In fact, I will openly admit: if not for piracy, I would never have read “Flex Mentallo”, and I can think of a few people who could admit to the same thing.
Yet with the hardcover in shops and on stands everywhere, it was certainly high time to revisit this work with older and (hopefully) wiser eyes than my previous encounters with the book. Take a look behind the cut for my journey with “Flex,” some thoughts on the book and why you without a doubt want to add it to your collection.
Some spoilers are discussed, but mostly thematic spoilers as opposed to plot spoilers (although there are a couple, admittedly). Nothing to ostensibly ruin your experience with this multi-layered story, but we respect your right to avoiding spoilers regardless.
The first time I read “Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery,” I am happy to admit I didn’t “get it.” I read it in a very straightforward fashion, having recently finished “the Filth” and looking openly for more like it and other Morrison books I had devoured in a short period of time. I came across Morrison’s body of work largely by accident, but I quickly moved around buying up everything I could find. With “Flex,” though, I remember coming away fairly cold. I had just read things like “We3”, “the Filth” and “Mystery Play” as well as some (not all) of “the Invisibles” and found them all so exciting, and I’d heard such praise for “Flex”, that I could readily see I was missing something, despite not really knowing what. I moved on.
Since then, I’ve read it on multiple occasions (again, thanks to piracy), and each time I come away with something new. I notice little details, I “get” elements of the story I didn’t before and my appreciation for the book grows exponentially with each go at it. Holding the book in my hands and flipping through the pages, however, results in a completely different experience; now, not only do I like and respect the book, but I finally truly love it.
Perhaps on my own level I wasn’t ready for “Flex Mentallo,” as much as anyone can be “ready” for something. What’s different between myself now and then, at least since the time I first read “Flex,” is a fundamentally different approach to comics, let alone Morrison’s body of work. I’ve finished reading every major Morrison work in comics (in addition to a bevy of less famous or noteworthy comics — really, any US published comic I can get my hands on), I’ve read several analytical and critical essays on him and his work, and I would like to believe that I have developed a knowledgable database within my own mind in the best ways to tackle Morrison’s various work. It’s this database that helped me throughout my latest read of “Flex” (which was, admittedly, the slowest and most carefully analytic read I’d ever done on the series), and it’s through this that I’ve come away incredibly fulfilled.
…which brings us to actually talking about “Flex Mentallo” and not just talking about talking about “Flex Mentallo.”
At its most basic plot, “Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery” is about the aforementioned fictional character living within the “real world” and trying to unravel the truth behind a mystery when he spots another character he knew to be fictional within the real world. At the same time, suicidal writer Wallace Sage, the creator of Flex Mentallo, is dying in an alley, recounting to a samaritan on the other end of a phone his life story. The two stories are clearly intertwined from the beginning, but as they begin to dovetail towards one another the reality of the story begins to blend with the fiction and vice versa, and we’re given a beautifully crafted tale that in no short terms is one of the best comics about comics I’ve ever read.
Continued belowThe book, really, is somewhat three-fold. The most apparent quality of the book is its ode to the superheroic and to heroes. One of the key elements of the book is that the superheroes have disappeared and abandoned the “regular people,” existing only in shadows or memories or hidden in the skies and underground. While there are several super-people within the story, Flex stands as the central and most visible one, and he in turn begins to exemplify the qualities that Morrison has shown on multiple occasions to be the ultimate or perfect hero. He’s both a parody (obviously of the Mac from Charles Atlas’ “The Insult That Made Mac a Man”, as well as musclebound superheroes in general) and the ultimate foil for every other satirical character to be placed against (a buff man in his underwear against costumed fetishists) who ultimately ends up as a beacon of hope against an otherwise dark or pessimistic culture going against him.
In fact, in many ways it appears that Morrison writes Flex with the same sense of awe and reverence that he would later us when writing Superman in “All Star Superman.” He’s a man who drinks milk at a bar and only wants to protect and help us, as opposed to indulging in abuse of his power, and he’s the perfect illustration of Superman in that way — a Golden Age character who pushes through the ages to retain that one ever-endearing quality despite being placed in era after era of cynicism and anti-hero revelry.
