Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Frank Quitely
Letterer: Ellie De Ville
Colorist: Tom McGraw
Four-issue miniseries
Published by DC Comics/Vertigo, 1996
$2.50 each

Reviewed by Gregory Dickens

Between the overburdened Robotman, diabolical Chief and industrial insectoid telephone operators of DOOM PATROL and the majestic evolutions brought about by transvestite shamans of INVISIBLES, is this gem of a comic, a four-issue, four-color treatise on the potential of superheroes as Jungian symbols of power.

I see you. Looking at the first sentence of this review. Rolling your eyes in your head and mumbling, "Jesus, just tell me if I should buy the damn thing already. It's a comic book, not the Book of goddamn Kells."

But what if it was? What if all comics were? This is what FLEX MENTALLO is about.

Wally Sage is a man on the verge of collapse. His girl's left him, his home's a shambles, his most creative period is decades behind him. He swallows a bottle of pills and chases it with vodka and drugs and rambles his last minutes away on the phone with a volunteer counselor. Meanwhile, somewhere else, Flex Mentallo, a character created and brought to life by Sage, is finding evidence that his previously fictional compadres have also become real. The millennial fears are spiking, chaos seems a blink away and someone is leaving fake bombs in major metropolitan sites. What to do?

"It was so simple. Who always saves the world? The superheroes, that's who ... "

And so Flex, the Man of Muscle Mystery goes to work.

Backtrack a bit.

In DOOM PATROL, Flex Mentallo is a homeless amnesiac who suddenly recalls his origins during a fight against the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. He remembers being the quintessential 98-pound weakling bullied at the beach. Given access through a mail-order book, he discovers the secret to accessing "muscle mystery. By flexing his muscles, he would activate his "Hero of the Beach" halo and pose away the evils of the world. Mentallo recalls discovering a mystical horror lurking beneath the Pentagon and his failed attempt to use his mental muscle to change the shape of the Pentagon. By doing so, the summoned power could no longer be harnessed. Didn't work. So he attacked the power directly and ... was sent away devoid of his identity.

Having regained his right mind and power, he leads the Doom Patrol against the clockwork hive lurking in the phone lines. He also finds Wally Sage, who used his magical green marker as a child to create Flex in his comics. The things beneath the Pentagon are using Wally's mental abilities to power their machinery. Flex regains his power, Wally is freed, the bad guys thumped and all is well.

Now Flex emerges in his own comic. But is his world inside Wally's comic? And what of the Legion of Legions who seem to be creeping into Wally's world and skittering around Flex's?

There's a lot of elements here seen on a grander scale in INVISIBLES: an exploration into the power of language, layered realities, repressed memories filtered for easier acceptance, symbolism and grand pop identities. INVISIBLES has spies and sybarites. FLEX MENTALLO has The Blue Blonde, Grasshopper Girl, Lord Limbo and Origami, the Folding Man. Also evident in both titles is the spherical cosmic traffic light. In INVISIBLES it's Barbelith, the evolutionary placenta on the other side of the moon. In FLEX MENTALLO it's a hospital light seen by Wally as "an alien intelligence, watching me, conducting some kind of experiment on me." In INVISIBLES Barbelith scans an individual with green light and changes to red to denote a viable advancement of consciousness. Here the hospital light shifts to a school bell in consecutive panels as we move from Wally's world to Flex's.

There's a lot of world shifting. Flex and Wally move between worlds as Flex investigates the mystery outside and Wally chases his interior enigma. What memory is he repressing? What happened to him in that room when he was five? Why does he fear the ceramic aquarium castles? And what effects does his stupor and realizations have on Flex's quest?

It helps with this kind of book -- one that requires multiple readings and introduces logics indigenous to each new reality -- to have a reference, an association. Try this. Remember how in THE NEVERENDING STORY we had Bastian reading about the warrior Atreju and how his decisions affected Atreju's efforts to fight the destruction of the fairyland? Bingo. Wally = Bastian. Atreju = Flex. Distinct facets of the same personality thinking separately but revolving on the same axis.

