The Iron Man films – and the cinematic Marvel universe in general – possess some pretty odd politics. Shane Black’s take on the villainous Mandarin, however, was a clever twist in a sometimes-too-clever-for-its-own-good movie. It turns out Iron Man’s nemesis isn’t a murderous, magic-ringed, uncomfortably ‘ethnic’ tyrant; he’s a down-on-his-luck actor chewing the scenery for cash.

(Alyssa Rosenberg deftly dissects the movie’s ideology, saying Tony Stark’s enemies are “the movie’s great joke, and the subject of its major critique of the War on Terror, and unfortunately, Iron Man 3′s significant weakness.”)

Of course, some Iron Man fans are pissed. For example: Shane Black and Marvel “wiped their ass with decades of Iron Man history, reducing Shell Head’s lone significant adversary to a punchline.”

It’s a striking example of ‘superhero embarrassment’ that often appears when comic book characters migrate to other media. In Bryan Singer’s first X-Men, the mutants are dressed in post-Matrix black leather. When Wolverine complains, he’s asked if he’d “prefer yellow spandex”. Or in a recent episode of the TV show Arrow, where a character is mocked for daring to suggest Oliver Queen’s vigilante could be called something as ridiculous as Green Arrow.

Perhaps the grandest example of this was poor Galactus in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. He wasn’t allowed to appear as his giant, purple-helmeted, planet-eating self. That’d just be stupid. Instead, he was… a hungry space-cloud or something?

Comic books often channel this kind of embarrassment back to their pages: look at DC’s current Superman costume, meant to suggest body armour instead of a strongman’s silk. But comics also respond to ‘superhero embarrassment’ with what could be called ‘superhero defensiveness’. In fact, it’s one of Geoff Johns’ go-to techniques. His epic Green Lantern tale is a retort to everyone who joked about how goofy it was a magic ring wouldn’t work on anything yellow. In Batman: Earth One, he has a villain mock Batman for wearing a cape. Batman uses the cape to defeat his opponent, saying it’s actually a weapon.

This defensiveness reaches its peak in Johns’ new run on Aquaman. Poor Aquaman has been the butt of jokes in our world for years, and Johns brings that mockery into Aquaman’s world, too. In the first issue, he’s asked: “So how’s it feel to be a punchline? How’s it feel to be a laughingstock? How’s it feel to be nobody’s favourite super-hero?” Since then, every issue pauses to answer the presumed eye-rolls of the public at large with a ‘you think Aquaman’s dumb? No, you’re dumb! Aquaman’s rad!’ setpiece.

Movies and TV shows sneering at their source material can be frustrating – but so can the need to always turn the bizarre, nonsensical, beloved elements of superhero stories into logic and practicality.

A side effect of knowing so many film critics is that your December is inevitably filled with talk of Top Ten lists. I’ve never felt comfortable ranking art; I even hate having to score movies out of five. (Blame how terrible I was at sport when I was young. Second place is just the first loser, kids!) Stacking films against each other always makes me feel a little like I’m rating the hotness of my ex-girlfriends or something equally as creepy.

That said, reading everyone else’s Best Ofs is a great way to discover films I missed, and some were nice enough to pester me about what I enjoyed in 2012 for that same reason.

Here’s the thing, though: those who know me in what we laughingly refer to as ‘real life’ might be aware I’ve had a tough year. I wrote about what it’s meant for how I’ve absorbed art lately over at Bookslut. It means I’ve missed a lot of movies – including some that I actually saw, beginning to end. I was somewhere else.

I more easily enjoyed films that were silly, like Whit Stillman’s surprise tonal sequel to Clueless, Damsels in Distress. Or cerebral, like Andrey Zvyagintsev’s character-before-crime piece Elena. Or bombastic enough to thunder through the noise in my head: the operatic Margaret, the IMAXed and Inception-horned Dark Knight Rises, the first and last scenes of Killing Them Softly. What was between those scenes in Softly was pretty great, too.

