Speed Force

“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 this morning 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 telepathing 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?

(Expanded from a remark I posted on Twitter earlier, itself condensed from a post on Comic Bloc in response to Heatwave the Rogue’s assertion that Cobalt Blue is the Mopee of the modern era.)

The Beat is running a poll called You are what you read, asking about people’s comic reading habits from a company perspective. I used to read mainly DC, but in the last 10 years or so I’ve branched out a lot, to the point where actual DC-labeled books are less than half of my current reading list (though if you factor in other DC-owned labels like Vertigo, it climbs to just over half).

Last month I went into why I read what I read, but I didn’t run any numbers on the list. Before filling out the Beat’s poll, I figured I’d break them down by label and see how they turned out:

7 DC: Flash, Secret Six, Tangent: Superman’s Reign, Final Crisis, Rogues’ Revenge, Legion of Three Worlds, and All-Star Superman.
3 Vertigo: Fables, House of Mystery, Madame Xanadu.
3 Image: Noble Causes, Gemini, Dynamo 5. (Yes, they’re all written by Jay Faerber)
2 Marvel: The Twelve, True Believers.
1 WildStorm: Astro City.
1 Dark Horse: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
1 IDW: Fallen Angel.

So that works out at 7/18=39% for DC proper, or 11/18=61% for all DC-owned books.

Of course, a lot of those are miniseries, and All-Star Superman just ended. Looking only at ongoing books: (more…)

I’m beginning to think that Final Crisis should have been an original graphic novel, not a miniseries.

I understand there are many reasons to do a big event as a miniseries. People are more willing to spend $3.50 a month for 7 months than to drop $20-25 all at once. And they’re more willing to pick up a first issue to try it, knowing that if they don’t like it, they don’t have to pay for the rest of the series (while with a book it’s all or nothing). It’s easier to schedule tie-ins. Plus it keeps the hype engine going for longer.

But those are all business reasons. Let’s look at artistic reasons. Specifically this one: it’s clear that Final Crisis will read better all at once than in serialized chapters.

After the contention that the series requires the reader to be a walking encyclopedia of arcane DC knowledge (a claim with which I disagree), the biggest complaint about Final Crisis is that it isn’t clear what’s going on. There’s a sense that you need to have read interviews and annotations just to follow it.

It seems like readers want an inverted pyramid structure to their comics. Establish all the players up front, then jump into the conflict. Which is certainly a valid way to tell a story, except that:

• It’s not the only way to tell a story.
• It’s not even what comics readers really want.

Movies and novels frequently tell stories where they give you only pieces of information, bit by bit, and slowly assemble them into a whole so that by the time you get to the end, or three-quarters through, or half-way through, you know what’s going on. Before the sequels soured people’s memories of the first film, The Matrix was massively popular — but it takes a long time before Neo — and the audience — find out what’s really happening.

And really, people don’t want everything spelled out ahead of time. They want to be surprised. They want the rush of a cliffhanger ending. And when you spend an entire issue establishing the situation and players, like in Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds, they complain that it’s all setup, and it’s like “reading a Wikipedia article.”

The problem is trying to mix the story structure Grant Morrison is using for Final Crisis with the serialized format.

A movie can spread out the exposition because it’s a whole work intended to be watched all at once. A novel can get away with it because it’s perceived as a whole work, not as series of connected stories. You can pause reading a novel and know that you can read the next part, which might explain more, anytime you want. When you have to wait a week for the next episode of a TV show, or a month (or two, or more) for the next chapter of a serialized comic, waiting for things to make sense can be a much more frustrating experience.

So doing it as a graphic novel would solve that problem. Have the whole thing come out in one volume. People can sit down, read it at their own pace, and follow the pieces as they come together. They can see how the story works as presented on the page, and then if they want to look deeper into symbolism, see how it connects to 70 years’ worth of shared universe stories, or do a literary analysis, then they can look up the annotations.

Comics of the 1990s have gotten a bad rap. A lot of people look at them and see only the holofoil cover gimmicks, interminable summer crossovers (which are back), everyone trying to ape the Image style with humongous shoulder pads and spikes, mullets, Spider-Clones, Electric Superman, Emerald Twilight, and “kewl” revamps.

But there were also a lot of very good comics being published at the time, and everyone was trying new things. Sure, some of them didn’t work (like Bloodlines or Fate), but some of them did (like Starman). This list is going to be heavily DC, since that’s what I was reading at the time, but this is the decade that brought us: (more…)

Spotted this article on Sony’s planned Flash Gordon movie: ‘Flash Gordon’ pace quickens with scribes. It opens with the tagline, “‘Flash Gordon’ is moving ahead at breakneck speed.” Those are odd comments for an ordinary guy who ends up having adventures in space, but appropriate for a super-speedster…. Yeah. Someone else got the Flash and Flash Gordon confused. It’s a typical example of what TV Tropes calls Cowboy Bebop at his Computer.

