Flex Mentallo #4: "We Are All UFOs"

At last, we reach the end of this great four part novel known as Flex Mentallo. The last issue clarifies a lot of what came before, and launches the superhero comic into a new age, writing future history. Not everyone has lived up to the promise of this issue, but Grant himself, Alan Moore and Frank Miller all embraced the new, it’s all true, love the stuff we were ashamed of and make it work message of this issue.

It all kicks off with Lord Limbo revealing that the “Polyverse” is in danger of being destroyed by “The Absolute.” This ties back to Crisis on Infinite Earths, and its destruction of the multiverse. The first time I read the series, I was familiar with the concept behind Crisis, this time I’ve actually read the series, as well as some more pre-Crisis comics, and have a better idea of what it really means to destroy the multiverse. The multiverse made it difficult to have a coherent narrative reality, to hew to continuity and definitely say what was ‘real’ and what was ‘unreal.’ Instead, there was a hugely complicated mesh of different realities that crossed over at times.

It makes it difficult to engage in the continuity of characters’ stories when you’ve got several different versions of them floating around. Who is the ‘real’ Superman, Earth 1’s younger Superman or the older Earth 2 Superman? For certain stories, it doesn’t really matter what’s real. 50s Superman told the most bizarre stories possible, and always returned to the same status quo by the end, so it doesn’t really matter what’s in continuity and what’s not. The status quo is all that matters, and any story elements that are really good will return of their own volition.

In a lot of ways, the old comics were a self regulating version of hypertime. The basic concept between hypertime was the idea that all the stories told about these characters are true, but there is a central timestream. The central timestream is made up of the stories that have resonated the most over the years, other elements that don’t fit into modern continuity branched off of the main timestream and died out. Hypertime makes it easier to manage continuity because it allows for a self repairing timestream, a continuity that serves the story rather than the other way around.

This whole opening sequence serves as a play on the in universe happenings of Crisis. These wacky Silver Age characters are facing an enemy so large he will engulf their entire world. So, they have to hide themselves in fiction. Much of the series’ arc is about the way that the world has changed, it’s become too ‘real’ for the wacky adventures of characters like Flex Mentallo or Lord Limbo. The wonder they represent as been reinterpreted as angsty darkness, much like the DCU itself. But, layered in the fiction is the spark of wonder that came before, the destruction of the multiverse is just another enemy to be beaten, and eventually these heroes will be liberated.

I love the whole opening sequence of the issue, the way this superhero conflict is reduced to its most potent emotional moments. Quitely’s art is obviously brilliant, but I’ve got to give special notice to Morrison’s words. He manages to build this whole crazy world and tear it down in three pages. My favorite panel is Nanoman and Minimiss shrinking down, trying to remember “Don’t forget the word…Sha…a…Sha…Oh God, it’s love, it’s…”
The s
So, the magic word, Shaman, which unlocks Wally’s subconscious, is associated with love. The whole arc of the series is on one level about Wally rediscovering his love of the world, moving beyond his self imposed isolation and re-embracing all the good things around him. He must pass through the darkness to get to the man in the moon, the trigger image that will let him unlock the heroes and help humanity, and himself, actualize its full potential. But, for now, the world is destroyed and the heroes lock themselves in comics to stay alive.

Next, we check in with Harry and the Hoaxer, standing amidst the dead bodies of the heroes from the superhero orgy last issue. This issue is all about leaving old paradigms behind and evolving into something new and better. Those heroes were trapped in their current mindset, and consequently, they could not become part of the new age. As Flex says on the next page, the heroes turned on each other, and tore each other to bits. People like “Deathtrappist” and “The Kill Klaw Klan” are clear parodies of those edgy Dark Age heroes like The Punisher or Youngblood.

I love the image of Flex broken up into many component images, floating through some kind of beautiful abyss. The single individual is broken up into many component pieces, all of which add up to become a whole. It’s one of the most striking depictions of an individual in a comic, representing a kind of extratemporal view of the individual. I also love the next page, where the blank green world gets filled in by Faculty X members, who shuffle like stage hands, wheeling in the props that make up the world of the Legion of Legions.

I’ve already talked about the way Faculty X, or the extratemporal version of The Fact, resembles John a Dreams. Outside of time, one’s role in the overall human narrative becomes clear. Certain actions have to happen to ensure certain ends, and these extratemporal beings fill in the little gaps in the timestream, they put people in the position they need to be to act. The stagecrew image is apt, except these guys work to make sure the people in the play don’t ever realize they’re in a reality that’s being manipulated.

From there, we make it back to Wally Sage, who is still spinning through time and space, eventually landing in the ceramic city of his youth. In the context of the narrative universe, Nanoman and Minimiss put trigger images into the world, that will eventually remind people of the world that exists behind our reality. One of these is the MoonMan, I feel like the ceramic universe is another one. It ties back into a childhood memory, all helping lead him to the magic word.

On the next page, Wally meets his younger self, in a time hopping scene that echoes what we saw with Wally and Flex earlier. In issue one, Wally recalls seeing Flex standing in the doorway of his school when he was a kid, a moment that we see from Flex’s perspective in the issue. The fulfillment of cross-time foreseen experiences is something that crops up in The Invisibles quite a bit, particularly with King Mob’s hopscotch through a dream universe during the Billy Chang Hand of Glory ritual. It’s a concept I used in my own film Universal Traveler. I’m not sure exactly why this sort of time travel stuff fascinates me so much, I guess part of it is that knowing that moments from the past can cross over with moments from the future indicates the existence of an ordered, purposeful universe. If young Wally sees old Wally, and old Wally eventually sees young Wally, it means that all time exists at all moments, and if that’s the case, it means that existence isn’t so much just random happenings, it’s a massive singular organism that exists in perpetuity. It goes back to that very basic Grant concept that all time exists and if we can step outside, we’d be able to see the dinosaurs right next to Shakespeare.

This leads us into the thematic core of the issue, and the series as a whole. Wally explains that the superheroes come from the place where ideas are made, and hid in our universe to avoid the absolute. The basic conceit of the miniseries is this idea that it’s the superheroes are real, and our universe that’s fake. This ties into the notion that Superman has to be more real than you, very few people have lived longer than Superman has, and Superman will probably still be having new adventures when we’re all dead. The nature of his adventures will change, they might no longer happen in comics, but the character will survive when we’re in the ground.

Now, you might say it’s preposterous that superheroes would have built the world, they’ve only been around for seventy years, but our universe has been around much longer than that. On one level, if you’re asking this question, this might not be the miniseries for you. But, to answer it, you can take two approaches. One is to look at the perspective of the series’ protagonist. Wally is a kid who was obsessed with superhero comics, for him, they are the models for his own behavior, they shaped his sexual development, and they’re what he’s trying to grow out of to become an adult. He essentially blocks out this childhood encounter for the first half of the book, casting Lord Limbo as an alien or a child molesting uncle rather than face up to the fact that as a child, he had the universe revealed to him in a superhero comic.

On a real world level, isn’t that what it feels like to be a kid and read a superhero book? It’s all about seeing into this wonderful world of power and possibility that’s so far apart from your own powerless place in the world. As a kid, you don’t have any responsibility, so having to save the world wouldn’t be a burden, it would be exciting and cool. It would mean you were needed. As a kid, you can believe that these characters are real, and it would be easy to believe in a secret history of the universe where the comics are real and your world isn’t.

So, if we’re to consider this series essentially the cosmic enlightenment of the human race from the end of The Invisibles, just seen from a different perspective, it would make sense that Wally would see the being coming to reveal the truth about the world and make us all into gods in a world of wonder and amazement as superheroes. That’s his template for dealing with the fantastic in the same way that Dane’s is aliens or Fanny’s is the gods of Mexican myth.

On another level, the notion that superheroes are real and our world is just a projection over their fiction ties into the notion of superheroes as the latest incarnation of the enduring storytelling mythology of the human race. Ever since the dawn of time, we’ve told stories and created gods to explain the secrets behind the workings of the world. In JLA, Grant made each of the big seven characters equivalent to a hero from Greek mythology. Are the exploits of Superman or Batman any more outlandish than what happened to Zeus?

Back then, Zeus was ‘real,’ he was worshipped as a god, and the mythology was the means of interacting with him. The stories gave him his power and dominion over the world. Stories explained the secret origin of why the sun rises, the hidden truth behind the seasons and other natural happenings. There’s always been an engine underlying reality, and what is religion but a series of stories that we believe? This story is essentially the tale of the second coming, of heroes who died for us and built the world as a stopgap until they can return and save us all. It’s the Jesus narrative all over again, the eternal human narrative of an all powerful savior coming to take us off this world and into paradise.

In that sense, superheroes are today’s manifestation of something that’s been with us for many years. They are the enduring mythological narrative that’s resonated throughout human history, all over the planet, in every religion. Whereas God used to live in a church, now he’s hidden himself in the pages of a comic book. If God came to us today, with special powers and uncanny abilities, we’d probably understand him as a superhero. Or at least Wally would.

“The world doesn’t have to be the way it is. We can be them” is as good a summation of all Morrison’s work as anything. At this point, Wally is no longer scared of the unknown. We first saw the freaky image of the boys in the circle from outside, now we’re above, and looking down on it, it’s amazing, not scary. Wally says that we made these stories to fill the gap, the missing wonder in our life, and discover the truth about reality. Lord Limbo had told Wally this when he was a kid, but he had suppressed it. It was implausible and didn’t make sense to his teenage self, but now, at his lowest ebb, it all surges back.

Next, we return to Flex, who is confronting the MoonMan. Wally’s self loathing teenage self. The MoonMan is all about taking away the wonder of the universe, exposing how implausible these things are and reducing things to a boring ‘realism.’ It’s all a matter of perspective. He says “I made you Flex. I made your whole sad, scabby little world to entertain myself,” as a way of reducing Flex to something insignificant. It means that Flex isn’t ‘real,’ when earlier we were astonished by the idea that Wally could believe in something so much, it would leap off the page and become real.

