Flex Mentallo vs. Lucy Van Pelt

.....I know that it's off-season to be using football metaphors so soon after the Super Bowl, but the goal posts have been moved again. For those who have just walked in on this movie, you can check the last three blog posts for details. The short recap is that in the fall of 2011 DC Comics announced that they would publish a deluxe hardcover collection of the Flex Mentallo mini-series published under the Vertigo imprint in 1996. This is germane to this blog because the character Flex was created by Grant Morrison for his run on Doom Patrol in the early 1990's. Morrison turned the series' scripting chores over to Rachel Pollack, who wrote all of the issues under the Vertigo imprint. After Doom Patrol was cancelled Morrison wrote the mini-series as a self-contained story. About two years later DC announced that it would republish the story as a paperback, but legal challenges (which DC eventually won) caused plans for the book to be shelved indefinitely. Since then there have been a few sporadic announcements of their intention to finally publish it, all fruitless.

.....Over the past decade, Pollack's run on Doom Patrol has also remained uncollected and out of print (as has the bulk of the Vertigo comics featuring DCU continuity characters), but Morrison's pre-Vertigo run has been entirely reprinted as six paperbacks with the Vertigo logo. The newly announced Flex Mentallo hardcover would also (more logically) be under Vertigo according to its original solicitation last fall. However, the original projected date of publication (February 1st) has been regularly nudged since the new year began. Shortly after my previous post the Diamond Distributors website announced that the release date for direct market outlets had been changed to March 28th, putting it in line with DC's own website. General interest booksellers would sell their copies the following Tuesday (April 3rd). This week the March cancellation announcements were posted on Diamond's website and once again the hardcover escaped the axe, but today when I checked DC's website the direct release date had been changed once again to April 4th. Good grief, Charlie Brown.

.....I suppose that by the middle of next week the Diamond shipping updates will reflect the new date and non-direct retailers will similarly change theirs to April 10th. The question on my mind is whether they will be sent a replacement promotional script. At the moment the sites I checked (Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Indigo) all carry the same capsule description, presumably supplied to them by DC. The description mentions that this is a Vertigo series. The sites each name DC as the publisher with the book's 'stats' (cost, length, ISBN #, etc.), which is what they do with all Vertigo trades. "Vertigo" is also how DC first categorized the book on its website where it maintains completely different pages for Vertigo and DCU trades, with each list containing both published and pending titles. At some point after I began tracking it, though, the still unpublished hardcover was removed from the DC website's Vertigo trade page and added to its DCU trade page. The significance of this is that there would be no point in doing this if the character would never see print again in new stories.

.....Grant Morrison's non-Vertigo Doom Patrol comics were reprinted as Vertigo paperbacks when John Byrne began a new Doom Patrol series in 2004. According to Byrne, he was told that the characters were to be newly introduced to the DCU as though they had never existed before, thus the Morrison run would be relegated to a non-continuity Vertigo status. The concensus seems to be that there was more money to be made in movies or animation with the concept than in print, but only if there was no baggage in the backstory. Byrne or no Byrne, they were going to be relaunched to establish any new identity that would more easily transfer to screen. There are accounts from outside of comics fandom that a movie option for the Doom Patrol name was indeed sold to someone, but events of the last five years make it hard to believe that those plans, whatever they were, will ever be realized. During the Giffen run all the previous incarnations of the DP were reintegrated into DC continuity just before the notion of having coherence across an imprint became some kind of taboo at DC. If the Flex hardcover had been originally listed with the DCU trades, then it would have been keeping with the publisher's current trend of just not caring about the distinction. But moving it after the fact was a deliberate act. Why? Why would the continuity status of a character who hasn't had an adventure in fifteen years matter to a company that doesn't maintain any sense of continuity in the books they currently publish? The two opinions I've heard is that Vertigo will be phased out as an imprint or else Flex Mentallo the character will be brought into the DCU, possibly as a supporting character or guest star in an ongoing series. Maybe Morrison and artist Frank Quitely will give him a short story of his own to contribute to DC's annual Christmas anthology, because at the rate the hardcover is going that would be a good way to tie in to its eventual release.

DP05-BT02 Flex Mentallo trade news 2

.....I've been amending the post on the Flex Mentallo trade solicited last year because the Diamond distributor's website has been posting changes to the announced release date(s). Noting that the first attempt to bring this mini-series into collected form is sometimes memorialized on some web-sites by giving it an April Fools' Day release date, I wondered if there was any significance to the fact that the recently announced shipping changes for this current attempt are edging closer to that date. It might be a coincidence. April Fools' Day doesn't fall on a Wednesday this year, so it can't be exactly the same. And it does make a good graduation gift. So I breathed a sigh of relief when the distributor's cancellation announcements for February last week did not include it. I was encouraged again this week when it did not appear among the shipping changes posted Tuesday. Then something occurred to me.