It fits with society’s general contempt for both comic books and science-fiction. If you ask whether a football team is playing in the World Series, people will look at you like you’re an idiot. But it’s okay to get Star Wars and Star Trek mixed up to the point where Dr. Spock has a lightsaber and Yoda says, “Live long and prosper.” In fact, many people look down on you if you do understand the difference.

Oddly, our mainstream culture is quite willing to go see science-fiction and comic-book films, as long as they have enough explosions. Take a look at the 30 top-grossing films list, and it’s one sci-fi, fantasy, or super-hero after another. (Exceptions: Titanic, Passion of the Christ, and Forrest Gump. I’m counting movies with talking animals as “fantasy.”) I guess it’s okay to watch the stuff, as long as you don’t remember too much about it afterward.

It also fits with the annoying tendency of headline writers to use the “Holy XYZ!” phrasing from the 1960s Batman TV show as if it’s somehow still relevant to modern-day comics or movies, despite a massive cultural shift away from camp and toward serious (and, in many cases, downright dark) storytelling over the past 20 years. That second link lists almost 50 examples from July alone!

I guess actually paying attention to what they write about would make them less cool or something.

The Weekly Crisis recently invited 5 comics bloggers to write about why they buy the comics that they do, then turned it over to ask the readership the same question. This is an extended version of my response to that post.

For most of my comics-reading life, I’ve followed characters. I’d pick up The New Teen Titans and stick with it. I’d follow that to Flash (and that to Justice League Europe), Hawk and Dove, Deathstroke, Nightwing, etc.

Sometimes I would pick up a new book for the concept. I’d take a look at, say, Darkstars in the early 1990s, and think, “Hey, that sounds cool!” Or Planetary back in 1999, or Welcome to Tranquility last fall (yeah, in trades).

I’ve also tended to stick with the universe I know best — DC — and stand-alone titles. The Marvel books I’ve read tend to be either creator-owned (Groo the Wanderer when it was published at Epic), licensed (Transformers when I was younger), or off in their own little corner (Alias, The Twelve). Same with WildStorm — while I eventually tracked down some Stormwatch and Authority trades, mostly I read Planetary, which was off doing its own thing.

For a long time, I read most of the big events at DC. Partly it was because everyone was in them (and I was reading a lot more super-heroes back then), and partly it was because, if Big Changes were afoot, I wanted to see what happened. Though I drew the line at tie-in issues of series I didn’t read, unless they specifically crossed over with a book I was reading. (The one exception: DC One Million. I read almost all of those tie-ins because I wanted to see what DC did with the ideas.) Eventually I got tired of the endless crossovers of the 1990s, and stopped. Until Infinite Crisis, which looked interesting, but annoyed me even more in the end.

These days, I find myself following writers. Astonishing X-Men was far from my first comic, but it was my first X-Men comic — not counting the crossover with New Teen Titans back in the 1980s — and I picked it up because it was Joss Whedon. I’ll check out almost anything mystical written by Bill Willingham. Neil Gaiman’s name got me to pick up his Eternals miniseries, and you can bet I’ll pick up his Batman story next year. And I’m beginning to get to that point with Jay Faerber — Noble Causes, Firebirds and Dynamo 5 are hard to beat, and I resisted picking up Gemini, but finally gave in.

Like some of the respondents, I also have trouble letting go. I kept reading various incarnations of Titans for over a decade (everything from “Titans Hunt” to Infinite Crisis, minus the Jurgens series) even though I no longer really liked the book — just occasional stories. I kept hoping it would get better, but after being bitten over and over, I finally wised up and walked away.

I’ve gotten much better at only reading the stuff I actually like lately (Countdown to Final Crisis excepted; it was research material). I dropped Fell after a few issues because, as good as it was, it just disturbed the heck out of me. I gave Shadowpact and Jack of Fables a shot, but neither really grabbed me the way Fables did. I even came close to dropping Flash with the 2006 relaunch, though I decided to give it a chance. Once I picked it up, I stuck with it because the writers were clearly learning on the job (and you could see that they were learning from issue to issue), and then actually liked the next writer’s arc — not where it went, but how it was presented.

Looking at books I’ve started reading recently: (more…)

Three issues into Final Crisis, there’s a large contingent of people who feel that the book is “impenetrable,” and that it requires an encyclopedic knowledge of the DC Universe in order to understand it. I disagree. In fact, I think up to a point, knowledge of DC actually makes it harder to understand it.

From what I’ve read, the biggest complaints seem to be coming from people who know quite a bit about the DC universe and are annoyed that they don’t know the background on, say, Frankenstein (as he fits into the DCU), or Anthro, or Libra, etc. On the other hand, people who aren’t totally immersed in DC history assume they’re not going to recognize everyone, and are more willing to go with the flow.