Depression made me impervious to some films aiming for grand emotion, most notably Beasts of the Southern Wild. I appreciated its aesthetic, but anything more bounced off me and ricocheted into the dark. There were other much-loved films I found entertaining enough – Argo, The Avengers, Holy Motors – but any impression they made faded soon after. I’d need to see them a second time to know if they’re to blame for that, or if I am.

Exceptions to the above: Andrew Haigh’s lo-fi romantic drama Weekend. I interviewed him about it here. It broke my heart so gradually I almost didn’t notice it’d stopped beating. The documentary Searching for Sugar Man broke my heart early and just kept on grinding it to pieces until the credits rolled. Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights had the kind of deft, deep poetic imagery most films can only dream of. And Hugo – Scorsese’s lecture on early cinema Trojan Horsed into a kid’s fantasy – hurt me with its plea that “time hasn’t been kind to old movies”.

2012 was also, unexpectedly, the Year I Got To Hang Out With Paul Thomas Anderson For A Whole Evening. Hosting a daunting Q&A with Anderson for Melbourne’s Astor Theatre meant I was predisposed to love The Master – but was enthralled by it, anyway. It’s the single most romantic film of the year, and whatever oblique moments or meanings it contains paled against that romance for me. Offstage, I told Anderson I was surprised to see so many talking about how “difficult” The Master was. He responded, incredulous: “I know, right?”

Mostly, last year, I remembered the solace of genre; the joy of conventions as satisfying when followed as when broken. I loved Josh Trank’s Chronicle, and thought it tapped into the dark logic of superhero stories better than its blockbuster equivalents. Takashi Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai was an incredibly effective slow-burn tragedy, with one reveal that made me gasp out loud like I was guest starring in a panto.

As Rian Johnson’s Looper unspooled on the screen, it was the most unthinkingly what-will-happen-next-? I was in any film in 2012. (Once I got used to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s makeup, anyway.) The way Looper combined so many strands of sci-fi into something so satisfying reminded me of The Matrix, all those years ago, and seeing it a second time better opened up its melancholic core.

And how do I explain my love of poor, poor John Carter? So many people I know, with opinions I respect, could barely even make it through Andrew Stanton’s labour of love. Is it my fondness of old-fashioned pulp that let me find so much magic here where others found none? My post-Friday Night Lights crush on Taylor Kitsch? The fact it arrived already labelled as the year’s biggest fiasco? With each gleefully terrible review, I admit I found myself wanting to like it more.

Did I Tinkerbell-clap it to life? I don’t think so.

I’m wary of criticism that’s about the author first and the art a distant second, and I know the above might read that way. What 2012 taught me, however, is that while cinema opens us up to new worlds we only ever watch it with our own eyes.

Experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin talks about his body of work, the development of his visual style, and his mistrust of cinematic ‘realism’.

Skins’ actor Kaya Scodelario on the challenges of playing Cathy in Andrea Arnolds’ new, poetic adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

Geoffrey Wright looks back at his controversial Romper Stomper on its 20th anniversary, and tells why just-starting-out filmmakers should take more risks.

Bollywood superstar Vidya Balan discusses lascivious winking,’virtual sex’, and shifts in Hindi cinema.

Here’s Claudio Simonetti of Goblin on how a young Italian rock band created one of the most famous horror soundtracks of all time for Dario Argento’s Suspiria.

And B-movie legend Larry Cohen – of It’s Alive, God Told Me To, and The Stuff – explains why most Hollywood films are so screwed up.

(Yeah, it’s directors. Goddamn directors.)

