Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery

Flex Mentallo #1-4

by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely (Illustrator)

Once he was Hero of the Beach...and of the Doom Patrol. Now Flex Mentallo, the Man of Muscle Mystery, returns to investigate the sinister dealings of his former comrade, The Fact, and a mysterious rock star whose connection to Flex may holding the key to saving them both.



This fast-paced tale twists super-hero tropes, introducing one mind-boggling concept after another.



This long-asked-for Vertigo title is collected at last, presenting an early collaboration between writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely, who would win much acclaim on ALL-STAR SUPERMAN.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Dc Comics, Superheroes, Comic Book, Fiction, Fantasy

127 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 6, 2014

About the author

Grant Morrison has been working with DC Comics for twenty five years, after beginning his American comics career with acclaimed runs on ANIMAL MAN and DOOM PATROL. Since then he has written such best-selling series as JLA, BATMAN and New X-Men, as well as such creator-owned works as THE INVISIBLES, SEAGUY, THE FILTH, WE3 and JOE THE BARBARIAN. In addition to expanding the DC Universe through titles ranging from the Eisner Award-winning SEVEN SOLDIERS and ALL-STAR SUPERMAN to the reality-shattering epic of FINAL CRISIS, he has also reinvented the worlds of the Dark Knight Detective in BATMAN AND ROBIN and BATMAN, INCORPORATED and the Man of Steel in The New 52 ACTION COMICS.

In his secret identity, Morrison is a "counterculture" spokesperson, a musician, an award-winning playwright and a chaos magician. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Supergods, a groundbreaking psycho-historic mapping of the superhero as a cultural organism. He divides his time between their homes in Los Angeles and Scotland.

Reviews

[Baba · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Morrison / Quitely dream team re-imagine a magical realist take on Flex Mentallo from the Doom Patrol series in his own book. Honestly... I am not totally sure what it all means, but quite interesting none the less. 7 out of 12, Three Stars.

2013 read

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

who is this "Man of Muscle Mystery" - and when he flexes, does he change reality? what is reality? can you show me?



what is a superhero? what is a person? what is a figment of the imagination if that figment is the projection of all we could be, all we can aspire to, all we can fail at, all that exists beyond our understanding? what is a jack-off fantasy template and what is a series of familiar moving images that provide us some small, temporary moments of comfort or satisfaction?



can you be a pessimist and also a realist? can you be cynical and idealistic at the same time? can fantasy be commodity, can it be disposable pop debris and yet also the source of creativity, something transformative, a way to dream the future or even live the present... something life-affirming while also something that is all too disposable - trash?

what is a "fact" and does a fact always retain its nature? can a fact be malleable? what is the difference between pastiche and parody? who is the Man in the Moon and do dreamers dream their own destruction because their dreams replace reality? what is this so-called "reality" anyway?



if you exist in one moment in time do you therefore exist throughout all of time?

hey is that orgy an adventure? do you want to join in or do you want to turn away? is turning an orgy into a massacre just a different sort of adventure?

what is a deconstruction? can you reconstruct a deconstruction? is a deconstruction its own kind of construction?

is every story its own form of reality? is every story equally real?



are you the sum of your history? are you what you are at this very point in time and nothing more? are you the image that you have created, an image that is given life because you have made it so? what if one important thing in your life, something that happened early on, something powerful, resonant, even traumatic... what if that thing was changed, what if what happened didn't happen or happened differently? what would you be like then? what would that version of you look like? would you still be you? if not, then who? what would your dreams look like? would this new version of you have the same sort of dreams?



what is good, what is evil, what is man, what is woman, what is gender, what is orientation, what is a society, what is an individual, what is the future, what is the past, what is life, what is death - and can we just mix and match all of those things together, as we see fit? and what is an Absolute? does that even exist? oh, it does? well who the fuck are you?

what is chaos magic?

what is a hypersigil?

what has happened 32 times and why does 3 + 2 = 5 = the number of sides of the Pentagon, and that's why the Pentagon must be destroyed?



the answers to all of those questions can not be found between the pages of

FLEX MENTALLO: MAN OF MUSCLE MYSTERY!

[Andrés · Rating 5 out of 5]

More than a review, this is my attempt to rationalize Grant Morrison's script of Flex Mentallo, so it's probably doomed to fail. This is not a resume of the plot of the comic page by page, but a post-construction I have dared to elaborate after reading the story three or four times, in different directions and from different angles. In my view, there is no other way to approach this work, due to the convoluted nature of the story.

Compared to Morrison's script, David Lynch's "Inland Empire" is plain linear storytelling.

I will try to put some order into this series by exploiting the obvious similarities of the "Flex Mentallo" story with the famous DC series titled "Crisis on Infinite Earths". In "Crisis..." there was a series of parallel universes (the DC multiverse) that were being devoured and destroyed one by one. Finally the DC superheros save the day and a new reality starts. Here, things happen a little different.

So, let's go. Spoilers abound (if the world "spoiler" means something in a morrisonian context):

Things start with a catastrophe menacing parallel universes. This multiplicity of universes, called the polyverse, is being destroyed by an evil force named "The Absolute". The superheroes of this polyverse ("The Legion of Legions") are failing to stop that evil force. As a consequence, the polyverse will disappear, and the Absolute will be the only reality from now on.

Before everything collapses, however, the superheroes develop a plan to at least save themselves (somehow) by self-mailing to a new kind of reality outside their doomed polyverse and within The Absolute. As part of the plan, two League members, Nanoman and Minimiss (how could someone not to love those names?), weaving through the spacetime of The Absolute, create a new world: the "real" universe, where we live. Now it seems that Legion members have some place to go. However, something went wrong. At the time of creation, parts of this new universe entered into a "quantum coma", neither alive or dead, like Schrödinger's cat. Superheroes arrive, but they are doomed to live in a strange state called "fictional", the place where all fictions live.

The Legion will not be able to actually become real until someone in the "real" reality will decide one way or the other, by virtue of a magic word that will break the quantum coma. However, that magic word seems to exist only in that fictional state, as the solution to a crossword in the hands of a misterious shazam-like retired superhero. Someone in reality should pronounce that word and bring the heroes into life.

