"Happy Christmas" is a more common phrase in Britain; this is a pun that didn't translate well for Americans.

Although you also gave a lot of literary annotations for things that went way over me head, thank you.

I love Flex Mentallo, he's such a fun character to write.

Doom Patrol #42 “Musclebound” (March 1991)



The cover text lampoons the first appearance of Robin:




Flex Mentallo is given an apartment of his own on Danny the Street. (As mentioned in the Doom Patrol thread, this is a pun on British drag queen celebrity Danny LaRue.) Flex tells the Doom Patrol his story, which begins just like the Charles Atlas “Hero of the Beach” ads that ran in Silver Age comic books. A runt is bullied at the beach, humiliated in front of his girlfriend. A mysterious figure promises to bring him mighty muscles if he sends in a coupon. Sure enough, in the mail he receives a book, “Muscle Mystery for You,” which brings spiritual enlightenment (including the ability to see into other dimensions, a Morrison favorite) and a powerful physique, with which he defeats the bully and, in a twist from the original advertisement, spurns his fickle girlfriend. Note the loony details in the background, including Death (no doubt combing the beach for a knight with which to play chess) and a flock of what could be pterodactyls.







This is the first appearance of the theme of "choosing comic book heroics over girls." Watch for others.

Flex teams up with other heroes, including the Question-esque “The Fact,” who hands out cards, spattered with green, containing truisms or koans. Flex talks about his beauty queen girlfriend Dolores (who wears a green bathing suit) and his meetings with fans including Wally Sage, who wears the same green shirt as in his previous appearance when he was said to be a college student. We’ll later learn that Wally grows up to write Flex Mentallo comic books, but he did not originate the character. Wally asks Flex to participate in a fiction that the two of them are good friends. In the rightmost panel, Flex appears to have pinned his "judge" ribbon directly to the flesh of his chest. He is just that tough!



Flex learns of a secret hidden beneath the Pentagon. He attempts unsuccessfully to use his powers of Muscle Mystery to turn the Pentagon into a circle to defeat its dark mystical powers. This is a reference to Abbie Hoffman and his Youth International Party (the “Yippies”) who staged a Vietnam protest at the Pentagon on October 21, 1967 and, to attract media attention, audaciously claimed that they were going to use mental force to levitate the whole building into the air. This Quixotic episode became emblematic of the David-and-Goliath struggle between protestors and the U.S. government, here recreated as Flex’s attempt to change the shape of the Pentagon into something more benign. Grant Morrison’s parents were die-hard protestors for causes such as this, so this plot point reflects both his activist heritage as well as his abiding interest in the powers of the human mind. But all Flex does with his heroic obsession is (for the second time in this issue) alienate himself from a girlfriend. Dolores is again wearing green. (it's a bluish sort of green since she's feeling blue, but it looks more green on the page than it does on my computer screen.)



Flex’s effort is so intense, it knocks Little Nemo out of bed!



Flex visits the Pentagon to challenge the malign forces directly but fails. He ends up an amnesiac, wandering the streets, a hobo with a long beard in what surely must be a Bowery Namor homage.



The sign on the wall “to no naves dzirdi” (“You are hearing from the realm of the dead” in Latvian) is a quotation from Konstantin Raudive’s 1971 book Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead. Raudive recorded radio waves without tuning into any particular broadcasting station and believe that amidst the white noise, he could hear the voices of ghosts, mainly speaking in Latvian, which of course happened to be his own language. The words quoted by Morrison, according to Raudive, were spoken by the deceased Latvian poet Kārlis Skalbe.




Another panel contains further speech in Latvian which I bet is also from Raudive’s transcriptions of the electronic aether. I can only get as far in translation as knowing that "te nakts" means "the night" and "te putni" means "the bird":



Finally one day Flex wanders onto Danny the Street, bringing his story up to date with his appearance in this series.

Meanwhile, in present day, Dolores visits a train station and talks with an attendant wearing a green vest. She is taken into a back room where he says, “We cannot see land, everything is strange.” This was the last transmission from Flight 19, a World War II squadron which went down in the Bermuda Triangle in 1945. Morrison mentions Flight 19 and the Philadelphia Experiment several times in this series as alleged examples of military attempts to use magic.