.....The market gravitation towards trade formats means increasing audiences turn to other information sources besides those tailored to the direct market. I started to investigate this by going to dccomics.com and found this:.....

http://www.dccomics.com/dccomics/graphic_novels/?gn=20897

.....Still a $23 hardcover (and still in color; thank goodness for small blessings these days), but on the company website it's being released on March 28th, not the 21st, which is the most recent date for the direct market. Amazon is expecting it April 3rd, the following Tuesday. That is in keeping with the standard practice with the past decade in which the non-direct (i.e. returnable) market waits for non-returnable copies to sell in the first wave. The really curious part? Amazon acknowledges the title as being under the Vertigo imprint, something that may have little or no meaning for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Chapters, etc. But DC's own website? DC maintains separate lists on separate pages for Vertigo and DCU titles. The new Flex Mentallo trade is listed under DCU. Why? Barnes & Noble also gives the April 3rd date and same ISBN as Amazon but only identifies the publisher by the parent company, DC Comics. (This is a common practice of B&N and many other booksellers not specializing in comics; the same is true of Sandman, Hellblazer, and Preacher titles they carry.) Even so, B&N does mention Vertigo in the product description, identical to the one for Amazon. So, unless one of the two highest profile booksellers in North America is cribbing copy from the other, I'm guessing that their product descriptions of yet-unpublished works were provided by DC themselves. "The Fact Is..." until the book is actually published we may never know if this is a clerical goof or if DC is planning on using Flex in their new, shaky continuity.

DP05-BT01 Flex Mentallo news

.....It seems odd to post a 'trade' announcement for the Wilderness Years (summarized in DP05-AB) before there have even been collected trades solicited for the Pollack Period (DP05-AA). The reason I'm going ahead with it anyway is the nature of the item in question. Most of the comics I've cited in the Wilderness Years are brief cameos, short stories from anthologies, retro period stories or non-DP stories that relate tangentially to DP continuity, since this was the period between the cancellation of the Pollack stories under the Vertigo imprint and the group's tentative reintegration into DCU continuity. However, about three months ago DC announced that they would publish a deluxe edition hardcover of FLEX MENTALLO: MAN OF MUSCLE MYSTERY, a compilation of the four issue miniseries from 1996.

.....This is far from the first time a trade for the miniseries has been discussed. The first attempt was derailed by a lawsuit filed by the owners of Charles Atlas' image claiming that the character Flex Mentallo (an obvious parody of Atlas' comic strip advertisements so common in comic books during Grant Morrison's childhood) had damaged the company's reputation. They couldn't substantiate any such injury in court but I have read accounts that DC agreed to pay a nominal royalty rate to the company that now owns Charles Atlas' image whenever Flex Mentallo appears because it would cheaper than continuously defending themselves against frivolous claims. It also means they've avoided reprinting the miniseries.

.....There was once a paperback planned that would carry the ISBN# 978-156389-408-4. Its release was delayed and eventually cancelled. (Some online booksellers note its 'release' date as April 1, 1998; April Fools' Day.) At the time there had only been one DP trade, so Flex' original appearances in Doom Patrol [for one year from #35 (08/90) to #46 (08/91)] had never been reprinted. There was some disappointment, but in perspective the lack of a trade had not yet become a serious issue. That came when the same creative team (Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely) began a lengthy run on New X-Men for Marvel [#114(07/01) to #138(05/03); Morrison continued with art by (variously) Phil Jiminez, Chris Bachalo and Marc Silvestri until #154(05/04)]. During that run John Arcudi and Tang Eng Huat created a new Doom Patrol series [#1(12/01)-#22(09/03)]. Inevitably new fans following either the creators or characters backwards learned of the out of print material. Demand (and secondary market prices) grew.

.....After Morrison left New X-Men two things happened. A Claremont/Byrne story arc in JLA introduced a modernized version of the original Doom Patrol, with the premise that previous incarnations never existed. That led directly into yet another Doom Patrol series months before a second paperback collecting Morrison's Doom Patrol run was published in October 2004. The third, containing the first Flex Mentallo stories, followed in November 2005.

.....Just as the Byrne series ended, Morrison and Quitely returned as a team with All-Star Superman, an erratically published title yielding twelve issues in three years, during which the remaining three volumes of Morrison's Doom Patrol run were published. There was then a gap of almost a year until the Keith Giffen series began, but otherwise the past decade has been continuously overlapping DP or Morrison/Quitely projects even though none of them covered more than a few years. The cumulative effect has kept Flex Mentallo, now fifteen years out of print, on fandom's radar when many of his contemporaries have been long forgotten.

.....The latest version of the promised Flex Mentallo trade is in a hardcover format whose dimensions are somewhere between Golden Age and US Magazine sizes (7- 1/16" X 10- 7/8"). It should be 112 pages for $22.99 (US) with an ISBN# 978-140123-221-4 (or 10-digit 1-40123-221-3). The original release date was solicited as February 1, 2012, but that was changed to Feb. 15 (announced 12/13 on Diamond's website), then changed to Feb. 29 this past week (announced 12/27). Here's hoping that isn't an omen of cold feet again. All I know is that the new date leaves only one month until April Fools' Day.

.....[ADDENDUM January 19, 2012: Two days ago Diamond announced that their shipping date for the Flex Mentallo trade has been moved again from February 29th to March 14th.]

.....[ADDENDUM January 26, 2012: Two days ago Diamond announced that their shipping date for the Flex Mentallo trade has been moved again from March 14th to March 21st. That much closer to April Fools' Day, but not cancelled. Yet. <<Sigh.>>