Close to Sirius, Legion members are waiting for someone to remember them and bring them to reality. For that to happen, the barriers between fiction and reality must broke, and a child named Wally (Wallace Sage) seems to be the perfect person for the task. The heroes manifest to Wally at critical points in his life, like a possible child abuse experience. During that experience we see a green-caped guy (the leader of the Legion) holding Wally's hand and taking him to a tour of the fictional world ("Welcome to… Where you-get-your-ideas"). It seems that those God-like fictional characters not only created our reality, but they take care of it (providence). They sometimes "come" to our world to help us, to help people like Wally to cope with his life.

The green-caped hero shows Wally the fabric of our reality, and how they have been transmitting fictional ideas into this reality they created. Wally is told that he is the one that will be able to make them real again ("Don't be afraid: before it was a bomb, the bomb was an idea").

Wally, inspired by the Legion, draws comics and creates new characters like Flex Mentallo. As such, Flex lives in a fictionary world, just like the Legion, but with little contact with them. In Flex's fictionary world, the Legion is a legendary entity that few people was able to see, but sometimes they manifest themselves through epiphanies, drug induced hallucinations, appearance to space travellers, etc. It seems that in the fictionary world there are parallel universes, so Flex does not mix with the Legion (in the same way that Sherlock Holmes does not mix with the characters in, say, The Walking Dead), but connections are not forbidden…

However, as Wally grows up, he abandons his love of superheroes. That will lead Flex Mentallo's world to a near-collapse, an "End Is Near" status, very similar to the state of the world in Alan Moore's "Watchmen". But another character created by Wally, called The Fact, believes that the fictional world created by Wally deserves to be saved. The Fact is very special. He was "spread and twisted" through time and space by some psychic superpowers of the adolescent Wally, as a kind of punishment that now results in a blessing. The Fact is the only character that seems to be able to jump from reality to fiction, and to move between the different fictionary worlds. His multiplicity of appearances, at different times and locations, leads Flex to consider him a collective, named Faculty X.

The-Fact-Faculty-X considers Flex to be the only hero that is able to save the world and leaves him a lot of clues to that point towards a teleport tube. Flex believes that the teleport leads to the Legion HQ but that is actually an illusion created by The Fact. Actually, the teleport is the door to the place where the "villain" lives. This villain is a moonfaced character representing the adolescent Wallace, who now negates and despises the superhero world that he previously loved and created. This moonfaced character is the one that previously punished The Fact to live in-between worlds. He claims to be the controller of the "creative engines", like an impersonation of the child's creativity Wally used to have, while reading comics with the help of his old moonfaced lamp: "I made you, Flex. I made your whole sad, scabby little world to entertain myself with and now I'm going to destroy it". The forces of creativity have also the destructive counterpart, the power of destroying its previously created worlds.

Moonface menaces Flex with a piece of coal symbolizing "The Death of Flex Mentallo". With the help of Lt. Harry and The Hoaxer (Grant Morrison himself who, being the writer, has the last word about everything that goes on here), Flex confronts moonface. In the fight that ensues, Harry is forced to shot himself and the Hoaxer simulates to collapse (but, of course, it's a hoax; no one can defeat the writer!) but finally they take control of the situation. Harry comes to life again and Flex defeats Moonface.

Removing his mask, the moonface reveals his teenage Wallace Sage identity: a person who, like many of us at that age, wanted to "destroy" everything related to superheros ("pathetic fucking power fantasies for lonely wankers…"). But Wallace is aware that, by destroying them, he somehow will die during the process. Luckily, Flex feels sorry for moonface-teenage-Wallace and helps him. Old superheroes like Flex "would never let us down". In parallel, we see how a grown-up Wallace reminds his love of comics. The piece of coal representing Flex's death now has become a diamond.

Flex, Lt. Harry and the young Wallace look towards the Earth with hope. They know that "The Fact is out there somewhere" and will rescue them. The fiction world is saved, but they are still fiction. How is The Fact going to help?

Let's see. In parallel to the "main" plot, Morrison tells us the suicide attempt of the adult Wallace Sage. When Wally grows up, he became a rockstar named Wallace Sage. He is now on the verge of suicide and talking about his past, his love of comics, child experiences, hallucinations, etc. Wallace tells his story by phone to a member of the "samaritans" help group. At the end we see that it was The Fact (as a Faculty X member) the one who the adult Wallace was talking to. The Fact knows where Wallace is and gives him a (now solved) crossword sheet with the magic word that breaks the Nanoman-Minimiss quantum weave and activates the superhero world into ours, bringing the superheroes into reality.

Utterance of this "sha_z_m" word is probably a metaphor for expressing the will of bringing fiction to reality. In any case, Wallace pronounces the word. In the final scence, we see Wallace's girlfriend waking up. Grant Morrison (as the Hoaxer) briefly appears to tell us that "They're coming through" and, looking by the window, she contemplates this new, amazing world.

That's all, or maybe not. I surely left a lot of things without comment (that dreamy world, with that castle above it). This is not an easy read by any matters, but it's an amazing re-read or re-re-read. The list of topics covered by this comic masterpiece is overwhelming: Fiction, reality, many-worlds, adolescence, cosmogony, love-hate of comics, the power of the writer over their characters, comic history, we humans as characters created by someone else, drugs, suicide, religion, gnosticism (our world was created by a bunch of imperfect Gods), childhood, abuse, fiction as a way to cope with reality, superheroes and their deconstructed counterparts, naivety, dreams, going back to childhood, the writing experience, writer-character relationships, fiction as hallucination and the other way round, etc., etc. In a word, Morrison at his finest.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

2017: At this point I think I've written about Flex Mentallo more than any other comic on my Goodreads -- certainly written about it more times than any other, which is so weird because I don't even feel like I like it all that much, or know it all that well.

But this is the first time I've read the book directly after reading all of Morrison's Doom Patrol, and because I still hate thinking about Flex as a 'hypersigil' comic (not as much as I hated it in 2015, because wow! But still, pretty bad), I'm interested now in thinking about how it might be a DP comic (because Flex originated there, but not because there's much reference to DP in this particular book).

At the end of Morrison's Doom Patrol, it's sort of established that there are two 'worlds': the first is the Real World, a sad and depressing place, devoid of magic or heroes, that certain issues of Morrison's comics take place in (the last issue of Animal Man and the last issue of Doom Patrol, specifically). It should be said that a character named Grant Morrison, who writes comics published by DC, lives in this Real World too. But this Real World is not, in fact, our real world, because it has some historical incongruities (mainly concerning the character of Flex, which we'll get to later). However, both Morrison's Real World and the actual real world are connected to what we might call Comic World, a shared universe of (DC) superheroes. We, in the actual real world, can read (and write) DC comic books. So can those people who live in Morrison's Real World.

