Flex Mentallo
The Robot 6 Holiday Gift-Giving Guide, Part 3
Flex Mentallo Man of Muscle Mystery Deluxe Edition
Four calling birds, three french hens, two turtle doves … welcome to day three of our holiday gift-giving guide, where we ask comic pros:
1. What comic-related gift or gifts would you recommend giving this year, and why?
2. What gift (comic or otherwise) is at the top of your personal wish list, and why?
A great big thank you to everyone who helped us out this year, including the ones who’ll be showcased tomorrow. Be sure to come back then for our big wrap-up!
Mike Carey
1. The Simpsons/Futurama Crossover Crisis. Leela helps Maggie deal with school bullies. Homer and Bender go drinking. England invades the USA. Come on, you need this.
Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery. The most ludicrous and wonderful supporting character from Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol got his own miniseries, and it’s just now being reprinted for the first time. I loved this miniseries when it first came out, and I’m gearing up to love it all over again.
Starstruck. The great Lee/Kaluta sci-fi epic, now between two robust hard covers. I should declare an interest: I wrote the intro. But I did that because it’s awesome beyond the feasible limits of possible awesomeness.
2. A Very Peculiar Practice, season 2. Wow. Just how much of my life right now is ’80s nostalgia? I think I need to get some professional help. Probably from Duran Duran.
Mike Carey has written numerous comics (and a few novels) over his career, including Lucifer, My Faith In Frankie, Ultimate Fantastic Four and Hellblazer. He currently writes X-Men: Legacy and The Unwritten.
- November 30, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by JK Parkin
Vertigo reveals the cover to Flex Mentallo deluxe edition
Sometimes I think I dreamed that DC Comics announced that they would finally collect Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Flex Mentallo miniseries into a deluxe edition, but no, I didn’t dream it — it actually was announced earlier this year. And if you need more proof that it isn’t some sort of hoax, dream or Elseworlds scenario, today Vertigo revealed Frank Quitely’s cover for the Flex Mentallo Man of Muscle Mystery Deluxe Edition, which is due out in February.
Check out the entire cover after the jump.
- November 1, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by JK Parkin
Grumpy Old Fan | Party’s over: DC Solicits for December 2011
Showcase Presents The SPOOOOKY
In many ways, for longtime DC superhero readers, this is the first week of the rest of our lives. This is the week the first batch of New-52 second issues come out, and as such, this week the New 52 stops being a September-specific gimmick. We all know the second issue is where the rubber meets the road. Accordingly, in conjunction with a look at December’s titles, here’s where I am after a month of first issues.
Back when the September solicitations came out, I listed 37 books that I was planning at least to try:
Action Comics, All-Star Western, Aquaman, Batgirl, Batman, Batman And Robin, Batwing, Batwoman, Blackhawks, Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, Catwoman, DC Universe Presents, Demon Knights, Detective Comics, The Flash, Frankenstein: Agent Of SHADE, The Fury Of Firestorm, Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern: New Guardians, Grifter, Justice League, Justice League Dark, Justice League International, Men Of War, Mister Terrific, Nightwing, Red Lanterns, Resurrection Man, Static Shock, Stormwatch, Supergirl, Superman, Swamp Thing, and Wonder Woman
- October 6, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Tom Bondurant
Vertigo to (finally!) collect Morrison & Quitely’s Flex Mentallo
Another day, another huge announcement from DC Comics, via Vertigo’s Graphic Content blog: After a over a decade in quasi-legal limbo, DC will release Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Flex Mentallo in a deluxe hardcover format in Fall 2011.
Long one of the most eagerly sought-after “uncollectible” books in comics, this four-issue 1996 spinoff from Morrison’s storied Doom Patrol run featured, in the person of its titular hero, a parody of the famous Charles Atlas bodybuilding ad “The Insult That Made a Man Out of Mac” — and thus attracted the legal ire of the Charles Atlas company. Though the courts found in favor of DC, the Charles Atlas company’s trademark-infringement/dilution lawsuit apparently spooked the publisher bad enough that their plans to collect the four-issue miniseries, scrapped when DC received Atlas’ original cease-and-desist notice, remained mothballed even despite the rise to superstardom of its creators on books like New X-Men, All-Star Superman, and Batman and Robin…until now. As such it’s the most high-profile example yet of DC’s post-Paul Levitz willingness to (re)publish books previously considered verboten, a la Warren Ellis and Phil Jimenez’s long-suppressed school-shooting Hellblazer story “Shoot,” which helped launch the “Vertigo Resurrected” initiative. It just goes to show you: There’s no resisting the Power of Muscle Mystery!
- January 4, 2011 @ 08:04 AM by Sean T. Collins
Collect This Now! Flex Mentallo
Flex Mentallo #1
This, perhaps, is an obvious selection for this column. Mayhap too obvious? One could, for instance, argue without a lot of brain-strain that if this feature has any sort of patron saint, it is without a doubt Flex Mentallo.
Part of that is because the chances of Flex Mentallo ever being collected in trade again are somewhere between slim and none, as my dad used to say. That in turn is largely because of an ugly lawsuit thrown at DC by the Charles Atlas folks. Even though DC got the suit dismissed, they’ve been reticent to get this series back in print. Rumors suggest everything from promising the Atlas people it would never see the light of day again to lackluster Doom Patrol sales squelching any plans.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. A bit of backstory is, no doubt, in order.
- March 9, 2009 @ 10:00 AM by Chris Mautner