Pynchon - The Comic Book

[Adam Lou Stephanides]

Another lost message.

On Sat, 27 Apr 1996, Adam Lou Stephanides wrote:

> In my last post I mentioned Grant Morrison's Flex Mentallo
> story from DOOM PATROL as a Pynchonesque comic.  Looking it
> over, it's even more Pynchonesque than I'd remembered.  It's
> about a government plot to transform the world into "a piece
> of precision machinery, with everyone in his place and every
> movement predetermined," with the help of an entity created
> from "the electric ghosts of dead words" which lives under
> the Pentagon and haunts the phone system, and of the enslaved
> husks of the dead (a. k. a. qlippoth).  This plan is foiled by, 
> among others, Flex Mentallo, a parody of a superhero (his
> superpower is derived from those Chales Atlas ads that used
> to appear in comic books) who turns out to be a fictional
> character come to life (shades of the Schwarzkommando).
> Whether Morrison has read GR, or whether he came up with
> this combination of elements on his own, I don't know.
> 
> --Adam
> 
>