Flex Mentallo to be Republished in Fall 2011

DC has just announced that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Flex Mentallo will finally be collected and published as a deluxe hardcover in the fall:

If youre a fan of Grant Morrison (and who isnt?), youll be stoked to know that FLEX MENTALLO will be published in book form this year. This marks the first time the four-issue mini-series written by Morrison and illustrated by artist Frank Quitely is being collected. FLEX MENTALLO sprang out of Grants mind bending and infamous run on DOOM PATROL.

Pick up this beautiful Deluxe Edition hardcover with bonus material this Fall.

The story was one of the first collaborations between Morrison and Quitely but has never been republished due to a lawsuit by Charles Atlas Ltd. Flex Mentallo’s origin story is a parody of Atlas’s famous “The Insult That Made a Man Out of Mac” ad that ran in comics in the 60s and 70s, and the character bears an undeniable resemblance to Atlas (c.f. the photo of Atlas in this article and the pinup of Flex Mentallo in this one). The case was dismissed but DC decided not to reprint the series, until today. (More info on the case, including Jim Shooter’s afadavit, here, and on its decision not to reprint it here.)

Flex Mentallo is important not just because it’s an early collaboration between Morrison and Quitely, who’d go on to reinvent the X-Men, Superman, and Batman, but because it is an amazing commentary on comics themselves and states many of the themes of fiction vs. reality that Morrison has continued to play with subsequently. It takes a tour of comics from their fun origins through the zany silver age to the dark 80s and toward Morrison’s idea of the future of comics, which he’s attempted to realize in his Batman work and others. Many have called it one of the greatest short comics series ever published, up there with Watchmen. Greg Burgas takes a stab at explaining why here.

The real question, since I own the original copies (and even had them bound into a hardcover), is whether I’ll need to buy the series again in this deluxe format with bonus material. (Answer: yes.)

Frank Quitely's Daredevil, Superman, and More

Just wanted to share a few amazing Frank Quitely images. He’s one of my favorite artists, partly because he works with Grant Morrison so much, but also because, well, I think you’ll be able to tell why from this Daredevil he drew:

(click to embiggen)

How fantastically dynamic. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud discusses how a single panel, like the one above, can show both one moment in time and have a narrative. The drawing originally appeared in Daredevil 65 as a standalone piece of art. It wasn’t part of the issue, just a piece of eye candy by Quitely (along with other artists’ work), so there’s no story to go with this. Just a Daredevil vs. ninja smackdown. But it does have a story. Let me amateurishly draw in a few gutters:

Suddenly we’re not just looking at one moment in time, we’re seeing a story. Daredevil versus a sneak of ninjas, swords flying. We have three different things going on. At the top, two ninjas are prepared, ready, posed, jumping into the fray. In the middle, Daredevil is ably dispatching a few of their friends. And in the bottom, the ones Daredevil has already defeated, their weapons in freefall below them. All in one image. This is visual storytelling.

The piece also makes homage to Frank Miller, who famously wrote Daredevil in the 80s and more or less created the treatment of the character as a ninja. Compare the composition to this iconic drawing by Miller from 300 (along with its movie version):

Birds of Prey

Just for fun, Quitely’s cover to Birds of Prey 125:

All Star Superman

And to show some mood, and not just action, All Star Super­man 1:

This cover, drawn by Quitely, came from an idea Morrison had for his never-realized Superman 2000 collaboration with Mark Millar, Tom Peyer, and Mark Waid (which Tim Callahan and Chad Nevett covered extensively last year). Morrison met a fan dressed as Superman in the middle of the night outside of a hotel and had a long conversation with him, in character. Superman.nu covers the meeting, about which Morrison says:

The thing that really hit me, wasn’t so much what Superman was saying as how he was sitting. He was perched on a bollard with one knee drawn up, chin resting on his arms. He looked totally relaxed… and I suddenly realized this was how Superman would sit. He wouldn’t puff out his chest or posture heroically, he would be totally chilled. If nothing can hurt you, you can afford to be cool. A man like Superman would never have to tense against the cold; never have to flinch in the face of a blow. He would be completely laid back, un-tense. With this image of Superman relaxing on a cloud looking out for us all in my head, I rushed back to my hotel room and filled dozens of pages of my notebook with notes and drawings.

Look again at how Quitely draws this scene. See how relaxed Superman is as he watches over Metropolis. Now look at how much depth is in that picture. It’s easy to focus just on Superman, but there’s a fully-imagined city below those clouds. You can see The Daily Planet just peaking up by Superman’s boots, with Centennial Park just beyond. The plane of clouds Superman is sitting on is hundreds of feet up, where it’s calm. Quitely captures the scope of the entire world there, floating hundreds in the sky. The city under those clouds isn’t just background filler, it’s the real focus of the image.

More of his stuff at Comic Art Community.