Certainly, the book is steeped in the DC Universe. But for the most part, the characters’ back-stories don’t seem to be necessary to understand what’s going on in this story.

Example 1: The prologue in the first issue was set in pre-history, in which Metron of the New Gods filled the Prometheus role and gave fire to humans. A cavemen battle featured DC characters Anthro and Vandal Savage. A lot of people complained that if they hadn’t recognized the characters, they’d be lost. Well, no, not really — they’d just see a battle among cavemen, which gets the main idea across quite nicely.

Example 2: Frankenstein and S.H.A.D.E. figure prominently in the opening scenes of issue three. If you haven’t read Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein, you might wonder what the heck Frankenstein’s monster is doing working for an F.B.I.-like agency. On the other hand, the scene would still work if it were a random F.B.I. or S.H.A.D.E. agent. The back-story on the character isn’t necessary to understand his role here.

Oddly, I haven’t seen anyone complaining (yet) that they needed to pick up a Cave Carson showcase in order to understand the scene in which they discover a petroglyph.

I believe it was Bruce Timm who explained that on the Justice League cartoon, they made an effort to use existing characters from DC’s stable whenever possible. In one episode they needed a sniper. They could have just had a random sniper, but they looked through DC’s roster and decided to use Deadshot. Was Deadshot’s background necessary to understand the resulting episode? Not at all.

In a lot of these cases, what readers are missing isn’t a critical piece of the story — it’s bonus material. And again, it’s the people who have a solid but not thorough knowledge of DC who feel left out, because they know, say, JLA backward and forward, but not Kamandi, or they’ve memorized everything Geoff Johns has ever written, but didn’t read Seven Soldiers. So they feel like they should know the back-story.

As an experiment, I handed the first issue to my wife, whose familiarity with the DC Universe mainly comes from the animated Justice League. She had some questions, certainly, but she was able to understand most of what was going on.

Working up the scale, you eventually get to the readers who do recognize almost everything, and then the key issue becomes: what attitude do they take toward the parts they don’t know? Are they frustrating? Or are they puzzles to solve?

As for myself, admittedly I do have a strong grounding in the DCU, having read a lot of their comics over the past two decades. But there were still characters I didn’t recognize, like Dan Turpin and Sonny Sumo. Heck, I missed the fact that the evil caveman in the prologue was Vandal Savage, which enhances a later scene (when Libra mentions that the world has been waiting a long time for Vandal Savage to make good on his threats to conquer it*). Even so, these gaps in my DC knowledge didn’t prevent me from figuring out what was going on, because I though, oh, these must be new characters. Picking up the details through sites like Final Crisis Annotations certainly enhanced the experience, but I didn’t feel that my initial reading had suffered at all.

So in short, here’s my theory (well, really it’s just a hypothesis) on how readers react to Final Crisis:

• Minimal DC knowledge: Accepts gaps in knowledge, goes with what they do know and what’s on the page, and follows the book.
• Medium DC knowledge: Gaps in knowledge are infuriating, feels the book is impenetrable.
• Extensive DC knowledge: Follows the book, then gets involved in discussions afterward to see what they missed.

*I prefer the take given by some story I can’t remember, in which Vandal Savage says, “From time to time, I have chosen to rule the world.” It makes him more menacing, to think that for the most part he isn’t really trying, and when he has put the effort in, he’s succeeded.

Okay. Time to lay it all on the line. As much as I’m a Flash fan, I’m more specifically a Wally West fan.

I’ve read Barry’s entire run. I’ve read nearly half of Jay’s (and spent way too much tracking down back issues). I’ve read all of Impulse and the one year of Bart’s run as Flash. But Wally will always be my Flash. So obviously I’m facing Barry’s return and practically-guaranteed retaking of the spotlight with some trepidation. Some of the rumors floating around haven’t helped matters.

But I’m trying to be positive.

So, DC, I know you don’t care about one particular fan’s preferences, but here’s what would make me happy at the end of Flash: Rebirth and the start of the new era in The Flash.

• Barry and Iris together.
• Wally and Linda together.
• Iris II and Jai alive, preferably somewhere between 8 and 17 years old physically & mentally so they can actually be characters. Powers optional. (Yes, I’m one of the weirdos who likes the twins. And yes, I’ve read last month’s issue. I’m still holding out to see how the cliffhanger resolves.)
• Wally still prominent as the Flash, not shoved off into a corner or renamed “Mr. Zip.”
• Jay alive.
• Bart alive, if possible. It’s okay if he’s in the 31st century. And I think he worked better as Impulse (though I think he could have worked as the Flash, if DC had really gotten behind the series and given it a chance instead of bailing at the first sign of audience discontent).

What would make me feel that Wally hasn’t gotten shafted?