The MoonMan wants to bring “some realism” to Flex’s world, to hit him with black mentallium and destroy his world. Flex is an inherently unrealistic character. A huge guy wandering around in leopard print trunks with no personality other than being a noble, good hero. He doesn’t have moral complexity, he’s just a classic idea of a hero. He’s not fit for the post Watchmen/Dark Knight world of morally ambiguous characters who hate themselves as much as the enemies they’re fighting. We’ve been privelege to Flex’s inner monologue throughout the series, and most of his thoughts involve longing to meet up with his crimefighting buddies and have some adventures. It’s not realistic at all, and an angry teenager would rail against the absurdity of Flex, hating that he could have ever created something so stupid.

That page ends with Harry pointing a gun at the MoonMan, threatening to destroy him with “Six chambers of semi-jacketed realism.” Wally’s own self loathing teenage self is threatened with the very edginess he was trying to embrace, and he’s now forced to choose. Lying in the alley, Wally realizes that he took either M&Ms or Paracetamol. In ‘reality,’ he took the paracetamol, that’s what we’ve been led to believe the whole series, it’s not plausible that someone could take M&Ms and go through this whole experience, at least in our world. In Flex’s world, anything is possible, if Wally has the will to live, he can rewrite reality to accommodate that. Flipping through timespace, he can change the events that happened and heal himself. It’s what a superhero would do, and it doesn’t matter if it’s absurd, it’s still possible.

Wally describes the ceramic castle world as “My head…everybody’s head.” It’s the collective subconscious, the place where ideas come from, that’s where the Legion of Legions lives. Lord Limbo tells him that Nanoman and Minimiss are trapped in a comatose state within the universe. The universe isn’t fully alive yet, the limits and sadness we feel are the universe getting further and further from the initial spark of life. In this case, we once again have a concept that can be interpreted on multiple levels. On one level, this story is about Wally’s own life hanging in the balance. You could read this whole cosmic journey as Wally coming to terms with himself, the choice to live or die his own. Lord Limbo is like the spirit of Death, offering Wally a choice.

However, you can also read it on a cosmic level. Humanity itself is in a stasis state, something’s missing, we’ve all felt it ,and if we just remember who we’re supposed to be, the universe will explode into brilliant life. But, we need to believe strong enough to make it real. As Limbo says “Before it was a bomb, the bomb was an idea.” Everything we imagined can become real if we try hard enough. That line also ties nicely into the series’ opening image, The Fact throwing a bomb that creates a Big Bang which is presumably the universe coming into existence. So, it reinforces this notion of our universe as a construction. It’s an idea someone once had, and ideas can evolve and become better. “No more barriers between the real and the imaginary.”

But, Wally isn’t quite ready to face that yet. He says “I can’t be remembering this. I’m losing my fucking mind.” People find it difficult to deal with the extraordinary around them, they reduce things to the most boring, rational explanation rather than seeing the wonder all around us. That’s not to dismiss science or anything like that, just because we know why the sun crosses the sky, doesn’t make it any less amazing that it happens everyday. To look at a world without wonder is to see thigns like MoonMan Wally who decides he took pills rather than consider the world of wonder Lord Limbo showed him.

Earlier, Flex got a Fact card that said “The fish got changed more often than the water,” which refers to Harry replacing his wife’s fish so she wouldn’t know it had died. The MoonMan reduces Harry’s efforts to just “the sentimental fish story.” The MoonMan version of Wally is filled with disdain for real emotion and caring. He’s become so isolated, so ashamed of the things he does like that he declares “There is no love in this world anymore.” He thinks that growing up means giving up the optimism of childhood. To sum it up “Get with the program, happy endings are for kids.”

That’s a sentiment we see a lot in the world. Works of fiction that are called ‘realistic’ invariably focus on characters who suffer massive amounts of personal trauma while living in a boring, rundown world. Yes, that’s a part of the world, but it’s not the only thing that’s real. Stories can inspire us and do so many things, particularly with superheroes, who are inherently unrealistic, there’s no need to be bound by the constraints of our current reality. Superheroes can serve as an example, they can guide us to a better life, one where happy endings are the norm. What this story is saying is our reality doesn’t have to be this way, it’s not the only thing that’s real, so why should we only think in terms of the way things are now. Things can be better, we don’t even have to change the world, we just have to change our mind and see M&Ms instead of Paracetamol.

Ultimately, it’s Wally’s own creations who save him. Wally may be saying “There is no love in this world anymore,” but his own creation is holding strong. Harry’s love is stronger than Wally’s disdain for himself, and an idea can’t be killed by a gun. The Hoaxer pretty much sums it up when he says “I think you want everyone to be dead because looking at life makes you realize what you’re missing. Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism.” This leads into an utterly absurd comic book moment where Flex flexes his muscles, displays the giant hero halo and defeats the MoonMan.

Of all Morrison’s work, Flex is probably the most relatable for me. In my own writing, I always fluctuate between infusing characters with my best, most optimistic self, and my most unhappy, self loathing impulses. I’ll make whole characters out of what I perceive myself to be at my worst, the thoughts I think when I’m most happy. And, that’s essentially what Morrison has done here, representing the different aspects of Wally’s personality in the various characters we see here. The adolescent Moonman Wally is Wally at his worst, filled only with disdain for everything around him and loneliness within.

The work has demanded reading on multiple levels through out, but in this moment all the realities telescope into one. Flex’s mission hasn’t really been about finding The Fact, it’s been about helping Wally overcome his own issues. Notably, Wally invokes Flex’s own creation myth when he criticizes superheros as “pathetic fucking power fantasies for lonely wankers who’ve had so much sand kicked in their faces they look like the opening credits of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’!” Wally is of course talking about himself, confronted with the utter absurdity of those characters he loved so much, he rejects them, but they don’t reject him. Earlier in the series, someone asked who would save the world, and the answer was the superheroes, that’s what they always do. So, in this series, the world is Wally’s mind, and it’s up to Flex to save him.

Flex is beyond the irony and self consciousness that so plagues Wally. Wally doesn’t know who he is, and he projects that insecurity onto Flex, asking him “Do you know what you are,” a question that is trying to puncture him, to point out how ridiculous he is, to point out the fact that he’s only a piece of fiction. But, Flex isn’t phased, he knows exactly who is, “I’m a superhero.” Flex knows his purpose is to help people, it’s to guide humanity forward, and he’s going to do that one person at a time. Morrison has talked a lot about superheroes as our evolutionary template. Typically, I interpreted that as being about gaining powers and abilities, literal physical evolution.

But, in this moment, we see the way that superheroes are also morally evolved. In All Star Superman, it’s not so much the powers that separate Superman from ordinary people, it’s his morality, his love and existence beyond a simple good/bad paradigm. Lex Luthor, his prime foe, is so petty and violent, all the worst traits of humanity. Superman is the best we can be, and so is Flex. He might not be a mature or realistic character, but if we believe that someone so good hearted can be real, it can make everything better.

Flex says exactly what Wally needs to hear at this moment, “Being’s clever a fine thing, but sometimes a boy just needs to get out of the house and meet some girls.” Essentially, the best way to get over all his psychological trauma isn’t to drift into an emotional cocoon and cut himself off from the world. The wonder is all around us, it’s in other people, and Wally’s best option is to embrace the world around him. Wally mutters about his adolescent desire to abandon the world, “to be the last boy on Earth,” but that’s all posturing. It’s not what he really wants, Flex shows him the way.

And, in a glorious panel, Wally re-embraces life. He decides that it wasn’t paracetamol, it was M&Ms. The adolescent, self-hating part of his psychology has been defeated and he’s realized he’s got “a brilliant life.” So much of the way we feel about the world is a matter of perspective. You can focus on the positive, the things you’ve got going for you, or dwell in what you don’t have, that’s the difference between happiness and sadness. I think we’ve all got that self loathing piece of ourselves in there deep down, it’s easier to feel alone sometimes than to reach out to the world. But, in that huge burst of light, Wally chose to look at the good side, to see the M&Ms, and that made all the difference.

The last few pages of the series show us the birth of a new age. As I mentioned before, I see this as the equivalent of the final issue of The Invisibles, as all the gears of the universe whir into action and kick start the next stage of evolution. Wally is seeing it as superheroes crashing into our world, all the technology we imagined becoming real, an entire world waking up and becoming what it was meant to be. I love the way Quitely has the spiraling freeze frames of Nanoman and Minimiss cycle through the page, and stop at the moment when they become aware. They made the universe and now it’s waking up again.

Then, we find out that the person Wally’s been talking to this whole time was The Fact. Early in the series, he says how nice this person was, how helpful he was on guiding Wally along. The Fact listened to what he had to say, he kept him hanging on at the worst points in his psychosis, and enabled him to actualize his potential. The Fact is kind of like God in this world, he set Flex on his journey and he kept Wally going through his. Flex has faith on him he knows he’s “out there somewhere and I know we can trust him.”

Flex wraps up his role in the miniseries standing on the bridge of a ship, waiting for the Legion of Legions. He’s got faith. I love the final lines he speaks directly to the reader “All we can do is hope. This is Flex Mentallo signing off. I’ll be right here if you need me.” Flex is less a character than a god, an incarnation of pure heroism, built to save us when we most need it.

Morrison just keeps piling on elements as we move to the end, kindly informing us that “You have been inhabiting the first ultra-post-futurist comic: characters are allowed full synchrointeraction with the readers at this level.” This presages Wally unlocking the code. The narration goes on to tell us that the key is in the man in the moon, which has two readings. One is that it was in Wally himself, once he overcomes the emotional issues that were personified by the MoonMan version of himself he unlocks his evolutionary potential and is able to grow out of his childhood state and become an adult, along with the rest of humanity.

The other reading is more cosmic, it’s the idea that the superheroes were waiting behind the moon, like Barbeltih was in The Invisibles. We saw this back in issue 2, with the crazy guy at the bar. Hearing the activation code, Nanoman and Minimiss start kicking the universe into being, and Wally completes it by writing Shaman.

The word Shaman has a bunch of layers. One is the obvious play on Shazam, subverting out expectations by giving us a different magic word. Sha-Man could also be a superhero name. The reading I like most is the idea that superheroes are today’s religious figures, they’re the ones guiding us forward, so a magic superhero would be a Shaman. Shaman are all about exploring consciousness, trying to heal wounds and help people. That’s what the best superheroes do, they’re explorers, charting humanity’s path forward. The whole thing reminds me a lot of Zatanna, the most distinctively magic superhero Morrison’s worked with.

