On Friday, Ethan Van Sciver posted two covers to the Jinxworld Forums. One was the cover to Flash: Rebirth #5 which was also released through The Source. The other? Check it out:
EVS doesn’t say which issue the cover is for, but judging by the end of issue #2, it’s almost certainly the variant for Flash: Rebirth #3.
Update (May 11): DC has posted a slightly larger image at The Source, and confirmed that it’s the variant cover to Flash: Rebirth #3.
Some weekend linkblogging:
Covered features artist James Duncan’s reinterpretation of Flash v.1 #108.
iFanboy’s Great Moments in Comics features a scan of the Flash’s costume begging Barry Allen not to leave it. “The Case of the Curious Costume,” which appeared in Flash v.1 #161 (1966) was a “bonus” story based on the cover from Flash v.1 #159. (Thanks to GCD for the scan!)
Crave Online’s Top 5 Covers for April starts the countdown with Flash: Rebirth #1 at position 5.
Over at Comics Should Be Good, Scott’s Classic Comics Corner has been trying to pin down the start of the Bronze Age of comics (a much fuzzier boundary than the start of the Silver Age), and finishes his series with several less serious suggestions. Among them: Flash #220 (1973), the return of Turtle Man, 17 years after he first appeared in…Showcase #4.
Profzoom has launched a series of Flash: Rebirth Annotations.
Pete’s Rambling Observations suggests that Wally’s kids are “Ewoks on steroids”
Read/RANT considers How Many Green Arrows (or Flashes) is Too Many?
The Weekly Crisis’ Moments of the Week include several “anti-moments” from Flash: Rebirth #2.
Newsarama interviews Geoff Johns about his 10-year run on JSA and Justice Society of America.
This is about a different sort of Flash, but it should be cool!
Various sources are reporting that ABC has officially picked up 13 episodes of Flash Forward, based on the Robert J. Sawyer novel of the same name (which I reviewed at Speed Force last December).
The series is about the fallout from an event in which everyone in the world blacks out for 2 minutes and sees a vision of their own future. (In the book it’s 20 years, but in the TV show it’s 6 months…presumably to make it more urgent and so that the show can catch up to it.)
The cast features Joseph Fiennes, Sonya Walger, John Cho, Jack Davenport, Brian O’Byrne, Courtney B. Vance, Christine Woods, Zachary Knighton and Peyton List.
Where else can you see William Shakespeare, Hikaru Sulu, Penelope Widmore and James Norrington together?
Variety points out that with Lost returning in January, ABC may intend Flash Forward to fill the gap in fall, while Lost fans wait for its final season. (ABC has said from the start that they’re hoping Flash Forward will be the show to keep Lost‘s audience coming back after that show wraps.)
There’s actually a Flash connection — or rather, several. David Goyer (who wrote a now-scrapped script for the Flash movie) co-wrote and directed the pilot, and Marc Guggenheim (who wrote Flash: The Fastest Man Alive — “Full Throttle” [edit: fixed title]) will executive produce the series.
(via Robert J. Sawyer. Cross-posted at K-Squared Ramblings)
DC’s The Source spotlights seven August Covers, including the cover for Flash: Rebirth#5.
It’s the latest homage to the classic “Flash of Two Worlds” cover from Flash v.1 #123, the first meeting of Barry Allen and Jay Garrick — only this time it’s Barry Allen vs. the Black Flash, and the poor hapless construction worker has been crushed by the falling beam.
There are actually two visual references to this famous cover in Flash: Rebirth #1 as well — a parade float, and then a side view in Jay Garrick’s reminiscences.
Also of interest is the cover to Final Crisis Aftermath: Escape, in which it looks like Nemesis is running on the Cosmic Treadmill.
I’ve seen several people online talk about how they’re curious about Wednesday Comics, DC’s experiment to bring back the old full-page Sunday comics format…but that they’re going to wait for the “inevitable” collection.
The thing is, I’m not 100% certain there will be a collection. And if there is, it might not be what readers expect.
Sure, in a world where Amazons Attack gets reprinted as a hardcover book and Terror Titans gets reprinted as a trade paperback, and most comics are written in 4-6–issue story arcs, it certainly seems like everything will get collected eventually. (Except that last arc of Flash after Geoff Johns left, but then I’m not sure anyone misses it.) But two things make me wonder about this one:
The first item means that, for once, the priority isn’t on the eventual collection: it’s back on the periodical.
As for the second, let’s look at the page size in more detail.