These multiple worlds are very important in Flex Mentallo. Flex himself is a little confusing -- he is a DC comics character (obviously), and as such he lives in Comic World. BUT, Flex's origin dictates that he was invented by another DC comics character, Wally Sage, a superpowered little boy who brought Flex to life from his imagination, specifically when he drew Flex in a homemade comic book called My Greenest Adventure. Flex knows he is a comic book character, but he thinks he was brought out of a comic book called My Greenest Adventure and into the 'real world.' However, Flex's understanding of his 'real world' is, in fact, the Comic World (since Flex, and all the other heroes that he cohabitates with, exist only in DC comics).

Half of Flex Mentallo is the story of Flex investigating a mystery in the Comic World, which itself seems to be falling apart -- he runs into modernized, sad-sack versions of classic characters like Shazam (now a janitor) and Kamandi (now a drug addict), and it's clear that Morrison is commenting on the shift toward gritty 'realism' in DC comics of the 90s. And Flex also runs into a child version of Wally Sage, in a scene lifted directly from Morrison's Doom Patrol, just in case we're curious about how this all fits together.

The other half of the book, however, follows a grown-up Wally, who's a drug-addled musician attempting to commit suicide. There's a prose intro to the Flex collection that contextualizes this version of Wally -- it seems that he is a part of Morrison's version of the Real World, in which comic characters do not come alive and there is no magic. In Morrison's Real World, there have been a series of "Flex Mentallo" comic books, from the 40's up to the Morrison's own Doom Patrol (meaning that 'Grant Morrison,' and this version of Wally, exist in the Real World together, a further acknowledgment that the Real World is still one step removed from, um, the actual real world).

The drugged-out Real World version of Wally Sage did not write Flex Mentallo comic books until he was in his teens, and did not invent the character in a childhood drawing. But this Real World version of Wally, we learn, is still able to move back and forth between Comic World (where Flex lives) and his own Real World (sad and depressing). There is also some confusing blends of the two worlds, which results in scenes with a teenage Wally, who did invent Flex, and it's not totally clear which level of existence this version of Wally inhabits. Adult, Real World Wally is not totally in control of the ways he moves between worlds, and is also pretty confused about his past. It may be that this mercurial existence is what's driving him to suicide -- in fact, it is almost definitely that thing.

I'm not saying, when you read Flex Mentallo, that it feels in any way like a hard sci fi, reality-jumping kind of comic. It doesn't at all. In practice it is just sort of a mooshy, fluid/lazy essay on superheroes, written in comics form. But that interpretation, on its own, is (to me) kind of boring, and I'm much more interested in fleshing out how Flex is meant to function within Morrison's larger body of work, based on what's on the page.

The culmination of this book is Flex Mentallo vanquishing confusing-teen-Wally, thus allowing Real World Wally to rediscover superhero magic, and create a relatively literal conduit from the Comic World to the Real World, thus infusing the Real World with superhero magical joy.

But the ending also suggests that Morrison believes his comic -- the comic that we are reading -- is an actual magical object which can make our own real world, um, literally magical. This isn't just me hypothesizing -- that's where Morrison's hypersigilism mumbowhatsit comes in, and he's spoken about it pretty extensively in interviews.

As I've said (too much), I'm not super into the hypersigil stuff myself (because really), but I am interested in how Flex seeks to combine the layers of Morrison's worlds (the Comic World that most of his stories take place in, and the Real World that he occasionally refers to as being terrible) into one whole. Seen this way, Flex Mentallo is a sort of logical conclusion to both Animal Man and Doom Patrol, which each deal with the ways that these two worlds are worse off for not being able to coexist.

The real problem, I think, with Morrison's 'hypersigil' theory is that he has confused his invented version of the Real World with our own. I get what he is trying to say, I do -- we're all sad, we don't dream, we're rotting from the inside, we need to be magicians. I mean, cool, man, you dig? But dude, get over it already.

I think it's enough for Morrison to insist that comics themselves -- and by extension, art itself -- needs to be more willing to take risks, and to look for joy. I support that idea pretty much without reservation. Living, as we do, in a culture that had no mechanism for seeing art as anything other than commodity, Morrison's viewpoint is pretty important, and I also feel that the sheer insanity of many of his works demonstrate that he's able to walk the walk, too.

I mean, I might take issue with one of the wealthiest, most self-branding creators today telling me that it's groovy to just, yknow, dream or whatever? Like, I sense a little friction there.

But like, who am I, really? I'm just some joyless cynic out here in the real world. Ain't no comic out here saving me.
--
2015: Apparently I read and reviewed this several years back, but I don't remember doing it so I'm going to review it again and then go and reread what I wrote two years ago.

Anyway. There's several reasons Flex Mentallo is pretty good. One, it's very pretty--Frank Quitely is just about the only artist who can make Morrison's comics really sing. Second, it's very short. This is important. I don't have the timeline of Morrison's ouvre in front of me, but Flex is sort of a hybrid between his meta-superhero comics like Animal Man and All-Star Superman, and his mindfuck magickal metacomics The Invisibles and The Filth. Doom Patrol could maybe be considered one of these hybrids as well, and Flex is technically a spinoff from that series, but aside from the appearance of Flex himself, nothing links the two.

And Flex is more overtly a commentary on superherodom -- specifically, the universe-shaping importance of superherodom. Literally, a comic that posits that superhero stories shape our universe. Which is, in a way, true -- superhero stories are the closest that the West gets to modern mythology, really, but Morrison's insistence that this phenomenon is a work of actual magic, like spells-and-chanting-and-bald-comic-writers-who-think-they're-shamans, is, yknow, pretty fucking stupid.

I mean, Grant Morrison is not the only comic writer who thinks he's a magician and aspires to be a cult leader. Something about funnybooks just brings this out in white dudes, from Dave Sim to Alan Moore to Neil Gaiman, kind of. But Morrison's version of comic book shamanism is so fucking asinine and literal. Alan Moore has written a reasonably sane argument for the ways that comics echo our most primal forms of storytelling, forms that reach back all the way to Egyptian tombs and cave paintings. Scott McCloud has done the same, and between the two it's a convincing argument. And one could, by extension, suggest that any art form with that much history and gut-level impact possesses a certain amount of somewhat unexplainable fairy dust. Many of us who don't believe in God still acknowledge the very human instinct to assume that the universe must exist for a reason, and we can talk about this phenomenon without having to sound like a moron.

