Welcome to the latest installment in our series of annotations of classic DC Comics stories starring the Flash!
We’re taking a break from The Trial of the Flash to look at Super-Team Family #15 (December 1977), written by Gerry Conway and featuring a team-up between Flash and The New Gods! This book contains major unheralded moments in the history of both franchises, as well as foundations for future stories that would go untold. Links to artwork and research are included throughout this post. For previous annotations, including Part One and Two of this issue, click here! Now, on to Chapter Three: “A Hell of Giants!”
I’ve been wondering whether DC planned on continuing the Flash Chronicles line of reprints. With the return of the Archives this year, I should have guessed we’d see a new Chronicles volume soon, and in fact, volume three is listed in DC’s July+ solicitations.
THE FLASH CHRONICLES VOL. 3 TP
Written by JOHN BROOME and GARDNER FOX
Art by CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA and MURPHY ANDERSON
Cover by CARMINE INFANTINO and MURPHY ANDERSON
On sale AUGUST 8 • 160 pg, FC, $14.99 US
In this third collection of 1960s adventures in chronological order, the Fastest Man Alive battles Rogues including The Trickster, Captain Cold, Captain Boomerang, Gorilla Grodd and more.
DC has three series of reprints designed to start at the beginning (or at least the beginning of the Silver Age) and collect everything in chronological order:
Archives: High-quality, hardcover, color reprints, typically about 200 pages, relatively expensive. For people who want a book that will last. Five volumes so far, with a sixth on its way.
Showcase Presents: Cheap, black and white paperbacks on newsprint, around 500-600 pages, for people who just want to read the stories. Currently on three volumes in the early 1960s, plus one featuring the Trial of the Flash in the 1980s.
Chronicles: Cheaper, color paperbacks, more like a typical collected edition of more recent comics.
I keep meaning to work out the math of just how many volumes each of these lines would need to reprint the entire 1956-1986 Barry Allen Flash series (including the four Showcase issues early on) — and how long it would take to complete them at DC’s current rate of publication.
THE FLASH #11
Written by FRANCIS MANAPUL and BRIAN BUCCELLATO
Art and cover by FRANCIS MANAPUL
1:25 B&W Variant cover by FRANCIS MANAPUL
On sale JULY 25 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
• The New 52 debut of HEAT WAVE!
• THE FLASH is on a crash course with THE ROGUES!
The image above is new and is included in the cover gallery for the solicits, but a caption does state it is not the final cover.
DC’s July Justice League solicitations are up at The Source. Flash fans looking for more Jay Garrick should check out the solicit for EARTH TWO #3 after the jump…
You should really check out this XKCD comic in a couple of different web browsers to experience the full effect. Some of them change when you resize the window, too.
THE FLASH BY GEOFF JOHNS OMNIBUS VOL. 2 HC
Written by GEOFF JOHNS
Art by SCOTT KOLINS, DOUG HAZLEWOOD, RICK BURCHETT, PHIL WINSLADE, DAN PANOSIAN and others
Cover by SCOTT KOLINS
648 pg, FC, $75.00 US (Or $46 on Amazon)
It’s the second hardcover volume collecting all the issues of THE FLASH written by comics superstar Geoff Johns! In this massive collection featuring issues #177-200 and DC FIRST: FLASH/SUPERMAN #1, an old friend of Wally West becomes the portal to another universe and Gorilla Grodd goes wild in Keystone City! Plus, don’t miss the Fastest Man Alive’s clashes with members of his infamous rogues gallery, including Captain Cold, The Trickster, the Pied Piper and more!
Notes: I’ve said before that these are my favorite stories from Geoff Johns’ run. He’d hit his stride by this point, bringing everything together first for Crossfire, then for Blitz, with some great done-in-one stories in the middle and a real effort to balance characterization, world building, and both the classic Rogues and new villains.
What the heck – I figured I’d post a second video for the Animated Anthems event. This one’s a fan video by tehbasil set to “The Ballad of Barry Allen,” by Jim’s Big Ego, from the album, They’re Everywhere!. If anyone in he music industry knows Barry Allen, it’s singer/songwriter Jim Infantino. He’s the nephew of classic Flash artist Carmine Infantino!
Check back at our first video of the day, the Filmation Flash intro from 1967, or check out the rest of the Animated Anthems being celebrated today!
This is the intro for the Flash segments that ran during the Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure (1967-1968). Filmation produced three Flash cartoons in which the Flash and Kid Flash battled original evildoers including a giant mutated bug (The Chemo Creature, seen here), a mad scientist in a robot suit (Professor Crag), and an alien speedster (The Blue Bolt). Sadly, he didn’t actually “conquer the barriers of time and space” in any of the segments they produced.
Warner Bros. released all the non-Superman/Aquaman sequences on DVD a few years back, and I reviewed the set a couple of months after this blog went online.
Even setting aside the image quality, you can see that it’s a very different style from modern shows like Justice League Unlimited and Young Justice, or even Super-Friends. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s no question that the 1990s are back in comics. Many of DC’s New 52 redesigns have been likened to the early 90s Image Comics look, and creators like Scott Lobdell and Rob Liefeld, virtually absent from DC for years, are now on multiple books. The Extreme-verse is back. Valiant is relaunching.
And you know what?
There’s going to be more.
Remember When…?
Pop culture nostalgia runs in a 20-year cycle. The 1970s had Happy Days and Grease. When I was growing up in the 1980s, it seemed like everything was about how great the 1960s were. (Oh, the hoopla over the 20th anniversary of Woodstock…) By the 1990s, we had Dazed and Confused and That 70s Show, and of course the first wave of big-screen TV remakes of shows like The Brady Bunch. Over the past decade or so we’ve seen Transformers and GI Joe made into mega-blockbuster movies.
People in the prime of their careers can create new pop culture inspired by their childhood or teenage years and get it produced and distributed. People who want to revisit those years can finally afford to buy the new version of that Millennium Falcon playset they wanted when they were 9, or see that band in concert that they wanted to see when they were 15. People who have children want to share those things they remember fondly from their own childhood.
What we’re seeing in comics is merely the leading edge of the wave of 1990s nostalgia.
Now, I’ll bet a lot of you are dreading this. “But the 80s were good!” you’ll say. “The 90s sucked!” Read the rest of this entry »
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.