And, the crossword ties into the crossword he used in Seven Soldiers #1. Crosswords are like magic spells, awaiting letters you fill in to complete them. Language is magic and completing the puzzle means launching the spell. That leads the wonderful image of Wally bursting with light and energy, evolving into the superhero he was always meant to be. The whole series is about Wally coming to terms with his issues, and realizing that he already is a superhero, he just had to remember to see it that way. Nothing in his life changed except his perception, he realized that the things he created in the past were great, not something to be ashamed of. His life wasn’t a waste, he wants to live, and he’s now living more than ever before.

The series ends with one last nod to the reader, as The Hoaxer thanks us for our paricipation in the experience. Then, the superheroes hit, hundreds of them soaring down onto the Earth, coming home. This is evolution, this is the change of reality, leaving our limits behind us and becoming a more real, more exciting and better world again. It’s all real at the end here, Wally is saved, the world is saved, and the heroes are coming home.

That pretty much covers it. This is one of the densest, most idea packed works of fiction in any medium ever made. But, it’s also light and effortless. You can do a close reading and try to understand everything, or you can just sit back and get lost in the moment. Other than The Invisibles, it’s my favorite thing Morrison has ever done. It lay the groundwork for Seven Solders and All Star Superman, and it was the start of an artistic relationship with Quitely that would produce some of the most amazing comics in the medium’s history. If you haven’t read the series yet, hunt it down, whatever you pay, it’s worth it. Hopefully, Flex will soon be freed from his rights prison and liberated again to save the world all over again.

Doctor Who: 'The Wasp and the Unicorn' (4x07)

“The Wasp and the Unicorn” is a pretty light episode, but it’s thoroughly enjoyable, taking a plot that sounds pretty weak on paper and making it work thanks to the really fun execution. I found the earlier Doctor meets historic writer episodes a bit ponderous, with their frequent references to classic literature, and all too obvious ties between the Doctor’s actions and what we saw in the author’s books. This episode does similar things, but always with a wink, and, like much of this season, what really makes it work is Donna.

Whereas Rose and Martha seemed awed simply to be traveling around with the Doctor, Donna plays things with a mix of enthusiasm and questioning. She’s excited to be caught up in this world, but also points out the ridiculousness of the genre conventions they’re messing with. It reminded me of the way Buffy used humor to make stories that are really goofy work. The humor doesn’t undermine the narrative reality, it’s an added pleasure on top of the story. Played straight, this episode would not work, but the jokes make it fun.

There’s not too much in depth to discuss here, so I’ll pretty much just do a list of the stuff I liked. I really enjoyed the cheesy dissolve and sound effect accompanying the flashbacks, and the digressive flashback within a flashback to the can can dancers. Another fun scene was the Doctor’s reaction to the poison and the farcical attempt to cure his poison. And, the constant misdirects in the big reveal scene were a lot of fun.

Typically, it’s been the historic episodes that didn’t work for me, but both “Fires of Pompeii” and this episode were great. “Pompeii” was the season’s high point so far, and this was a pleasant surprise. Other than the Sontaran two parter, the season’s been really strong so far. I think part of it may be watching the episodes spaced out a week, instead of bunched up on DVD, but I feel like the stories are more distinct and significant. There hasn’t been that feel that some episodes are just filler that I got from the previous years.

And, I think a large part of that is the fantastic chemistry between the Doctor and Donna. They’re making this season work, and I’m dreading these hints about Donna’s fate. The more she says she’ll never stop traveling with the Doctor, the more I’m worried that she’ll wind up dead down the line. Either way, we’re moving closer to the epic many character season finale, and I’m eager to see how Davies pulls everything together.

Battlestar Galactica: 'Revelations' (4x10)

Typically, my reaction to a Battlestar season is major enthusiasm at the start, which wanes as they go through a lean period in the middle, only to be salvaged by an amazing cliffhanger at the end. So, maybe it’s appropriate that in a season where nearly every episode was really strong that the midseason cliffhanger should underwhelm a bit. Don’t get me wrong, this is a really solid episode, but I wanted something a bit more at the ending, some kind of twist or layer that would blow my mind, in the way the cylon revelation last year or the New Caprica stuff did. They’ve built up such high expectations, this cliffhanger just didn’t grab me that much.

Now, on some level it’s ridiculous to say reaching Earth, the goal of the entire series, is underwhelming, but it’s a perfect example of the journey being more interesting than the destination. Once I realized they were really going to reach Earth, when we saw it there and people started celebrating, I knew there were about ten minutes left in the episode, so I was waiting for that next twist to come. And it did, when we found out that Earth wasn’t the paradise they had been promised, it’s just another broken planet, not unlike New Caprica. I really liked that tracking shot from an aesthetic point of view, but by its very nature, I was waiting for what we were tracking to, the crazy revelation that would top everything off, but we didn’t really get any twist beyond the planet being broken.

It’s a bit hypocritical to criticize the show for not having enough of a twist. Really, I’m watching for the characters more than the narrative, but I wanted something exciting and mind blowing, and I don’t think we really got that. Admittedly, it’s near impossible to come up with an Earth that would satisfy everyone, but I think this is in a lot of ways the most predictable option. I’m guessing next season will be about trying to build a civilization with the cylons and humans, New Caprica redux. I loved New Caprica, it’s my favorite episodes of the entire series, and I’d rather see stories in that milieu than more space travel, but at the same time, that story was already told.

On a show like this, plot developments aren’t important solely on their own terms, they also have to create a viable future. Last season, I loved the cylon reveal, but wasn’t sure how it would play in the next season. It worked out really well, and I’m sure the crew behind the show will make this work in an interesting way. Still, I have that uncertainty about what it will be. It seems like so much was resolved, will the rest of the show be about the cylons and humans trying to rebuild Earth? Does the fifth cylon even matter anymore? There’s a lot of interesting questions left, but they don’t seem like questions that will open up new narrative avenues. At this point, I’ve just accepted Tigh and his gang as cylons, I don’t necessarily need a flashback to tell me how he is a cylon. I’m assuming it will be addressed, but we’ve almost moved beyond it. And, if they’re on Earth, what will the fifth cylon do?

For the fifth cylon, I’d like to see them do something different than with the others. We’ve already seen the person we thought was human revealed as cylon a bunch of times. D’Anna says the fifth wasn’t in the fleet, people are speculating that means he/she was on the basestar. I hope not, I hope it’s someone who’s just on Earth, a mysterious new character who is closest to their God. So much was made of the fifth having special knowledge and power, it’d be cool if they meet someone who actually is aware of this power, a person who is beyond the Manichean human/cylon conflict. I’m thinking of someone along the lines of Kaworu from Evangelion, a guy who takes what would be a copout appearance in the series’ third to last episode and creates a fully realized character who is key to the series’ mythology in twenty minutes.

So, I do like that they reached Earth, but I felt like this was the most obvious path for the series to take regarding Earth. It’s a dark, dank and dreary series, wouldn’t an interesting twist have been to given us a utopia and see if they could live up to it?

Tracking back, there were some brilliant moments in the episode. My favorite scenes were Tory’s change of allegiances, and embrace of D’Anna’s cylon command. D’Anna is owning the screen at all times, with a cutting competence that puts the humans to shame. Before she came back, the humans seemed in control of the alliance, now it’s the cylons leading the way, and I don’t think the humans will double cross them soon. And, Tory’s inspired by that, she’s not going to serve Roslin anymore, she’s going to take control of her own destiny. No moment in the episode was as full of foreboding and promise as Tory deciding to take the medicine to Roslin, what D’Anna had prophesized would come to pass through no action of her own.

One of my major disappointments with the last two episodes of the season is the treatment of Kara. Once she got past screaming about Earth, I really liked her committed visionary phase. I’d have loved to see more of her with Leoben, and explored what it means that she was able to rise from the dead. But, she seems to have reverted to the more stable Kara of yore. Admittedly, this is an issue of focus, her personal life wasn’t much in play, but I hope next year we return to figuring out what’s going on at her core.

The big emotional punch of the episode was Adama’s disbelief that Tigh could be a cylon. More than ever before, Adama feels old in this episode. But, at least he’s got Roslin and his son to help him out. There’s a lot of relief and emotion in his voice when he address the fleet about reaching Earth.

It’s a really good episode, but at the end, I just felt like I needed something more. There’s none of the stylistic flourishes we typically see in a season finale, none of the hypnotic impressionistic sequences the series does so well, and nothing so crazy you’re just left in disbelief. I’d rather see the show honor its characters and narrative than just throw crazy stuff out there, but still, just a little something, please?

Either way, I’m excited to see what they do in the last run of episodes. I hope they don’t all go back to Galactica again. Let’s see this new world being built, let’s see if Earth can be the promised land they all hoped for. And let’s get to it before March 2009, please,

Flex Mentallo #3: 'Dig the Vacuum'

Issue 3 of Flex Mentallo brings us into the ‘dark age’ of superhero comics, starting with the Dark Knight parodying cover, which ever features faux autographs from the creators. This quickly segues into a Watchmen style rainy city and gritty captioned voiceover. What Morrison does here is evoke the spirit of those books in the same way he evokes the Silver age, simultaneously pointing out its ridiculousness and paying tribute to what made it successful. If you’ve read early issues of Animal Man, you know how much of an influence Moore was on Morrison back then, and the opening page shows that he can still capture that feel. My favorite moment on the page is when Harry says “Jesus! When did I start talking to myself,” undermining the whole notion that somehow the caption box is more realistic than the thought bubble.

The subsequent page features a number of interesting things. Harry’s wife dreams of two people buried in a cigarette pack, residual memories of Nanoman and Minimiss seeping back into the world. However, the word they’re seeping into is one filled with worrying and fear. She’s constantly scared, unable to watch the news because it makes her feel bad. I’ve seen a lot of people like this in the real world, who are so inexplicably scared of everything, who read the newspaper just to talk about whatever awful events were reported on that day. The sadder the story, the more worthy of discussion it is.