But Morrison's subgenre of "magic" comics are so hamfistedly embarrassing because it's made clear that he can't handle the abstract neither-here-nor-thereness of the relationship between the narrative and the spiritual. He's literally got to make that ineffability the story itself, which is. Fucking. Stupid. Matrix Revolutions level stupid. L Ron Hubbard-level stupid. And the worst thing is that because no one else in comics is clumsy or inelegant enough to write these kinds of comics, Morrison also literally believes he is some kind of comic book magician for writing them.

Which, when channeled into actual comics, makes him an awesome and exciting writer. But, when he tries to put the treatise of superheroes flying through a hole in the reality to save the world with imagination or whatever, everything gets fucking dumb. Like Care Bears dumb. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. It is just so awful.

So. Flex Mentallo is good because, I'm pretty sure, it's the first time Morrison writes one of these hypersigil comics (no really, that's what he calls them) that he believes exist to jumpstart the culture (really, he believes this, he believes he did this in his apartment or whatever). And Flex is only four issues, and it's well-drawn, and it has a lot of fun characters, and it only gets horribly awfully stupid towards the end.

So please, dear God, when your friends recommend his other hypersigil books, which are like a million pages of utter horseshit, just mourn the loss of their ability for critical thought and read this book instead. It will tell you everything you need to know about Morrison's general pompousity, and then you can go back to reading the good stuff, which is literally anything else he's written for the love of fucking God. Or read books that will actually trip you out because they're actually weird, instead of just talking about being weird. Or anything. ANYTHING. LITERALLY READ ANY OTHER BOOKS BUT A GODDAMNED 'HYPERSIGIL' COMIC WHAT IN FUCK.

Okay. Whew. Shit.

**previous review follows, sort of a fine review but neither here nor there**

2013: It's really weird how, on a story level, Flex Mentallo is so completely simplistic that it borders on "and it was all a dream" -- in other words, Nothing Makes Sense and That's Fine Because The Magic Of Imagination.

But on a page-by-page level, WHAT IN HOLY HELL. This book is absolute insane-pants and I have no idea how a human being wrote it. Like, I have no idea how Grant Morrison is continually able to turn utter cockaboo rambling brainpuke into these cogent sequences of scenes and character and dialogue and story that do, in fact, build on each other in an associative (if not exactly logical) way.

That's the part of his work that keeps me coming back. Not the narrative revelations, which just aren't, really, but the getting-there-through-the-valley-of-whaaaaaaat??

The man's gift is being able to hold onto all his fevered 3am-half-dreams and turn them into story, with all the weird hallucinatory bits completely intact and working in that story's favor.

I'd like to see Grant Morrison do a "This is your brain on drugs" PSA, except in his version he takes the egg and frying pan and makes a light soufflé, then proceeds to smile at the camera while making love to thirteen women on a pile of money in a room lined with signed Hendrix guitars, original Kirby art, and a choir of chanting monks in drag.

[Lyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very fun.

If this is ever animated, and I wish it could be, Flex would need to be voiced by Patrick Warburton.

Hmmm. Actually, looks like he was portrayed by Devan Chandler Long in the live action Doom Patrol HBO Max series. I’ll need to check that out.

Grant Morrison is an evil genius and knows how to pull strings.

This is a satire inside a parody, all wound up in a fun Doom Patrol-esque comic.

Imagine a Charles Atlas “Mac” who gets bullied until he finally turns He-Manly and can take care of business. Then, imagine our Hero of the Beach solving crimes and using his flexed muscle powers to alter reality.

Like I said, Grant Morrison is an evil genius.

Bwahahhahahhaha!!!

Fun, and with the same break the fourth wall gadgetry that Morrison has used in other titles, this does somewhat devolve into Doom Patrol weirdness – but, evil genius and all that jazz.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pop singer tries to commit suicide by overdosing on pills, meanwhile talking to the Samaritans on his Stingeray phone while waiting for death; a fictional golden age superhero called Flex Mentallo is out to find his long lost sidekick "the Fact" while saving the world; and reality and fictional, hyper-reality (remember you're reading Grant Morrison) collide as people and superheroes find out a deeper truth about the cosmos. Muscle mystery indeed!

Having recently read Morrison's nonfiction book about superheroes "Supergods" as well as a documentary about Morrison "Talking with Gods", the book feels part autobiographical from the viewpoint of the suicidal pop singer. The childhood he relates is a lot like Morrison's, growing up with the threat of the bomb, the fighting parents, and the early and long lasting love affair with comics. The kid's drawings of comics might even be reprints of Morrison's early attempts at creating comics (he originally wanted to be a comics artist rather than writer). Flex Mentallo dates back to these teen years when he created him as a parody of the Charles Atlas characters from the 30s-40s.

There's also the theories of other worlds, parallel worlds, and how comics are our true selves trying to remind our parallel selves that we are more powerful and incredible than we think we are, that we're superheroes who've forgotten we're superheroes. The theme stretches across a number of Morrison's works and is explained in full in "Supergods", while the multi-dimensions and superbeings talking to one another echo his own supposed alien encounter in the mountains of Katmandu in the early 90s.

The book is a bit hard to follow, crashing about the place with all sorts of twists and turns, but it's still amazingly creative and interesting. Frank Quitely's artwork is also the best I've seen from him and he's an almost unfairly talented artist. Each page is gorgeous because of his talents and the book is made that much better because of his contributions. The book is also part of a larger trilogy that Morrison created in the 90s, the other two being "Doom Patrol" and "The Filth" both of which are mind-bendingly bizarre and fascinating.

"Flex Mentallo" is a fantastic, metatextual, hyper-imaginative work that's been long out of print and is well worth picking up if only for the artwork, but Morrison's writing is top notch as well. A fascinating look into the superhero genre from the outside in.

Also the hardback deluxe edition is so well produced and has an amazing slip on cover which feels great and doesn't carry fingerprint smudges on it somehow.

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grant Morrison's under-the-radar ultimate superhero deconstruction, and also a deeply personal work.

Cosmic, shamanistic, powerful, and autobiographical. Yes, really.

And, I'm gonna say it, better than Watchmen. Really!

