Mindless Ones

RECEIVING TRANSMISSION – “A LITTLE MORE POWER OVER THAT MEMORY…”

Sorry, what’s that? You were waiting for the second part of my Tygers and Lambs series? Well hey, thanks for checking in mum, glad you still read the site –  that post should go up over the weekend! [1]

The rest of you are probably looking for more SILENCE! or more League of Extraordinary Gentlemen annocommentations or something [2], and who can blame you, but you’ll have to wait a while for all of that because right now we’re doing Dirty Thoughts From Other People’s Comments Section!

WITHOUT WARNING!

Okay, so over on The Comics Journal’s website, Sean Rogers wrote a review of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Flex Mentallo that posited the aforementioned comic as a prime example of the “strenuous vapidity” of Morrison’s writing.  I think it’s safe enough to say that most of Team Mindless [3] are pretty into Flex Mentallo – the manifesto like “Candyfloss horizons” posts that graced the site during its early days are definitely written in the key of Flex Mentallo, with its “candy-striped skies” [4] – and I wrote about the book again when the freshly recoloured “deluxe” edition was released in April of this year.  As such, bearing in mind that FEELINGS ABOUT COMICS ARE THE ONLY TRUE FEELINGS [5], I decided to have a go at taking Sean’s review apart.

Sean seems to think that Flex Mentallo is a guide to better living through superheroes, whereas I think it’s more like a Dennis Potter drama in two-dimensions [6], a strange story in which a grown man cracks and finds himself trying to make sense out of everything with reference to a lifetime’s worth of ruddy superhero comics.

My comment is up on The Comics Journal site if you want to check it out and see what you think.

[1] Just kidding, obviously. No one in my family is dumb enough to want to reas what I’ve written about comics on the Internet. It is not a frequent subject of conversation at the dinner table. “David, that bit you did on The Infernal Man-Thing was the balls, but could you quit hogging the pepper for a minute?” – doesn’t happen.

[2] I believe we’re still going to do a post on the text story, so you should keep an eye out for that if you like what we do in those posts, and why wouldn’t you?

[3] The only Team you should have been routing for in Olympageddon 2012. Rest assured that our national anthem is better than yours.

[4] Sean’s review sticks close to the classic TCJ template, so of course the caption in question is singled out as an example of the book’s overamped stupidity:

…too often Morrison tries to convey a sense of unearned wonder by spilling out vagaries in overheated prose, adopting an awestruck tone and asking his readers to “imagine” half-baked fantasies that seem rescued from Burroughs or Ballard’s litter bins. “Candy-striped skies!” the TV says at one point to a pensive Flex. “Can you imagine? And a child smiling, weightless—each floating strand of hair with a tiny eye at its tip. A swaying mass of blinking lights.” Elsewhere, we’re invited to admire a superhero utopia of bullshit portmanteaux—“Dreamatrons and boom shoes, paraspace-suits and omniscopes”—or to marvel at the experience of “Breathing the narcotic vapors of spectral avengers, inhaling ghost girls[…].”

Like I said in my comment, I found those flourishes to be at once evocative of a certain sort of frazzled romance and self-consciously silly and amusing, but as always you’re free to feel otherwise. Even if that does make you wrong. You pervert.

[5] You know this. You have always known this.

[6] If anyone’s keeping track, Pennies From Heaven is a more compelling drama but Flex Mentallo looks better.