My favourite thing about Portlandia is how it’s always entertaining even when I’m not finding it funny. The best sketch comedy is always weird little short stories, right? It’s great when there are laughs, but laughs aren’t the only thing…

I find that too. I went back and watched Kids In The Hall, and I sometimes found that I wasn’t laughing. When you think of something being funny, you think: “This must be something that makes me laugh.” But I realised that wasn’t the only way I was responding to the show. I think our intention is not always to make people laugh – we’re okay with sometimes making people feel a little uncomfortable, or making something last a little too long. I appreciate what you said in terms of ‘short stories’. There are moments of surprise or entertainment or discomfort. You’re not just laughing. You’re going on a little journey. We credit that to our director, Jonathan Krisel, who approaches everything like we’re making a bunch of short indie films.

Can you predict the scenes or characters or lines that might explode in popular culture? Or is it always a surprise?

It’s a surprise, of course. I don’t think you can go into a creative endeavour with any kind of assumption about how other people will understand it – or whether people will understand it. I don’t think that’s a good place to start. It’s a backwards way of looking at it. You have to go in knowing your intentions, having a point of view, and then all you can do is hope it will capture the imagination of others. We never go in thinking: “This is a phrase people will quote back to us!”

In fact, one of the most pleasant things about meeting fans is how everyone has an individual experience of the show. Even though ‘put a bird on it!’ might be the most ubiquitous line, others will come up and repeat back an obscure line from some sketch we’d nearly forgotten about. That’s very rewarding. Not only can you not predict what people are going to enjoy, it also really differs from person to person. Even sketches you think weren’t as successful as you wanted them to be – somebody finds them applicable to their lives.

You’ve also managed to avoid the thing that kills so much sketch comedy: when something is successful, running it into the ground. How do you resist the urge?

I’ll tell you. We fight against the network. We have a wonderful network in IFC, and they give us a lot of creative license and freedom – but everyone gets excited about something and wants that thing to keep happening. You just have to convince yourself and others that it’s best to keep it rare, and try for something new instead of repeating the old. I think that’s something I learned and remembered from music. You don’t want to just keep putting out the same album.

Actually, as we went into the second season and now the third, the analogy we used was a record. Your first album can be a series of singles – like “here’s our opening thesis” – and you have a couple of hits. It might not be cohesive as an album, but we had ‘Dream of the 90s’, or ‘Put A Bird on It’. And then, for the second record, it’s okay if it’s a little more complicated. It fits together better as an album but might not have the same sort of singles. We talk about that all the time, and it’s very intentional not to go back and retread territory we’ve already gone over.

I love this analogy. So does that mean we’ll soon get Portlandia’s ‘difficult’ album? Just weird instrumental tones for hardcore fans or something?

Hopefully not yet. That’ll be a spin-off show. But let’s see – traditionally, the third album tries new things. And the third album is a good one because you can mine some of the things you know how to do, but you can hopefully do them better. And people also allow for some experimentation, some artistic deviation, from what you did on the first and second records. I know we’ll be trying some new things this season.

You once said that you didn’t want to keep climbing up on stage and “mimicking your younger self”. How is that different now with Wild Flag? How is this Carrie different from that Carrie?

That’s hard to say because I’m just myself. But I do think that having a new relationship to something, having the actual endeavor be new, helps you get out of any nostalgic sentimental trap. Nostalgia can be so comforting – but then you realise it’s actually a deceptive feeling because you feel almost dirty afterwards. Stuck in a weird loop of sadness. A weird, dreamy melancholy. The person I am on stage with Wild Flag is just someone trying to enjoy it, in the moment, feeling connected to it. Not trying to emulate or repeat something I did in the past.

Is Portlandia in part addressing that kind of nostalgia?

A little bit. I think the cycle of nostalgia definitely gets shorter and shorter. It used to feel like the cycles came further apart – like we were mining something twenty years ago, then ten years ago, and all of a sudden you almost feel nostalgic for yesterday, or this morning. There’s something about that sense that yesterday might have been better, or our childhoods better than now. I think a lot of the characters on Portlandia are grappling with that. Trying to find meaning in the here and now. But now I’m talking really big – obviously we’re not a drama! We approach a lot of our themes in a really absurd way, but I think the grounded premise is often: “Who are we? Who are we supposed to be? Are all the choices I’ve made the ones I intended to make when I was young? Am I doing what I set out to do?” That’s part of what ‘Dream of the 90s’ is about.