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Wallace Sage ODs in an alley in a suicide attempt, Flex Mentallo tries finding his old partner The Fact and goes up against Faculty X...

Okay, that sounds way more cut and dry than the book actually is. Is this the first team-up between Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely?

Anyway, there are multiple things going on here. The universe is collapsing. Flex Mentallo is looking for The Fact. Wallace Sage is on the phone with a suicide hotline after taking every drug in his house. Or is any of that true at all?

This is one of Morrison's big idea books where you end up in the weeds and have to chop your way back out. It seems to be Morrison coping with some childhood trauma through super heroes, as well as exploring the idea that we created super heroes but they created us first. It's not accessible or especially coherent but it is thought provoking and I'll have to read it again at some point.

[Artemy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Help! This Grant Morrison comic book is speaking to me... on a personal level!

Flex Mentallo is amazing and brilliant, and I am a fool for not reading it sooner — or maybe I read it exactly at the right time to really enjoy it, who knows. This is everything Morrison's writing has ever stood for, condensed into a short four-issue miniseries that is deeply personal, smart and thoughtful. The plot is impossible to describe, and the themes throughout the book are numerous. It's simultaneously a love letter to comics and a harsh critique of them, an exploration of the relationship between the creator and the creation and between the creation and the audience, an outcry about the state of the world and the significance of superheroes in it and so, so much more. In short, this is the kind of story that convinces me that Grant Morrison is a genius and not just a madman. I absolutely loved it.

[Rory Wilding · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're a fan of the meta-writings of Grant Morrison, it's worth checking out the documentary Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods that takes an in-depth look at his life and career. From the Scotsman, comic book storytelling should be meaningful towards his livelihood, no matter how outlandish his stories and certainly superheroes since their very inception mean a great deal towards Morrison, as established in his 1996 miniseries where he first collaborated with artist Frank Quitely, thus begins the start of a beautiful friendship.

Introduced in an issue of Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, a fictional Golden Age superhero called Flex Mentallo investigates the sinister dealings of his former comrade, The Fact, and a suicidal rock star whose connection to Flex may hold the key to saving them both. As these two stories are progressing alongside each other, reality and fiction begin to merge and you're in classic Morrison territory.

Having watched the aforementioned documentary, it's funny reading the dramatization of the writer's self-confessed memories of his parents who were freedom fighters who protest against The Bomb to even masturbating at his own illustrations of nude women. It is also Morrison's own commentary on how superheroes have evolved from the brightness of the Golden Age to the weirdness of the Silver Age to the grimness of the Dark Age, where Morrison pokes fun at Alan Moore and Frank Miller.

With the two storylines happening at the same time, whilst jumping through multiple realities and different time periods, it can be hard to follow. However, it is the characterisation of its titular hero who, despite his Hercules-type physicality, is purely good-natured and doesn't resolve all situations through violence, which is clearly evident in the way Morrison and Quitely would approach the Man of Steel in their masterpiece All-Star Superman.

Despite Morrison's labyrinthine narrative, it is credited to Frank Quitely – arguably the best artist working in comics today – in making these four issues a visual delight from start to finish. With his quirky and high-detailed art style, Quitely presents a world that breaks away from the rules of our reality with a world that is dark, but spandex-heavy, which is the closest thing of David Lynch telling his own superhero story.

As part of what Morrison calls a thematic hypersigil trilogy along with The Invisibles and The Filth, Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery is a surreal hyper-reality adventure that is part-autobiography and part-commentary that embraces the various cycles of the superhero.

[Lúcia Fonseca · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terá o seu encanto e talvez tenha sido eu que não apreciei.
Não percebi nada do que li. Achei tudo muito atabalhoado. Este herói não me disse absolutamente nada.
A arte é porreira mas, neste caso, nem isso salvou a classificação que lhe dou.

[Matt Quann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hot off the heels of my reading of Morrison's Doom Patrol comes the extremely meta offshoot of the main series starring everyone's favourite weirdo who turned the Pentagon into a circle: Flex Mentallo!

If Doom Patrol is just weirdness for the sake of weirdness, Flex Mentallo has the distinction of being a four-issue examination of the superhero "ages." Alternating stories between the "real world" and the world of Flex seem separate at first, but both narratives begin to influence one another and mesh in predictably trippy Morrison fashion. If I'm being entirely honest, this is a hard one to follow, but it seems like it would benefit from a re-read.

The real draw for me were the drawings themselves! As far as I know, this is the first collaboration between Morrison and Frank Quietly, and it is neat to see them already so in sync with one another. There's some really beautiful pages in this collection, and Morrison comes up with ideas that seem derived from the very heart of creativity. It's a bit of a shame that Morrison doesn't have the space to play with some of these characters as they each seem like they'd be able to take up a series of their own.

I had a good bit of fun with this one! I've read a few good interviews and analyses of the comic and there's lots to dig into. Definitely a strange read, but a must for Morrison & Quietely fans!

[Ｆｒａｎｋｈ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know how to begin reviewing this graphic novel mostly because there is too much context that one needs to know if they ever decide to read this blindly, which I did, and it affected how I enjoyed the story a lot. The point is I could not recommend this to someone who is just getting into comics, because this is essentially a compilation inspired from another comics line which was Doom Patrol and which Grant Morrison himself has written for.

From what I can discern when I researched this story, Flex Mentallo as a character came from that series, created by Morrison himself in an issue, and who was then expanded as more than just a side character he originally appeared to be as. Now two years ago I had the distinct pleasure of reading through Morrison's semi-autobiographical book called Supergods, tracing the superhero myth and contextualizing it with his own experiences as a professional writer in the industry. I mentioned this book since it is critical in further explaining the roots for Mentallo.

You see, he is just a part of an long string of 'fictional character who came to life' that Morrison has been doing for the past two decades or so, and also ties in with his other works like The Invisibles which I intend to read soon enough. Mentallo is a part of a roster of other characters written and drawn by a psychic child. According to the wiki, "The characters created in this child's youthful scrawlings, titled "My Greenest Adventure", apparently came to life. Amongst Flex's "Greenest Adventure" siblings were the villainous Waxworker and the heroic Fact."