This ties into the mindset that the best is behind us and we’re living in a world on a downward spiral, that today’s kids are bad and the world quickly headed for disaster. Why do people feel this way? It all ties in to a fear of change. The world is evolving, not every part of that evolution is good, but societal change will always happen. Today’s Grand Theft Auto is yesterday’s gangster rap, proof that this generation of kids is irrevocably messed up. Bush has played up this fear, of change, of others, to serve his own agenda, but a large part of this series is showing that the fear is something that must be overcome. The world we live in now has to die to make the new one, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This issue is all about the hard times we must go through on our journey to the light. Before things can get better, they have to get really bad. The Filth ends with Greg using all the shit he has to deal with to fertilize his flowers, a perfect summation of the themes of a lot of Morrison’s work, the idea that we have to suffer through bad times because that’s what makes us stronger. I think it’s a valid point, people can go along in destructive patterns and it’s not until they absolutely bottom out that they really do something about it, and change their lives for the better. The temporary pain is worth it in the long run.

I’ve had this debate with people before, and the opposing point is usually, but what about the starving child in Africa who dies because he has no food? What point does his suffering have? That’s a tougher call. Morrison’s work is written with the mindset of someone in a fairly stable society, one where not many people are starving to death, and his philosophical points come out of that perspective. But, I’d argue on a societal level, the people worse off are there to remind us of how we all need to change things. It may be awful for the individual, but the more people suffer that fate, the more we will all work to make things better for everyone. The thing is, we’re only just becoming aware on a global level, so it’s hard for people to think beyond themselves, or their own country, and recognize that we need to help everyone. That’s our next evolution, to become a single global society.

Next up, Harry meets with the Hoaxer. The concept behind the Hoaxer ties into the illusory nature of our reality in the series. With only a magazine and a flashlight, he can make Harry believe he’s in the woods, just as the superheroes are able to construct our entire universe as an illusion to hide in. We believe it’s real, but in actuality it’s a construction, our own kind of prison. But, as the Hoaxer says, “implicit in the design of any prison is the means of escape from that prison,” in this case it’s the magic word.

Next we trip through various events in the life of Wally Sage. This is the bad part of the trip, all his fears and negative feelings spiraling in his mind, motivated by the guilt and self loathing at the core of his being. Essentially, the series is about the character coming to terms with who he is, recognizing that the parts of himself he hates and thinks are immature are a part of him, and just as valid as anything else. Society teaches us we have to behave a certain way, to give up ‘childish things,’ like comics, as we grow up, but there’s no particular reason for that. The more crazy ‘childish’ things we give up, the more we become the same.

He begins by asking where we get our ideas from. In the case of this series, ideas come from the bleed between the superhero universe and our own. The superheroes seed themselves into fiction to remind us that they’re out there. That’s visually conveyed in the panel with Nanoman and Minimiss, in which Nanoman is imprisoned and she touches him. Our minds touch their prison and come back with information.

The rest of the sequence is less connected to the overall narrative of Flex Mentallo, and more interesting as an exploration of the character’s, and by extension Morrison’s own, psychology. I think of the most damning, and relatable things for me, is the scene where his girlfriend says he writes songs about love, but doesn’t really feel it. As someone who writes stuff, I have that same kind of reaction to bad stuff happening that he does when he says “Maybe I can get a song out of it.” Art is the transformation of feeling into song or film or comic. You pour emotion into it, and hopefully emotion comes out in the viewer. But, at the same time, when does creating art put a distance between you and the world? For Wally, he’s more concerned with the conceptual idea of love than the actual experience of it, and that’s why he ends up pushing everyone he cares about away, and sits in an alley alone, dying.

The reason Wally can’t emotionally engage with anyone ties back to his adolescent self loathing, manifested in the Moonman next issue. All his guilt in this issue seems to tie back to the drawings he made of Thundergirl and Supernova naked. In doing this, he turns the comics that sparked his imagination as a child into something elicit and wrong. He is literally using the pieces of his childhood for adult purposes, and that creates a whole vortex of emotional uncertainty. He feels like it’s wrong, and wants to “sick it all out,” but this is a natural part of growing up.

The problem for Wally is that he isolated himself and didn’t engage with the world around him. He says “who needs girls when you’ve got comics?” But, that isolation led to both his messed up relationships and an inability to deal with women on a meaningful level. He imagines the girl in the alley, who looks like Thundergirl, being raped, a manifestation of the way in which he has corrupted the heroes. He can’t engage with a pure hero like Flex anymore, he has spread the seed of destruction on the comics he once loved. The superheroes have become “as fucked-up as the fucking rejects who write about them and draw them and read out them.”

He’s at his low ebb of self loathing here, saying that there’s “no one left to care about us. No one at all.” Except, there is. Flex is the piece of him that remains untainted by all his guilt, and that good piece of him can pass through the dark and save Wally. More than the two previous issues, there’s a direct correlation between Flex’s adventure and what we see Wally going through. Flex, the symbol of childhood, passes through the confused sexuality of adolescence, while we see Wally’s flashbacks to the same period in his own life.

Flex ponders the issues raised by the dark age of comics, and tries to find “rational explanations for past weird adventures,” a clear reference to Moore’s Miracleman, which posited that all the crazy Silver Age adventures were mental hallucinations generated by a scientist to train superheroes. Flex passes Faculty X on his way through the sewer and ponders if they are “only one man, pretending to be dozens.” That’s the case, Faculty X is the Fact split through time, it is one core of being taken and spread throughout the timestream. I like the notion that “the bombs that Facutly X use destroy not objects but certainties.” That ties in nicely with the notion of growing up, the idea that we have to shed the things we believe in and take on new attitudes. It can be hard to lose that belief, but it’s part of our evolution.

Wally plunges deep into self loathing, unable to express himself to his girlfriend for no particular reason other than the simple fact that he has built this emotional wall around himself and won’t break through it. He tries to remember the magic word that will liberate him, but can’t, he’s stuck in his dark period. The heroes can’t give the word to him, they can only help him find it himself.

Next up, we find Flex journeying into the dark underbelly of ‘adult superhero’ world. The narrative captions get a bit screwy here, the blue boxes typically associated with Flex now put Flex in the third person. If Wally is the creator of Flex, is he also the architect of Flex’s narrative? Is he projecting himself, as Flex, on this mission? I think you can read it that way, certainly it’s what’s encouraged by the first/third person slip. Wally would have taken Flex down in to this mire as a way of indulging the same desires he had earlier when drawing Thunder Girl.

From there, the blue captions seem to focus exclusively on Wally’s discussion of the events. He goes on a self loathing/revelatory rant, and comes to the conclusion that Frederic Wertham was right, comics really are just twisted adolescent power fantasies. This approach to comics are just another way of undermining them. People who don’t want to engage with the social importance of superheroes write them off as simple adolescent power fantasies. Yes, certain books do have elements of escapist fantasy, exploring how awesome it would be to have a secret identity and be someone important, not the face that society sees.

I think there’s a fundamental appeal to the secret identity concept, and on some level, we all do have secret identities. To others, we appear as mild mannered whoever, doing his/her own thing and going along. The world at large isn’t aware of the churning mess of ideas and emotions that lives within everyone’s brain. One of the things I really hate in contemporary pop culture narratives is the fetishization of the ousider, implying that only the rejects have something going on beneath the surface, and your ‘ordinary’ person leads an unexamined life. Some people are more analytical than others, but everyone has their own issues, everyone wants things they can’t have and wants to be someone they’re not. Everyone’s striving for something, everyone has a side they don’t show the world.

But, back to the comic, the whole trip to superhero orgy land is about unlocking one of the things that is inherent in the books. People where skintight costumes, there’s a lot of imagery that can be interpreted as sexual, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. The way Wally sees it, this reading strips the characters of their power, and I think that’s the goal of a lot of these ‘dark age’ comics. A book like Identity Crisis takes out the superpower elements and reduces the villain to simply a rapist. I feel like the brilliance of the superhero concept is in its ability to take the issues we face everyday and turn them into battles of cosmic importance. It’s the same issue that came up with those 9/11 books set in the Marvel Universe, the rules aren’t the same there. Nobody’s going to get worked up about a terrorist attack when cities are destroyed seemingly everyday.

On a purely visual level, the orgy sequence is a major success. There’s such a sleazy vibe to all the images, particularly the way Quitely abstracts human form. The giant woman is just a body, no face, only her sex organs matter. Other panels are simply a mash of entwined limbs and bodies, all engulfing Flex. Quitely always seems to draw books where he winds up drawing scenes with hundreds of superheroes, and he always manages to give them all unique, interesting designs.

This whole reverie ends with Wally quoting the ubiquitous newspaper headline I quoted in my review of issue one “Zap! Pow! Look Out! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore.” The inherent thinking there is that adults wouldn’t want to read the sort of crazy stories put out in the Silver Age, they’re only interested in “serious” work with adult themes and violence and sex. I’ll be the first to say that a lot of Silver Age comics were awful, just as a lot of ‘Dark Age’ comics were awful, but I think it’s reductive for society to decide that those crazy adventures of yore were only interesting for children. The whole superhero orgy works as a rebuke of this, pointing out how hollow and sad some of those superhero deconstructions were. The concept is about being able to go anywhere and do anything, why stay stuck on the street level? I don’t think it’s about not making those kind of comics, it’s about remembering that comics can be anything, and you don’t have to be sad to be mature. If there’s one message to this work, it’s that there’s nothing childish about being happy and embracing the wonder of the world.

Wally sees himself at the nexus of multiple universes. In this story, there’s so many universes, the image could refer to a number of things. The next panel, with the skeleton from the ban the bombzine implies that his childhood memories are colliding with the present, his mind is losing touch with its footing in time as he slips further and further into the acid trip.

The bottom two panels of that page raise the question “How could you love anybody the way you loved Thundergirl? You try and it’s like heaven…But it’s only like heaven. It’s not heaven, is it?” This line has a lot of possible interpretations. In the context of the narrative, it refers to the idea that our world is just a construction, Thundergirl is at the core of things, and the illusions we put on the surface will never match the teeming essence of life at the center. When Wally says the magic word, he unleashes that realer reality and experiences life in a way he never had before.