And talking about choices made when you’re young – you once said that punk was a “salvation” to you. So what’s comedy to you now?

I’d say comedy is a way of getting out of my head. Music is as well, but comedy’s a way of embracing frivolity that music can’t be for me. I take music very seriously. Obviously there’s a lot of joy and elation surrounding music – but I don’t find it funny, and I don’t necessarily like ‘funny’ music. Comedy sometimes stems from dark inclinations, but I love trying to find the levity in a situation, and having that be the way to tell a story. Finding something surreal or absurd about something serious. It’s definitely a good outlet for me, I think.

Last question: earlier you mentioned the restlessness you have, always looking for what’s next. So… what’s next?

I’d like to continue to do more writing. There’s a book I’m working. It’s more of an isolated pursuit, but I do really enjoy writing, and I’d like to do more of it. But for the time being I’m trying to just be in the moment with music and with Portlandia, and to embrace it as long as it will have me. And then, once it spits me out, I’ll find something else to do.

Maybe you’ll be the one to spit it out instead.

Yes, that’s a good way of looking at it. I will reject it, just like a relationship. I will reject it before it rejects me. A preemptive rejection. I’ll break my own heart. That’s what always happens.

Here’s two epilogues (one old, one new) as part three of my ‘Morrison’s Muscle Mystery Versus Everyday Reality… and Other Parallel Worlds!’ from Routledge’s 2008 anthology The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Here’s part one. Here’s part two.

In 2005, Grant Morrison was appointed as the DC Universe ‘revamp guy’: a creative consultant who helps to revise older, out of date characters to bring them back to popularity. This played into this year’s Infinite Crisis miniseries (2005-06), a sort-of-sequel to the original Crisis On Infinite Earths. The last page of Infinite Crisis #1 (2005) was packed tight with Muscle Mystery. Here, the long-forgotten, long-overwritten Superman from Earth-2 came back into current comic book reality using his own kind of ‘superhero poetry’ – punching not just through space, or time, but physically shattering the continuity barrier itself!

And the shockwave of this blow shifted continuity for other heroes, too. There was only one who mattered to me. Continuity, you see, fragmented around a member of the current Doom Patrol in a double-page splash in a crossover issue with the Teen Titans (#32, 2006). It showed us all their previous incarnations thrust back into the present: shards of the recent, rebooted Doom Patrol; pieces of the 1960s originals; moments clipped from Morrison’s strange, ludicrous, heartbreaking run. And hidden within this mosaic – tucked away so you can’t make out a face – one thing’s impossible to miss:

Familiar, skintight, leopard-print trunks, framed with beach as background.

That’s how I ended this piece when it was originally published. Now it’s 2012, and Flex Mentallo is finally back in print. The colours of the comic have been unexpectedly redone for its new edition, however, and the vivid dayglow of Flex’s worlds has been replaced with grim blues and greys.

(It also had the unfortunate effect of ‘whitewashing’ some minor characters. Accidental, I think, but still depressing, and happens pretty regularly in comics.)

In this great Mindless Ones piece, they say this new colour scheme manages to show us Flex “through the eyes of a Flex who has been dosed with a previously undiscovered sixth form of Mentallium, ‘Grey Mentallium’, a lump of dull moon rock that shows you all of life’s possibilities as filtered through the PRISM OF ADULT DISAPPOINTMENT.  And hey, maybe it’s only fitting that you find yourself freshly disappointed while reading your favourite superhero comic about how your perception of superhero comics change as you get older.”

It makes a horrible, monkey’s-paw sort of sense that this is the price Flex pays for his resurrection. To sit on our dusty, real world bookshelves again he must sacrifice some of his otherworldly optimism. This is what it takes to have his story read once more.

