I could not move, could not speak, could not hear. I could only see. I could only see white. And I was alone. All alone.
Though initially billed as the World's Strangest Heroes, a lot of their adventures go a bit farther than "strange", especially when Grant Morrison turned the comic into an out-and-out Surreal Horror story.
Volume 1
- The matter-of-factness of Bruno Premiani's art made images like Negative Man's face under the bandages, or the mutants Ir, Ur and Ar, truly disturbing.
- Robot Man's entire gimmick was that his body could be horribly mutilated and still keep going as long as his brain was okay, but one Silver Age issue had him infected with something that made him disintegrate into sand, and the process even affected his head.
- Once Madame Rouge gained stretching powers the artwork tended to make her look very inhuman, especially in an issue where she had a psychotic break and both sides of her personality literally splintered and fought one another.
- The final Silver Age issue ended with the team trapped and unable to escape as Captain Zahl made them choose who would die, themselves or a fishing village of 14. They chose themselves, so Zahl blew them all up. It ends with Rita's husband vowing to get revenge for her murder as he places flowers in the still-boiling water.
Volume 2
- The Scissormen start off Morrison's run with a bang, especially with how they come almost entirely out of nowhere. Although there are several Signs of the Apocalyse as foreshadowing, they get introduced to the protagonists frighteningly casually. Cliff finds Jane covered in blood and chanting a Madness Mantra, and then down the hall, standing there, are men in full-body red and black jumpsuits with scissors for hands, speaking nonsense.
- The heroes manages to pierce one of their suits and it just falls apart; there's nothing inside them.
- Red Jack, the first villain encountered during Grant Morrisson's run, derives psychic sustenance from millions and millions of butterflies kept in a state of eternal agony in his dimensional palace, walls covered with still-living butterflies pinned down with nails. He may or may not also be Jack the Ripper and God.
- Dorothy Spinner having what is basically a nervous breakdown when her reality warping powers brings back three of her childhood imaginary friends, Damn All, Darling-Come-Home and Flying Robert, in reality mental representations of her abusive family.
- The Cult Of the Unwritten Book, which worships the Antigod, the first shadow that was created when God said "Let There Be Light". The cult is centered in the non-existant German town Nurnheim, and it's revealed that the much-feared leaders of the cult are nothing but a pair of immovable mannequins that can somehow talk.
- The cult's surreal and terrifying servants, such as the Hiroshima Shadows, the Needle Children and the Never-Never Boys.
- Mr. Nobody's incredibly disturbing backstory: he Was Once a Man who was kicked out of the Brotherhood of Evil under mysterious circumstances, and spent time living at a mansion in Paraguay owned by a former Nazi war criminal. Agreeing to become a test subject in Bruckner's latest experiment under the belief it would turn him into a "new man", Bruckner had him wear a full-body suit and injected him with a paralyzing anesthetic, before leaving him alone in an endless white room. Left alone in the empty space for three days and three nights, unable to hear, move, or speak, the man went completely insane by the end of the first day, and soon lost all comprehension of the passage of time, until he saw something: a single tiny black dot, moving across the endless white space. Obsessed with the only thing he could identify in this empty space other than him, the man soon began to wonder if it was not something tiny and very close, but something incomprehensibly vast and very far away. And then he began to wonder what would happen if it suddenly discovered he was there. The results were catastrophic (shown in the page image above), and he emerged from the chamber "a new man", indeed.Doctor Brucker: (As he and his men are being slaughtered) ... Herr niemand..."Mr. Nobody".
- The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Oblivion, a giant Eldritch Abomination living inside the Painting that ate Paris and looks like a dead horse (Similar to the ones Dalí would paint) mounted by a demonic rider of metal, feeding on various forms of art inside the painting. If it managed to escape from the painting it would extinguish reality, "and when only void remains, it will destroy itself". It required the Doom Patrol and the Brotherhood of Dada to pull an Enemy Mine to have a chance to defeat it through Dada, and put Jane in a coma.
- Darren Jones, like many villains (and heroes!) in the comic, is completely insane, but what makes him horrifying is that his insanity is based on the concept of normality. To the point that he installed a laugh track in his house that he forces his wife to keep on so he could feel like he was a normal man in a 50s sitcom. This would almost be comical, except that when his wife makes one mistake too many, he stabs her eyes out, which itself is accompanied by the laugh track. It's also shown that he tied up his dog Rover to the ceiling in barbed wire, and he's still alive. The theme of an obsession with normality held by somebody who's very far out of it would shortly be revisited by the Pentagon arc proper, on a grander scale.
- The Smoke Dogs. One of them tore Robotman in half in a matter of seconds. Once they’re set to hunt you down, they can find you no matter where you go. Even if you mask your scent, they can smell through time itself and smell you before you did it.
- The horrors underneath the Pentagon are the stuff nightmares are made from. Some include:
- The real Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E., who look like 3 metre tall bird skulls and are made by reading "Anyhow Stories" to the dead, which scares them out of their wits and forces them to come back to life.]]
- The tearoom of despair, which serves Despair Event Horizon to anyone enslaved there.
- The Ant Farm is highly surreal since it's drawn in a different art style, and channels the power of the Avatar.
- When Alexander Graham Bell uttered the first words to ever travel through a telephone line - "Watson. Come here. I need you." - it unleashed forces so great that even the spirit world was affected. In that moment, the Telephone Avatar, a creature of potentially limitless power, was born, which has been singlehandedly powering the entire Pentagon all this time.
- Just the idea that a government agency such as the FBI could be harnessing powers beyond our comprehension to destroy all oddities is very unsettling.
