Grant Morrison Talks Flex Mentallo and Alex Ross' Brainiac - Creator Owned Art

Grant Morrison is the acclaimed writer behind Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Arkham Asylum, All-Star Superman, Flex Mentallo, New X-Men, We3, and many other acclaimed comic book titles. I spoke with Morrison about some of their favorite pieces of art from their collection as part of a series called “Creator Owned Art.” Here’s what they said:

FLEX MENTALLO I don’t have many pieces of original art – aside from books, I’m not much of a collector. Nevertheless, over the years, my artistic collaborators have gifted me one or two pieces.

The first piece was created by Frank Quitely as the cover illustration for a proposed book collection of our 4-issue series Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery released in 1996. Due to a lawsuit from the Charles Atlas company, which felt that the upstanding, law-abiding and thoroughly decent Flex Mentallo’s resemblance to their figurehead, might make Atlas look bad. The brief legal spat which came to nothing in the end (Atlas lost) prevented the publication of the collected Flex Mentallo for many years and the drawing went unseen except by visitors to my study.

The original idea was to have Flex pushing two comic pages apart like Samson with the temple pillars, or The Spectre holding Earths 1 and 2 in place in Justice League of America #45-46 This led to the notion of Flex forcing his way out of a whole comic book. Is he escaping from the comic or is he trying to prevent the feral contents from breaking out? Inspired by imagery from Buddhist thangkas, the arrangement of the pages is designed to recall a lotus flower, with Flex in the Buddha position at the centre.

Quitely gave me the pencil drawing, and it was framed on my wall until 2012 when DC finally got the go-ahead to reprint Flex Mentallo. I cracked the drawing out of its frame, handed it back to Vin to colour, and the end result became, as intended, the cover of the collected edition!

This is an original painting by Alex Ross, working over Doug Braithwaite’s layouts and pencils. Alex liked to base characters on real people so when he was developing his take on the cold-blooded, bald-headed space fiend Brainiac, it was to my innocent face and shaved head he turned as a model. I’ve been a fan of Alex Ross since Marvels came out, so I was delighted to be cast as one of Superman’s most enduring foes.

I came by this one quite by accident. My wife Kristan and I were walking past Alex Ross’ stall at San Diego Comi Con when we saw this iconic image from the cliffhanger of Justice issue #2. Brainiac, in his bloodstained smock, preparing to perform open head surgery on Aquaman, looked to us like a photo-realistic portrait of me under a green light, with some sub-dermal red bulbs in my head posing as an Aqua-vivisectionist.

As we admired the painting and Kristan posed me for a photo mimicking the avid eyes of Brainiac in background, we were spotted by Alex’ art dealer/agent, who removed the painting from the wall and handed it to me as a gift! He insisted that Alex would want me to have it, and we were only too willing to take his word for it!

I treasure this one and it has hung proudly on the wall of my study since then. An ever present reminder of my willingness to put superheroes through hell for the purposes of entertainment…

Thanks so much to Grant for showing off these pieces. Here are previous Creator Owned Art pieces.