As Morrison has a character announce in his half-empty / half-full conclusion of Animal Man: “And every time someone reads our stories, we live again.” (Animal Man #24, 1990).

When Flex Mentallo’s fame spread, his musclebound morality was called into question. Was he pure of heart or brutish parody? The pinnacle of the masculine ideal or cruel mockery of same? Questions like these were posed in a court of law when the Charles Atlas corporation sued DC Comics for copyright infringement.

“There has to be a limit to how far you can let someone ridicule your trademark,” said Jeffrey C. Hogue, President of Charles Atlas Inc. “They took that character and made him into something that was not an Atlas man…” During the case, repeated reference was made to Flex ‘beating’ a woman in his Doom Patrol appearance. Flex does shove away his would-be girlfriend during his origin story, saying “I guess I was a brute!” (Doom Patrol #42, 1991). It’s a shame that they never read on to see Flex’s later adventures, and the hero that he became.

The court reached a decision on April 29 2000, with the judge failing to “…discern a substantive difference between ‘surrealism’ or ‘irony’ on one hand, and ‘parody’ on the other, much less do we find them to be mutually exclusive.” Charles Atlas’ lawsuit against DC was dismissed, but for Flex, it seemed a hollow victory. Perhaps because of potential future legal issues, the case did what Black Mentallium never could – and Flex disappeared from comics altogether.

Does our real world always have the final stamp of authority over fictional heroes? After Morrison made a guest appearance as an omnipotent author in his own Animal Man comic, a very familiar character showed up in the pages of DC’s Suicide Squad. He was called ‘The Writer’ and looked suspiciously like the comic-book Morrison. His power was to rewrite the universe as it happened – but since he’d once written himself into his own comic, now he was fair game for other writers to use in their books. Later in the issue he suffered from unexpected writer’s block and was, uh, eaten by a werewolf (Suicide Squad #58, 1991).

Morrison said he wanted more than simply to have himself drawn onto the page, to ‘fake’ our world, as he did in Animal Man. Instead, he wanted to explore “…the two dimensional surface of the comic itself and at the point of interface where 2-D becomes 3-D and then touches 4-D.” But how could he be alive to say this after becoming werewolf-food? Remember the advice given by the Chief back in Doom Patrol #21 (1989):

“Reality and unreality have no clear distinction in our present circumstances, Cliff. It might help to consider the Zen koan, ‘first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is’.”

It does help. So does the term ‘krypto-revisionism’, referring to moment when the comics audience actively ignores certain plot twists, choosing to believe their own versions of stories instead; in a terrible and touching pun, the term is named for Superman’s own ridiculous, kitsch, often out-of-continuity super-dog. As does how the court’s ruling in the Flex Mentallo case highlighted a certain line from the background material provided: that Flex “…represents Morrison’s argument for a space beyond critique”. These distinctions – between fact and fiction, between official and imagined, between the page and the world that sits around it, above it – might not matter.

That’s no excuse for nihilism. Flex says: “Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism.” (Flex Mentallo #4, 1996). Morality, again, is called into question in Flex Mentallo. Someone tries to commit suicide, reassured that somewhere out there they have an antimatter twin who will live. This is countered by Morrison refiguring parallel worlds into conscious choices. Flex Mentallo’s narrator, the once-psychic child who first created Flex, tells this story while dying of a drug overdose. At least, he might be dying. In one reality, the pills are killing him, but in another they’re just M&Ms. The decision appears to be his.

It’s not that nothing is real. It’s that everything can be. Flex Mentallo wouldn’t be bothered by Alan Moore’s famous statement in the Superman story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?: “This is an imaginary story… aren’t they all?” It’s not that all fiction is just fiction; it’s that my story, out here, is imaginary too. I’m just another in a long, long line of ridiculous narrators who’ll disappear from continuity the moment the page is turned. I suppose I should watch out for werewolves. Radioactive spiders. Cosmic rays.

Anything can happen in an imaginary story.