- The backstory of Alias the Blur is highly off-putting: A German actress who, like Narcissus, became obsessed with her own reflection on a mirror, and would spend hours naked and licking the reflection. When the mirror began to deteriorate she couldn't take it and destroyed it with battery acid, but her face was left there, frozen and deformed. The actress Ate Her Gun and now lives on life support in Bremen. The mirror was thrown on a dumpster, but now only reflects a horrible shattered Nightmare Face.
- When Niles snaps, his breakdown and his actions are absolutely horrifying. He plans to unleash a horde of self-duplicating nanobots to unleash some sort of catastrophe wave across the world to bring change and see the results, like some sort of twisted lab experiment.
- The same arc reveals the truth about the team's accidents that made them "freaks": their own mentor, The Chief, caused them.
- The Chief has unleashed the nanobots and is about to bring wanton destruction. It seems that will be the Grand Finale, right? Wrong. He quickly gets Hijacked by Ganon by an even worse evil: The Candlemaker. The Candlemaker is the Anthropomorphic Personification of the anxieties over the end of the world through nuclear annihilation, looks like a winged demon with a crown of candles and it's bent on ending reality. Once trapped inside's Dorothy's head, it tempted her with wishes to slowly release itself. When it does, it takes control of the nanobot android Niles had built and rips Caulder's head off, and then crushes Cliff's brain under its foot. It then proceeds to travel to what's heavily implied to be the real world seen in Animal Man and kill everyone it finds, draining their seven souls until just a husk remains. Nothing short of The End of the World as We Know It is enough to satisfy it, and the only reason Robotman, Rebis and Will Magnus are able to defeat it is because it's still getting used to physical existence and because the nanobots of its body are succeptible to hacking.
- Pollack's run opens with the disturbing image of Dr. Caulder ripping his own head off with his bare hands to atone for almost destroying the world. After the Teresias used the nannos on him, he now can live as a disembodied head. His nonchalantness about it only makes it more surreal.
- The cover of issue #67 shows the Chief's new state in all his gory glory, including the dirty foam try with visible bloodstains he rests on, his grayish wrinkled face and those cold eyes. Warning: It may ruin chocolate milkshakes for you forever.
- Foxfur and Crowdark are two impossibly old creepy Animalistic Abominations based on the Tarot cards of the Sun and the Moon respectively who once lived in peace until Crowdark devoured Foxfur's collection of souls and the two entered a bloody feud. By the time the Doom Patrol arrived. Crowdark had began collecting preteen girls from Violet Valley's local population to create the Wild Girls, while Foxfur recruited the denizens of a nearby senior rest home to form the Old Foxes, an allegory for the generational gap. It's also implied that as a child, Cliff made a deal with Foxfur to gain an "indestructible body", which could mean that his car accident and rebirth as Robotman were orchestrated by him.
- You thought the Ant Farm arc was creepy? Rachel Pollack brings it back much worse. The Ant Farm was just one of the conspiracies that lurked under the Pentagon. Pollack introduces the Builders, another Ancient Conspiracy (Only much older, pre-physical world older). At some point in the mythic past, a curious Teiresias experimented with the novel idea of language based on grammar, thus creating names, labels, categories, the idea of opposites leading to a dichotomous world, and worst of all, trapping things in one form. This created the Builders, who instead of being opposed to weirdness like the Ant Farm, are opposed to change itself, and to make sure of it they created civilization so people would become sedentary and unified under a larger male-lead religion. Unsatisfied with this, they also built the Tower of Babel, to make everyone speak the same language (And thus, have only a single fixed viewpoint of reality). After millenia, the Builders, lead by the Beard (Founder of Sumeria), are about to finish building a second Tower of Babel, which will once again install fascistic order onto the world.
- What's worse, when the Doom Patrol finally beats the Builders through tongue-speaking, the General remains Defiant to the End and informs them that Babel's the foundation of the world, so if they want to ensure Babel can't be rebuilt, they'll have to destroy the world. The Teiresiae come very close to actually blowing up the Earth until Coagula manages to persuade them to only destroy the tower-part of Babel, but leave the foundations.
- Imagine meeting up with an Old Friend you had forgotten about. They tell you about all the adventures and experiences you went through, and you two reconnect sharing old war stories. Only that's not your friend: That's the False Memory, a Backstory Invader who implants fake memories on random people to make their lives more interesting. Even though they have more-or-less good intentions, their potential for evil is shown when he makes Coagula believe she was raped as a kid note .
- Rabbi Joseph Della Reina, the final villain of the second volume, looks like an emancipated corpse and is a megalomaniac that seeks to shine the light of God throughout the whole world and bring the Messiah, despite the Kabbalah being too weak to do so. Essentially, he wants to save the world even if it means it'll be destroyed in the process. Killing Charlie the Doll definetely stands out as a big Kick the Dog moment.
Volume 3
- Issue #4 begins with the disgusting image of a tiger who was skinned alive, shown in full gory detail.
- Tycho Bray's Nightmare Face: He lacks eyes and his skin has stitches, as well as very ugly scars.
- The Doom Patrol of the Pollack run disbanding is this, as well as a Tear Jerker. Dorothy believed Robotman and Coagula were going to abandon her, and in a fit of rage she lost control of her powers and exploded, killing Kate and putting herself in a coma. The face she makes before unleashing her attack is pretty horrifying too.
- The wizened, sickly appearance of Dorothy's comatose body as she's shown with catheters and other forms of life support equipment hooked up to her is rather unsettling.
- Issue #10 ends with the Doom Patrol finding themselves in Hell, and the next issue shows Fever, Slick and Flash Forward being tortured by their deepest fears. The giant literal Demonic Spider, with huge beastial fangs, bony legs and glowing eyes should also give the shudders to anyone with arachnophobia.
- The spider's web contains various tortured victims who are implied to have been there for centuries, begging for Cliff to save them.
