiet desperate anger in Doom Force, that it had all come to this. 

Sarah didn't know any of that crap - and nobody really needed to know it - and she didn't seem interested in comic for years afterwards.

Still, we talked recently and she raved about how much she liked The Boys, so who knows?

I don't push comic shit on people so much anymore. Not just because of this - although it but it didn't help - but because evangelism for a medium can be eroded away, and you realise that nobody has to like everything. 

But when I do, I'm a lot more careful about the things I leave behind. Nobody needs Doom Force dropped on them, out of the blue.

* Names have been changed because I'm not a fucking monster. I'm still Bob, though.