The book also plays off the fictional element of superheroes and how, in many ways, they are just as real as anything else we encounter. Characters exist on a page, but they also exist within us as ideas and inspiration, and that aspect plays a major role in the outcome of “Flex Mentallo” — but to avoid giving everything about the book away to those who have not read it, I’ll refrain from elaborating further here.
At an another layer down, the book is a rather critical analysis of the various ages of superheroes, specifically directed towards DC. All of “Flex” is somewhat a satire of DC’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, which the book wags a muscle-bound finger at through numerous sequences (particularly one featuring infinite earths colliding), but as much as it is a critique on what had happened with superhero comics, “Flex Mentallo’s” goal is to show in so many panels how we got to where we are in the first place. The book’s four issues can be easily broken apart as specific commentary on the Golden Age, Silver Age, the Modern (or “Dark”) Age, and then the future, in that order:
- Issue #1, Golden Age: As the book begins, the light-hearted tone and idealistic optimism of the Golden Age is felt everywhere, both with the Fact’s goofy bombs, Mentallo’s hopeful and upbeat attitude and little nods to famous superheroes (with a deliberately placed “boy becoming a superhero/god” character making an “appearance”) that helped define the fantasy of men and women in brightly colored suits fighting for ideas.
Issue #2, Silver Age: When the second issue begins, we’re pushed into the Silver Age, which had a more specific slant towards science-fiction and the generally weird, illustrated both with Mentallium Man and the former astronaut’s speech on what happened to all the superheroes, as well as a beautiful sequence of a character becoming “cosmically aware”. There’s even a nice and quirky nod towards the penchant of having multiple stories with multiple versions of characters, none of which added up on an ostensible timeline before everything came clashing against the 80’s and the introduction of singular, uniform continuity (which is something Morrison butted against on multiple occasions throughout his later work, especially when it came to his “Batman” run). - Issue #3, Modern/”Dark” Age: The book is thrust into the Modern Age (or whatever it’s called) that is defined by the advent of talents like Frank Miller and the push for “grim and gritty” elements within comics (which are still aggrandized today, truth be told). The issue revels in the seedy elements that comics had come to idolize, replacing the Fact’s joke bombs from the beginning with fear of nuclear war, emphasizing the now-famous and iconic use of characters in the dark against lightning (the cover to the issue an obvious nod to “Dark Knight Returns”) and culminating in Mentallo, the Golden Age archetype, walking through Knight Club, a place for the remaining superheroes to indulge in their sexual fetishes long before Garth Ennis and “The Boys” had Herogasm. Continued below
- Issue #4, the Future: Finally, the book gives us the final issue that pushes towards the unknown, and where Morrison and Quitely assumedly hoped superhero stories would move towards in the future – the abandonment of excessive realism, the advent of imagination as central thesis to all comics and the return of the superhero. That entire idea is also beautifully rendered on the cover of the issue (pictured above and to the left), featuring Flex falling into the unknown, disassembled and rearranged by panels with a clear-yet-unclear structure to his very being.
Just to point out a few instances, anyway.
At the deepest element, though, and the least apparent one (which I admittedly only really learned about/realized from watching the biographical Morrison film Talking with Gods), the book is somewhat auto-biographical of Morrison and Quitely, both under influence of their actual lives and that of the life of any comic creator. Elements of Sage, both physically and within his fictional history, directly reflect both Morrison and Quitely, and elements of Morrison’s own upbringing directly seep into the book — his parents and their fear/actions against the government and The Bomb, war literature he grew up with (specifically of the skeleton riding the black horse), the escapism comics gave and the hope heroes inspired. The film Talking with Gods shows off multiple elements through “Flex” represents Morrison specifically, let alone his semi-autobiographical book “Supergods”, but all of it when known add an interesting little element to the character of Sage and what he ends up doing.
