9. Flex Mentallo: Man Of Muscle Mystery
Now available (at last!) as a glorious, exquisitely rendered, hardback book, Grant Morrisons incandescent Flex Mentallo miniseries is, quite simply, a work of monumental, fevered genius. His first collaboration with artist Frank Quitely (as well as Quitelys big break into mainstream comics work), Flex Mentallo is part psychedelic memoir (described by the author as the life of an Earth 2 Grant Morrison), part drug-addled apocalypse (in the Revelations sense of the word) and part philosophical objection to the rugged realism practiced by Frank Miller and Alan Moore, amongst others. This absurd bildungsroman tells the life story of a would-be rock star, who is dying in an alleyway and telling us about comic books to pass the time. The story is so multi-faceted, however, that several layers of reality are referenced and explored, including one where the superheroes, facing their ultimate destruction in a Crisis on Infinite Earths style extinction event, band together and intentionally become fictional, giving rise to their paper counterparts in the process. The central story, however, concerns Hero of the Beach Flex Mentallo as he searches for his missing crime-fighting partner, The Fact. By turns scary (who is that holding your hand?), uplifting (the final scene is so breathlessly rendered that we confess to opening our curtains and scanning the sky when first we read it) and fiendishly clever (youll need to read it at least twice in order to fully appreciate it), this is Grant Morrison at his most flippant, as well as his most playful and sentimental. The art, on the other hand, is nothing but sublime. In the hands of another artist, the weird-factor of this story may have overshadowed the themes and intricacies within (and obfuscated the appeal of the simple, likeable protagonist that is Flex Mentallo in the process). Not so with Quitely, who renders every scenario and character, no matter how ridiculous or bizarre, with perfect anatomy and an attentive, sketch-like quality that never lets anything feel too serious (or, dare we say, arty) to be enjoyable. Quitelys unfamiliarity with superhero comics complimented Morrisons obsession with them in a way that makes Flex Mentallo one of the most original, unique and flat-out amazing pieces of graphic storytelling yet produced by anyone.