But, our world most likely isn’t based around a core of superheroes. So, the line reads more as a psychological issue for Wally. He’s grown up so immersed in this fiction, he’s been living with these archetypal essences, the gods of our reality reincarnated in the form of fictional beings. So, maybe it’s not such an unreal conclusion, is it? What Morrison does in JLA is equate each of the seven heroes with a Greek god, and he puts them through epic stories that play as modern myth, full of the same larger than life symbolic narrative that characterized Greek mythology. According to him, superheroes are the contemporary incarnation of the same gods that have recurred throughout our history. They have been made obsolete in religion, so they have to show themselves to the world in this new form.

But, still, isn’t it kind of sad that he could never love anyone like he loved Thundergirl? A lot of the work is about the adolescent Wally’s inability to come to terms with the fact that his life isn’t like the comics, isn’t as crazy and exciting as Flex. In Flex’s own narrative, we see a desire to return to simpler times, and Wally shares that. Nothing in his life can live up to the idealized childhood he created, and no real woman can live up to the idealized woman he built out of the superheroines he read about. But, at the same time, this very fact makes him feel bad, he doesn’t want to feel that, he wants to feel ‘normal,’ but it just won’t work. Flex punctures this whole self indulgent mytholigization of struggle next issue, as we’ll soon see.

Wally trips through various moments from his life next. He and his girlfriend pass from regular reality to the ceramic village world. The ceramic village is the secret lair of his self loathing adolescent self, still drawing him in and trapping him in old, bad patterns. Next, we go back to the circle of shitting image from earlier, but this time they’re around an exploding nuclear bomb. The circle of boys, with Wally on the outside seems to represent his fear, fear of exclusion, fear that there’s some massive unseen force out there working to destroy him. Young Wally equated the bomb with a comic book apocalypse, it is an element of the irrational fear that powers the Moonman.

Wally has constructed a whole narrative of abuse or abduction, likely because that’s how our society teaches kids to deal with the things that happened to them. There’s this relentless drone of fear drummed into us, psychologists dig into the psyche seeking childhood traumas to blame for adult failures. But, there doesn’t need to be some huge mysterious problem, it can be as simple as an encounter with the unknown. The unknown can seem scary until you face it. Here, young Wally seems to have dealt fine with meeting Lord Limbo, but over the years, he has deemed this impossible, and turned this good memory into a mysterious, dark experience.

Earlier, Wally pondered where he got his ideas from, unaware that he had been taken to that place as a child. On one level, the entire series is about Wally learning to deal with what he experienced as a child, both this superhero encounter and on the simple level of the things that happened to him, the magazines he saw and the strange, irrational fears he had. I worry that kids are losing touch with this strange, other world. My parents grew up in Brooklyn and as kids, they hung out on the streets and went around on their own. I didn’t do that, we usually hung out inside, and played video games or things like that. Parents are too scared to let their kids go off on their own, and if you constantly tell kids to suspect strangers and fear them, they’re going to have these kinds of reactions to the world around them. Yes, child abuse is a serious problem, but staying inside and being scared of the outside world is its own problem too.

The notion that superheroes show us where we get our ideas from is interesting. In JLA, Morrison had Metron say that superheroes would provide the guide for human evolution, and that’s been a recurring theme in his work. They are our template for post human existence, and you could argue the army of superheroes surging the world at the end of the series is really just the next stage of humanity actualizing itself. In that sense, the final scene is the same moment as the last issue of The Invisibles, just seen from a different angle.

But, more on that next time.

Battlestar Galactica: 'The Hub' (4x09)

This season of Battlestar has been consistently brilliant in a way the series never achieved before. With the exception of last week’s wheel spinning and odd character developments, it’s been one great episode after another. More than ever before, I have a feeling of things growing and changing, that pretty soon there’ll be no status quo to go back to. My biggest gripe with the series throughout its entire run has been this relentless pull to return to the character and plot dynamics that were set out at the start of the series. We’ve always got to have Lee and Kara in a tense, possibly romantic relationship, we’ve got to have the cylons as villains, the fleet being pursued, Adama ruling the fleet. Things have changed along the way, but invariably that change is wiped away and we return to the basic status quo.

After last season’s finale, I felt like the show was at a turning point. The revelation of the final four was so bold, and seemingly out of nowhere, it could have sunk the series if it wasn’t handled right. I’m still not sure how they were able to hide in the fleet, or what their exact nature is, but watching those characters deal with being cylons has been fascinating. But, that doesn’t really play into this episode. The other major plot that’s changed things this season is the cylon civil war. In season three, they experimented with doing a cylon plot, but it was more of a travelogue and didn’t have much forward narrative momentum. Here, the cylon plot is arguably more interesting than the humans, and it’s exciting to watch them try to work with humanity for a common goal.

This episode features a number of great things. It was great to have D’Anna back, and Lucy Lawless really ran with the role, right from the first moment when she snapped Cavill’s neck. Say what indeed. Was that the last Cavill around? I’m guessing there’ more of them out there somewhere, so hopefully we’ll see Dean Stockwell back. Her greatest moment was definitely the conversation with Roslin, where D’Anna totally fucks with her, all while kicking back in a bathrobe. If I had to get unboxed, that’s definitely how I’d roll.

Elsewhere, we get some interesting philosophical questions raised over with Helo. If this Eight has Athena’s memories, are they same? Is betraying her for Roslin like betraying his own wife? If he sleeps with her, is it really cheating? You know Helo was thinking about the threeway with two versions of Sharon, or at least I was. Anyway, Helo’s allegiance over the course of the series is interesting. He’s consistently been more likely to help out the cylons than Sharon-Athena. Sharon knows she can’t slip at all or she’ll lose her place in the fleet. As she said earlier this season, she chose a side and is going to stick with it. But, Helo is aware of the way the president is double crossing the cylons. He doesn’t like it, but there’s nothing he can do. I think it was pretty cruel of Roslin to screw them over after she made the cylons complicit in destroying the resurrection hub, but I guess she’s always been prone to value survival over doing the right thing.

The main action of the episode was the space battle, and it was perhaps the most gorgeous in the series’ history. I’ve mentioned before, but the effects team on the show has moved beyond simply creating credible images and on to creating beautiful, artistic ones. The missiles exploding like fireworks, the supernova like image of the hub exploding, the surging tracking shot through the battle, it was all gorgeous.

This episode saw Baltar swerving rapidly between zen messiah and crazy egomaniac, frequently within the same scene. Roslin brings out the worst in him, and vice versa, seldom have we seen the characters more pathetic and childish than when they were screaming at the hybrid, trying to get her to tell them something. The hybrid is one of the show’s best creations, she seems totally alien, it’s hard to imagine an actress gets in that tub and plays her every week.

Anyway, the most intense scene of the episode was Roslin grilling Baltar, finding out that he did in fact give the cylons the defense codes, but has forgiven himself for it. She’s so full of anger at him she shakes, but in the end, she decides to save him rather than let him die. I thought she already knew he had done this, but I guess hearing him say it make a difference. Baltar has owned up to his crimes, and she’s not so eager to forgive. I think Baltar actually has some good points for Roslin. Throughout the series, we’ve seen her do awful things, all in pursuit of human security. How will her desire for control mix with Lee’s ascent to president when she returns to the fleet?

But, I don’t think that’s the Roslin development most people will be talking about after the episode. Finally, she and Bill admit they’ve got feelings for each other and kiss. It’s been a long time, one of my favorite moments of last season was the scene with the two of them lying together on New Caprica. It captured a feeling of hope and idyllicness that nothing else on the show’s really had. But, here, they’re reunited and finally ready to share their feelings. It was a great ending to the episode.

It’s unfortunate we’ve got a six month break (at least) after next episode. The show’s been so good, I don’t want it to take that long a break. But, at least we’ve got one more, and what I’m sure will be an absolutely infuriating cliffhanger coming up next week.

Flex Mentallo #2: 'My Beautiful Head'

The second issue of Flex Mentallo takes us into the Silver Age, and having just read a bunch of Silver Age Superman stuff, it makes a lot more sense to me than it did on the first couple of reads. The series as a whole makes a lot more sense thanks to that reading, it’s easier to understand where Flex the character, and Grant are coming from when they talk about the change in superhero comics, the loss of wonder and craziness. Yes, a lot is gained through the exploration of superheroes in a world closer to our own, but a lot is lost as well. The purpose of this series is to synthesize the deconstruction and the older works to create a post-deconstructionist new approach to superhero comics. That’s what issue four’s about, for now, we’re still tripping through Wally Sage’s life, trying to understand how his story fits in with Flex’s.

The issue opens with a trippy flashback to a weird scene where young Wally sees a bunch of kids shitting on the floor. He’s being taken there by a green clad man, likely another incarnation of Limbo, the third eye superhero who’s fully revealed next issue, guiding Wally down this same hallway. I feel like this scene has to be a childhood dream, or some kind of warped memory, not an actual recollection. On acid, all his memories bleed together, and it’s singlular moments from childhood that grow into something larger. So, the fish and castle in the fish tank become a whole city, and a fractured dream might turn into this bizarre shitting memory.

But, he’s here to talk about comics, about “something cheerful before I die,” and that segues us into Flex and his Silver Age adventures. The Mentallium Man. One of the things I love about the series is the way Flex exists in a world where all his adventures are real, and he speaks about them in the way we as comic fans do. So, Mentallium Man was part of his rogue’s gallery, and recalls their fight as “one of my greatest exploits.” Flex, despite being the title character of the miniseries, remains a pretty simple character. He had some good times in the old days, and doesn’t quite fit it in today’s world. He was born from the mind of a child, and never went through the sophisticated updates that other heroes did.

This fits with Flex saying that “The ‘Fact’ has escaped like me, into the real world.” His memories are comics, that’s where his adventures took place, but the ‘real’ world he’s in doesn’t seem to be quite like our real world. In the series, there are at least three different planes of reality. Underneath everything is the world where the Legion of Legions lives, the world that was destroyed by the Absolute. On top of that is the world Wally Sage lives in, the world that was built by Nanoman and Minimiss, the world where the superheroes hide themselves in the fictional world. Then, there’s the fictional reality that Wally Sage invented, where Flex Mentallo and The Fact come from, where they had their initial adventures.

