Will Brooker, Communication, Richmond, the American University in London

will_brooker@hotmail.com

Grant Morrison’s comic book mini-series Flex Mentallo (1994) is a story of alternate earths – different timelines and levels of reality – set on a collision course. Flex Mentallo is the weakling from the 1950s Charles Atlas ads who was humiliated on the beach, sent off for a bodybuilding course and revenged himself on the bullies who once kicked sand in his face. Famous for his build, Flex now fights crime in leopard-print trunks, ankle-bracelets and high boots, a "Hero of the Beach" halo materialising over his head when he goes into action. Flex appears as a character from the "Golden" (1940s) and "Silver" (1950s) ages of comics who crosses over into the 1990s, "Dark Age" style of superhero narrative in time to prevent global apocalypse.

However, the Golden and Silver Age superheroes carry paradoxical meanings. Symbolic of a more "innocent" time of noble heroism – in contrast to the cynical, violent, tormented vigilantes of the Dark Age graphic novel – these were also the characters who were censored in the mid-1950s for their supposedly homoerotic content. Flex’s muscled form and bulging trunks figure both as hyperbolically straight machismo and as an equally exaggerated reworking of the 1950s gay male pin-up, thinly disguised as a classical action hero or health and fitness illustration. So the 1950s Hero of the Beach operates in the 1990s comic narrative as an unwitting radical whose combination of ultra-straightness and über-queerness overturns structures of containment around masculine sexuality and brings diverse parallel fantasies and alternate interpretations into the repressively "realist"world of the 1990s graphic novel. Flex transforms the end of worlds into an opening up of new ones, offering a vision of play and possibility which shaped the "official" definitions of the DC superhero comic at the end of the century.