Dolores is captured by the bad guys and programmed to rehearse her lines for a visit with Flex.

Doom Patrol #44 “Voices” (May 1991)



Flex Mentallo and Dorothy, captives of strange creatures beneath the Pentagon, are taken to meet Major Honey (apparently demoted from the General he was last issue) and Sergeant Louis Washington. Wallace Sage is a prisoner in a washing-machine sized cell there. Honey plans to use the Pentagon’s five-sided mystical power to era creativity from the world, making everything predictable and controllable. Sage is the conduit of creative power. “Talent like his comes along once in a lifetime.” This is Morrison tooting his own horn; he has said that Wallace Sage is the "Earth-2 version" of himself, though this story does not take place on Earth-2. But Sage’s creative energy has been poured into Flex, which is why Flex has been brought here.

Walking and talking, Honey reminisces about the advertisements for “Grit” periodicals in 1970s comic books. Were the promises of Grit any more realistic than those of Charles Atlas?



Flex rescues Wally from his tiny prison, and before dying, Wally recounts how he drew Flex in comic book stories as a child. This inspires Flex to protect Dorothy from the villains and to use his amazing powers of Muscle Mystery to change the Pentagon into a Circle, dispelling its mystic powers.





Back in issue #42, Flex had commented, “Strange how all our adventures seemed to involve the color green.” This issue explains why: Wally originally drew his Flex Mentallo comic books with a green pen given to him by his cool uncle. This answers the question “Why Green?” posed back in issue #40, as well as the many appearances of the color green in the Flex-related material in this series. I doubt the green pen detail is biographical; it was just an opportunity to make the pun “My Greenest Adventure” as described with respect to issue #43.

Doom Patrol #46 “Aftermath” (August 1991)

Wally Sage’s mother stands at his grave and commemorates his life.



Flex Mentallo announces his intention to buck the prevailing trend of depressed superheroes with a cheerier approach. This reflects Morrison's disdain for gloomy Dark Age anti-heroes. Next we’ll go on to look at the Flex Mentallo mini-series in which another version of Wally (and perhaps of Flex) figures heavily.

Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery #1
“After the Fact – Flowery Atomic Heart” (June 1996) –Part One



Cover: The central element of this cover is Flex, leaping at the reader, commanding him to purchase this issue. The most obvious referent is The Flash #163 (August 1966), in which the title character makes a similar plea, because our belief in him is necessary for him to sustain his existence. (Kurt Busiek would homage this concept in Astro City with the story of Loony Leo, the cartoon lion.) Morrison has written at length about how this sundering of the fourth wall affected him as a child:




The other cover details of Flex Mentallo #1 replicate details of Golden Age comic books which promised “Full Color Pages!” and “All New! No Reprint” and “1st Issue!” and “4 issue min series” in bright captions which would rightly be considered a distraction from the art today, but at the time (the Golden Age, not 1996) were considered necessary self-promotion. Even the $2.50 cover price is repeated twice for good measure as if it were a selling point.

This series was the first of Morrison’s several collaborations with fellow Scotsman Vincent “Frank Quitely” Deighan, whose work reminded him of the whimsy of Scottish comic strip artist Dudley Watkins (The Broons) combined with the detail and pastel shades of Winsor McCay (Little Nemo).





Page 1-2: We are immediately clued into to the metaphysical nature of the story, and we can hardly do better than to hear Morrison’s own explanation of what is going on here:



Elsewhere, Morrison philosophizes on the zoom-out from one The Fact which revealed yet another on a different scale:




“Flight 23” is an error in Supergods; the comic book actually references “Flight 230” which is either arbitrary or an inside joke, but there is another reference to it at the end of the series. “K-9” is a standard pun on “canine,” probably a reference to Sirius “the dog star," which as Morrison mentions is in the constellation of Orion depicted on Page 1, and which will be important in issue #4. By “Ditkoesque” he means that The Fact looks like Steve Ditko’s faceless character The Question, who was of course the inspiration for Alan Moore’s Rorschach.



