(illustration credit 17.1)
I saw in front of me a perfect astronomical vista with three nearby suns of different sizes. I became aware of a huge pond-water-green planetary horizon, which I plunged toward. There I met intelligent sculptures made of what appeared to be ultraviolet neon tubes, which fanned and changed configuration as they attempted to communicate with me. My “angels” dragged me out of there, admonishing me for offending the cultural sensibilities of the Alpha Centauri. (I included a version of them as the Electrokind in All-Star Superman—tungsten-gas aliens with brittle glass exoskeletons.)
“Okay,” they said. “This is what you wanted. The secret of the universe.”
I was turned around, is the simplest way of thinking about it. My sense of being was rotated through a plane I could not now point to, turning my attention to an environment that was not entirely incompatible with theoretical physics’ descriptions of hyperspace, or the bulk, a hypothesized mega-medium in which entire universes are suspended. This was like that, but real—more real than anything I had ever experienced.
Whatever it was, I had fully entered a space that felt both vaulted and enclosed, like an immense cathedral but also infinite in horizon. It was as if infinity and eternity could be contained and bottled inside something much bigger than both. The space was profound azure blue in all directions, laced with bright silver lines and grid traceries that came and went, ghost blueprints zipping up and down an invisible monofilament scaffolding all around me. I could not feel my body or open my eyes in the physical world. I wouldn’t have wanted to. My real eyes were wide open here. Stranger yet, my arrival in this place felt like a homecoming. All the cares and fears of the mortal world were gone, replaced by the hum of immaculate industry, divine creativity, and, through it all, that unmistakable always-known sense of deep familiarity, of belonging and completion.
This was as weird as anything that Batman or Superman had faced in the pages of World’s Finest.
Continued same time, same channel, next chapter, new age!
CHAPTER 18
AFTER DOOM PATROL and Arkham, I felt I was all but done with traditional costumed superheroes. New forms could be created, new kinds of heroes and more elaborate, intricate, experimental work like The Invisibles was possible. However, I found myself drawn back to superheroes.
Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery, published in 1996, was the result. It was the story of the finest, noblest, most selfless hero of all; an exemplar of a type of hero who had all but disappeared. With one tremendous curl of his bicep, he had transformed the Pentagon into a circle, in the pages of Doom Patrol no. 44, thereby negating its occult energies.
In Flex Mentallo I wanted to answer the question that writers are always asked: “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s always seemed quite obvious to me: I look inside my head and there they are. Flex was an attempt to lay out that process on the page. This was my chance to show what I meant when I talked about realistic superheroes.
Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery also turned out to be the first of many successful collaborations with my long-term friend and partner, Frank Quitely. I’d seen the artwork of the pseudonymous Quitely (“Quite frankly”) in the Scottish underground dope humor magazine Electric Soup, where his clean-lined, detailed, and expert draftsmanship stood head and shoulders above the gifted R. Crumb and Gilbert Shelton wannabes with whom he shared page space. Quitely’s drawing style reminded me of Winsor McCay, Arthur Rackham, Harry Clarke, and other great illustrators of the early twentieth century, with touches of Norman Rockwell, early Disney, and the Max Fleischer Studios animators. Best of all, he seemed to have taken the majority of his inspiration from Dudley D. Watkins, the genius behind D. C. Thomson’s The Broons (The Browns) and Oor Wullie (Our William) newspaper strips that were such an indispensable part of a Scottish childhood. The idea of Watkins-style American superheroes appealed to me greatly.
Frank Quitely was the artist I wished I could be. He had a command of anatomy, movement, and expression that gave every character a nuanced life and personality that leapt off the page, and unlike many of his peers who used extensive photo reference, Quitely’s world was generated inside his head; he was able to draw anything from memory and imagination. Even better, Quitely had no particular interest in or love for superhero comics and their conventions, which meant that he could approach them with a fresh eye and few assumptions.
Flex Mentallo made his debut in the pages of Doom Patrol with an origin story that was a surreal take on “THE INSULT THAT MADE A MAN OUT OF MAC,” a famous single-page comic strip advertisement for the Charles Atlas bodybuilding course. Aimed at the skinny and obese, this ad was a perennial in the back pages of Silver Age superhero comics. Atlas promised that he could “make a man out of you” if you only had the guts to “gamble a stamp.”
