MYTHCOMICS: FLEX MENTALLO (1996)

To repeat my criteria from POMO AND PLURALISM, I’m judging works as “modernist” or “post-modernist” based on the author’s attitude toward the nature of the universe on which the work is modeled. A modernist work starts with the proposition that the fictional world depicted is modeled on a single “realistic” world that can be largely explained by science and rationality. A post-modern work states or implies the possibility of a multiplicity of worlds in the story, which may imply a similar statement about the reader’s real world, if only in metaphorical terms. Alan Moore’s MIRACLEMAN stands as an example of the first type, reading various superhero tropes, mostly from franchises like “Superman” and the Golden Age “Captain Marvel,”as pointless escapes from a unitary, mundane realty.

Though the Internet is rife with various descriptions of a personal feud between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, there’s no reason to assume that Morrison’s commentary on superhero tropes, either in FLEX MENTALLO or elsewhere, is necessarily a response to Moore’s treatment of them.  That said, MENTALLO also gives a great deal of emphasis to tropes associated with Superman and Captain Marvel, as well as those of The Question, Steve Ditko’s most philosophically representative creation, whom Alan Moore parodied in WATCHMEN as “Rorshach.”

The character Flex Mentallo first appeared as a fully formed concept in issue #42 of Morrison’s DOOM PATROL. This was also an endorsement of the relativity of reality, in that Flex was a character created in an amateur comic book by a kid named Wally Sage. Sage’s latent psychic powers brought Flex to life in the “real world”—or at least, as real as the Earth of DC Comics could get. 

Flex was also “unreal” in that he was modeled on the once prevalent ‘Charles Atlas” bodybuilding ads that appeared in commercial comics for many decades. Yet instead of depending on physical strength as did the character in the ads, Flex’s power was to project waves of energy from his unified “bodymind.” Nowhere in the DOOM PATROL or in this mini-series does Flex actually hit anyone in the old-fashioned way. Morrison didn't even stress any continuity between the miniseries and Flex’s previous appearances. Flex seems to exist in a world that barely has any superheroes left, which means that it can’t be DC-Earth. He does seem to share the same world as his now-adult creator Wally Sage. The two of them never meet, though they both encounter some of the same supporting characters.

The plot of FLEX MENTALLO isn’t intended to be especially coherent, so I won’t spend time summarizing it. The story more or less begins with the musclebound protagonist looking for one of his long-vanished crime-fighter colleagues, the Fact (who is in part Morrison’s take on The Question). Flex wanders through his unnamed city, having mystifying encounters with the remnants of the native superhero world, or with super-people who seem to be emigrants of some disintegrating cosmos.

Counterpointing Flex Mentallo’s peripatetic quest are the largely verbal divagations of Wally Sage. He spends most of the mini-series talking on the phone with an unseen volunteer for a crisis hotline—said crisis being that the reality-hating Wally has taken pills in an attempt to commit suicide. True, Wally is so addled that he’s not sure whether he took barbiturates or M&Ms. In many respects he seems to be the epitome of the escapist superhero fan with his head up his ass, for all he can talk about is his juvenile love of superheroes:

“…when you think about it, they’re like archetypal… they come right up from the depths, those things—how can they that stuff’s stupid?”

The imputation that superheroes are juvenile escapism is the place where most elitist critiques of the genre both start and stop. But even though Wally’s pretty messed up, Morrison implies that the character's desire for visionary experience allows him to tap into a deeper level of reality. Wally has suppressed memories that initially seem to be recollections of sexual abuse, but turn out to be a childhood encounter with “the Legion of Legions,” who are some of those emigrant superheroes mentioned earlier, trying to manifest in a nearly superhero-less world.

There’s also one more subplot: Flex has an ally on the police force, name of Harry, and for some reason Harry enlists the help of an imprisoned super-villain to investigate the threat of world destruction. The villain’s name, The Hoaxer, is a patent reference to The Riddler, making him the only major reference to DC’s Bat-mythology.

Although Morrison’s main project is to demonstrate the reality of the superhero world, if only in archetypal terms, he doesn’t neglect to picture the limitations of ordinary reality. He devotes several pages to an unnamed junkie/ male prostitute who desires transcendence so badly that he takes a drug designed to make him feel like a superhero, but he dies in the attempt. Flex tries to save him by resorting to a magic word written on a piece of paper, but finds that he’s lost the paper. 

