| Scissormen | |
|---|---|
| Publication information | |
| Publisher | DC Comics |
| First appearance | Doom Patrol vol. 2, #19 (February 1989) |
| Created by | Grant Morrison |
| Characteristics | |
| Place of origin | Orqwith |
In the DC comic book Doom Patrol, the Scissormen are a fictional race of beings that come from the metafictional city of Orqwith.
The authors of the book of Orqwith (and Grant Morrison, writer of the comic) based the Scissormen on The Tailor from The Tale of Little Suck-a-Thumb in the children's picture book Struwwelpeter. They function as Orqwith's answer to the Spanish Inquisition, attacking non-fictional entities in the 'real' world. They attack using the large scissors they have in place of hands which they use to literally cut people out of reality, leaving a white outline where they were, much like cutting a picture out of a magazine.
The Scissormen are clothed in red and black, and have featureless faces apparently covered in the same material. They speak in a seemingly random series of words when they talk, resembling dada poetry, created by cutting up text and rearranging its constituent words in a random order. Morrison got these suggestions from his word processor's spell check feature[1]. They are shaped like men but when struck hard enough they are defeated and seem to leave behind nothing but cloth. They were finally destroyed along with Orqwith when the story was destroyed by a contradiction revealed in the solution to a variation on a traditional riddle.