Flex Mentallo: Great comic, or the greatest comic?
Jacobkosh
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
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"It's funny how that's what's left at the end, isn't it? All the stupid stuff. Not "War and Peace," not James Joyce, just the comics. The superheroes.
"When you think about it, they're, like, archetypal...they come right up from the depths, those things...how can they say that stuff's stupid? Why do people get so ashamed of things?"
A good-hearted 1950's superhero embarks on a quest through an increasingly surreal modern world to find his long-lost crimefighting partner.
Meanwhile, in the real world, a musician dying of an overdose in a rainsoaked alley pours out his last thoughts to a suicide hotline - thoughts that turn increasingly to the comic book he drew as a kid, a comic about a hero named Flex Mentallo.
If The Invisibles is Morrison's Hamlet, his giant magnum opus, Flex Mentallo is his sonnet 18 - short but oh so sharp, deeply revealing and intensely powerful. It's my favorite of his books, and one of my top three favorite comics ever. It's an unashamed and unapologetic love letter to comic books, superheroes, and the transforming power of idealism. I defy anyone who's grown up with comics to turn the last page and not burst into a blubbering wreck of man-tears. And thanks to Quitely, it also looks absolutely incredible.
Too bad it's impossible to find.
DC got sued by the Atlas bodybuilding company over Morrison's parody (in Doom Patrol, where Flex was introduced) of the infamous beach-bully ads. DC won, but the court stipulated that Atlas had to be royalties on any reprints of the Flex miniseries, which DC has so far been unwilling to do. It's become a lost treasure of the comic world, the four issues fetching up to eighty bucks on eBay.
To me, this is an unconscionable tragedy. I mean, I'm sure it's probably readily available through filthy internerd piracy but of course I wouldn't know anything about that. Not that scans are a replacement for a deluxe hardcover that could sit proudly on my shelf next to From Hell, Watchmen, and The Spirit.
So who here has been lucky enough to read this? And what did you think?
(btw, for the curious, scans_daily has a selection of pages up.)
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And that last page does hit home pretty hard.
I do think it makes exponentially less sense the less you know about Marvel and DC lore. The missing letters of the SHA_A_ crossword never occurred to me until I read the explanation online, for instance.
And I mentioned that I felt it was grounded by the autobiographic elements. It's a really solid piece of work that doesn't feature the same weaknesses you might find in Morrison's other stuff (too many plot elements cluttering up a story, mildly anticlimactic/disappointing endings etc.).
I'd definitely agree about the experience being enhanced by some comic book lore. I'd also imagine it would never have had the same impact on me had I never been an (occasionally) lonely kid taking solace in his comics when things got a little tougher. That I'm Glaswegian - like Morrison, Quitely and Wally (by proxy) - adds another personal dimension to the story.
It's basically a sincere, heartfelt love-letter to the medium; to the elements that make comic books more than the sum of their parts to become something, for want of a better word, magical. Especially to a child.
So, in summary: Flex Mentallo is A-OK by me.
And deserves to be read by anyone who's ever felt close to a character in a funnybook.
Most important Morrison comic about Morrison and comics.
Needs to be fucking in print.
Sigh.
Woo.
OK so that is the very last page?
We aren't allowed to have those things here. You should edit your post
hey now
what happened
It's simply amazing.
didn't they finally clear up the legal issues?
Stick it in the last DP trade
people will read it, and maybe, then decide to pick up the earlier DP trades
take a second to reflect on how utterly amazing a life you are leading where something like this is about to happen when you are around to see it. I cannot wait to see what happens when a new generation of readers encounters this book. And I can't wait to see the kinds of amazing things those readers will go on to make.
they are surprisingly similar in a lot of ways, with plot elements and so forth.
but All-Star is very much a Superman story, like the ultimate Superman story, where Flex is kind of a meta-story about superhero comics in general. It's about why they're great and why people love them and so forth, and it is hugely autobiographical about Grant Morrison. So it's not as epic and sweeping as ASS, but it is very personal and emotional and I dare anyone to get to the last page without crying like a girl.
I tend to think that All-Star Superman is more than the ultimate Superman story, although it is certainly that. It seems to me that it is Morrison's riff on the literal super, or ideal, man, the exemplar that we should strive to emulate.
Protip: the superman and the ideal (ultimate) man are very different, in fact opposed, concepts. A key element of the Superman character (and in Morrison's treatment of it) is that he is not quantatively better than normal men, but qualitatively better.
In essense, to be the best a man can be is not, by definition, to be above (super) man; to be a true superman, one must cease to be a man. I think Morrison understands this, and it's a serious misreading to imagine Morrison's Superman is an 'ideal' man who we should strive to emulate.
Seriously, dude?
I will believe it when it is in my hands. Marshall Law was going to get a hardcover omnibus in 2010, Battling Boy was going to come out in... 2007 I think, the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stuff was first advertised as a complete graphic novel rather than three or four graphic novellas... I will believe it when I have it in my hands.
what, are you arguing that Hamlet isn't Shakespeare's magnum opus? I guess the other nominee would be, what, the Henry plays? VI is super extra boring. :P
I believe he's saying that The Invisibles isn't Morrison's Hamlet
I personally haven't read Invisibles, but I'd say All Star Superman was his
You make two points here, and I disagree with both of them. First, you state that the "superman" and the ideal man are opposed concepts. If we're using Nietzsche's conception of the superman, you may be right. Despite the fact that Morrison puts Nietzsche into issue 10, however, I think it's a mistake to assume that Superman shares any qualities with Nietzsche's superman beyond the name. The whole tenor of the series is that the "super" in Superman refers to the ideal, not to any concept that Superman is "above" us.
Second, to the extent you claim that Morrison's Superman is not an ideal that we should strive to emulate, well, I can't disagree more.
Will I glean anything extra from reading the Doom Patrol run before then, or does this stand alone pretty well?
This seems like part of a trilogy with Seaguy and All Star Superman, from what you guys have said in this thread.
It's connected with Doom Patrol by name only - in Doom Patrol, Flex was a homemade comic book character willed into 'real life' (aka the DC Universe) by the psychic powers of a kid named Wally Sage, and in Flex Mentallo Wally Sage is a grown man in the actual real world and Flex is a comic book character in an archetypal comic book world that is not necessarily the DCU (but he has the same origin in that world, that a kid named Wally Sage brought him into existence etc etc).
Just to get off topic, because it's days later and way too late in the evening/early in the morn, the other nominees are, according to my theatre school professors:
- Othello
- Macbeth
- King Lear
All show a similar level of accomplishment and characterization as well as theatricality. In particular the case for Lear as the best male part ever written stands up pretty strongly against Hamlet, if only because the actor playing him will be so much older and, so, more capable. If you allow comedies their nomination, Midsummer probably gets a nod as well.
However if you actually read the plays and study the history the one that comes out most clearly as Shakespeare's magnum opus proper is The Tempest, which is a pretty deeply personal reflection by the artist on creation and comes very late in the canon, meaning he's a much more accomplished writer during its composition. Hamlet is a great part, but the play itself cleaves pretty closely to a story that was probably nearly a thousand years old at the time, so it had some proven staying power already and may not be the best example of the Bard's particular strengths.
All of which is a way of saying just because something is good or "the best" doesn't make it the one thing to look at when you want to really understand what someone is doing.
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