The bad guys are by this point clearly identified with the establishment and, specifically, with policing sexual identity and norms. Moreover, those bad-guy establishment figures are every bit as weird as the weirdos they want to police; as just one iconic example, the conspirators beneath the Pentagon dye their pubic hair green. Marginality and normality, chaos and order, are shown as arbitrary distinctions. All of which raises the question, why is the Doom Patrol fighting "bad guys" anyway?

This question occurs to the Doom Patrol as well. After beating back the Pentagon threat, the Brotherhood of Dada return—and when their leader, Mr. Nobody, runs for president while dispensing psychedelic hallucinations far and wide from a magic bus, Crazy Jane refuses to try to stop him on the grounds that she likes him and thinks he'd be as good a president as anybody else. "See what Mr. Nobody is doing is forcing people to think in new ways. We can't allow that," some faceless military jerk opines. The supervillains are the good guys, the superheroes are on their side, and both are menaced by the fascist forces of order on whose behalf superheroes are traditionally supposed to be fighting the good fight.

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Morrison doesn't exactly take a doctrinaire stand against doctrinaire stands either, though. In the final arc of the series, the Chief is revealed as the ultimate supervillain, who plans to use nanorobots to create a worldwide catastrophe in an effort to get everyone to evolve to the next (presumably weirder) level. He tells Cliff that his earlier experiments led him to arrange the car crash that destroyed Cliff's body, turning him from a self-centered, misogynist blowhard into an empathetic hero. "If you'd met me before my accident, I wouldn't have given you a second glance," Cliff tells Jane; his own trauma has made him identify with the marginalized and with those who need help.

But, importantly, the Chief's actions aren't condoned. Using others in a grand plot to replace the Man just changes the iron corrupt rule of the law-giving Pentagon with the iron corrupt rule of the chaotic nanomachine. Either way, somebody else makes you suffer at their arbitrary whim. The new supervillain is the same as the old superhero, or vice versa.

Doom Patrol doesn't offer a revolutionary political program, then, nor even a straightforward critique of law-and-order superhero fascism as, arguably, Watchmen tried to do a couple of years earlier. Instead, if Doom Patrol subverts most superhero stories, it's through a deliberate, elaborate goofiness. Danny the transvestite street is the least of it; the comic teams with oddity and parody. The Beard Hunter, a Punisher-like figure wages a lonely war against facial hair; the Quiz is a supervillain that has every super power you haven't thought of; Rebis spends an entire issue having sex with hirself (which seems to be Rebis's preferred pronoun); the blue-skinned Sex Men (named Cuddle, Kiss, and Torture) show up to put a stop to outré erotics; the men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. speak entirely in acrostics; and Flex Mentallo uses his power of muscle mystery to turn the Pentagon into a circle.

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This is all meant to be very meta. In one arc, the Doom Patrol is able to stop an imaginary world from taking over the real world when the team finds a black book that tells the story of a black book about an imaginary world taking over the real world. The painting that ate Paris is recursive; it's a painting of a painting of a painting, embedded, of course, in a comic book (showing the image of a painting). The final battle in the comic is against a monster called the Candlemaker, who keeps saying things like, "This world is only one of many, none of them real. I make them all." He's all-powerful in part, it seems, because he knows he's in a comic.