This absurdist subversion of a standard “life-saving” trope is also another standard trope of elitist critiques. Nevertheless, Wally survives while the “last boy on Earth” (as the junkie calls himself) perishes, even though Wally clearly knows his way around a pharmacy as well. It's possibly meaningful that Wally's insights go beyond his own personal welfare, as when he conceives that the emigrant superheroes “live in a factory where ideas are made.” Further, Wally’s visions are oriented not only on himself but upon humanity as a whole, saying of superheroes, “We can be them.”

To be sure, Morrison’s vision of what superheroes mean doesn’t resemble that of most critics, even though at one point Wally declares, “Frederic Wertham was fucking right!” Clearly Morrison isn’t thinking about sexual superheroes in the same way Wertham did: as seductive power-fantasies devised to seduce innocent children. Sexual realization is part of Morrison’s program of visionary fulfillment.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the author’s validation of the Silver Age of Comics, which is, as many fans know, the comics-age Morrison experienced as a young fan. Wally observes that the Golden Age of superheroes was “pretty simple,” boiling down to the “Charles Atlas hard body homoerotic wish-fulfillment.”  (I disagree, but this one interpretation doesn’t undermine the general strength of Morrison’s theme.) Wally then observes that the Silver Age changed the paradigm. “Strange transformations, multiple realities, dreams, hoaxes… it was like the hard body began to turn soft...” I could carp that this description mostly applies to the line of Superman comics supervised by Mort Weisinger, with a little Julie Schwartz on the side, but it’s still a stimulating reading.

The miniseries concludes on the implication that the emigrant superheroes will indeed break through to Wally’s fallen reality. I’m not quite prepared to term this a Jungian katabasis, given that I think Morrison is at best a dilettante Jungian. Nevertheless, when he has Wally speak of a “synchro-interaction with readers” of this “ultra-post-futurist comic,” I’d like to think that he, as much as Jung, is trying to show the favorable aspects of understanding more worlds than just the one in front of one’s nose every day.

MYTHCOMICS: "A DREAM OF FLYING" (MIRACLEMAN, 1982)

(Note: "A Dream of Flying" is the title of the first MIRACLEMAN story, and is used for a Marvel Comics reprint of material with the character. In my review-usage the title denotes what I deem the first main arc of the MIRACLEMAN story, from the beginning to the death of the hero's principal villain.)

Though WATCHMEN will probably continue as the main touchstone for many readers regarding the talents of Alan Moore, MARVELMAN-- renamed MIRACLEMAN in its first and subsequent American reprints-- may carry more cultural weight in the long run. When the character first appeared in the first issue of Great Britain's WARRIOR magazine (1982), Moore's idea of examining the superhero in more realistic terms was far from new, as evinced by the 1970s works of creators like Steve Gerber (for DEFENDERS) and Ross Andru (for THE FLASH)-- to say nothing of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN of the 1960s.

What Moore did was to up the game. Lee, Gerber and Andru all remained firmly within the ethos of melodramatic entertainment, but Moore created a sociological and psychological myth of the superhero that embraced the dominant critical attitude he'd apparently grown up with: that of literary modernism.

In this essay I touched on the salient differences of modernism and post-modernism as regards popular culture, so when I define Moore as a modernist, I'm thinking primarily in terms of my distinction that "modernism was essentially tied to a realistic paradigm not appreciably different from that of representational realism, and that post-modernism was in essence a reaction against that realistic paradigm."

In short, though Moore did not invent the idea of "the realistic superhero," he brought the idea in line with one particular philosophical outlook: that of rejecting the fantasy-appeal of violence and regarding it as a violation of "real" human values. Though not all literary modernist authors favored this view-- Jack London being a major exception-- it's a common trope throughout the early 20th century. A cogent example would be Simone Weil's 1939 essay THE ILIAD, OR THE POEM OF FORCE, whose radical interpretation of Homer's classic epic was grounded in a rejection of the credo of "force" that had plunged the world into a Second World War.

The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

In old interviews Moore stated that in his MIRACLEMAN work he was seeking to exorcise the part of him that loved the "fascist power-fantasies" of the 1950s "Marvelman," of which MIRACLEMAN was a more "adult" reboot. Throughout the first large arc of the story crafted by Moore and various artists, the inhuman "force" which Miracleman incarnates-- as well as his fellow "monster" Kid Miracleman-- is treated as a source of horror rather than as an occasion for juvenile excitement. Moore's "overthought," as I've employed the term here, is clearly to interrogate the genre of superheroes for its love of "force before which man's flesh shrinks away," as Weil puts it. In many respects, Moore's tone sounds not unlike that of Frederic Wertham, decrying outrageous fantasies in favor of humble normalcy.