Morrison loves to play with the idea of the Microverse, that if you zoom in (or out) far enough within one universe, you find yourself in another universe on another scale entirely. Think of DC Comics in which the attempt to see the Big Bang tended to summon an image of a Creator's giant hand holding a galaxy.



The cook quotes the 1980s TV public service announcement “This (boiling egg) is your brain on drugs.” Then he offers those eggs to the reader, but it’s Flex Mentallo who (in a splash panel on page 3) ultimately claims them. By implication, both Flex and the reader are partaking of a narrative which originates from Morrison’s brain on drugs, and we’re reminded of the Foreword’s explanation that Wallace Sage’s stint writing Flex Mentallo involved vast quantities of LSD.



On Page 3, Flex rises to claim his egg sandwich in the airport cafeteria. He’s been seated at the table with a spiral notebook and a pencil, watching the varied people in the airport, either taking notes about their behaviors or sketching them. So Flex too is a creator, an avatar of Morrison, taking in details from real life for later use.

He explains his behavior to us in a caption on Page 4: “I like to go down to the airport once a week. I usually take a taxi there and just sit for most of the day watching the planes landing and taking off, watching the people come and go. Kids lugging bags and toy animals. Businessmen checking watches. Lovers hugging, parting. I like to watch life going by, a river of faces that never grows dull. You can always count on life.” However, the image accompanying these captions shows Flex not watching but acting, as a threat materializes.



The classic Watchmen-style nine panel grids of the first two pages are replaced on later pages by overlapping panels. This is a common modern style, but in the context of the story it also reinforces the notion of overlapping realities—especially when (on page 5) The Fact throws another cartoon bomb outside of the frame, toward the reader, before fleeing the scene. These bombs seek to break down the fourth wall between reader and text. However, unlike the bomb from page 1 which succeeded in exploding and bringing the story universe into being, this bomb fizzles in the presence of Flex, so that the reader/text barrier remains intact for now. Flex recognizes the bomb as not a destructive element but rather “a key” to something. Also on Page 5 are two quotations from the end of the Charles Atlas ad: “What a build!” and “He’s famous for it” as well as the “Hero of the Beach” halo which the hero of the advertisement manifests.

On Page 6, the scene shifts to another dimension, where an unkempt and intoxicated young man, Wallace Sage, fumbles amidst his LPs and drug paraphernalia to find the telephone, which is shaped like a striped racecar, later identified as the Stingeray from the King Sting series. Favorite comics from Wallace’s childhood like Lord Limbo and Outerboy, published by Grant Morrison’s fictitious childhood company Stellar Comics, litter the floor, as well as loose pages of Wallace’s own art, long abandoned. Like Morrison, he tried to draw but ultimately became a comics writer. Sage’s cat Tibbert is transfixed by a housefly careening across the room.

On pages 7-8, Flex has taken the unexploded bomb to the police station. A villain in a red bodysuit is being escorted in with a hood over his head; we’ll meet him again in issue #3. The lieutenant in charge has a drawer full of JLA paraphernalia which somehow crossed dimensions, including Green Lantern’s ring, Flash’s boots, and Starman’s scepter.

The bomb is said to be the work of a group called “Faculty X,” a term from Colin Wilson's book The Occult: A History (1971). He defined Faculty X as “that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present,” meaning basically what scientists call “object permanence,” a sense of certainty in the existence of things which are not directly evident to one’s senses at any given time, such as other parts of the world or the events of the past. But it could refer to any ability to perceive the unseen. Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires (1976) also became the basis of the sci-fi B-movie Lifeforce (1985). The housefly from Sage’s living room is present in the police station as well. Also there is one of The Fact’s cards, characteristically stained with green liquid, but without any statement of fact on it.

Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery #2 “After the Fact – My Beautiful Head” (July 1996) –Part One



Cover: An astronaut reads an issue of Flex Mentallo while floating outside a spaceship orbiting Earth—a Silver Age homage, though I don’t know if a specific cover is being quoted. The Wrestling logo remains, as does the double price tag and the declarations about “All New! No Reprint” and “4 issue miniseries.” My old eyes required digital help to read the tiny seal of approval near the upper right corner: “Sci-Fi Boys of West Ealing: Favorite Comic Award.” In addition, two inkstamps mar the front cover showing that this issue was purchased at a used comic store more recently, and that it's considered adult literature rather than a kids' comic book.

