Doom Patrol: Musclebound: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Richard Case, Doug Hazlewood, Mike Dringenberg, and others (1991; collected 2008): Grant Morrison's post-modern sensibilities flowered early on in American comic books of the 1980's and early 1990's with Doom Patrol and Animal Man. The Doom Patrol, a C-List superhero team created in the 1960's, had always been a bit weird. Morrison made it weirder.
Longtime foes The Brotherhood of Evil became the Brotherhood of Dada. The Doom Patrol's headquarters became Danny the Street, a sentient street capable of teleportation anywhere. Questions of identity, sexual and psychological and physical, became dominant motifs given that the heroes included a woman with 64 super-powered multiple personalities (or 'alters' as we'd say now), a human brain in a super-powered robot body that kept getting destroyed, and a strange amalgam of an alien energy being, a man, and a woman. Good times!
Here we make the acquaintance of Flex Mentallo, an odd superhero who would later show up in his own miniseries in slightly altered form. Flex can alter reality by flexing his mighty muscles -- that's why he's the man of muscle mystery, complete with an origin that's a parody of the old Charles Atlas body-building ads, and a 'hero halo' that spells out 'Hero of the Beach!' whenever he exerts himself to his utmost! But when Flex battled The Thing That Lives Under the Pentagon, he lost his memory for decades. Memory restored, he and the Doom Patrol must seek out the mystery of Flex's origins and probably save the world from some crazy thing or another.
Then it's off to a battle with a man who hates people with beards, written by Morrison as a witty parody of that tersely purple Frank Miller prose style from Daredevil and Batman. In a sequel to an obscure Jimmy Olsen story of the Silver Age of comics. Then comes the Sex Men, on patrol for abnormally elevated orgone levels and trans-dimensional sexual imvasions. Meanwhile, something stirs within The Painting That Ate Paris, where the Doom Patrol left the Brotherhood of Dada imprisoned two years earlier after the Brotherhood's attempt to summon the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse had a surprising denouement.
It's all good, clean, R-rated fun, though it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger that will require you to buy the next collected volume. A bevy of artists, including the underrated regular artist Richard Case, keep things weird and yet somehow grounded at the same time. Case's style was always closest to that of a regular superhero artist of the time, clean-lined and straightforward and traditionally heroic, which always seemed to make the things he was rendering look even weirder. Though there was something disturbing about the mouths of Case's characters, which sometimes seemed to be clenched in some rictus of over-powering horror or passion. Highly recommended.
Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Frank Quitely (1996; collected 2012): Near the beginning of Grant Morrison's comic-writing career at DC, he created a character named Flex Mentallo in Doom Patrol. Mentallo's origin was basically a parody of the old Charles Atlas body-building print ad. A scrawny kid gets bullied and works out; eventually he becomes Hero of the Beach.
Flex turned out to be the comic-book creation of a kid named Wally Sage. He'd escaped into the real world. His powers stemmed from his total control of his muscles: flexing them could alter reality! And above Flex Mentallo's head would appear his Hero Halo, the giant glowing words 'Hero of the Beach!'
A few years later, Morrison and soon-to-be-superhot artist Frank Quitely did a Flex Mentallo miniseries set on another Earth. Then the lawyers for Charles Atlas threw a fit, and DC agreed not to reprint the miniseries for some undetermined length of time that, finally, has ended. Flex Mentallo is back! Just in time! The Dark Age is over!
This oversized hardback reprint collection has one major flaw: it doesn't reprint the two or three Flex Mentallo issues of Doom Patrol. I have a feeling another edition of Flex Mentallo will rectify this in a few years. DC is really good at endlessly repackaging material, as anyone who's tracked their shuffling and reshuffling of Alan Moore's DC Universe work well knows.
But other than that omission, this is an awesome piece of metafictional, optimistic, hopeful superhero work. Quitely's art is gorgeous -- the depraved and the heroic and the mundane are all beautifully, sharply rendered; the layout is innovative and non-traditional when it suits the story and straightforward when it suits the story.
And confined to about 100 pages, Morrison distills many of his obsessions in relation to superhero comic books down to an almost pure form. He'd explored these obsessions earlier in his career in Animal Man and Doom Patrol. He'd explore them later in everything from The Filth to Sea Guy to JLA. But here and now, we get the pure dope -- hope that you can cope.
On an Earth without superheroes, a musician in his early 20's talks on the phone to a suicide hotline. He's taken an overdose and he's waiting to die. While he waits to die, he wants to talk about comic books and superheroes.
On an Earth with one superhero -- Flex Mentallo, escaped from fictionality! -- doomsday looms for everything and everyone. Can the Man of Muscle Mystery follow the clues, unravel the mystery, find the other superheroes, and save the world?
How do these stories relate? Read the comic book. Order the workout package. Learn the secrets of muscle mystery! Because sometimes a guy just has to get out of his room and meet some girls! Highly recommended.