What you need to know in summary is that Flex Mentallo is also called the 'Man of Muscle Mystery' and he has the ability to affect reality by flexing his muscles. It sounds absurd, but purposefully so. He even has what is called a 'hero halo' above his head when he uses his powers, and it says "Hero of the Beach" which had something to do with his origin story about a swimsuit competition. It was never explained in this graphic novel, and I literally had to read his fictional biography online to understand this. So now that I have established that this GN is not newbie-friendly, let's talk about the content.

Artist Frank Quitely's style has been a personal favorite since Batman and Robin and Batman Incorporated, titles which he also collaborated with Grant Morrison. Visually speaking, Flex Mentallo is gorgeous. The illustrations are well-defined and rendered with great detail. The art is also as eccentric as the narrative, matching its absurdity and rather surreal scope. There is really no way for me to explain sufficiently what this GN is unless you are already familiar with the mythos about Doom Patrol, and Morrison comics in general. I'm going to try my best to comment on the content, however, because it had been an interesting read, albeit also a baffling one. My review isn't going to be helpful to a Morrison fan, I'm afraid, who may be reading this to compare notes with my personal opinion. But I sure want this review to prepare first-time readers who may be inclined to pick this up one day.



Flex Mentallo goes to investigate the whereabouts of his other friends, fictional characters who also came to life and are lost somehow. There's a whodunit element and some comedic action in between, spliced with genuine moments of suspense that lend its story enough levity. What is confusing are the scenes featuring the psychic child who created Mentallo and co. who apparently has become a mentally unstable junkie and a former rock star musician. His sense of self and his telepathic imagination are slowly unraveling as the pages continue, and his part of the narrative is important but also alienating for someone like me who isn't as acquainted with Morrison outside of his Batman works. That being said, the transitions do make sense and are often seamless enough to get the message across that this is a rather psychedelic meta experience that comments on the genre conventions of superhero storytelling. It would take readers like me a while to realize this until halfway through the climactic scenes, but the message becomes clear and substantial enough once finished.

Unfortunately, it's also rather jumbled up, filled with references and allegories I am not familiar with.

In a nutshell, Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery is something you read as a true-blue comics aficionado who also knows a lot about Morrison's universe and body of work to fully appreciate what it offers and satirizes. For a new reader with specific taste in comics or only goes for one or two genres, this may not be the comic book you are looking for, at least at this point in time. I might re-read this again too once I'm more acquainted with a few more of Grant Morrison's works. Still, I could tell this a momentous celebration about superheroes.

I can't really spoil the ending because it is the message of this story to begin with, but I will say that it has something to do with Morrison's thesis in Supergods.



RECOMMENDED: 7/10

READ MY REVIEWS AT:

[Ill D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Flex Mentallo is an unbelievably mind-bending trip through the past four decades of comics. Innumerable cape driven tropes and characters are sartorialized with all the latex induced insanity their tales entail. Imbued with all the self awareness/criticism of Watchmen and Marshal Law densely woven into the already potent patchwork, Flex Mentallo is as it will remain a classic not just of our era but a radiant spool of literary golden fleece in the Grant Morrison canon.

While most comics revel in their inanity and supernumeraries with little in the way of cohesion nor internal logic, Flex Mentallo powerfully inverts nonsensical themes with a story that is just as deserving of their established styles but (with some psychic stretching) actually makes sense. A truely illustrated mobius strip of plot, character, and setting, whirls with the speed of a billion Dervishes. Utter ecstasy, bordering on, then belching over the realm of the imaginative toward the religious is the ravishing result of this cyclone of fantasy.

Tarzanesque clothed Flex Mentallo perilously meanders first, then dives headfirst into a narrative brimming with as much mystery as comic book history and lore. Alongside this primary narrative, the second stream of consciousness is propelled by an internalized drug addled author riddled with his own neuroses and densely laid down strands of connection. A billion threads are loosed first upon the pages and then a thundering panoply of costumed heroes bulldoze through both bands of narrative and then coalesce themselves into a story that is much self-critical as it is self-reveling and finally concludes with a triumphant roar.

With no Beatrice, Mentor, nor White Rabbit for us to follow, only our previous (comic-related) experiences will be able to lead us through the furiously fanged fantasy world of Flex Mentallo. The initially terraneous drops into the subterranean. The subterraneous dips into the subconcious. Then they both surge back forth to bind the ouroborous in a firmly linked closed loop bound together by just as many chains of meaning. Symbolism, illustrative references and a deep knowledge of comic lore/history result in the finality that is Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery.

*PS. if you get the chance, definitely dig the Deluxe Edition. Replete with awesome art work and preliminary paneling, and most importantly, a well-written introduction at the beginning which elucidates as much the weirdness of the original authors/illustrators as much as the WWII era context Mentallo was born into.

Two muscular thumbs up.

[Garrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I can probably say with certainty that Grant Morrison is my favorite comic book writer now. I had just gotten introduced to Flex Mentallo from reading Morrison's Doom Patrol series, and I wanted to read this to learn more about the character. This book has a really amazing script that kind of reminds me of Peter Milligan's Enigma, and Quitely's art here is amazing as usual.

[Neon Snake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth more stars than will ever be available, this is the one; one of the most cogent and concise manifestos for living in the present that has ever been written (and so has been out of print for years, naturally).

The world is collapsing, global warming will destroy our future, religious fanatics will destroy our cities, capitalism and communism will destroy our economies, the oil shortage and water shortage will collapse the globe, bird flu will ravage our health and the despair of existence will ravage our psyche. There is no hope, not for humanity, not for individuals, everything you love will get washed away by the rain and everyone you love will die in front of you while those who are supposed to care for you will betray you. We tell our children all of this and we hold up empty celebrity and "reality" as paradigms for living, and wonder why, having presented our children with this vision of the world that we have fucked up and no longer care about, they emulate us and stop caring, taking to the streets and rioting instead of trying to save it.

Fuck.
All.
That.

The world is fine as it is, it's the people who need saving. The message we need to deliver is one of hope, not despair, and reality is precisely what we make of it in our own head. Once, we knew this, and we created fictions in the form of supermen and wonderwomen, who would always be there to save the people, and would teach us how to be better people. And we have long since forgotten this, and sneered and looked down, confusing this with childishness and naivity, and we whined about the world and about reality, and we forgot that each and every one of us has the power to make the world better, that we create our fictions and our fictional worlds, and in turn those fictions create reality.

Be fictional! Go out and be the fiction you want the world to be! Watch it conform to your expectations and watch reality turn into what you wish it to be!

...

