Young Animal is back up and running with Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds #1, which hit the stands today. The issue, from writers Gerard Way and Jeremy Lambert, is a thematic continuation of the work Way did during Doom Patrol‘s first run with artists Nick Derington and Tamra Bonvillain. This time around, the art is by James Harvey and Derington (who has been working on projects like Brian Michael Bendis’s Batman) on covers. The story so far feels a bit like a rumination on identity and the very notion of humanity — something that makes perfect sense given that Cliff Steele/Robotman is back in his original body.
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Young Animal, an imprint that brings with it some of the adventure and experimentation of early Vertigo (as well as using some of the same characters), is coming back at just the right moment, of course, with DC’s recent announce that their plans to streamline their branding will result in the end of not only Vertigo, but their DC Ink and DC Zoom lines aimed at younger readers as well. That means Eisner winner Way will be celebrating the return of his fan-favorite Doom Patrol just after a beloved season of the TV series as well as the announcement that Young Animal’s kissin’ cousin Vertigo is no more. Way, who oversees the Young Animal line, is the only one left from the book’s original lineup, though, so we had to ask Lambert whether it felt a little strange to be stepping onto the moving train of Doom Patrol.
“It’s wonderful for me, because I’ve been a massive fan of Doom Patrol for so long,” Lambert told ComicBook.com. “And also, I’ve been reading Gerard’s run as it was coming out because I would talk to him about it when we’d get together for Warhammer nights or something. But there was never a point where I didn’t feel welcome, which is one of the best things I could say about this group of folks is that they’re just so welcoming. And Gerard specifically sort of brought me on and sort of onboarded in the best way possible. Because we met to talk about the characters first and sort of our emotional attachments to everybody and just the purpose of the book. And really what it means to each of us. So once that was settled, we were off to the races and it was always comfortable.”
For Way, he said that he thinks this has the potential to be the best Doom Patrol he has worked on yet because of the approach that he took during its development.
“I really learned to loosen up a lot before this one,” Way said. “I just wanted to have as much fun as possible and not worry about anything that happened before.” He added, “Nick and I and Tamra and Todd, we had a lot of fun with that, with those first two runs. It was actually a lot of fun. I think they were having more fun. I was kind of white knuckling the whole experience. I was just like at the edge of my seat. Like, ‘Oh, this has to be great.’ And I kinda got in my head a lot in those first two arcs. And it feels different now, it feels like I was able to let some of that go.”
Way and Lambert have tried to make sure that while Weight of the Worlds feels like a spiritual successor to the Way/Derington run, and while the characters will remain consistent, the story itself will expand out from what was already there in unexpected ways, without feeling too constrained by what came before.
“I think it’s just the structure of it sort of pulls from the narratives of the previous arc,” Lambert said. “But with this one, I think we approach it in this sort of monster of the week space. But it definitely freed up a lot of the characters and sort of brought new things to the fore with them. And with that, I think we had a very sort of bottle episode approach to each. With running three one, where you’ve got your, you can call it a B-story I suppose, that trickles through all the way to becoming something quite memorable. I think that approaching it in that way, gave it a different vibe and a different feel. And it sort of freed it up from any residual effects from the previous arc.”
Way added, “Arcs one and two have a lot of heart, and I always try to put that in anything I do, but something about this arc … Jeremy and I would refer to it as like an experiment in how much positive energy we could put out there. And that doesn’t necessarily always mean like heartfelt moments. It could just be literally putting positive energy out there through the characters and trying to see how much of that we could do.”
Doom Patrol: The Weight of the Worlds #1 is available in stores and online today, wherever comics are sold.