And yet, despite the mediocrity of this "overthought," Moore was-- and possibly still is-- too much of an artist not to allow for a deeper "underthought," in which he can still see superheroes and supervillains as transcendent presences. Thus we get this authorial observation during the city-smashing battle between Miracleman and his opposite number, Kid Miracleman.

They are titans, and we will never understand the alien inferno that blazes in the furnace of their souls. We are only human. We will never grasp their hopes, their despair, never comprehend the blistering rage that informs each devastating blow… We will never know the destiny that howls in their hearts, never know their pain, their love, their almost sexual hatred… …And perhaps we will be the less for that.

This poetic aside does not nullify the thrust of Moore's modernist critique, of course. In the "real world," superheroes are not made by stalwart young chaps being given powers by saintly old wizards. Such expenditures can only come from the government, and the government only makes such expenditures in the name of war-technology. That said, Moore can't quite resist the allure of  a key trope of superhero fiction: the "supervillain-as-master-manipulator." The man responsible for turning an ordinary English bloke into an Aryan god is not a faceless bureaucrat, but the closest reality can come to a "super-villain:" an obsessed schemer whose whole project is to use the "superman technology" as a way of gaining personal immortality. The villain can only do all this through one of the most popular tropes in modernism: that of "everything you know is wrong"-- in this case, causing ordinary bloke Mike Moran to become consubstantial with Miracleman.

By now it should be obviously that I'm passing over the specific permutations of Moore's plot, with his confused double-identity hero and his no-less-confused wife, for the key to A DREAM OF FLYING lies in Moore's "Readers' Digest" version of Friedrich Nietzsche. Put bluntly, I don't think Moore read the German philosopher with any great insight. Nevertheless, as a teller of fictional stories, he's allowed to bowdlerize, as long as what he produces is a *good story.* Nietzsche serves the same purpose for Moore that he did for Wertham: he's a name everyone knows as a proponent of a "superman philosophy."

Happily, Moore only selects one or two actual quotes from the philosopher: like Wertham, Moore's real target is capital-F fascism. Both of the main villains of the arc-- "opposite number" Kid Miracleman and master manipulator Doctor Gargunza-- are strongly associated with Nazis. In the case of the former, he rants that "the real era of the Overman is here." Gargunza, though he is of Mexican nationality, ends up working under the Fuhrer himself, not to mention enjoying kaffeeklatches with famed "Nazi philosopher" Martin Heidegger, whose only purpose in the story seems to be as a stand-in for Nietzsche. Gargunza defects to England-- possibly a comment from Moore on the alacrity with which Allied nations accepted ex-Nazis into their midst. In Old Blighty the unscrupulous scientist comes in contact with the alien technology that will make the Miracleman project possible. Thus, as Moore points out at least twice, Gargunza is in a philosophical sense the "father" of Miracleman, but he hopes to become a "son" by impressing his brain-engrams upon the persona of the infant offspring of Miracleman and Mike Moran's wife.


The "Flying" arc ends with Mike Moran escaping a trap by Gargunza-- a trap which, like those of most super-villains, is entirely unnecessary, compared to the ease of shooting the vulnerable alter ego in the head. Moran manages to re-assert his Miracleman persona. First he kills various thugs working for Gargunza, all of whom seem to be practicing modern Nazis ("Forty years we have waited for you, for the first of the blonde gods that would replace us"), and then the hero executes Gargunza while Moore's captions invoke the "Star Light Star Bright" verse.

I don't take seriously Moore's political take on superhero psychology; while it's deeper than that of Steve Gerber, it's still fairly shallow. I do, however, regard him as a leading creator in the modernist tradition-- and my next mythcomic will show how one can examine some of the same content through a more "postmodern" lens.

POMO AND PLURALISM

"...the usual gang of academic lintheads and popcult apologists display their usual confusion of values by mistaking something of social interest for something of artistic significance."-- Gary Groth meditations on Superman, 1988 AMAZING HEROES whose number I don't care to look up.

'If there is one thing that especially distinguishes postmodernism from modernism, according to [Linda] Hutcheon, it is postmodernism's relation to mass culture. Whereas modernism "defined itself through the exclusion of mass culture and was driven, by its fear of contamination by the consumer culture burgeoning around it, into an elitist and exclusive view of aesthetic formalism and the autonomy of art" (Politics 28), postmodern works are not afraid to renegotiate "the different possible relations (of complicity and critique) between high and popular forms of culture" (Politics 28).'--Modules on Hutcheon at:
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/postmodernism/modules/hutcheonpostmodernity.html

Recently I cited the second quote in the comments-section of Curt Purcell's incisive new essay on Grant Morrison's FINAL CRISIS, but the quote may prove equally applicable to both Curt's concerns and my recent discussions of Comics' Greatest Elitist, Gary Groth.