Pages 1-2: In the rainy alley, high on LSD, Wally hallucinates that his hand is melting wax. Disjointed memories arise from childhood: His pet goldfish Peter in a bowl with a miniature castle “made out of ceramic stuff.” Being taken by a man to a washhouse where a group of boys were defecating.



Pages 3-4: Flex Mentallo recalls facing the Mentallium Man. Each of Mentallium Man’s heads has a different effect upon those exposed to it. This is a nod to the different kinds of Kryptonite, especially the Red kind which Morrison adores due to its unpredictable transformative properties:


One of Mentallium Man’s heads is made of “Lamb and Turkey,” which is what Wally remembered feeding his hungry cat back in issue #1. We don’t know what “reality that version of Wally inhabits, perhaps just a hallucination within dying Wally. The Lamb & Turkey detail invading the memory of our Flex Mentallo (while he’s thinking about the Golden Age Flex Mentallo) suggests that he too exists in the mind of dying Wally. Otherwise the reality in which adult Wally feeds his cat is interacting with the reality of Golden Age Flex, in stories written by others when he was just a child.

Another head is made of Black M, “The sinister radioactive residue left behind after the disappearance of the Golden Age Flex Mentallo.” So, the Flex we’ve been following since Doom Patrol and in issue #1 is actually a legacy character, not the original Flex Mentallo. This leads us to wonder whether the original Flex had a different origin, and whether the two Flexes are in the same dimension, or in different ones yet aware of each other, like the Supermen of Earth-1 and Earth-2. Watch for "Black Kryptonite" when we cover All-Star Superman.

Page 5: Flex signs an autograph for young Wally Sage. When we previously saw this scene we’ve already seen in Doom Patrol #42, it seemed like a causal loop since Wally grows up to write Flex Mentallo comic books. According to the Foreword, Wally grew up reading Golden Age Flex Mentallo comic books and began writing them himself in 1959-1963, beginning at the tender age of 18. So it’s difficult to reconcile this present-day Flex interacting with a Wally who looks to be about eight years old, when Wally was born in 1941 and died in 1982. Perhaps the Wally in Flex’s world was born forty years after the Wally who wrote Flex’s world. As mentioned before, neither is the college student Wally seen in Doom Patrol.

Now young Wally is alone at night in a creepy “whole town made of ceramic stuff.” This is the LSD trip; Dying Wally has placed himself inside the fishbowl, aware that someone unseen is watching him from the outside.

Page 6: Back to Golden Age Flex. Exposure to Pink Mentallium would make Flex “explore complex issues of gender and sexuality,” so it too is a sort of Red Kryptonite directed toward the frequent Morrison topic of transsexualism and transvestism. Silver Mentallium merely robs him of his sense of humor.

Ultraviolet Mentallium can turn him completely into another person. So now all bets are off. Anybody in this story could be Flex with fake form and memories, though “Wally in the alley” is the most plausible candidate. Especially when Flex’s hand starts melting like wax, just like the dream that dying Wally was having, and Flex’s wristband looks a lot like the creases in Wally’s overcoat, and Flex says, “Who am I?” So in true Morrisonian fashion, LSD is shown not to mess up your mind, but to clear it, giving you access to truths that were being hidden from you. Also, we recall the promise of Charles Atlas that anybody could become the “Hero of the Beach” with the help of his instruction book.



Page 7: Wally in the alley also asks, “Who am I?” which is either dramatic parallelism or else more evidence that Wally is Flex in disguise like the amnesiac Bowery Namor version of Flex first seen in Doom Patrol. The LSD has given him access to all his alternate selves, including Grant Morrison, who is writing the comic book that we are reading. Wally is also on an analogue of the JLA satellite in a throng of heroes looking down on the Earth. We will later learn that this is the Legion of Legions.


In a single panel, young Wally wears striped pajama bottoms and brushes his teeth, his head flanked by mirrors facing each other, generating an infinite number of reflected Wallys receding into the interior of the mirror. His adult self is indifferent to death, knowing that alternate versions will survive. Human free will has no meaning in a multiverse in which somewhere, you have made every possible combination of choices that you can make. You just happen to be experiencing one of those possible combinations here and now. You have experienced the others elsewhere.