Never Use Real Names in the Field

I love this Frank Quitely panel from Batman & Robin 1. Look at the body language, how Robin has his arms crossed like the indignant little snot he is. And the dialogue, how obnoxious he sounds. Then Dick/Batman’s response, trying to teach Robin a few things. He’s been there before, sitting in the Robin chair as Bruce Wayne taught him the same lessons. And then the mini punchline, “I’d have killed for a flying Batmobile when I was Robin.” There’s a levity there that writers didn’t seem to be able to give Bruce Wayne after the 80s.

That, and I do like the actual topic they’re discussing. I hate when comics depict characters with super secret identities yelling each other’s real names to each other in the middle of crowded cities. Batman takes this stuff seriously, like special ops military do. He knows to use codenames in the field so that people can’t overhear their identities. I enjoyed parts of Brad Meltzer’s Justice League of America story, but all the characters calling each other “Clark” and “Bruce” and “Diana” bothered me. It’s one thing for them to know who each other are, but I don’t want to see them signing birthday cards for each other.

All Star Superman Complete Retrospective Fun Fest

All Star Superman Complete Retrospective Fun Fest

Assorted Things that Never Became Posts

I’ve started to write a few posts over the past few weeks and have lost interest in all of them before coming to a version I wanted to publish. When Twitter lets me say it in 140 characters, why write a whole post?

So here are a few seeds that never grew to full posts, in no order whatsoever.

Politics: Sarah Pailin really worries me. I fear she’s like George Bush in not understanding the nuances and constitutional effects of various positions, like that it’s okay to go aggressively after criminals but still offer them trials. John McCain is making me like him less than I used to, especially with the dirty campaign he’s running. Lies I can understand, all politicians lie, but voter suppression is unconscionable.

Toys: my favorite Batman action figure is from the Hush series that came out a few years ago based on Jim Lee’s art. This week I bought the All Star Superman toy based on Frank Quitely’s art, and I love it. It’s not the definitive Superman, but I like having one of Quitely’s drawings come to life on my desk. (The definitive Superman is, I think, the 1984 Hasbro one that looks like Christopher Reeve. I have that, too, but the cape has faded to magenta.) I’d like a definitive Tim Drake Robin in his most recent red and black costume, but none of them come out just right, and depending on how RIP comes out he might not be Robin anymore.

Star Wars: I rewatched all six movies recently. I’ve been wrestling with a post about the prequel trilogy that I can’t seem to turn into prose that’s worth reading. Summary: I think Episodes II and III would be pretty much fine if a better actor had been cast as Anakin. I think Episode I looks like they filmed Lucas’s rough draft before he took out all the obviously unworkable brainstormed ideas like midichlorians. The overall framework of the film is fine, but you need to fix a few things like make Anakin older, make Jar-Jar a real character, and make the story fit into the trilogy instead of just being the one where Obi-Wan meets Anakin and nothing else important happens.

Comics: All Star Superman makes my heart pitter patter and fills me with hope for mankind, similar to the Juno afterglow. That and Casanova are the two best things to come out in the past year.

Books: I finished George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire and am eagerly awaiting the next one. I finished ‘salem’s Lot and am reading The Stand. After that I have a ton of things I want to read and have to keep reminding myself to just enjoy the thing I have in my hand right now.

Movies: Pretty excited about Quantum of Solace.

TV: The shows I’m most pining for to return are Pushing Daisies and 30 Rock. Lots of others of course but those are the standouts. I’m not watching Heroes, Smallville, or Terminator anymore. Fringe hasn’t wowed me but I’m willing to give it a few more episodes.

Apple: I’d really like the AppleTV/iTunes to be a viable competitor to broadcast cable, but the money doesn’t add up. I’d like to see them allow rentals of TV on a full season basis for a sharp discount.

Tit-for-tat by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely

Tit-for-tat by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely

Neat, ostensibly true, story about Mark Millar’s grandfather fighting the British in Ireland.

scans_daily: Ma Barker

scans_daily: Ma Barker

From The Big Book of Little Criminals, a story illustrated by Frank Quitely about Ma Barker.

Flex Mentallo

In 1996, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely published a four-issue spin-off of the acclaimed Doom Patrol called Flex Mentallo. The issues have never been reprinted and haven’t been collected in a trade paperback. You can find them for sale on eBay and on 4 Color Heroes, but it’ll cost you $50-$100 for the whole series. As such, I’ve never read it, but everything I’ve heard about the book has convinced me that it’s the finest work from one of the best writer/artist teams working today. Of Flex Mentallo, Bill Reed says, I avow the series to be the greatest comic book ever made—the holy grail of the medium.

Describing what it’s about is, I understand, a rather tricky enterprise. Every description I’ve read takes up many printed pages, and that’s just summarizing the key plot points and how they inform the greater points Morrison is trying to make. Greg Burgas writes about it at length at Comic Book Resources, but beware of spoilers. More from the same site here. If you do find a copy, Jason Craft did a finely detailed set of annotations. Anyway, the premise is that Flex Mentallo is a comic book character (in the comic) who learns that all comic book characters used to in fact be real but, to avoid a villain, created a new world in which they were fictitious, which is our real world. As you can guess, there’s a ton of post-modern stuff going on their, with a mixing of mediums and questions about authorial intent, imagined worlds, and so forth. Each issue is based on a different era of comics, with a cover parodying that era, from the Golden Age to the Silver Age to the grim and gritty 80s to the conclusion, Morrison’s thesis on where the medium is (or should be) headed.