Next: the Return of Flex Mentallo!

It was also the subject of my first published academic chapter – bearing the unwieldy title ‘Morrison’s Muscle Mystery Versus Everyday Reality… and Other Parallel Worlds!’ – in Routledge’s 2008 anthology The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. My chapter was also an odd mix of analysis, autobiography and flat-out fiction, and I’m still amazed that they saw fit to publish it.

With Flex Mentallo now back in print, I thought I’d put up some excerpts of my chapter over the next few days. (The analysis, not the autobiography. I’ll spare you that much.) I began by asking what Morrison’s offbeat stories in Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and even Justice League of America meant for superheroes used to solving every crisis through action. A blast of heat vision, or ice breath, or an uncomplicated left hook…

Super-muscles are untrustworthy at best. Regular human weightlifters have more muscle mass than Superman but they can’t pull a moon out of orbit. And when Animal Man absorbs the power of flight from a passing bird, how come he doesn’t have to flap his arms to fly? This jaw-droppingly obvious fact was finally pointed out to the hero during writer Tom Veitch’s post-Morrison run on Animal Man. “What’s this so-called ‘bird power’ you talk about? The birds don’t have it! The poor creatures have to flap their wings!” The response? “Uh… you’ve got a point there.” (Animal Man #35, 1991).

Morrison’s Justice League of America aren’t his Doom Patrol, and they didn’t fight men with clocks for heads and nursery rhyme monsters – but the surreal logic of superheroes still questioned the validity of the body as a way to resolve conflict. Entire issues take place in dreams with bodies left, inert, waiting impotently for minds to return (JLA #8, 1997). Or in other worlds where the heroes are flattened into two dimensions, the same way we see them on the page (JLA #31, 1999). In one memorable scene, an enormous superbody is the host to an entire miniature world with a population that must die out of natural causes before he can be rescued (JLA #30, 1999).

Morrison once had the Flash remembering that “…with powers like ours, you have to learn to fight like a science fiction writer writes.” (Flash #130, 1997). It means rethinking conventional morality, too. Superman now has a reason for refusing to kill beyond the fact that it’s wrong. Superman berates rookie heroes who were happy to kill their enemies, saying: “These ‘no-nonsense’ solutions of yours just don’t hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel.” (JLA Classified #3, 2005). And you know? He’s absolutely right.

Perhaps it’s not that the overmuscled superbody is obsolete against the ontological threats of parallel universes and antimatter twins. It’s just that it must be stronger, faster, and harder than ever before to fight these forces of postmodern angst. I mean, how does the Flash move smoothly between parallel dimensions? He just moves really, really, really fast.

In a moment of genius by Morrison, a Superman ancestor visiting from the future attempted to return home by virtue of his superhuman strength alone. He actually punched his way through time (DC 1,000,000 #4, 1998). This pushed the boundaries of the superhuman body, and the credulity of comic fans. When asked to explain it, Morrison said: “It’s superhero poetry.” Readers should “bask in the audacious, absurd beauty of a man literally battering his way through the time barrier…”

That’s how Animal Man flies like a bird but without wings. That’s how Superman’s biceps can lift an oil-tanker and still be smaller than his head. Their bodies are superhero poetry. It’s Muscle Mystery.

Enter Flex Mentallo, Hero of the Beach. He’s too much of a man to question how his muscles function; it’s enough that they do. And it’s a good thing he’s not bothered by these same existential questions as his origin is more confusing than most. He was born as an imaginary friend of a young psychic boy, then brought forward into DC Comics ‘reality.’ His story provides multiple points of origin: he’s the childhood creation of psychic Wallace Sage; he’s the fictional brainchild of Morrison himself; he’s the wimp from the faded Charles Atlas commercials from my childhood half-memories. Will Brooker, in a discussion of the ambiguous signs of Flex’s sexuality, points out that these multiple origins themselves also suggest a ‘queerness’ present in the narrative structure itself.