"Only a bitter adolescent boy would ever confuse realism with pessimism."

[Jesse A · Rating 2 out of 5]

What. The. Hell.?!!

[Belen (f.k.a. La Mala ✌) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I've got a theory about comics, right? It all started back in the '30s and '40s..yeah. They called it the Golden Age (...) It was pretty simple then--Musclemen in costumes, idealized masculine figures (...) Homerotic wish-fullfillment...Then came the Silver Age, when superheroes were reinvented and that's when it started to go a it weird..."

Cuatro estrellas en esta reacción tras la primera lectura. En el futuro, seguramente volveré a leerlo

Es de esos comics que hay que releer para terminar de entenderlo. Es una parodia sobre los comics de superhéroes pero al mismo tiempo, una mirada inteligente y surrealista sobre la ficción/realidad; la niñez/adolescencia/adultez de los lectores de comics y el modo en que uno madura a la par de sus lecturas.



No soy seguidora del género así que no pude apreciar del todo (al menos no como se debe) las ironías ni los guiños a otras historietas clásicas pero, aún así, lo disfruté muchísimo. La idea principal, y el modo en que la historia salta de un universo a otro casi en en forma circular (siempre empezando y terminando en el Wally Sage adulto) me dejó gratamente sorprendida--casi fascinada. No obstante, estoy segura de que los fanboys/girls del género van a saber apreciarlo muchísimo más que yo.

Muy original e interesante.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery is a book I've waited for for too long. The original mini-series, an unlikely spin-off centered on a minor character from the Doom Patrol, aired sometime in the late '90s. I was lucky enough to get all four issues of this incredible comic, but I'm overjoyed to see a hardbound edition of this underread series. It would have been out a lot sooner, but Charles Atlas sued, and even though you can't claim copyright protection against a parody, DC backed off. Obviously, though, the book still retains a fan following even at DC itself.

This is Grant Morrison at his most positive, deconstructing comic book heroes to a horrible degree, only to reject the obvious conclusions drawn from adolescent extremes and build something new on top of them. The result is wholly arresting, strange, and compelling. A book that gets beyond obvious Freudian analyses and asks 'what do super heroes really represent?' The answer is us, humanity at its very best. It's about time that the super heroes saved the world, don't you think?

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A side benefit of closing out the storage unit is finding stuff I meant to read and finally getting around to it (the downside is the trashing, donating, selling end of things is so damn time consuming).

I've wondered why so many people have raved about Morrison's Flex Mentallo, and I think the reason I would tell a comics fan to read it is simply this. In many ways this is a love letter to fans. Both the good and bad parts of comic fans, how they are portrayed, perceived, and growing up. There will probably some who would read this and say where did I get that?

Wally, who is really the story's main character, is Morrison's stand-in for telling the tale. This isn't Morrison's first time breaking the fourth wall, see the end of his run on Animal Man, but this is arguably the most effective use I've seen of that story-telling device in comics. Unlike Mark Millar's Wanted, and Morrison helped Millar get his U.S. comics career strated, when the wall is essentially broken it is not done for shock value and to raise a middle finger at the reader.

Yes, there is conflict, world in crisis, etc.

But, overall this is a tale of a young boy who became a comics fan and his feelings about comics, and at times life, while growing up.

[Barbarroja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantástico. Grant Morrison (y Frank Quitely) en estado puro. Sé que ganará más y más con próximas relecturas, y aún así ya me ha parecido una pasada.

[Baal Of · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a hard time connecting to this collection despite loving Morrison's run on Doom Patrol. Yes, it's all very self-referential and self-consciously critical of comics. It bends concepts of real world vs. imaginary worlds and specualates about them crossing over and each influencing, or maybe even creating, the other. But it left me emotionally detached from the proceedings. Perhaps I couldn't identify with the fictional, junky Morrison stand-in. And wow was the ending anti-climactic. Not bad by my measure but not something I feel compelled to ever pick up again.

[Anthony Mathenia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pop-star Wallace Sage may have taken a bottle of paracetamol or they may have been M&M's. He may or not be dying. Either way his mind is screwed. He lays down in an alley and phones a suicide hotline, not for help, but to talk about his life and comics and his life in comics. The four-page mini-series constitutes his ramblings that weave in and out of a story about a superhero he created named Flex Mentallo. The narrative is a surreal dose of metafiction peeking at how fiction invades our own reality. In particular it looks at the concept of the superhero through the decades and asks what purpose they serve us.

The titular character, Flex Mentallo, has his origins in those old Charles Atlas comic ads where a scrawny loser gets sand kicked in his face by a beach beefcake. The skinny guy employs the Atlas workout and returns as the buff "Hero of the Beach". The reason this collected graphic novel was delayed for over a decade was so that DC Comics could settle a lawsuit with the Charles Atlas people for using the character. Flex, the Hero of the Beach, possesses the power of muscle mystery. Not-so-simply put, when he flexes his muscles he can alter reality.

The character, Flex Mentallo, acknowledges that he is a comic creation brought to life by Wallace Sage. As the story kicks off Flex searches for another Sage character called "the Fact" against the backdrop of the end of the world. Has the Fact come to life as well? Flex Mentallo's search for the fact dovetails with Wallace Sage's search to find the answer to his own life. Sage struggles to unlock the puzzle of his own memories centering around a childhood abduction experience. In his memory the experience takes on dark overtones. He vaguely remembers being in a washhouse with a circle of children. He asks, "Why were they shitting on the floor?" He wonders who took him there and in the shadows we glimpse an alien holding his hand. But is it really an alien?

The comic asks the question, what is real? I secretly suspect that the insane among us are closer to the truth then rest of us. The problem is that they lack the ability to articulate it coherently. In Flex Mentallo, crazy people ramble on about Superheros. A man walks the street proclaiming to disinterested passersby about a flying fortress hovering above the clouds. He can hear it, why can't anybody else? A former astronaut, now a washed-up drunk, talks about seeing the superheros that live in a satellite on the dark side of the moon. A junkie takes a new mind-altering drug and looks up at the sky with panic eyed as the heavens part and it fills with superheroes. "They've always loved us," he says falling asleep in death. The superheroes seem to be a stand in for the gods, secretly observing humanity from the heavens above, or wandering the earth in disguise, only observed by the insane.