On a more universal level, though, Sage is perhaps every comic book fan. Sage is both a writer and an illustrator who “created” the characters within the book, as well as a struggling musician thriving off his pain. Sage himself is an archetype as much as Flex Mentallo is, and while the book’s initial selling point is its deconstruction of superheroes, it’s the character of Sage who truly becomes the focal element of relevance. Flex Mentallo is the ideal optimistic archetype, but Sage is the modern day everyman faced with cynicism and realism. We can relate to Sage as we’ve all been there; who reading comics hasn’t doodled their own superheroes, created their own mythology and used both that and your weekly consumption of books as escapism or a crutch? Who can’t relate to that?
Of course, none of that really elaborates on why this is a recommendation. At this point, really, I’m more lecturing about all I think I know about the book, as opposed to sharing why I want you to read it, so let’s change that:
All things considered, “Flex Mentallo” is one of the best deconstructions of comics and comic culture I’ve ever seen. It’s long been a trope that non-mainstream superheroes and independent characters could be used to analyze and tear apart the mainstream, both in terms of interior comic content and the world that helped create it. We’ve seen it ad nauseam at this point, from “Watchmen” to “the Authority”, “Powers” and now books like “Kick-Ass” and “Superbia”, and while beginning as a clever way for writers to say something about these characters within our culture, some of these books have veered away from satire and moved obnoxiously into parody (specifically “Kick-Ass”). It’s a trope that has been done to death and I fear it’s a device with nothing left to say, left only for “bitter adolescent boys” who “confuse realism with cynicism,” to borrow a phrase.
But “Mentallo” did it the best, and it did it 15 years ago.
Through a combination of Morrison’s impeccable writing abilities and Quitely’s gorgeous and hyper-evocative artwork, “Flex Mentallo” is an absolute tearjerker of a book that reminds me and you and everyone we know just what’s so great superheroes in the first place. If you’re reading comic books today, it is perhaps a universal truth that we all got here (literally) through superheroes (outside of a few exceptions, like those who grew up with “Tintin” for example). Superheroes are, in so many words, a unifying factor for those reading comic books, and given that Marvel and DC are both culpable of replacing the heart of superheroes with “whatever sells best,” it’s nice to get a healthy injection of some of the best that the sequential medium has to offer.
Continued belowAnd really, at a better possible time this book could not possibly come out. The state of DC when the book came out and the state of DC today are staggeringly different, to a fairly disheartening extent. With DC’s milieu of subpar books over-reliant on the “grim and gritty” attitude mixed with the gratuitous personification of the “COOL!” flashiness of 90’s comics (the pivotal example of style over substance), Morrison’s good-but-not-great “Action Comics” work (which truly suffers from endless comparisons to “All Star Superman”, though I suppose that’s inescapable), and Quitely’s upcoming series with Mark Millar (which, as much as I cross my fingers and hope beyond hoping that it will be great, I highly doubt it will be because today’s Millar is writing it instead of the man who wrote “The Authority”), it’s nice to remember a better time.
The things that “Flex Mentallo” could teach us about where we went wrong could probably fill a few volumes worth of books, but I suppose that’ll be a discussion for another day. In the mean time, just go get yourself a copy. We’ve all earned it.
——
As a parting note, I’m happy to admit that as much as I love the man’s body of work, have a good grasp on the recurring themes and a sharp eye towards tackling some of the “more difficult” books, I’m not an expert. Heck, a quick Google search will reveal Morrison fans who are even more diehard than I am about analyzing his fiction and sharing that with readers (names like Timothy Callahan and David Uzumeri come to mind). Yet, regardless of whether I can get my points across as eloquently or intelligently as they can, I am never the less extremely passionate about my adamant love for these books. Individually they each changed aspects of how I view comics, let alone as a whole, and re-reading “Flex Mentallo” for the umpteen-billionth time finally in paper form and not via a screen or an iPad reawakens a love affair I’d forgotten.
If the inherent purpose of Friday Rec is to recommend something on a Friday before people leave the office, shut down the computers and go do something more interesting all weekend, I don’t think I could recommend grabbing “Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery” any more earnestly than what I’ve just tried to do. Take that as you will.