According to solicitations, each page will be 14 inches by 20 inches. Basically, open up two comic books flat, then line them up one above the other, and you’ve got the page size. Or pick up a newspaper. (The Los Angeles Times is currently 23″ x 12″ per single page, so WC is a little shorter and a little wider than a newspaper.) If they want to keep the page size, that’s going to be a big book. Certainly hardcover, and more suited to a coffee table than a bookshelf. Like this massive 21″ x 16″ 7-pound Little Nemo in Slumberland tome. That’s larger than (and almost as heavy as) Comic Book Tattoo!
Now, consider that DC charges $50 for a ~200-page hardcover in its Archive series at normal comic book dimensions. A ~200-page hardcover with 4x the page area is likely to cost even more.
So the options I see are:
If there is a collection, it’s likely to be either very big and very expensive, or a poorer reading experience than the original.
Of course, none of this matters if the experiment fails and the series doesn’t sell well in the first place.
Update June 21: The Beat has a photo of a mock-up from Wizard World Philadelphia, demonstrating the size. CBR reports that at HeroesCon’s DC Nation, DC said they planned “both downsized and full-size trades” for the series.
Update October 12: The hardcover will be an 11×17″ coffee table book at $49.99.
I’ve re-read the first issue of Flash: Rebirth so that the setup is all fresh in my mind, and I’ve gone over Flash: Rebirth #2 again. To follow up on my first impressions: Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver continue to deliver a well-constructed story, though some of the pieces it uses strike me as ill-chosen or a waste of material.
Van Sciver’s art is, as always, excellent — and incredibly detailed. There’s a flashback sequence to Barry’s life before gaining his powers, and you can clearly see how some characters have aged over the years. There are also some nice symbolic images, such as Sam Scudder (the future Mirror Master) and his reflection (and props to the colorist who gave him an orange and green striped tie). At one point Barry and Wally get caught up in a battle with a villain, and half of Wally’s mask is ripped away. This not only makes it instantly clear which Flash is which (it does get confusing in the pages leading up to that point), but gives us a very clear view of his facial expression on the second-to-last page.
And then there’s the cover, an homage to Showcase #4 and Barry Allen’s first appearance.
The story picks up on the appearances of Savitar and the Black Flash from last issue, and the unexpected consequences, framed by a painting ceremony in Gorilla City. It follows through on Savitar’s appearance more than I expected (at least before DC posted the preview pages last week), though I get the feeling that DC and/or Geoff Johns is seeing this miniseries not just as a way to set up new pieces, but an excuse to throw out old pieces, even the ones that have been sitting unused in the back of the closet for years.
Oddly enough, I’ve had no problems with the pacing of this story, even though the general consensus online (at least among people who aren’t long-term Flash readers) is that it’s too slow. This is especially odd because my biggest criticism of the last two relaunches — Flash: The Fastest Man Alive’s “Lightning in a Bottle” with Bart Allen as the Flash and The Flash’s “The Wild Wests” with Wally West and family — was that they started with big six-part stories that were paced too slow for someone whose main claim to fame is speed. I still maintain that if “Lightning in a Bottle” had been condensed into three parts instead of six, fans would have responded much better to Bart as the Flash instead of rejecting him so thoroughly that DC turned around and killed him.
Maybe it’s because of the emphasis on Barry Allen, who has always been slow and steady in contrast to his alter ego of the Flash.
That said, I still don’t understand why they felt it necessary to explain Barry’s bow tie instead of just treat it as an artifact of when the original stories were produced. Modern retellings of Superman’s origin don’t make an effort to explain away Clark Kent’s anachronistic hat — they just leave it out.
I think that’s about as much as I can cover without giving anything away, so keep an eye out for spoilers after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll post a more complete review after I’ve had a chance to get home, re-read the first issue, and read through this one again, [Edit: it's up now] but here are my first thoughts on Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver’s Flash: Rebirth #2.
Good mix of flashback and mystery.
The simple solution to explain why civilian Barry Allen is back, and where he’s been all this time.
Follow-through on both Savitar and Black Flash — the story’s starting to get going.
Nice to see some familiar faces like Patty Spivot, Barry’s lab assistant. That makes me wonder where she is now, and whether she’s ever met Angela Margolin, who had Barry’s former job during Chain Lightning and the Dark Flash Saga.
Sam Scudder’s green-and-orange striped tie from his pre-Mirror Master days.
During a fight, Wally’s costume is ripped in such a way as to suggest Walter West‘s “Dark Flash” costume.
Another mention of Max Mercury (remember, he co-stars in the Mercury Falling collection that also came out today!)
The Gorilla City paintings as a narrative tie.
