Final Crisis vs. Flex Mentallo

I recently caught up on Final Crisis (alongside Douglas Wolk's helpful annotations) and subsequently read Flex Mentallo for the first time, something Matt Fraction advised me to do at last year's Comic-Con that I wanted to accomplish in less than a year. Both are Grant Morrison works that involve themes of alternate realities, death wishes, and the apocalypse (as well as some more direct shared references) that stood out to me.

The end of the world -- from a variety of perspectives, temporal points, and realities -- is an integral part of Flex Mentallo, culminating in a scene where the Legion of Legions supergroup faces down "The Absolute," a force that is about to consume all of the realities in their "polyverse." Or as they say, "the end of everything."

(Interestingly, there is a Flash stand-in on hand when the end begins, who says, "Look at it. 'The Absolute.' Rising like the dawn. Nothingness eating the universe. Eating everything. It's finally happening and we can't do anything to stop it. I could run at light-speed but there's nowhere left to go...")

Now, it's hard even two issues in to say exactly what Final Crisis is about, or going to be about, except that "evil wins." The multiverse played a central role in Infinite Crisis (the LAST Crisis) and 52, which "destroyed" the multiverse and revealed that it hadn't been destroyed, respectively. The new 52-earth multiverse and its monitors have been a big part of Countdown and the lead up to FC, and it seems probable that we're going to be revisiting the nature of the DCU multiverse again, supposedly for the "Final" time. So what kind of chaos magic does Morrison have planned for us now?

Consider Morrison's post-Invisibles comments at Arthur magazine:

"I was kind of forced into a position where the dualistic simplicity of what I’d believed in before wasn’t holding up to actual scrutiny and to the reality of the life I was living. I found myself in a place where I felt I had to confront all the negative aspects of a lot of stuff I believed. I realized that as much as I believed in freedom, in saving the world from tyranny, something in me was also against that drive. A death impulse. The dark impulse. ... The idea that everything I ever thought, everything I ever believed, had its negative, and the negative could just as easily be justified by all the right words. It’s a destructive, corrosive state of consciousness."

Whiiich sounds an awful lot like the anti-life equation, a formula from Kirby's Fourth World which mathematically proves the futility of life and is capable of robbing people of free will. (Note: Does it involve statistics? You can prove anything with statistics.) It has also been referred to as "the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds."

On his annotations blog, Douglas describes anti-life as, among other things, a "loss of self," and notes a last minute rewrite in DC Universe #0:

"On the version included in the 2008 New York Comic-Con program, the caption was "I am... everything." Note also that the captions start with a black background, and that the red creeps in from the right as the story progresses. The idea of an entity that can be everything (and articulate it!) relates to the concept Morrison has mentioned a few times of trying to make the DC universe sentient.

The notion of universal sentience is an interesting way to approach the apocalypse, particularly in the ways it can relate to the personal. Losing yourself is the end of the world. Especially if we are entities not so different from the DCU-- we are ourselves universes; we contain multitudes.

The "I am everything" theme runs strongly through Flex Mentallo, as does "I am anything." Identity is fluid and interchangeable, as are realities: "On one parallel Earth my pill bottle had Paracetamol in it, on the other it had M&Ms," says the protagonist Sage during his (potential?) suicide attempt. " All I've got to do is decide which one I'm on." In Final Crisis, former monitor Nix Uotan wakes up in another life, as a human working in food service after his banishment, with only lingering dreams of his former life. Like Sage, he is searching for "the magic word that'll take me home," perhaps the same "magic word" Sage ultimately uses to unleash superheroes into his world.

So how will Final Crisis end? What will Morrison unleash? Will there be another world-shaking continuity reorganization? Will a new reality be created? And if evil wins, how does the DCU survive?



In Flex, the Legion of Legions and their world are saved by "open[ing] a defect envelope into 'The Absolute' and mail[ing] [them]selves into a new kind of reality." That reality, it turns out, is the fiction of our world, where the heroes remain concealed, expressing themselves as subconscious manifestations of comic book creators. "It's not death. It's something new," says Limbo. "It's not death. Prepare to become fictional." And thus they survive by becoming the heroes within, sublimating themselves inside our collective unconscious and urging us to enact them.

Returning to the very start of Final Crisis, there's a key scene where Metron plays Prometheus and offers fire (and knowledge) to Anthro, the first boy. In Flex, there's something very Metron-eque about the way Limbo reaches out to both the astronaut in issue #2 and the child Sage at the end of issue #3, gifting him with "Where-you-get-your-ideas," a more creative spin on the Prometheus analogy. Morrison has spoken of personally summoning Metron in a magic ritual, something that echoes the relationship between Sage and the superheroes, and the "Word" that he ultimately uses to summon them to our world.

In the same interview with Arthur magazine, Morrison said:

"I figured even within 50 years we’ll probably have quite a few superhumans on the planet. There’s something about the superman idea that’s pushing itself closer and closer to reality, to the real-life material workaday world that we can touch. The supercharacters began in the pulps and then worked their way through comics, and they keep moving to more and more extensive mass media. Now it’s everywhere, and it’s become the common currency of culture. I said, way back, almost joking, that I thought the super-people were really trying very hard to make their way off the skin of the second dimension to get in here. They want to be in here with us. They’re colonizing people’s minds, and they’re now colonizing movies, so the next stage is to clamber off the screen into the street."

Libra's pleas in FC #1 to "Believe in him, that's all he asks" echo themes in both Flex and Morrison's larger work about the power of belief to create reality. In Flex #4, Limbo explains that Nanoman and Minimiss (Atom-esque heroes) saved them by shrinking down "to quark size and build[ing] an entire universe from the ground up. They're everywhere and everywhen simultaneously. We're made of them." Unfortunately, the strain of being everything sent them into a coma, where "they weren't alive and weren't dead and neither was the universe. The Legion of Legions couldn't come back until... until we decided one way or the other. They want us to believe the universe into life."

Which is even more interesting if Morrison is now attempting to make the DCU sentient, for reals. Is pushing superheroes closer to reality part of Morrison's goal with Final Crisis? If so, how would that even function? Would he try to "mail" the DCU into our reality, summoning it to life inside us? Am I really making this argument? ...I think I am.

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There are direct references in Flex that recur in FC, as well. What the-- is that Kamandi? How far you have fallen, last boy.



The "last boy on Earth" reference comes up more than once:



On a personal and human note, I would also argue that as frustrating as it can be from a continuity perspective, this constant shaking of the fabric of reality actually resonates on some level with real life. For most people, the world ends many times within our individual lives, and we are forced to change and forget and remember and somehow try to make it all make sense. And much like comic book continuity, it often doesn't. We move, we get fired, we get dumped, we lose people we love, we do things we never thought we'd do, or watch other people do them, and suddenly the universe turns upside down. And we have to find a way to put it back together, either by turning backwards to our most essential notions of who we are, or by pushing ourselves forward to be things we didn't know we could be.

"Somewhere, I'm not a singer," says Sage. "I'm an office executive, or the father of a little girl or a comic artist, drawing this story. I can see myself in all times and places."

That's the idea, I think. You create yourself; you are whatever you believe you are. All of it is us, all of it could be, because we're all just making it up.