The above summation of Linda Hutcheon's concepts, authored by one Dino Felluga, dovetails with my incomplete reading of one of Hutcheon's works, THE POETICS OF POSTMODERNISM, where I recall Hutcheon discoursing on how modernism was essentially tied to a realistic paradigm not appreciably different from that of representational realism, and that post-modernism was in essence a reaction against that realistic paradigm. Obviously, this approximate summation taken from memory may prove incorrect. Fortunately Curt cites a direct authority, Steven Pinker, whose views on the interactions of "high and low art" may serve as a gloss to those of Hutcheon on the postmodern project:

"The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation. As Bourdieu points out, only a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things."

If Hutcheon is correct on the above points, then post-modernism (or "pomo") may have come about because its artists wished to explore other conceptions of existence beyond those offered by the realistic underpinnings of early 20th-century modernism.

For instance, for all the brain-torturing phantasmagorias that stream out of Joyce's characters, "real reality" in Joyce's world is still there: res extensa basically unaffected by res cogitans. But it's questionable whether "real reality" goes so unaffected by its viewers in the works of Borges and Pynchon.

Similarly, for the High Modernist author it's entirely appropriate to excoriate the viscerally-appealing, often-nonsensical fantasies of pop fiction for not living up to "reality," as one can see in a work like Nathaniel West's DAY OF THE LOCUST. A "content elitist" like Gary Groth essentially echoes this High Modernist preference by reducing the fantasy of SUPERMAN down to something that has no "artistic" value in itself, but is only "of social interest." For Groth, as for the Frankfurt School elitists he emulates, popular fiction exists only as a quasi-scientific datum by which one demonstrates how shitty the world of pop fiction is, and how much a good reader needs to possess finely-tuned "powers of appreciation." Hutcheon's postmodernism, in contrast, suggests that its authors are more "finely tuned" in terms of negotiating the relations between high and low on more complex grounds than simple exclusionism.

To my knowledge Gary Groth has never uttered a kind word about the Man of Steel. However, he has tacitly admitted, via his many public encominums on Jack Kirby (a popular artist if there ever was one), that popular culture can be "good," if not "good" in quite the same way as the fine arts. Groth's only way out of this paradox is to invoke the auteurist theory that evolved in 1950s film criticism: Jack Kirby's not a fine artist, but he puts forth his popularly-derived visions with the force and integrity of a fine artist, and so doesn't deserve to be lumped in with lumpen-types like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

At base the auteurist theory is just a way for the High Modernist to defer the question of What to Do When You Find Good Stuff in Popfiction. The question is deferred because it's impossible to answer within the scope of any species of elitism, as I've noted here. That's why I continually emphasize the need for a pluralist criticism that recognizes (1) that different forms of art generate different sets of artistic values, and (2) that such a recognition is not, as Groth has it, a "confusion of values" but a deeper elucidation of them.

As Groth is a "content elitist," most popular fiction is "bad art" just by reason of its bad content, so that Jack Kirby isn't really separable from Siegel and Shuster. "Art" in Groth's world signifies High Art alone.

Plainly this definition doesn't help one suss out what "art" is in the more general sense of the word. My working definition is that art is anything that is made with what I'll term "open functionality." For example. a jug that holds water and does nothing else (i.e., has no pictures on its surface) has a closed, purely denotative functionality. A jug decorated with pictures of horses or maidens or whatever would have open, connotative functionality in that the jug is still meant to hold water but now the pictures on it are meant to entertain anyone of a mind to be entertained by them.

For me, then, the aspects of the "visceral" and the "physical" that Groth finds so objectionable in the Superman myth are no less art for so being, for they still fall within the sphere of an open and connotative functionality.

Nothing demonstrates this more than my own essays on early Siegel-and-Shuster SUPERMAN stories. In "OCD on a Hotplate," I expressed my own reservations on the quality of work put out by the early SUPERMAN stories. And yet, even if this work wasn't as well executed as some later iterations of the character, it did show certain glimmerings of a symbolic complexity going beyond the demands of the "visceral."

In conclusion, post-modernism as defined by Hutcheon is an ideal means by which one might come to grips with the different narrative worlds implied by different literary forms, and so is all but covalent with the aims of a pluralist criticism.