So, has Flex escaped into the Wally Sage reality? Or is his escape into the ‘real world’ more a metaphor for the way comics have changed, for the way that wonder and craziness have been replaced by real world logic and grimness. I’d argue the latter is the case, though in this comic, trying to figure out a strict linear reality is pretty much pointless. It all bleeds together, everything that happens is real and you just have to enjoy the ride. Flex meets Wally Sage in the ceramic world, did this ever ‘happen,’ is it what Wally’s seeing on his acid trip? Is it what Flex is seeing as he seeks The Fact? It doesn’t matter, the significance of the scene is how it shows Wally interacting with a fictional character, the way that kids latch onto superheroes and look up to them.

Next up, we see Flex facing the many strange varieties of Mentallium, including one that can force him to “explore complex issues of gender and sexuality.” Those Silver Age superhero stories were all about a guy struggling to control his life, to keep his identity secret and return everything to normalcy, despite the many, many bizarre transformations he underwent. The plots may be a bit nonsensical, but they do raise a lot of questions about gender roles in that era.

Also, I love the idea of the Ultra-violet Mentallium which can “turn me into anyone, complete with a whole life and memories.” Much of Morrison’s work centers on awakening experiences, when the characters in The Invisibles met Barbeltih, they were reminded me of their true selves, they became actualized as the people they were meant to be. Similarly, in this series, the superheroes exist to show us the world we could have if we can only remember that magic word. The potential is always there, but we choose to wallow in these put on identities, with the problems and concerns intrinsic there in. Superhero comics are a perfect venue to explore these issues because they can turn psychological battles into literal battles. Our identities are so fragile, what makes you who you are? If you change your memories, are you still the same person? This Mentallium is an example of how the most absurd superhero concepts can actually tell us a lot more about the world we live in than something set in the real world.

Flex’s impending identity crisis bleeds into Wally Sage’s own. Looking in a mirror as a child, he saw an infinite reflection of himself. I remember seeing the same thing as a kid, in the Haagen Daaz next to the local movie theater. It always fascinated me, seeing the endless mirrors, looping on themselves. Here, Wally does what writers do, takes a real world phenomenon and turns it into a comic book concept. So, the mirrored reflections become “Endless parallel worlds. Infinite versions of me.” On these other worlds, he could be anyone, does that mean that his individual existence has no meaning? Like Flex, is he subject to the whims of Ultraviolet Mentallium? He concludes that if so many versions of him exist, if his life is so arbitrary, then “it doesn’t matter if I die.”

Flex wanders the streets of this dirty town, of the superhero world post deconstruction, and eventually finds some kids tripping on Krystal. I love the stream of consciousness way Flex just happens on to this place, it has no particular connection to what’s come before, or will follow in the story, but it fits thematically and just feels right at the time. Sometimes that’s where the best art comes from, just trusting your instincts and doing what feels right in the moment. It turns writing or drawing into something closer to improvisation, that live performance feeling of inventing something on the spot.

The guy in the bathroom looks like a contemporary version of Kamandi, and refers to himself as “the last boy on Earth.” He’s a Silver Age character who just doesn’t fit in the world that comics have turned into. So, he decides to take this drug that will show you the entirety of the universe, “Everything that has happened, is happening, will happen, could happen, couldn’t happen,” ultimately revealing that reality is “the imaginary story.” For fictional characters, fiction is reality, therefore reality is fiction, our world is an imaginary story. So, this whole dark time could just be a bad dream, one they can wake up from if they just find the way. He talks about how sick he is of the darkness of reality, how he wants something different.

On one level, this can all be read as a comment on comics, and how they’d changed, but I think it also fits with the way a lot of people view the world around us today. There’s this tendency to mythologize the past, to think that everything must have been cooler and more alive back then. For conservatives, it’s the 50s, this mythic age when Americans were strong, families were normal and everyone was happy. For liberals, it’s usually the radical 60s, a time when they really did believe that we could change the world. People want to get back there, but they don’t realize that image is a false construction. People had the same troubles as we do now back then, it’s just those troubles get washed away in a sea of nostalgia.

What it’s really about is growing up. The passage from childhood to adulthood in our society is typically about giving up silly things, ‘childish’ things and becoming a serious, more productive member of society. You can read the entire passage from wacky heroes to grim/gritty as a metaphor for our own growing up. Flex recalls hanging out with his crimefighting buddies, watching ‘My Favorite Martian,’ which really sounds a lot like being a kid, not having to worry about a job or relationships, just having fun in the moment. Flex is the creation of a child, and in many ways, his purpose in the series is to incarnate the wonder we felt when looking at the world as a child, when it was easy to get lost in crazy comics, and to make our own. In issue one, Wally says that the comics he drew were so “pure,” that’s what Flex is, he’s about tapping into the idea place and coming out with something that shows a child’s new perception of the world, not an adult’s weary one.

But, the series isn’t about just cherishing the childhood point of view and creating some kind of prolonged adolescence. It’s about integrating the childhood wonder with the adult world, and growing up into a synthesized whole. And, as with everything in the series, there’s more than one meaning. Flex isn’t just designed to show the child’s view of the world, in a lot of ways, he’s a child’s view of what an adult should be, he’s noble and kind, the ultimate father, yet devoid of the cynicism of real adults. He calls Tiff, an obvious man dressed as a woman, “Miss.” He may be a conservative figure in a lot of ways, but he accepts people for who they are and is able to deal with out of the norm things without prejudice. I love that panel where Tiff says “Miss…” because it tells us a lot about what being a hero is. It’s not always battling a villain, sometimes it’s just simple kindness. That kind of sentiment sounds pretty cheesy, but when you play it out as well as Grant and Frank do here, it makes total sense and feels right.

Flex soon finds Kamandi boy tripping on Krystal. They say that “it makes you feel like a Superman, but then you die.” The drug opens the door to the world underneath our one, the world where the heroes are real. I love when he says “I just remember how to on my…solo vision,” it’s not that we lost the power, it’s just we don’t remember it anymore. This leads to a wonderfully trippy series of panels that bring him to cosmic awareness. It’s my favorite image in the issue, the man’s face rendered solely in the starry pattern we previously saw used to show The Fact when he ignited the big bang and started the universe. He has moved outside the game and sees the world for what it is. While cosmically aware, he sees the superheroes, he sees that they’re waiting to return, and it blows his mind. Like The Invisibles, it’s about evolution “we’re like ants” next to what we could be, next to what they are.

It all concludes in a strange, sad series of panels where Flex can’t get him the crossword puzzle, can’t get him the magic word that will actualize him and save the universe. The man dies, and the world is not yet saved. In many ways, I see this work as a reaction to Alan Moore’s Miracleman. That series was all about trying to contextualize the strangeness of the Silver Age in a real world context. Of course those wacky adventures weren’t real, they were the creations of a delusional scientist. There, the discovery of the magic word leads to immense amounts of destruction and our ‘hero’ winds up as a fascist dictator. I love the series, I think it’s one of the three best superhero comics of all time, but I also think it betrays a fundamentally different understanding of the genre than Morrison has. Moore, even when he was trying to ‘reconstruct’ heroes in the ABC books feels too cold and logical to fully embrace the insanity of superhero comics. For Grant, superhero books have their own logic and morality, of course weird stuff is possible, that’s just how it is in their universe. And, of course good always wins, that’s the way their morality is structured.

But, that doesn’t mean the books don’t have something to say about our universe. The page where Wally equates 50s superhero comics to the upcoming rise of LSD may be a bit head on, but it really works in context. And, having read those books, it makes a lot of sense. Those Superman comics were totally insane, and I could easily see them being snapped up by the 60s counterculture both for the sheer bizarreness and as a commentary on how hollow social norms really are. If Superman can barely keep a normal life together, how could a regular guy hope to do it? And, after reading the story where Superman inexplicably is transformed into a guy with a lion’s head, the images Quitely presents here aren’t particularly far fetched.

This history lesson bleeds into Wally’s own personal issues. He wonders why superheroes couldn’t save us from the bomb, why they “didn’t stop my mum and dad fighting?” The obvious answer is, they’re not real. But, that doesn’t work so well in this series. Ultimately, I’d argue that superheroes are designed to show us a model of how to live our lives. They can give an example that can inspire someone like Wally Sage to live a better life, but they can’t just step in and save him, especially when it turns out that he’s both the hero and the villain of this story. Grant returned to this theme briefly in his aborted Authority run, which centered on the question, they can save the world, but can they save Ken’s marriage?

We get another flashback to the weird circle of shitting scene, this time Wally’s holding an alien’s hand. In The Invisibles, Grant uses those green aliens to represent the other, be it God or some other extra-dimensional intelligence. It’s the lens society has given us for processing intelligences greater than ours. So, until he’s really ready, he’s going to see the superheroes who created our world as aliens.

Flex goes to a bar, and is taunted by Killer Kitten. She’s a totally sexualized superhero, foreshadowing Flex’s journey next issue. But, following this encounter with the worst of what the heroes have become, he’s reminded of the best of what they can be, when an old man tells the story of meeting the Legion of Legions in space. This encounter reminds me a lot of astronauts encountering Barbeltih behind the moon in the last issue of The Invisibles. It’s beautifully done by Quitely, a totally surreal visual moment.

After our ascent to the stars, we prepare for a plunge into the underworld, as Flex sets out through a path of death and despair and Wally slips into darkness as well. This is a really fantastic, complex issue. Quitely nails everything he draws and Grant manages to pack an almost absurd amount of concepts into one single issue. This is the definitive superhero story of all time.

Doctor Who: 'The Doctor's Daughter' (4x06)

The Doctor’s Daughter is a glass half full episode. If you choose to focus on what worked, there’s plenty good here, if you focus on what didn’t, you could easily call it a failure. But, I choose to see it half full, and thought this was a pretty enjoyable episode. And, I’m guessing once the season ends, the purpose of the episode’s going to be a lot clearer.