Page 8: Wally stands up. “I can’t feel the rain. Is this a dream?” He’s standing in a roofed enclosure, not in the alley, and he’s wearing different clothes – no more green stripey pants, and he’s dry, not soaked with rain. So yes, he’s dreaming, though perhaps dreaming of something that actually happened on another occasion. He finds a box of matches on the ground. Inside are two tiny superheroes, unmoving and spooning. They are Nanoman and Minimiss, members of the Legion of Legions who have broken through physically to Wally’s world, or at least he dreams it that way. He recalls reading about them as a kid in a Nanoman comic in which DNA is made of people who hold hands in two strands. This gets back to Morrison’s idea about the same patterns repeating on every scale of existence. DNA is made of people containing DNA which is made of…



The back page of the comic book is an advertisement for: “Learn how to draw: Easy steps guided by artists.” This is just another version of Charles Atlas targeting would-be artists like Wally Sage instead of would-be musclemen.

Wally recalls listening to Radio Lichtenstein while drawing comic books as a kid. This could refer to the country of Lichtenstein, a tiny German-speaking state wedged between Switzerland and Austria. But the voice coming over the radio is English, not German, and Lichtenstein is almost 1,800km from Scotland, so a radio signal is dubious. More likely “Radio Lichtenstein” refers to pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, who hung comic book-inspired art in museums. The DJ on the Radio Lichtenstein is “Your right royal ruler Ken King.” “Roy” means “King.”

Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery #3 “After the Fact – Dig the Vacuum” (August 1996)



Cover: A clear homage to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns shows our hero silhouetted against lightning, with his leopard-skin briefs glowing defiantly in the dark. The Wrestling logo is still here. Not only that, but it’s a signed copy in pristine condition! Ought to be worth a lot, right? Nope. We can see from price labels that it’s been sold multiple times on the secondary market and has been marked way down. This represents one of those early 90s comics like Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 which was bought by the hundreds by speculators, then languished in boxes for a few years hoping the price would rise, and now released back into the bargain bins of the wild. (For some reason the cover image above lacks the detail of the multiple marked-down price stickers, but it’s present in my trade paperback version.)

Page 1-3: A single bolt of lightning splits the sky, again a Dark Knight Returns reference. Harry, the police lieutenant from issue #1, tucks his wife into bed. She had a dream about Nanoman and Minimiss just like Wally, and her bedside table has a goldfish named Peter, just like Wally. Why? Because, as we saw in issue #1, these Flex Mentallo adventures were written and drawn by young, amateur Wally. They discuss fears of war and the departure of superheroes, “all but one.” Presumably he means Flex, but we shouldn’t assume.

Page 4: Wally awakens in the alley, his LSD trip subsiding, surprised he is still alive.

Page 5: Harry’s wife has died of brain cancer; we see the burial service on a very blustery day. The cemetery contains a pair of tombstones just a few inches tall, suggesting that someone has buried Nanoman and Minimiss here. Who is the legless figure in the grey cloak, attending the funeral? Another “very odd” thing. Harry goes home and hugs Peter’s fishbowl.



Page 6-7: Harry visits the prison cell of Riddler-like criminal The Hoax. The twin question marks on his chest are mirrored, forming a heart, but also reminding us of the many mirrors symbolizing parallel dimensions in this series. He has a similar heart tattooed on his forehead, and even in prison, he wears a Riddler domino mask and skintight leotard, but it's colored red, not green, because green symbolizes optimistic superhero comics in the mind of Wally Sage. The hoax projects an illusion based on an arboreal scene in National Geographic magazine. This is what happens when we read: The information on the pages becomes a realistic world inside our heads.