Flex himself is a simulacrum of Charles Atlas, “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man”, a body-builder who founded his own gym and fitness program in the 20s. He’d run ads in comic books selling his workout program, promising to help weak boys bulk up so they could get girls. Gene Kannenberg Jr. wrote a piece for MSNBC about these called The Ad That Made an Icon Out of Mac, in which he discusses why they were so effective and how widely known and parodied they become. Atlas’s website has a collection of the classic ads.

There’s little doubt that Flex’s physique and leopard-print briefs come directly from Atlas’s own physical appearance, and his origin, printed in an issue of Doom Patrol, is a direct parody of “Mac” from the most famous of the cartoons. This likeness lead to a lawsuit by Charles Atlas’s company. The case was thrown out, on the basis that the Flex Mentallo is a valid First Amendment-protected parody, but my understanding (though I can find no source for it), is that a settlement between the two companies exists such that DC will give a portion of any of Flex’s proceeds to Charles Atlas. Because of the legal issue, DC has never reprinted the book.

There is hope, fortunately. DC has solicited a publication of the last volume of Morrison’s Doom Patrol, showing at least some interest in completing their collections of Morrison’s earlier work for the company, to go along with the Animal Man trades already out. I gather that a Flex trade would have to sell pretty well to make enough money for DC after their payout to Atlas. Rumor is that if Doom Patrol proves successful and demonstrates an interest in Morrison’s stuff, DC will reprint Flex Mentallo, but of course that’s not an official stance. In the meantime, you can read Morrison and Quitely’s current project, the excellent All Star Superman, or dine on some ultra-violence with 2004’s We3.

The Case of the Super-Serif

All-Star Superman has been out for a month now, but I’m just getting around to writing about this. When the preview images came out, there was a small but noticeable amount of chatter about the new logo. It wasn’t anything drastic, but penciller Frank Quietly had taken out the serifs on the famous Superman “S”. Back when the book was in its early stages, writer Grant Morrison wrote We’re changing his costume slightly… the symbol slightly. Yet when the book actually hit the shelves, the standard Superman logo was what we got. Why the change?

The cover:

Page 10:

First, you can see the sans-serif version that was never published (click to enlarge). Then, the published version, containing the traditional “S” logo. It’s a slight difference, but the omission of those little bits takes out the definition of the “S” shape, moving the emphasis from the logo being an “S” in a diamond to the diamond shape itself. It’s a softer look, in my opinion, maybe indicating that this Superman, the one in the All-Star books, hasn’t had as rough a time as the standard version. It also gives us a kind of half-way point between the standard logo and the Kingdom Come shield (seen bottom-right here).

So why the change? Why did Quietly’s original design never make it to the page? A poster on Barbelith asks:

So could someone tell me what the deal is with the Superlogo? I know Quitely rounded of the top serif, and that caused and uproar in some arenas. Then Tom¹ wrote an article about it on plastikbag. Then I sat and to design a mark. Then “new” images come out of A-S:S#1 wirth what looks like redrawn linework over the original, making me question whether the new Superlogo was retracted, and DC now has equity in an antiquated design, or what?

The response on that forum was:

What it seems like is that Grant & Frank proposed a new S logo for this series, DC took them seriously for a while but at the last minute decided their iconic trademark S was too precious to change at all, esp. for a title aimed at readers who maybe aren’t super comic book fans (the whole ‘these are the Classic versions of the characters that the average man/woman on the street know’ approach to the All-Star line).

Similar things happened right before Greg Rucka took over Wonder Woman, the artist had designs that were shown in various comics news magazines that would change Diana’s costume, take away the star-spangled panties and make them a permanent star-spangled skirt, and make her look more Greek, change her hairstyle a bit. It seemed these were a go until the issue came out and lo and behold, Diana was drawn the way we all know her, the ‘classic’ WW look. So basically, DC seems very hesitant to change the look of their big 3 characters even in slight ways. (Apparently getting rid of the yellow oval on the Batman in a permanent way doesn’t seem to matter much, Batman Begins having solidified that image in the public’s mind.)

I buy that explanation, but I think it’s a bit of a shame. The Superman logo is one of the most recognizable icons in the world, so I can see that DC wants to protect it and make sure they aren’t dilluting it, but I’d like artists to be able to have some fun with it, too. I guess there’s no middle ground here, and since DC’s the owner of the mark, they can decide if they want to be strict about the design or not. Except of course that Infinite Crisis, currently their best seller, features two different Supermans, one of whom wears a golden-era shield, so they’re clearly willing to break the rules in some cases.

So if DC did decide that they couldn’t allow their Superman logo to be changed, did they really have a staff artist go through each panel and draw in the tops and bottoms of the shield? Maybe this is common practice and I just didn’t know.

1. The reference to “Tom” is in regards to the post Type Challenge: Redesign the Superman logo… on Plasticbag.org. ↩