I can see where he’s going with the new backstory introduced last issue, but I still don’t like it much. Is retfridge a word? Or retro-fridge?
Was it really necessary to take a page and a half to do the Secret Origin of Barry Allen’s Bow Tie? Honestly, I’d have just ignored it the way modern Superman ignores the fact that Clark Kent used to wear a hat.
On one hand it’s a cop-out to bring back missing characters just long enough to kill them. On the other…I guess it’s better than killing off active ones. And it’s not as if death is (usually) permanent in comics anyway.
The last page ends on a cliffhanger. On one hand, it’s shocking in the “how will they get out of this?” sense. As far as revelations go, it’s only surprising in the sense of, “Really? They actually went there?”
Initial Verdict: Good, could be better.
Stay tuned for my full review later today. Update: My full review is up.
Amazon has announced the Kindle DX
This could be the first e-reader device suitable for simply taking comics formatted for the printed page and transferring them to a tablet. No need to break it down and show one panel at a time like most iPhone or Android comics. No need to zoom and pan. Just transfer the whole page.
Sure, it’s only black and white, but there are plenty of comics produced in B&W, or reformatted for printing in cheap collections like Marvel Essentials or DC’s Showcase Presents series.
Imagine 30 years of Justice League of America or Spider-Man in the space of the latest trade.
The only drawback is the steep price tag: at $489, I’m not picking one up anytime soon.
(Cross-posted at K-Squared Ramblings.)
Catching up on linkblogging before Flash: Rebirth #2 hits the shelves…
4thLetter!’s Esther Inglis-Arkell considers the resurrection trend in comics, and likes it — “Because I like characters to be alive.” Photon Torpedoes, however, seems more resigned to the idea.
The Comic Treadmill considers what should go into an All-Star Flash series.
BSI Comics contemplates the fallout Blackest Night will have on DC’s many character variations.
Robot 6′s Grumpy Old Fan wonders if it was really necessary to kill off Bart Allen and a certain other character just to bring them back to great fanfare in Legion of Three Worlds.
Off-topic, I’ve got a post on using Twitter with a blog over at K-Squared Ramblings.
Last month I missed this review of Flash: Rebirth #1 at Secret Wars on Infinite Earths.
Major Spoilers reviews Legion of Three Worlds #4, giving it 2 of 5 stars.
Can you believe it’s been a whole month since Flash: Rebirth #1 launched? It has, and this week, the second issue of the miniseries that will change the Flash forever (for whatever “forever” means in comics). Also of note is the second-ever Impulse collection, Flash: Mercury Falling, featuring art by Flash: Rebirth‘s very own Ethan Van Sciver, written by Todd Dezago (Perhapanauts).
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by Ethan Van Sciver
Covers by Ethan Van Sciver
What’s happened to the Speed Force? One of the world’s most powerful speedsters is dead, and Barry Allen must discover who — or what — is responsible! But the reborn Barry is a man haunted by a dark secret in his past. A secret that drives him to push far beyond his limits. A burden that, if he’s not careful, could send him right back into oblivion! Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver’s reinvention of the Scarlet Speedster picks up the pace — we dare you to keep up!
This issue will ship with two covers. For every 25 copies of the Standard Edition (with a cover by Ethan Van Sciver), retailers may order one copy of the Variant Edition (with a cover by Ethan Van Sciver).
A 6-page preview is available at The Source.
2 of 5 · 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US
Written by Todd Dezago
Art by Ethan Van Sciver, Eric Battle, John Stokes, Prentis Rollins and others
Cover by Ethan Van Sciver
In this classic story from Impulse #62-67, featuring art by Ethan Van Sciver, Max Mercury discovers that his connection to the speed force has been severed. Now, it’s up to Impulse to save his mentor and surrogate father.
Order from Amazon or read about it at Speed Force
144 pg, FC, $14.99 US
Written by Dwayne McDuffie
Art and cover by Ed Benes
In this new hardcover collecting Justice League of America #22-26, Red Tornado discovers the culprit behind his recent malfunctions — and the ensuing confrontation leads to a massive battle between the JLA and one of their oldest adversaries. Meanwhile, Vixen and Animal Man struggle with their own super-abilities and challenge Anansi, a deadly being who warps the histories of every JLA member. It’s DC’s heaviest hitters as you’ve never seen them before!
144 pg, FC, $19.99 US
As usual, there’s a good chance of a Flash appearing in Trinity this week.
Welcome to SpeedForce.org, a blog focusing on DC Comics' super-hero, The Flash. It's a companion site to Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning, a fan reference site for the Fastest Man Alive.
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