Pages 8-11: A scantily clad woman wanders down Wally’s alley and is beset by a gang of shirtless skinhead thugs wearing visors. He talks to the telephone about “Where do I get my inspiration?” He doesn’t know, but we know. He gets it by observing other dimensions, and from literature he’s read. He gets it from the experiences of his life, especially the tough ones, like his girlfriend walking out on him and his messy apartment while he noodles nonchalantly on his guitar. He talks further about the terrifying anti-war literature found at activist bookshops like “comics from hell.” This is why the world of Flex Mentallo teeters on the edge of an unspecified war, because Wally (i.e. Grant) has lived his whole life expecting it, based on the doomsday warnings of his (Morrison's) parents. He papered the walls of his life with comic book fantasies of adventure and sex. He’s incensed by the inane violence of 1990s mainstream comic books. Heroes are supposed to protect us from the violence, not perpetrate it.




Wally draws pictures of naked women and then pleasures himself with the work of his hand while gazing upon images which also are the work of his other hand (which still grasps a pencil), and his orgasm becomes one of the nightmare nuclear explosions depicted in at the political bookstore. More Thanos and Eros mingled than his young mind can handle. He reflects on the unwholesome effect which sexually charged comic books had on him as a child. He wishes he could vomit out all the filth he imbibed. This is a very different take than the enthusiastic paean to fiction-assisted masturbation which J.M. DeMatteis incorporated into Moonshadow, and it prompted an excoriating 2012 review in The Comics Journal, “Flex Mentallo and the Morrison Problem,” in which the author seemed to think that by “adult comics” Morrison was talking about Maus when really he was talking about pornography.






In the middle of all this is a half-page image of Wally on a hill overlooking his town as a giant triangular airplane fills the sky. We’ll find out next issue what that is.



Pages 12-13: Wandering the sewer, looking for the Legion of Legions teleport tube, Flex recalls the time that he and Walter Ego faced off against the sentient Counting Tree. The power of “deeply held conviction” allowed Walter to see in the dark. (Theme: Mind over matter) For Flex, the vial of Krystal that he took from the dead junkie acts as his Phial of Galadriel, providing a green (=heroic) glow. (Theme: Drugs illuminate your path.) A trio of Faculty X men (they look just like The Fact and the Mystery Pilgrim) lob cartoon bombs at him. He enters a club for “adult superheroes” – the Knight Club, since Miller’s The Dark Knight inaugurated the grim-n-gritty era through his legion of inferior imitators, and the buying public didn’t know the difference. Inside is a superhero orgy, a tangle of costumed arms and legs.

Page 14-15: Wally recalls another argument with his girlfriend—a one-sided argument, since he refuses to speak. He needs to be a man, but he can’t remember the magic word from the crossword puzzle. The Hoax stands before him, and Wally knows someone unseen is watching him.



Page 16: Now The Hoax is in Lieutenant Harry’s home, watching the fishbowl (in which Wally is), agreeing to help Harry help Flex. Peter is a legacy goldfish, having been surreptitiously replaced several times so as not to disturb Harry's wife. What helps us more—The Fact, or The Hoax?

Pages 17-20: Flex finds the superhero sex club more disturbing than alluring. The teen sidekicks from issue #1 are here too, lounging about suggestively. Wally’s captioned narration declares that the skintight costumes of super-heroes were mainly about selling sexual images to adolescent boys in the guise of narrative. For Dark Age comics at least, he has a point. Flex tries to make it through the debauched scene by chanting the names of Golden Age heroes like Lord Limbo, but he is overwhelmed in a quagmire of costumed bodies.

Page 21-24: Wally has a vision of the scary anti-war magazines, of being with his girlfriend by the fire. Thanatos and Eros confused. He can’t stop the multiple Earths from colliding; the Crisis has come. Have you ever been in a situation where people who knew you from one context of life met people who knew you from another context? Your grade school friends meeting your adult co-workers at your wedding can be a little disorienting as they trade notes about who you are.



The boys in the washhouse are watching a nuclear explosion devour a tiny world, and Lord Limbo is there in his bright green costume with young Wally, escorting him to the interior world from which he gets his ideas.



Is it time for Wally’s Greenest Adventure? Some of this is repetitive for our purposes, but it’s kind of Morrison to do that for readers not as familiar with (and perhaps inured to) his tricks. Adult Wally vomits out what’s inside him into the alley (just as he longed for back on page 11, and the vomit is green. Catharsis from the excesses of the Dark Age. Is it just my imagination, or are there faces in the puddles of vomit?