Does Flex whine about his unreality, like Animal Man’s Buddy Baker? Does he wail about whether or not he’s even human, like The Doom Patrol’s Cliff Steele? No. “I’m a superhero,” he says, and that’s everything he needs to know (Flex Mentallo #4, 1996). In Morrison’s work, it’s the characters that are clearly labelled as ‘imaginary’ that can most easily withstand the shock of parallel worlds.

The possibility of parallel worlds colours everything in Flex Mentallo. Is it all a writer’s delusional drug trip? An elaborate supervillain hoax? The terrifying effects of Black Mentallium? A pocket universe of paper where the world’s ‘real’ heroes have been hiding? It’s all about leaving these possibilities open rather than shutting them down; not destroying parallel worlds but instead keeping them alive. Morrison is much more interested in the infinite earths than in the crisis.

Flex is pulled apart, put back together, and his very existence questioned again and again – but he never doubts himself. His Muscle Mystery holds him together. He’s so strong that when he strikes a pose, the words ‘Hero of the Beach’ actually appear above his head like in the old Charles Atlas advertisement. His biceps have conceptual powers all their own. Flex narrates:

“So I summoned up the power of Muscle Mystery – activating the occult of each musclecord, each tendon. Above my head, my famous ‘hero halo’ shimmered into view. And I flexed, reaching out to probe the interior of the bomb with my bodymind.” (Flex Mentallo #1, 1996).

His ‘bodymind’ suggests that his muscles and his heroic subjectivity are indivisible. Flex’s invulnerability isn’t a brittle costumed shell that could crack, allowing disruptive energy to escape or dissipate. He’s all man, through and through, and his boy scout morality remains absolute. When an admiring woman says to him “Boy, I just adore all-male he-men!”, he humbly answers: “And you’re a fine, hardworking woman.” Even when the story’s villain is unmasked, Flex doesn’t want revenge. He offers him the same chance we all had, reading the advertisements in those old comics, and tells the villain:

“Gamble a stamp! I can show you how to be a real man!” (Flex Mentallo #4, 1996).

Next: Flex gets dragged into the ‘real world’ of our legal system! Can even he prevail?

Here goes:

Over the years, Watchmen has become something I admire more than love. When I first read it, however, it absolutely amazed me. If I try, I can still remember the sick, breathless sensation I felt reading its grim climax.

Anyway, Watchmen survived Snyder’s film and it’ll survive these Before Watchmen prequels too. It is a little sad that someone will have to wade through all the prequels on the shelf to purchase the original. If DC was serious about this, they’d do a single 12-issue story – something to sit proudly next to the Moore and Gibbon’s collected Watchmen – instead of these scattershot miniseries.

Corporate comics will always focus on characters rather than stories because it lets them produce more material and make more money. (The idea that Rorschach has been sitting, unused, for decades must’ve been making DC executives wake up in cold sweats.) As Josh Flanagan wrote for iFanboy, DC have the legal right to make more Watchmen against the wishes of Alan Moore, and “morality and what’s right doesn’t come into it.” But why shouldn’t morality come into it? Isn’t the whole point of morals that they come into everything?

The most depressing thing about Before Watchmen for me isn’t the cult of nostalgia or corporate greed or wondering why Darwyn Cooke said yes. It’s seeing how – yet again – so many comic book fans automatically take the side of the company over the creator. Do they think Marvel and DC are the ones protecting these characters? And unhappy creators could cost them the new stories they desperately want? I don’t know – but if superheroes teach us anything, I’m pretty sure it’s not “morality doesn’t come into it”.

It seems like summer blockbusters have the opposite problem. In films like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and The Darkest Hour we see entire cities crumbling and destroyed – but what about the humans? These movies still want to rack up a decent bodycount but can’t have bloody bodies lying around. They’ve got to avoid a rating that’d prevent young audiences from buying tickets, after all. And stories about alien invasions don’t get to play the Saving Private Ryan card of historically accurate, ‘important’ violence.