My biggest issue with the episode was the perfunctory introduction of Jenny. If we’re supposed to really view her as his daughter, it should probably take longer than five seconds for her to appear out of the clone tank. And, shouldn’t the Doctor be more worried that they’ve created this weird clone of him? Is she a clone, what is she, how much is him, how much is her society? There’s a lot to explore, and admittedly we do get some emotional stuff with him and Donna, but in general, there’s not enough time spent to make it feel like, yes, this is really his daughter, and thus make the end of the episode really work on an emotional level.

What does work is The Doctor’s eventual realization that in some ways at least, this is his daughter, and consequently, he is no longer the only Timelord. The Time War itself returns, and we are reminded that The Doctor had at one time destroyed both Timelords and Daleks. The nonviolent aspect of the Doctor’s character has been hammered home the past few episodes, and that’s something I didn’t really get back in the Eccleston era. Knowing this is a guy who is so hesitant to kill makes his decisions back in “Parting of the Ways” even more layered.

I liked Jenny, I think she had a good amount of the Doctor’s spirit, but I would have liked more time to explore the dynamic between her and the Doctor. I think this story would have benefited from being a two parter, rather than the lackluster “Sontaran Strategem.” The story wouldn’t necessarily have had to be expanded, rather we could get more scenes with the makeshift family of Doctor, Donna and Jenny. What worked best in this episode, and the season as a whole, is the dynamic between the Doctor and Donna. She continues to challenge him and push him out of his comfort zone in a way neither Rose nor Martha did.

I like Martha well enough, but seeing her up against Donna, it becomes clear that her character’s main purpose was to be Rose redux, and never quite match up to the original. She has her own personality, but her dynamic with the Doctor isn’t as interesting as Donna and the Doctor. My favorite scene in this episode is Donna challenging the Doctor, saying he talks, but never says anything, which prompts him to tell her about the Time War.

Back in “Sontaran,” the main plot was a bit clumsy, but the scenes between Donna, the Doctor and her Grandfather really hit me emotionally. I love the idea that Donna, like Rose, has fully embraced this new kind of existence. She’s happy to travel everywhere, she’s seen some bad things, but understands the kind of changes they can make. I think she understands the Doctor better than any of his other companions, and I’m curious to see what will happen with her when Rose turns up. I’m sure we’ll get one last “No, we’re not a couple” gag, but beyond that, it’s unclear.

On the whole, I enjoyed this one. I think it could have been a lot better, but Jenny has a lot of potential, and I’m curious to see what they can do with her in the future. Will she show up for the guest star bonanza that’ll close out the season? We’ll see.

Flex Mentallo #1: 'Flowery Atomic Heart'

My epic series of posts on The Invisibles from last year covered Grant’s definitive work on our world, the nexus of his philosophical worldview, simultaneously the source and culmination of his ideas about our universe. But, there is another world, the superhero world, and for him, it’s a world that’s just as valid and alive as ours, if not more so. Flex Mentallo is a philosophical treatise on the superhero comic, the definitive exploration of what makes the form work and why it’s important for the world as a whole. Superhero comics are a guide to a post human world, and Flex Mentallo is our first step on that journey. It follows up and expands the themes of Doom Patrol and Animal Man, and provides inspiration for what he would do later in Seven Soldiers and All Star Superman. It’s the definitive superhero story, a synthesis of sixty years of stories that mashes up everything that came before and spits it out with a new vision for the future.

Let me start outside the book with the story of how I found Flex in the first place. The book has never been reprinted after is original single issue release, which means there’s probably something like 20,000 or 30,000 copies in the entire world. I think that’s helped to build the legend of the series, you can’t just walk into a store and buy it, you’ve got to hunt it down. Admittedly, torrents have made it easier, but I still prefer reading on paper. I bought issues 1, 3 and 4 from a comic store in 2002. I walked in, asked if they had any and got those issues. I picked up issue 2 on Ebay and had the whole series for about 30 bucks.

Will Flex ever be reprinted? I hope so, but on some level, it’s cool that it’s so valuable. There’s a forbidden mystique around the issues, you’ll probably never see a Flex Mentallo movie, it’s not going to be a mainstream hit, it just is what it is, a tripped out acid trip journey through the border of our world and the comics world.

The series begins with a big bang, a cartoon genesis. In The Invisibles, John a Dreams steps outside the game and serves a variety of roles to move the universe towards its predestined ending. The Fact is a similar figure here, he exists at different moments in time, and serves as the catalyst for both Flex and Lt. Harry’s quest. If, as the end of the series posits, our world was created as a place for superheroes to hide in, it would stand to reason that the big bang would be a cartoon bomb, which spirals off into a million pieces of cosmos.

I love how screwy scale gets in this opening zoomout, as we journey back The Fact to the cosmos to The Fact again, this time rendered in blue and white, like the kid on drugs’ view of the cosmos in issue 2, and eventually out to a diner where our hero stands tall. One of the things that jumped out to me reading this first issue after going through the whole series is the subtle change Flex’s visual presentation goes through over the course of the four issues. Here, he’s very much the uncomplicated squarejawed hero, almost a cartoon. He gradually gets ‘realer’ as the series goes on, less out of place in the universe. It ties in to the general progression of the series from Golden Age to Silver Age to Bronze Age to New Age.

I think Quitely is the greatest comics artist of all time, and this series, like everything he does, is a visual masterpiece. In terms of sheer technical skill, We3 is the best thing he’s done, but on some level, I don’t think he’s topped this series. The variety of scenes he draws, the worlds he creates, are all amazing. And, throughout, the storytelling is totally spot on. To paraphrase Coppola, this comic isn’t about an acid trip, it is an acid trip. You can read this straight and still go on a mind bending journey, right from that first panel on.

Having just read Doom Patrol, I was wondering how this series fit in to the mythology there. It would make sense that this would be Flex’s next journey after what he went through in the Pentagon, but this Wallace Sage is alive, he died in DP. It doesn’t seem to be a direct continuation, rather it’s an alternate universe take on the story we saw in Doom Patrol, expanded into its own narrative.

This series frequently causes issues for readers, it’s pretty difficult to follow because of the linking narratives. There’s a desire to know which is ‘real,’ is the Flex story just a vision of this guy who’s tripped out on acid? That would be the logical conclusion, but in the Morrison universe, it doesn’t quite hold. Each story is equally real, Wallace is alive in a world close to ours and Flex is alive in a world of his own, a world which Wallace Sage created. The act of telling a story is the act of traveling to another world that exists in your own mind, but ideas don’t come entirely from your mind. That’s what we get to later, when Wallace travels to the place where ideas come from. There is something outside ourselves that we channel into stories, and that’s the place where Flex is. Wallace gave Flex life through the comics he drew, and eventually Flex will save his creator.

Flex and Lt. Harry talk about Faculty X, an organization that’s devoted to “showing us how fragile the whole system is.” It eventually is revealed that Faculty X is the multi-dimensional form of The Fact, and what he’s doing is preparing them for the imminent return of the superheroes. That’s why we see paraphernalia from the Legion of Legions in Harry’s desk. Notably, the bombs The Fact throws aren’t real, but people still behave like they are. The idea of a bomb, the image of a bomb can make people react in the same way as a ‘real’ bomb.

This gives way to Wallace Sage reading a story about The Fact and Wax Worker. He talks about how you don’t think and analyze yourself when you’re a kid, “you just do.” The dichotomy between childhood awe and wonder and adolescent doubt is central to the series. Wally gets so wrapped up in his own issues, he loses sight of the wonder of the world around him. He can’t lose himself in those simple pleasures anymore because what once was amazing now just feels kitsch. That’s what happens to a lot of people as they grow up in our world, this layer of irony grows around you, wrapped up in your own failures and perceived inadequacies and it becomes hard to enjoy the world.

Comics are a medium that still struggle to grow beyond “Zap! Bif! Pow! Comics aren’t Just for Kids Anymore,” and so much of that becomes overcompensating. Wally may have been a geeky, lonely kid, and on some level he still is that kid, hating who he is, hating the stuff he liked. As we find out at the end of the series, it’s that adolescent self hatred that’s the real villain, the inability to love the world the way he used to.

Flex says that both he and The Fact are fictional characters created by Wallace Sage, and that Wally died in his arms. This is what happened in Doom Patrol, which could mean that Wally created an alternate fictional version of himself who also came alive in Flex’s world. I love the fact that Flex knows he is a work of fiction, but is none less real for it. He has come to life somehow, and is going to do his thing.

Each issue features a page or two discussing a specific age of comics. On pages 12 and 13, Flex reflects on the simpler times that were the Golden Age. Much like he’s doing with Batman now, Grant considers the entire history of comics as a series of events in the same lives. So, it’s not like a different Flex lived during the Golden Age, this Flex was alive in the wacky Golden Age and is left to reflect on why his world has become so much darker and more subdued. While I love some deconstructionist superhero stories, it can’t be too much fun for the heroes themselves to have their worlds torn down.

Things start to get weird when Wallace flashes between petting his cat and standing in the rain. I love the way the series manipulates time and realities. It’s hard to create any sort of liner narrative or strict definition of what’s real, it just sort of flows from moment to moment. I feel like that’s how our minds actually work. When I’m not directly engaged with doing something, I shift between the world around me, a story I’m creating, my own memories, stories that I’ve read or movies I’ve seen, all bleeding together.

So, who’s mind is this work taking place in, whose worlds are we moving through? The logical answer would be Grant’s own. Grant started to fashion himself as the rock star of comics around this time, and always played in bands, so Wallace would be a logical alter ego. I can’t say for sure, but this feels like the most autobiographical work Grant’s ever done, an attempt to integrate all kinds of experiences from his own life into a kind of coherent narrative, bleeding between real memories and the stories he’d created. So, Flex moves into the school in his story, where he sees eight year old Wally. The times blur because fiction and reality don’t exist on the same tracks, Flex exists at various moments in Wally’s life, always the same even as Wally changes. That’s how it is for superheros, the world changes around them, but the archetype at its core remains the same.

One of the things I really like about Flex is the way it explores the actual experience of reading comics, how much of an influence it can be on kids. That’s what sticks with him in the end because it’s what helped shape Wally’s view of the world. It’s simultaneously something to aspire to, and an impossible thing to match. Our world can never be as exciting as theirs, at least not until it is.