Flex Mentallo isn't Morrisson's only leap into the metaphysical, but I find it to be his most concise. He accomplishes something in four parts that he doesn't in the voluminous Invisibles series or the thirteen part, the Filth. As Edgar Allen Poe onc said, “A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it." The brevity of Flex Mentallo allows for such a singular mood to develop, not just at the pen of Morrison, but by artist Frank Quitely. As the story ebbs and flows between Wallage Sage and Flex Mentallo there are no hard breaks, two realities overlap smoothly. It is dizzying and effective.

The four issue divisions take the form of chapters influenced by comic eras over the decades. The first part is colored by the Golden Age of comics, where superheroes were more rooted in reality, walking among us and fighting our battles. The second installment looks at the Silver Age of comics which had a shift toward the surreal and bizarre. Here the superheroes engage in cosmic battles in alternate realities that we can barely understand. The third book handles the modern (or dark) age of comics, where "heroes" embody humanity at their worst. The fourth book looks to the future and asks the question: where does the superhero go from here? Here, Morrison displays an optimism and a hope that superheroes we created are still needed to save us. The final chapter implores us to believe in them much in the same way Peter Pan breaks the fourth wall to implore children to believe the fairy Tinker Bell back to life. As the book concludes the penultimate panel is a call to the waking reader to "look up" to a sky filled with benevolent saviors that love us.

[Zedsdead · Rating 2 out of 5]

A while back I saw a Marc Forster movie called Stay. It started in reasonably coherent fashion with a shrink trying to locate a suicidal patient. Then it devolved into plot chaos: events repeating themselves, people wandering around murmuring sentence fragments into space, conversations between characters that died years before, it's contorted and phantasmagorical. Stay tried to salvage itself with a gasp!-twist ending, but it was much-too-little, much-too-late, what-was-the-point as far as I was concerned. I hated that movie.

Flex Mentallo's surreality reeks of Stay and that's a bad thing. A narrator ODing in an alley who meets Flex at different ages yet in a short timespan although Flex used to be an illustration but now he's real kind of like Pinocchio and fights a giant robot with five heads and hunting Rorschach-looking mystery men who throw not-real cartoon bombs and are pixelated while his partner The Fact MUST be found but HE might not be real and a castle in space that the little-boy version of the narrator is on sometimes and a herd (a flock? a murder?) of costumed heroes appears repeatedly they don't speak or do anything and Morrison tries to ramp up the doomsday-dread all Watchmen-like but fails and still fighting the giant robot wait his hand is actually the narrator's hand while the astronaut sees the superheroes but nobody believes him and that's it, I'm out. It might make sense in the end but I don't care. A quick skim of the back half doesn't look promising anyway.

Two stars instead of one because it's pretty and I've read dumber.

[Bruno Carriço · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I was special to like this like everyone else...but I'm a creep, not enough weirdo, I don't belong reading this. This book makes me cry on how awful it is.... but for sure it's me, not Morisson.

[Marcelo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Flex Mentallo é um herói da era de ouro: só tem virtudes, nenhum problema, nenhum drama de consciência, bem "bidimensional" mesmo - como todos os heróis daquela época.
Conforme a série vai avançando, as eras dos quadrinhos também (ouro no nº1; era de prata no 2, e assim por diante); só que Flex Mentallo continua o mesmo.
É interessante ver como ele não enxerga a mudança e segue avançando em busca de "Fato", um parceiro perdido.

Cheio de referências (como a forma que ele retrata o abandono do "sidekicks" na era de prata; a "Faculdade X" etc), metáforas, e outras "viajadas", típicas do Morrison, é um quadrinho bem autoral-experimental.

Paralelo a história de Flex, tem a história de um Rockeiro decadente, que na verdade é o próprio Morrison custurando sua autobiografia à obra.

É uma experiência única.

Se você já tentou ler e não conseguiu. Ou, como eu,não curte muito o estilo viajandão do autor, recomendo que leia o texto do site "quadrinheiros": "Flex Mentallo: quadrinhos para o lado direito do cérebro".

Ele serve como uma espécie de "guia de leitura" e te ajuda no envolvimento com a história.

Boa sorte com a leitura!

[César Rodríguez Cuenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Las drogas. Está demasiado enrevesado todo, aunque tiene sentido que sea así. Este cómic reflexiona sobre el impacto que tienen los superhéroes en niños que acaban tomando drogas y dibujando sus propios cómics, supongo que durante algunos años eso sería un porcentaje importante de la población, pero conmigo no ha conseguido conectar.

[Rumi Bossche · Rating 2 out of 5]

Way to meta for my taste.

[Sara Platero · Rating 1 out of 5]

En este cómic el "superhéroe" principal, por llamarlo de alguna manera, es Flex Mentallo, un hombre que tiene superfuerza y al que dieron vida a partir de un cómic.

Las historias que se ha recopilado en este tomo son incomprensibles. No hay un hilo argumental claro, aparecen y desaparecen personajes constantemente y no hay ninguna línea de acción lógica.

El cómic es lúgubre, lleno de referencias a las drogas, los suburbios y bajos fondos y la prostitución.

Sin duda un cómic que no recomiendo leer, a menos que tengas más de 18 años y ya conozcas previamente a este personaje.

[Aaron Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5

Can you be the hero in your own story? After reading Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery, I believe you can be.

Wonderful, heart breaking, thoughtful, inspiring, brave, personal, passionate, disgusting, beautiful, loving, questions, answers, facts

The Fact is: you need to experience this book

When I read Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery I got the strong inclination that it was made as a very personal and thoughtful study on many aspects of life. Put simply the story is about a man who was about to lose everything but remembered how to love again. It connected with me on so many levels but it is hard to explain about every idea, opinion, and revelation that happened during my experience with this series; I just got it. I can say that when reading this book I took my time examining each and every panel, word balloon, and illustration, because much like watching a Kubrick film, each and every aspect of the book can have a purpose or meaning. That being said, I wouldn't openly recommend this book to anyone, especially those who have not been reading comic books for a while or know about comic book history. I feel like in order to really appreciate this series you have to go into it with the understanding that the book itself is a study and interpretation of Grant Morrison's portrayal of comic books in society, what they were, what they have done, where they are going, and what they can do for us.

Like I mentioned earlier, it is quite difficult to review a book like Flex Mentallo. Words just wont do it justice, I experienced so many emotions during the book and I know I will be revisiting the story again and again.

Eye of the beholder, Harry. Maybe I see things that you miss.
-The Hoaxer