“Chain Lightning” (Flash #143–150, including the lead-in) is a polarizing Flash storyline. Some fans love the look into the future of the Flash legacy. Others can’t stand that it hinges on Barry having an evil twin. (I’ve never been entirely sure how much of the objection is to the evil twin trope in general, or to the fact that Cobalt Blue is Barry’s evil twin.) Even Mark Waid admits that it didn’t work, though he maintains in The Flash Companion that the idea was sound, he just screwed up on the execution.
But then I had a thought: What if Cobalt Blue had appeared during the Silver Age instead of the late 1990s?
The evil twin trope hadn’t been discredited yet, so there would have been few objections on that basis. And with Barry as the new, current Flash rather than a fond memory, there would be no sense that DC was tarnishing a cherished hero’s legacy.
Consider: The Flash’s opposite number, who could have had his life but for a twist of fate, who fights against the law instead of for it, who uses magic instead of science. There’s some solid appeal there. And being a conceptual opposite makes him fill a different role than the Reverse-Flash, who is basically the Flash, but evil. (Sort of like Savitar vs. Zoom)
Obviously the big 6-issue epics didn’t exist back then, but I can imagine Chain Lightning as a recurring type of story, where once a year or so, the Flash has to go into the future to help another future Flash fight that generation’s Cobalt Blue.
So…
Is Cobalt Blue that much worse a name than Captain Cold, Professor Zoom, Pied Piper or Abra Kadabra? (Admittedly, Waid says in the same interview that he wanted to use the name Wildfire, but DC nixed it.)
Is a literal evil twin that much harder to swallow than a clone (Inertia), a mimic who has been known to alter his appearance to match the original (Professor Zoom), the product of an imperfect duplicator ray (Bizarro), or an alternate universe version (Ultraman)?
Is the concept that much more hokey than a gang boss who dresses as a clown (Joker), a talking telepathic gorilla (Grodd), a villain who spins (The Top), runs around in a parka and snow goggles in the heat of summer (Captain Cold), or throws trick boomerangs (Captain Boomerang, of course)? Look at the reactions to Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge from people who don’t read The Flash. They were surprised to find that the Rogues were compelling characters. Readers outside the Flash fanbase look at the Rogues’ names, costumes, and powers and figure that they’re nothing but lame jokes, but when used properly, they transcend the cheese factor.
What do you think? Am I totally off-base here, or could Cobalt Blue have worked as a classic Silver-Age villain?
One of the worst Flash characters ever, second only to Mopee.
Barry has had several different dopplegangers during his life. Comics has had thousands. The concept would have worked in the Silver Age with the right execution (hecked, it was just pulled again in the last issue. WHOAH, ANOTHER BARRY ALLEN!). The hate generated for the character mostly had to do with the fact that he was an evil twin of Barry’s that didn’t appear in a Barry Allen story. And since the original CB was a small part of a much grander story, he also didn’t have enough page time to flesh him out as anything other than the source of the Cobalt Blues. If he appeared in a Silver Age story, there’s no doubt in my mind he’d be held up and praised as a classic Flash villain.
Hey hey hey, spinning is not lame
Generally I agree with you that he would have been a lot more palatable in the Silver Age and we’d probably look back on him more fondly now, but the evil twin is still an overdone trope. And even though the Rogues are classic now, people are still making fun of some of their sillier schticks
so we wouldn’t necessarily embrace Malcolm whole-heartedly even if he had debuted in 1961.
But Steve also has a point suggesting that if Malcolm had been more fleshed out he might be more interesting; as it is, he’s not a deep character and seems little more than a cliche. Having 50 years of (possibly erratic) characterization would surely have helped with that, so that’s another point in a Silver Age origin’s favour.
He could have been quite something…
Perhaps against Barry it would have actually made more sense…
(though the evil twin still sounds a bit far-stretched)
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Right, because talking gorillas are so much more believable than separated-at-birth twins.
Who let you out of your cage, Malcolm? Don’t you have some highly-venomous spiders to play with?
I was more talking about the relation to the hero (as in, Cobalt Blue vs. Barry Allen rather than Wally West) rather thant powers.
And, come on! Talking gorillas are pure “pulp” styled villains. Separated at birth evil twin sounds like something from a Soap TV show..
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Remember, the point of this is to imagine how the character would have played if he’d been introduced 50 years ago.
maybe i’m just the odd evil twin, but I enjoyed this run!
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I tend to agree with Waid’s remarks from interviews that it was a sound idea, just poorly executed.
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