“DARN IT! I’M SICK AND TIRED OF BEING A SCARECROW! [THINKS] WHY CAN’T I BE A REAL HE-MAN LIKE THOSE OTHER FELLOWS ON THE BEACH?”
I sampled the beautiful, muscular prose of the Atlas pitch and put it in the mouth of a Captain Marvelesque “mysterious stranger” outside a gents’ public toilet, to continue and elaborate upon the story of young Mac’s determination to “get even.”
LET ME PROVE I CAN MAKE YOU A NEW MAN! ARE YOU “FED-UP” OF SEEING THE HUSKIES WALK AWAY WITH THE BEST OF EVERYTHING? SICK AND TIRED OF BEING SOFT, FRAIL, SKINNY OR FLABBY—ONLY HALF-ALIVE? YOU WANT THE “GREEK-GOD” TYPE OF PHYSIQUE THAT WOMEN RAVE ABOUT AT THE BEACH—THE KIND THAT MAKES OTHER FELLOWS GREEN WITH ENVY. THEN FILL IN THIS COUPON NOW.
With these words, the mysterious stranger handed young “Mac” a coupon entitling him to a free book, Muscle Mystery for You!
I DON’T SUPPOSE I’LL EVER KNOW WHERE THAT BOOK CAME FROM. IT CONTAINED TECHNIQUES THAT I CAN’T EVEN BEGIN TO HINT AT. MUSCLE POWER DEVELOPED TO SUCH A DEGREE THAT IT COULD BE USED TO READ MINDS, SEE INTO THE FUTURE, INTO OTHER DIMENSIONS, EVEN.
Flex was the pre–Dark Age superhero delivered—with his simple morality, his kind and friendly nature, and his hatred of bullies—into a more sinister world. Rather than succumb, as the Watchmen characters did, to real-world pressures, he would overcome them with the sheer power of muscle mystery.
Each of the four issues took its thematic cue from a different age of comics, so the first, entitled Flowery Atomic Heart, dealt with the golden age of childhood memories and lost Edens. The second was the silver age of transformation and young adulthood, My Beautiful Head. The dark age and late adolescence were represented by issue no. 3’s bleak Dig the Vacuum, while We Are All UFOs, the final installment, anticipated that coming, as yet unnamed, age, which almost twenty years later we’re calling the Renaissance. In that respect, Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery can be seen as a template for Supergods. Together, the four issues told the story of the titular superhero’s quest through a night city built from what appeared to be the debris of half-forgotten comic-book memories, in search of his lost teammate, the Fact.
But these might also have been the dying hallucinations of a suicidal rock star tripping in a grimy back alley in the rain, while rambling over the phone to what he thinks is a Samaritans help line.
The book was part biography, real and imagined—the story of a life I might have led if the Mixers had been successful. I saw it as the memoir of an “Earth-2 Grant Morrison,” so I gave him my own childhood, and he inhabited a rough facsimile of my West End terraced town house. He was me with my cat and visiting girlfriend, my comic books, aliens, and white-hot blitzkrieg visionary nights. An odd, liminal alleyway near Charing Cross in Glasgow had often caught my eye on buzzed-up walks at three in the morning and became the setting for the main character’s life-saving hallucinations—or perhaps they were his genuine contact with a departed superworld that had always existed all around us, surfacing only in our fantasies. The book showed the influence of my occult experiences too, and tried to resolve them in the context of superhero fiction, using the symbols, archetypes, and characters that had formed in m
y imagination to construct a kind of superhero alternative to religion.
The first cover was plastered with graphic bursts and exclamations in a frantic Pop Art saturation that quoted Infantino’s great Flash no. 163 cover illustration: the hero’s hand outstretched to make direct contact with the reader.
“STOP! YOU MUST BUY THIS COMIC OR THE EARTH IS DOOMED!”
It opened with a nine-panel grid showing a Ditkoesque “hat and trench coat” character with a fizzing cartoon bomb in his hand. The thrown bomb arced into 3-D foreground in the second panel, to explode in the third.
This explosion was the big bang itself, as we understood when cosmic expansion slowed in panel 5 to show the familiar configuration of the constellation Orion and its brightest star, Sirius.