The weaponsmiths of the evil Decepticons of Transformers and the invisible aliens of Darkest Hour reached the same solution: disintegration. No blood, no gore, no bodies left behind. Just show bodies turning to ash, show the ash spiralling in the wind, and then show them gone. Vanished. Now your next cool action set piece won’t be choking on leftover corpses!

Old westerns used to be mocked for the way that cowboys would just clutch their chests and die instantly and painlessly – but at least we saw them fall. They didn’t just flicker away like cannon fodder in a videogame. A PG-rated Hiroshima is its own kind of hell.

Daniel Clowes’ comic The Death Ray is a sort of decoder ring for the violent, adolescent urges behind Michael Bay’s Transformers. Not only does its titular weapon not leave anything behind; we don’t see the disintegration at all. Instead Clowes tucks all the violence into the gutter between panels, leaving only a bloodless there-one-moment, gone-the-next. Andy, the boy who becomes a vigilante named for the gun, has a recurring nightmare:

“There was this street with these big white berries growing on it, and as soon as a person ate one they would start to disappear. This process seemed to be both physically painful and super-terrifying.” He says that no matter what, he “couldn’t get away from the nothingness.”

The nothingness. Most sane. Super-terrifying.

Steven Spielberg made his own post-Private Ryan sci-fi film: War of the Worlds. Its aliens were also fond of disintegration. (Blame H.G. Wells.) But the way Spielberg visually linked the leftover ash to the aftermath of 9/11 gave it gravity – and he was respectful enough to ensure something was left. Even if it was just the victims’ clothes, fluttering to the ground.

The good news: the movie’s very enjoyable. The concept used to introduce brothers Gary and Walter – one human, one muppet – is a clever one; the songs are mostly great; Jason Segel’s excitement at being surrounded by these puppets is palpable. I laughed, I cried. And yet…

The bad news: the voices are wrong. For the first hour of the movie I cringed every time Fozzie or Piggy spoke. It’s like seeing your favourite band play but hearing a cover song boom out of the speakers. It made me feel a little bit like I was going mad.

This isn’t the first time. When Jim Henson died, and Kermit’s voice changed forever, I remember thinking that maybe the character should’ve been retired. But that’s a selfish thought – why shouldn’t new generations enjoy Kermit, just to spare my feelings? New voices won’t matter to the kids who see the film. That’s how it should be.

It’s harder to take in The Muppets because Frank Oz – the man who gave life to Fozzie and Piggy – is still alive. The fact that Oz was unhappy with the script and worried it didn’t “respect the characters” did affect my viewing experience. Couldn’t they find some way to allay his concerns and get him on board?

It doesn’t always serve art to give creators the final say over their creations. Everyone alive agrees the Star Wars universe would be much improved if someone had found a way to ignore George Lucas’ whims. Everyone except Lucas, anyway.

It comes down to this: what is a muppet? Is it a character that should stay an extension of its creator or creators? Or is a muppet a Robin Hood or a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, kept alive by dozens and dozens of different interpretations by artists good and bad?

(Or, as Homer Simpson once said, a muppet might be “not quite a mop and it’s not quite a puppet… but man! So to answer your question, I don’t know.”)

My favourite new Muppet story isn’t the film. It’s the muppet comic book by Roger Langridge from a few years ago. They mimic the format of the 1970s Muppet Show, keeping its anarchic humour while managing some beautiful character moments. His muppets are pencil-and-ink abstractions of already abstracted foam-and-felt, but they’re absolutely alive.

Ignore the funk revelations of the decade-old Muppets in Space movie. Langridge provides the definitive answer to Gonzo the Great’s true identity, completing an emotional journey that began in 1979’s The Muppet Movie as he sang ‘I’m Going To Go Back There Someday’.

Scooter asks Gonzo: “Tell me… please… what the heck are you??”

And Gonzo replies: “Oh, Scooter. I thought you knew. I’m an artist.”