Change is Coming – Review of THE FLASH #32

Flash 32 FinalThis issue of THE FLASH may not reveal everything that is coming down the road for Barry, Wally, and company…but one thing is certain.  Change IS coming, for Barry’s personal life, for his work at THE FLASH, and for at least one more Rogue!  Want to know more?  Read on…but remember we still give…

LIGHT SPOILERS ONLY

This tale begins twelve years from now, in a hospital room in Central City, where one of our best-known Rogues is in his last hours.  Was he put there by the Flash, by his own actions, or is there some other reason to find him there?  Whatever the reason, he does have a special visitor…Future Barry, stopping by on his way to our time!  In the present time, Barry is still tracking down whoever it was that stole all those special weapons out of the Central City Police Department Evidence Locker Room…to find that the person holding them has found some very interesting uses for those weapons!  Afterward, Barry and Wally…and someone else…go to a baseball game in an attempt to establish a connection.  What happens next with Wally?  You’ll have to grab the issue to find more.

Without giving too much away, Wally’s initial reaction to baseball mirrors the reaction my own adult children have shown when I’ve tried to drag them to a game, and it is the perfect way to show the generational difference between Barry and Wally.  We also see more of the psyche of future Barry and why he is on his way back to our time.  This is a Barry Allen who is just as broken as the Speed Force itself, and I can’t wait to see what happens when he gets to our time.

Robert Venditti and Van Jensen give us a little more of the new Wally in this issue, though a full Wally-centric issue is still in the future.  They are juggling several story threads well, not giving too much away in any one thread but instead giving the reader the feeling that all this is coming together soon for something truly big.  As for the artwork, I’ll say once again that I’m a fan of Brett Booth’s pencils, and the inks by Norm Rapmund and colors by Andrew Dalhouse were spot on, which brings me to this…has anyone else noticed that the red of present Barry’s uniform is getting a bit darker?  I realize that the main scenes for present Barry/Flash are nighttime, but still he has been almost glowing red regardless of the time of day in prior issues.  Could this be some foreshadowing of how Future Barry’s look comes to be?  Whether it is or not, the artwork was excellent.

One last note – the featured Rogue in this issue is my personal favorite, and that made this one particularly bittersweet for me.  I’m not sure where this will all end up, but it is certainly a story that has had an impact on the FLASH-verse, and it looks like more significant twists are on the way.

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7 thoughts on “Change is Coming – Review of THE FLASH #32

  1. Steve

    Yeah. At this point, you can’t blame the character. Any decent writer could turn him around at this point. I hate to say it, but it’s the writing. You have both Barry and Iris repeatedly saying that Wally’s a good kid, but when do we, the readers, ever see it? SPOILER ALERT: Never. We never see it on page. Maybe Wally volunteers at a soup kitchen off-panel, I don’t know. But we never see Wally being a good person on panel. We only see him being used as a plot-device to show us how Barry’s a good person, And the cliches…oh my God, the cliches. “How do we show that this kid’s becoming a bad apple? I know, we’ll have him graffiti up the town!” “How do we show Barry and Wally bonding? How about a baseball game?” It’s so, so lazy. And at this point, there’s no excuse for it. Wally doesn’t feel like a real person, And people can tell me to just be patient, but are my expectations so high because I want to read about a character instead of a plot device? And for all the people who think Wally is justified in his anger against the Flash and authority…no. False. He’s blaming a superhero for not being around to save his mother. He’s blaming a superhero for his uncle being convicted in a court of law as a result of his own actions. That’s not Wally being justifiably angry. That’s Wally having entitlement issues, and it’s very, very grating. The same kind of behavior is on display when he yells at Barry for not getting basketball tickets instead of baseball tickets. The art is great, but unless the writers learn how to show instead of tell, and actually construct a morally conflicted character who feels like a real person…they really screwed the pooch on Wally’s re-introduction. It saddens me to remember that the previous writing team had a pitch all planned to bring Wally back, and the editors said no. This mess is a result of their sloppy input and bad ideas.

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  2. Scott Timms

    I still think its early but I see ur point!, and I reminded of one of the writer’s knowledge of the character is “shockingly lacking”. There is no excuse for taking a project and not doing ur research into that character. No prior knowledge fine (Henry Cahill knew little about superman but say what u want about that movie. He embraced the role) but seriously do ur homework. Frankly I be pissed if grant Gustafson didn’t pick up a stack of Flash comics r download em. Didn’t DC.get rid of Bart Allen (for the time being) for being a bratty punk. Still holding out and I LOVE THE ART! Even fixed the finger over bend which is a self admittedly petty critique.

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  3. Savitar

    The best part of the baseball scenes was the correlation between Barry and Wally’s conversation & the announcer’s play-by-play. Plus, Barry’s reasoning of choice behind choosing baseball was well-founded, I thought.

    But the best part of the issue was the scenes with Len. Very moving and emotional.

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