“FLIGHT 23 IS NOW DEPARTING THROUGH THE K-9 DOORWAY.”
Panels 6 and 7 began an immense reverse zoom from Orion out to the galactic spiral, seen from a distance of one hundred thousand light-years.
Panel 8 was blackness, with a single tiny white dot containing the whole universe, and in panel 9, the light of the universe itself vanished into what seemed eternal darkness.
But page 2’s continuation of the disorienting reverse showed that not even the darkness can claim absolute sovereignty, when the first three panels slowly revealed it to be nothing more than the shadow in the dimple of a felt hat. The same hat, in fact, worn by the bomb-wielding mystery man we met on the first page.
Now he was a drawing of a different kind on a different scale: a spindly pen sketch on the shell of an egg, which, in panel 6, was cracked against a pan’s iron rim.
“THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS.”
Panel 7 showed a hand emptying the egg into a frying pan.
“HAVE YOU SEEN THAT ADVERT?”
Panel 8 revealed a smiling chef who turned to look directly at the reader just as Animal Man had done but without the same alarm or existential confusion.
“EGGS, EGGS, EGGS.” He grinned. “WHO WANTS EGGS?”
The title page 3 was a full-page picture of our hero, smiling and winking. Flex was the superhero stripped back to his core appeal as an all but naked muscleman in leopard-print trunks and lace-up wrestling boots. He was as ludicrous, camp, serious, and completely dependable as we could possibly make him.
“EGGS? THAT’LL BE ME!”
Every single character was given his or her own distinct body language, and Quitely included twenty-three separate and distinct airport diners in the background of his splash, each reacting to the presence of this outlandish, grinning, egg-ordering muscleman with the notebook for recording his impressions. As the unreconstructed, good-hearted, unself-aware superman stood among them, some were disgusted, some were mocking, some were impressed, and some were frightened or surprised.
When a terror cell known only as Faculty X (British author Colin Wilson’s term for the hidden potential of the human mind) left a fizzing cartoon anarchist bomb—like the one from pages 1 and 2—in the airport concourse, Flex leapt in to save the day, only to discover the bomb was designed not to explode but to frighten and confuse. Faculty X uses bombs to “destroy not objects but certainties.”
As we looked down on Flex pondering the airport bomb in a majestically composed overhead wide-angle view, the story switched on a page turn to a detailed close-up re-creation of a tabletop in a well-heeled stoner’s apartment: bong, hash block, rolling papers, and a scatter of superhero comic books with titles like Outerboy and Lord Limbo, published by the fictional Stellar Comics line (named for my own DIY boyhood comics imprint). Here we were introduced to the real hero: the nameless, aimless unshaven rock star, drunk and on drugs, manically clearing out cupboards containing boxes of old comic books and his own youthful drawings of what turned out to be the adventures of Flex Mentallo. A realistically rendered scene of Mentallo in police headquarters blended into the same scene drawn by a talented ten-year-old as the story’s levels of fantasy and fiction began to interact.
Flex set out through a seedy, fallen Limbo that stood for the devastated postdeconstruction landscape of superhero fiction, where kid sidekicks bereft of adult hero supervision haunted the backstreets as brutal costumed gangs, part–Burroughs Wild Boys, part–Burgess droogs, or where junkies searched for an elusive kryptonite high that would confer upon them Captain Marvel–style cosmic consciousness and apocalyptic revelatory visions of superheroes swooping in their thousands from a hole in the clouds on the Day of Judgment. I imagined superheroes had become hearsay, glimpsed in blurred photographs like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
A third tier of the story was set in a Platonic superhero universe that was being eaten out of existence by a godlike entity known as the Absolute. The surviving superheroes, known as the Legion of Legions, had devised a desperate plan that required the creation of a whole new universe into which they could escape. The only catch: The superheroes would have to become fictional in order to survive in this new universe with its less forgiving physics. The new universe they created was, as you may have guessed, our own. Our superhero stories were race memories of our own origins in this lost world.
Like The Invisibles, Flex was a direct product of that Kathmandu experience, to which we can now return and where, if you remember, I’d just been twisted off the surface of the universe into the fifth dimension.
