Two of my favourite issues in this book. The Beard Hunter and the Flex Mentallo origin story. For all my heroes of the beach.

Starts off really strong with closure on the Pentagon/Flex Mentallo stuff from volume 3, and features the return of the Brotherhood of Dada(!) but some of the other stuff - the Beard Hunter and Mr. Evans - has...not aged that well. I think I'm going to take a break before I go looking for volume 5, especially since I've been reading some of Gerard Way's Doom Patrol, which (surprisingly) I'm enjoying more than Morrison's work. ( )

Frankly reviewing Morrison’s Doom Patrol run often seems redundant. The surreality of it all means it’s difficult to criticise, with seeming non-sequiturs and heroically daft ideas being thrown around at every turn. Musclebound isn’t a coherent collection, covering a few story arcs and the odd one-off, but it’s good fun, particularly after the relative tedium of the abstract alien war that ended Down Paradise Way.

The Ant Farm storyline comes across as a rehearsal for Morrison’s magnum opus, The Invisibles. Various elements, such as government conspiracy and a writer’s mind distorting reality crop up prominently in that later work. It’s a fun test run, particularly when the Charles Atlas parodying Flex Mentallo origin story is thrown in. The one off Beard Hunter veers towards snarkiness, particularly with the dig at comic fans but is saved by Morrison’s sharp wit. Mr Edwards, an English gentleman type who’s apparently Satan is again good value, but gets dispatched perfunctorily. And the final story, which is left hanging across collections, brings a new Brotherhood of Dada to the strip, led once again by Mr Nobody. The incomplete story makes this tough to judge, but the almost conventional structure of having an equal and opposite team to battle means it’s almost straightforward superhero fun (albeit with fun, off the wall fight scenes).

So is it an avant-garde masterpiece or freewheeling nonsense? The secret of the series, the reason why it’s composed of wild highs and incoherent lows is that it’s both. It aims for the stars, often hitting them (then probably stuffing them and mounting them on a wall) and equally being unafraid of going too far and falling flat on its face. It’s the antidote to the Ant Farm, a world of glorious unreason. And that’s why it’s so much fun. ( )

LIDO!