Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Heroes Case File #186: Flex Mentallo

It occurred to me recently, as I write this column once a week, that I could probably mine oodles and oodles of weeks just from the Doom Patrol.  The DC Comics superhero team has been around for decades, and while I have pulled minor figures from various, more prominent hero teams many times over, the thing about the Doom Patrol is arguably 85% or so of its roster probably qualifies as a forgotten, misplaced, or just plain weird hero.

So, let’s take a look at Flex Mentallo, the Man of Muscle Mystery.

Flex Mentallo came about during Grant Morrison’s run when things got really weird, and that’s for a team whose enemies included a brain in a jar, a gorilla armed with a machine gun, and a guy called Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man who obviously could change his body into any animal, vegetable, or mineral as needed.  No, Morrison’s work, which was done during the early days of the Vertigo imprint, took an already weird group and made them even weirder.  I covered one of Morrison’s creations once before in the form of Crazy Jane, but Crazy Jane was rather straightforward compared to some of the other characters who came along during Morrison’s run both as friend and foe.

Seriously, I really should do one of these on Danny the Street at some point.  He was a sentient street.

At any rate, one storyarc introduced the Doom Patrol to Flex Mentallo, the Man of Muscle Mystery.  He was a very muscular man in a leopard skin bathing suit, designed deliberately to look like the guy from the old Charles Atlas comic book ads.

So much so that the Charles Atlas people sued.  DC claimed fair use as parody and got the case tossed out.

So, with a physique and title involving a lot of muscle, Flex had superhuman strength right?

Actually, it looks like that was not the case.  No, he had even weirder powers.  Flex Mentallo could flex his muscles in order to alter reality.  If he flexed the right way, his “hero halo” or whatever lit up above his head, spelling out “HERO OF THE BEACH”.

So, what made Flex even more special on a team full of weirdos?  Well, he didn’t really join the team for much beyond his original appearance, largely because he wasn’t real.

OK, technically, none of these guys are real.  But Flex Mentallo was even less real than the others.

See, he was a comic book character, drawn by a psychic named Wallace Sage.  Wallace used some kind of special green ink which somehow brought all of his creations to life, most notably Flex.  This may seem odd…OK, it is odd, but this was actually a reoccurring thing for Morrison’s run on the team:  fictional characters somehow routinely came to life, and even when they didn’t, oddballs and weirdos would show up and cause the Doom Patrol all kinds of trouble, with the most normal member of the team maybe being Robotman, the guy who routinely pointed out that nothing happening around him made a lick of sense.

Flex Mentallo for this one storyarc actually saved the day by flexing his muscles to temporarily turn the Pentagon into a circle.  After that, he disappeared.

I really should reread that run sometime.

Or not quite.  Morrison teamed up with his eventual All-Star Superman collaborator for a Flex Mentallo mini-series, and he also seems to be a member of the team in its most recent incarnation as part of DC’s Young Animal line.  That line is sort of a Vertigo-like imprint allowing for more experimentation and mature storytelling in the DC superhero universe, and let’s face it, a Silver Age style hero that can change his surroundings by flexing a bicep probably is about as experimental as you can get.

Yeah, maybe check back in later today for more thoughts on Flex Mentallo.