Lying in the hospital, we get a throwback to Barbelith from The Invisibles. This universe’s Barbelith is a giant green lamp hanging over his hospital bed, “an alien intelligence, watching me, conducting some kind of experiment on me.” Barbelith is typically an enlightenment experience, later on, the color green is associated with Limbo, the Third Eye hero who guides Wally to the place where ideas come from. He’s got to suffer through this experience on his journey to enlightenment later in the series.

At the school, Flex speaks to the janitor about the lack of role models for kid sidekicks today. Grant has said that the reason he writes superhero comics is because he sees the superhero as the model for future versions of humanity. So, if this model is dragged down in violence and muck, what will become of humanity? We need someone to save us, but we’ve trapped our heroes in the ‘real world,’ we’ve taken away what makes them wonderful. The Janitor says “It’s just people who need saving. The World’s fine as it is.” We can create change through individual action, we don’t need to shift some cosmic paradigm.

The issue ends with Flex stopping another bomb and narrowly missing The Fact once again. The Fact is the spark that ignited the universe, he is in many ways God. And he’s also the person Wally is speaking on the phone this whole time. So, the whole conversation that frames the story is a discussion with God, it’s Wally trying to figure out what his life means, and whether he should give up and die, or grow beyond his adolescent self and embrace who he could be. He has the crossword puzzle, he just has to find out the magic word. And, in the end, it’s his own creation who will save him, a being who emerged fully formed out of his own mind will rise up, take his hand and show him a better world. That’s what art can do, that’s what comics can do.

The work of Grant’s that comes closest to Flex Mentallo for me is All Star Superman #10. In each case, he uses the superhero as an aspirtational figure, a perfect being we try to live up to, who inspires and saves us when we’re down. All of Flex is contained in the one page where Superman stops Regan from jumping off the building. That’s the essence of this series, when things are at their worst, channel the heroes, live like them, if Superman can destroy an evil sun, surely we can get over a bad breakup, or a bout of depression.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll post my thoughts on issue two, a trippy journey through the Silver Age and more strangeness. Stay tuned!

Doom Patrol: Another World, A Better World

I finished my reread of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol yesterday, and my feelings about the run as a whole pretty much echo my initial impressions on the reread, there’s some moments that are absolutely amazing and among the best stuff Morrison has done, however there’s also some run of the mill storylines that just throw out weird concepts, but don’t really click emotionally. However, he ends on a superlative high note, with one of the best single issues he’s ever written, the beautiful “Empire of Chairs.”

“Empire of Chairs” synthesizes all of the series’ major themes in one issue, in which the Doom Patrol faces their most troubling enemy of all, the real world! Crazy Jane was sent to hell by the Candlemaker, and it turns out that hell is a world that’s pretty much our own. Colored in flat sepia tones, Jane is treated as she would be in real life, her multiple personalities are a problem, the adventures she thinks she had delusions.

It’s notable that this issue on the surface undermines the reality of everything Morrison’s ever done. He appears to reduce all the stories of the series to the delusions of a mentally ill woman, and deconstructs them, pointing out the similarities between the series’ villains and the simple underlying meaning of everything. He makes us realize how absurd and unbelievable everything that’s come before seems.

But, the central message of the series is that it’s okay to be different, that normality is boring and the crazy lives of the Doom Patrol are far more interesting than the lives of traditional superheroes. The Mr. Nobody arc is all about Cliff confronting this fact. Cliff clings to normality, he may be a brain in a robot body, but when Jane presents herself in the Scarlet Harlot outfit, you can sense how embarrassed he is by the attention she’s drawing to herself. However, his innate caring for Jane makes him realize that he’s more worried about her getting hurt than what people think of her.

In the ‘Magic Bus’ arc, Rebis and Jane realize that there’s nothing particularly worth protecting about the world they live in, so they’re not worried about Mr. Nobody disrupting it. Cliff decides that people should have the right to choose their own world, ignoring the fact that maybe they’d rather have Mr. Nobody’s world than the one they’re in. Cliff, at the beginning of the series, is a pretty conservative guy, he clings to authority figures, like the Chief, and longs to have a normal life. However, as the series goes on, he learns to change, and accept who he is.

As the series ends, Rebis and Dorothy float off to uncertain futures in the magical Danny the World. However, Cliff stays behind, he’s not quite ready to disconnect yet. He’s still got to decide whether or not he wants to leave the regular world behind. He’s been through so much awful stuff, but he clings to that normalcy. One of the most important issues of the series is the secret history of the Doom Patrol, as revealed by the Chief. On the one hand, it’s a really courageous story structure because Morrison reveals the villain behind the whole series, sets up this huge confrontation, then completely subverts it when the Candlemaker rips Caulder’s head off.

But, on an emotional level, it’s really significant because it tells us a lot about both the old Cliff and present day Cliff. As the chief tells us, old Cliff was not a particularly nice guy, he was someone who lived mainly for himself. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, in a lot of ways it’s normal, but that Cliff had little of the soul that Robot Man Cliff develops over the course of the series. It’s notable that Cliff has to lose his body and virtually everything that previously defined himself to finally learn who he is. Cliff clings to the Chief because the Chief saved him, made him the body he has and let him live. But, it turns out that Cliff is a victim of abuse that’s not too dissimilar from what Jane went through. His father figure betrayed and used him, and left him a broken shell. It’s not as bad as the explicit sexual abuse Jane suffered, but both of them went through the experience of having their worlds shattered, and their minds left in disarray.

Both of them shut themselves off from the world to deal with the trauma. Jane creates the elaborate network of alternate personalities, while Cliff throws himself into his work, into preserving the Doom Patrol and saving the world. Only after plunging into the world of the nanobots and saving the world does depression really set in, does he realize that Jane is gone, as is his best hope of ever feeling more. But, there is a better world.

Much of the series centers on the Doom Patrol’s nebulous relation to order and chaos. Sometimes they’ll find themselves fighting on the side of chaos, trying to prevent things like the Pentagon horror from destroying the world, other times, they fight for order, trying to stop the Candlemaker or Mr. Nobody from disrupting everything. Through it all, the constant remains a desire to stop people from getting hurt, a desire to make lives better and end destructive conflict. The Invisibles makes a big deal of there being no sides, so it’s appropriate that the allegiance of the Doom Patrol should shift so often.

In the last issue, Jane finds herself caught up in the conflict between the need for normalcy and the room for individual expression. In the Doom Patrol world, her psychological trauma turns her into a superhero, and her battles over the course of the series help her cure herself. But, in our world, we don’t process problems that way. We see something out of the norm and try to medicate it out of existence. There’s no room for Jane’s fanciful imaginings, here they just mark her as insane.

The real tragedy of the issue is that I think that most people in our world would want to ‘cure’ Jane if they knew her. They’d want to return her to our reality and give her a functioning life. But, is that desire motivated by helping her, or is it more about making ourselves feel okay. When someone’s in a psychological delusion, it’s not necessarily them who are being hurt, it’s us, unable to deal with something so out of the norm. Now, it’s not plausible for Jane to live in our world the way she was, but as the issue makes clear, that’s not her fault, it’s the fault of the world.

We live in a world where that which is outside the norm is treated as illness, and every attempt is made to bring people to the same mental place, with the same kind of feeling. Alan Moore has talked a lot about this, particularly in From Hell, where we see that mental illness used to be considered the intrusion of gods into this world, but now we view it is an anomaly to be cured.

The issue raises a lot of questions about the nature of reality vis a vis the rest of the series. Was everything simply the delusions of Kay Challis, an attempt to deal with the sexual abuse she’d suffered? Or is it the world she’s plunged into, our world, that’s the creation, born by the Candlemaker as the ultimate hell? That’s a bold call, to make our world hell, but it works in this story. In Morrison’s cosmology, it’s the boring, uninterrogated life that’s worst of all. In his reality based works, characters generally exist in relation to pieces of fiction, King Mob and Robin dream of being like characters in the books they grew up reading, and are excited when they find out that they grew up and became those characters. One of my favorite single issues of all time is The Invisibles 2.20, in which a young Robin (aka Kay) talks about reading The Invisibles and imagining herself into the story until it all became true. Similarly, Flex Mentallo’s Wallace Sage finds himself reflecting on the shitty comics he read, imagining an alternate world where they’re what’s real and he’s what’s fake.

Ultimately, Jane’s story here echoes those other stories. In each case, the character writes themselves out of the everyday world and into a fantasy world that’s more alive. It’s about moving beyond the real/not real dichotomy and choosing to live in the world we want. People want to minimize the struggles we go through, so called ‘realistic’ works are all about not much happening, but in my own perception of my life, the trials I go through are huge. And, that’s why I think superhero stories, like Doom Patrol, are important. Morrison understands that our own depression isn’t best depicted as a guy sitting alone in a dark room while it’s raining, it’s best depicted as a giant black hole that will engulf the entire universe if we don’t stop it because that’s how it feels in our own mind. If you die, your world ends. To the world at large, it may not matter, but to you, and the people around you, it’s a huge deal. Jane’s story is insignificant to the world at large, she was just the girl at a shop, ringing you up, going about life alone, but in her mind, she was involved in these huge, world changing struggles. You never know, the person you pass on the street might just have saved the world the night before.

And, in the end, she chooses to abandon the dull, boring ‘sane’ life and embrace the craziness of life with the Doom Patrol. Does Jane kill herself at the end, is that what we’re meant to perceive happened in the real world? Perhaps that’s what happens in the ‘real world,’ but it’s not what really happens to Jane. Jane moves into Danny the World, the other world, the better world that must be out there.

It’s a really beautiful story, and a perfect conclusion for the run as a whole. I think Morrison’s a bit more consistent today, works like New X-Men or Seven Soldiers are slicker and have fewer weak arcs, but there’s very little he’s done that has the emotional impact of that issue. Back then, Morrison was an outcast, struggling to find his place in the world, a feel that runs through his work until The Invisibles Volume II, when he decided to become King Mob, at which point everything became a lot slicker and cooler. I love that hypersigil pop period of work, but it’s occasionally nice to go back and read the stories of a bunch of ordinary, but incredibly strange people. That’s what the Doom Patrol is about, recognizing that no matter how strange someone appears on the outside, we ultimately all want the same thing.