In fact, very bingo. The Legion of Legions is fighting against the Absolute, a void wiping out realities and universes as it spreads across Creation. The Legion reveals to Flex that they actually existed in Wally's reality before the Absolute knocked them out of phase. They launch an effort on a quantum level to rewire the kids to remember the heroes back into existence. The comic book creators are sparked by their buried memories of a world with heroes and the kids open up each comic, dusting off a subconscious assurance that such stuff was real and should be again.

However the maturity of the children falls into adolescent fantasies. The comics likewise entered phases like Silver Age and the Grim'n'Gritty as the audiences got older and demanded stories to mirror their social obstacles, be it pessimism, sexuality and the awareness of warfare and the bomb with a capital "b." This severed the link between the Legion reality and Wally's and no one has yet mustered up enough belief that such a world could exist. The nostalgia for comics and their glamour stunts some readers from connecting fully to the world. It numbs their taste for reality.

"How could you love anybody the way you loved Thundergirl," Wally recalls. "You try and it's like heaven. But it's only like heaven. It's not heaven, is it?"

The problem here is an emotional disconnect between the mature readers and their hopeful childhood mixed with the readers cut off from the world around them. Wally wonders aloud as to the reason.

"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 super heroes. ... Why do people get so ashamed of things? ... I mean, I really love those comics." If the adult Wally is the manifestation of emotional blocks, dashed dreams and half-assed aspirations, then Flex -- impossibly proportioned, hair perfect, leopard shorts from a circus strongman -- is pure optimism and confidence. They're both try to unstick the dread and angst of a lifetime, buried somewhere in Wally's mind. And Wally's delirium provides an aperture.

"Haven't you ever felt like there's something missing?" he asks. "No. The world doesn't have to be the way it is. We can be them."

Flex, loosed from a fictional world and facing the infringing reality Wally dwells in, echoes the sentiment. "Whatever happened to the good old days? The heroes and villains, the team-ups and dream-ups? Seems to rain all the time. Never seems to get light."

But Wally recalls ... aliens? Something creeping into his childhood images. Something tapping him on the shoulder, holding his hand. Something shared with other children. He focuses, panicked through the haze and twisting of hallucinations and he hits a sandbar of clarity: It's a hero. An honest to God super hero. Real. Huge. Powerful. After that, it's a struggle to believe, to discern his reality from the drugs (was it drugs? was it really candy all along?). Is he breaking down or finally coagulating? It's primal dream therapy in an alley, with a faceless audience and a toy phone. It's a dream intruding, an invisible prison disintegrating, a breathless hope and the answer to the world's prayers. And all one has to do is believe. A rock song crescendo. A comic book splash page. It's David Bowie lyrics come to life.

We can be heroes.

God bless Morrison's drug-soaked mind. He keeps pumping out material blending universal elements from every comic reader's experience and melding it with divided personalities and an assurance that within us all is the potential to be greater, to think a better world into existence. We've seen it in each of his comics mentioned above, from Danny the World to Ragged Robin to Dad's Phantom and G Whiz. And either he's taken just enough hallucinogens to maintain his intellect or he's so far gone he's brilliant, but he's weaving some masterfully intricate elements through his comics and they're practically glowing in FLEX MENTALLO.

The power of language is exercised with the trigger word, the magic incantation to bring the heroes to reality. It's displayed in pieces in a crossword puzzle: SHA_A_. Ah, Captain Marvel, you're thinking. Wrongo. It's SHAMAN, the title of a magician who can bring miracles to our world. The Fact, a Claude Rains super hero, bedevils Flex by speaking backward, sideways and quasiphonetically, giving him the answer to the Legion's ploy, masked but easily solved. "Nyerdlithc vauh smyerd" is "children have dreams." "Puh warg ahven" is "never grow up."