Moving through the rich blue space of the beyond were more creatures like the silver blobs who’d brought me there. When one of them passed right through my substance, trailing a tidal wash of emotions, I heard my mother’s voice saying, “Next time I’ll be you and you can be me.” I saw from my own reflection that I was a mercurial hypersprite too and remembered that I always had been. I was fine with that. I understood that we were all holographic sections of something invisible to me in its entirety; I was reminded how to “plug into” the silver grid lines that zipped and glistened in and out of being all around me. These lattices, I knew, were for the input and output of pure information. There was time and space, but those were lower dimensions, useful for creating worlds in the same way that comic artists drew living worlds on paper. Here was an unending perfect day of absorbing eternal creation.
To help explain to my blown senses what was happening and why I was here, the beings were keen to show me the universe I’d just come from and how it looked. When they did, it was one of several, inside something I recall as a kind of stall of incubators.
The universe—the entire space-time continuum, from big bang to heat death, no less—was not a linear stream of events with beginning, middle, and end. That was only how it felt from the inside. In fact, the totality of existence looked more like a ball of sphincters, constantly moving through itself in a way that was hypnotic and awe inspiring to observe. There was Shakespeare scribbling King Lear on one wrinkled fold, and just around the corner from him, forever out of his line of sight, was the Cretaceous period and tyrannosaurs padding past his wife Anne Hathaway’s cottage.
And, as if to confirm that ours was not the only universe, it was explained to me that what I was seeing was a nursery of some kind. In order to grow their “offspring,” the chrome angels had to “make” time, because, as they pointed out reasonably, only in time were things able to grow as I understood it. Time was a kind of incubator, and all life on Earth was one thing, a single weird anemone-like mega-Hydra with its single-celled immortal root in the Precambrian tides and its billions of sensory branches, from ferns to people, with every single detail having its own part to play in the life cycle of a slowly complexifying, increasingly self-aware super-organism. It was as if I had been shown an infant god, attached to a placental support system called Earth, where it could grow bigger, more elaborate, more connected, and more intelligent. Growing at its tips were machine parts; cyborg tools made from the planet’s mineral resources. It seemed to be constructing around itself a part-mechanical shell, like armor or a spacesuit. “It” was us, all life seen as one from the perspective of a higher dimension.
I was told to ret
urn and take up my duties as a “midwife” to this gargantuan raw nervous system. It was important to ensure the proper growth and development of the larva and to make certain it didn’t panic or struggle too much when it woke up to its true nature as a singular life form. Incidentally, what we experienced as “evil” was simply the effects of inoculation against some cosmic disease, so I wasn’t to worry much.
I felt slammed into the sudden weight of my meat on the bed, the rasp of breathing, reeling as sounds returned and the room jigsawed itself backward out of the void, like a kit assembled by my opening eyes. The sense of loss, the fall from heaven, was heartbreaking, but it was my origin story too—my personal induction into the cosmic corps, the army of light.
My experiment was going very nicely indeed.
The next day, Ulric and I flew home via Frankfurt, where I locked myself in an airport hotel room to fill dozens of journal pages with my attempts to describe what had just happened to me in Nepal. If nothing else, I was left with enough ideas for comic books to keep me working for another fifty years.
But there was much more: I soon discovered that I’d been sent back to Earth with my very own superpower. I was now able to “see” 5-D perspective. It became impossible to look at a cup, for instance, without seeing it as the visible surface of something much bigger and even more astounding; something that was winding back through its progress toward my table and beyond, back through its manufacture. The cup was the tip of a string that, if it could be followed back through time, had an immediate physical connection to origins in prehistoric clay beds created by the weathering of primordial rocks, composed of elements spun from a cooling star that was itself one blazing spark of an unimaginable, still-occurring explosion at the dawn of time and being. This one cup had been all those things in time. One day it would break, but the fragments would continue forever. And if a cup was a spectacular, constantly shape-changing, disassembling, re-forming, never-ceasing process, what about the human body itself, morphing extravagantly and more totally than any special-effects werewolf, from small, soft infancy, to hard-bodied teenage self-replicating self-aware maturity, to sagging middle age, and decomposing dry-leaf seniority? How completely has your own body changed since you were five years old? Even when we die, our physical process continues; centuries reduce our bodies to dust, recycling every atom so that the air you breathe today might contain a particle that was once Napoléon. An atom of iron in your body might once have spilled from the brow of Jesus Christ.