There's a great many double-meaning panels in the comic. In one, young Wally is walking through a dream reality looking for answers. He sees an isolated castle wherein lives the teen Wally who can't accept the heroes' existence. Young Wally points to the castle, saying, "I made it," meaning he's come to end of his journey and he's aware he's responsible for the structure's existence.

Morrison breaks each issue into an encapsulation of comics. Issue one is the initiation explosion of visions each new reader encounters. Issue two begins with the words "Silver. Everything's flowing ... It's so weird" mirroring the bizarre Silver Age tenants of "strange transformations, mulitple realities, dreams, hoaxes ... always changing shape." Wally suggests the comic creators of the time prophesy the hallucinations of recreational drugs. They "intuited the social transformation in their work ... "

Issue three sports a cover tipping its hat to BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and beginning with "I don't believe in super heroes." It's the Grim '80s with apathy, violence and heavy metaphors. Flex moves through sewers and finds an enclave of heroes writhing in sex and drug use. "Luscious snakebitches in red rubber. Sexy telepaths stripping your mind naked. Fredric Wertham was fucking right!" The issue ends with the five-year-old Wally holding Lord Limbo's hand as the latter asks "remember?" It's the siren song of simpler times and purer tales in the medium.

Issue four begins with a cosmic crisis, straight out of crossover hell and bad enough to make Galactus pee his purple loincloth but bubbling with Vertigo vocabulary. "The polyverse faces complete annihilation. Endless parallel realities consumed by a force beyond understanding ... the end of all life everywhere." This is the crashing reality issue where things have multiple meanings, universes glide past each other and the reader is bounced through staccato panelwork of juggled realities.

And some realities are created on purpose. "Imagine a jail cell, yeah? A fallout shelter, where the walls are covered with so many drawings you can't tell it's a prison anymore." Match that with the Hoaxster's hypnosis. "You can make people accept anything as anything else ... believe it's your life? It's all a hoax, lieutenant." Sounds quite MATRIX-y, eh? Tack onto that a castle on the hill straight out of Philip K. Dick's novel where realities fight for their lives.

Like many Morrison works, influences creep in like vapors and references crash on the shore. A scared farmer builds a rocket to blast his son into space to escape the end of the world. Hoaxter yells "my hoax-sense is jangling!" Various discovered hero paraphernalia include "yellow boots with ridged fireproof treads." The amassed heroes resembled many a classic hero and some are great designs on their own. The last word balloon contains "look up," harkening back to Alan Moore's MIRACLEMAN coda to the ability of focus and desire to improve the world.

Credit for some of those must go to artist Quitely. This, I believe, was his big break in U.S. comics, but I was aching to see his art after being teased by a few pages in various Paradox Press BIG BOOKS. I love his linework and the universes of heroes shows off his imagination. FLEX MENTALLO is a spectacle comic with a message, eye-popping and mind-blowing. Could you ask for more? Really? Then go read INVISIBLES. FLEX MENTALLO's fractured realities make for a good scrimmage before diving into Morrison's three-volume work.

Just last month, DC Comics was spared a lawsuit from the Charles Atlas company alleging FLEX MENTALLO damaging the image of Charles Atlas, whose classic comic ad inspired the character. With this suit dismissed, maybe now we can see the collected Flex miniseries. It deserves a wider audience and Morrison's post-JLA stature in the industry would call for as much presentation of his past works, one would assume. But there's a greater reason to dust off this title.

FLEX MENTALLO isn't just a dissection of comic history or an autobiographical look at their influence. It's a paean to their ideals and their potential as a moral primer and creative touchstone. All one has to do, says Wally, Flex and Limbo, is read and believe and remember.

Recommended.

Gregory Dickens is a staff writer for PopImage.

Note to readers: You may need some help piecing together the story. If so, take a look at page-by-page notes at the Annotated Flex Mentallo. It's very legible, concise and handy as all get out.