• Nothing that screams “demotion” or “second-rate” or “sidekick.” No “Thanks for filling in, the real Flash is back. Go back to the kids’ table.” (Obviously some of this is inherent in Barry taking over the spotlight and Wally getting the costume change, but let’s minimize it, okay?)
• Put him in an outfit that doesn’t evoke his old Kid Flash costume.
• Have him appear in more than just The Titans on a monthly basis. I spent most of a decade picking up various incarnations of that book solely out of hope that it would get better, and finally broke myself of the habit during Infinite Crisis. (Actually, I did like the first year and a half of Geoff Johns’ run, but other than that, I didn’t really care for more than the occasional storyline from Titans Hunt onward). Unless I start hearing that it’s fantastic, I’m not going to pick it up just because it’s the only place I can read new stories with Wally West.
• Wally in Justice League of America and Barry in Justice League. This is such an obvious win-win solution, especially since Barry’s friends Hal, Ollie and Ray are all supposed to be in the latter book.

Also, assuming Barry takes over the main Flash title, I’d like to see Wally in a parallel title. Some ideas:

• Pick up Barry’s series as The Flash with #351, and start Wally’s series up again with #248 and a title change.
• Launch The Flash starring Barry with #1, and launch All-Flash with a rotating cast of Wally, Jay and others, also with #1.

So, there you have it, DC. One of many points you can add to your marketing data.

One of the strangest things to hit comics fandom last week was the furor over DC EIC Dan Didio’s rumored ouster. It didn’t happen — in fact, his contract was renewed — but in response, Collected Editions has posted a list of 3 things Didio has done right for DC:

1. Revitalized the summer event crossover.
2. Greater continuity in publishing (ex: Countdown, Full Throttle, and The Lightning Saga all fitting together).
3. Emphasis on a good story (including support for low-selling, but critically-appreciated books).

#1 is a matter of perspective: if you like big events, it’s a good thing. If you don’t, it’s not. Personally, I’m getting tired of them.

#2 is a bit of an odd choice for a wait-to-trader, since you don’t get the impact of, say, Bart’s death and Wally’s return hitting simultaneously if you’re reading the trades months later.  Though I suppose it’s sort of like looking at the way the various pieces of Seven Soldiers interlock.

#3 I absolutely agree with. I’ve lost a number of favorite books to low sales in the past, and while I haven’t gotten into, say, Manhunter or Blue Beetle, it’s nice to see some of these books given more of a chance.

My Frustrations

That said, I’ve found myself very frustrated with DC over the last few years, for the following reasons:

1. As mentioned above, I’m tired of mega-crossovers. I was actually prepared to skip Final Crisis until I found out it was being written by Grant Morrison. (Of course, it’s since become clear that I would have had to pick it up anyway for research material!) Edit: This is, of course, not unique to DC. Marvel is just as focused on big events. It occurs to me that my current favorite series are Fallen Angel (IDW), Dynamo 5 (Image), Fables (DC/Vertigo) and Girl Genius (Studio Foglio) — all of which are stand-alone series. Of those, only D5 even takes place in a shared universe.

2. Mishandling of the Flash after Geoff Johns left. Six creative changes in three years. Two relaunches, and possibly a third coming up. A high-profile launch with writers who hadn’t adjusted to the medium. Starting both relaunches with slow burns instead of hitting the ground running.

There was no need to relaunch the book after Infinite Crisis. DC just figured “You can’t have a Crisis without a dead Flash” (or whatever the quote was). On the relaunch, Bilson & DeMeo were learning rapidly, but not fast enough to turn around sales. Marc Guggenheim was brought in to kill Bart, and response to his story made it clear that DC didn’t need to replace him.  I’m very much enjoying Tom Peyer’s arc on the book, but just as it got going, DC announced a new creative team.  It feels like DC has no idea what to do with the character, and is flailing around in a panic, grasping at everything without actually taking hold of anything long enough to let it build.

Since Flash is the only ongoing DCU book I read regularly these days, that makes a big difference.  I can only hope that the attention the Flash is getting through Final Crisis and Rogues’ Revenge will turn things around.

3. The wholesale slaughter of “redundant” and C-list characters to make a point. That’s just throwing away long-term story potential for short-term shock value. Yes, you can bring them back, but every time you do, it makes the threat of death that much less credible for the next story. And no, this didn’t start in the last few years — I’ve seen more than a few favorites killed off within months of their series being canceled back in the 1990s — but it seems to have accelerated drastically from Infinite Crisis onward.

I can’t say how much of this is Didio’s fault, however, which is part of why I stayed out of the discussion last week.  That, and it had turned into a virtual lynch mob.  It was downright eerie watching the same thing happen, focused on the recent Flash editor, Joan Hilty, over at Comic Bloc — yes, Comic Bloc, the place that Newsarama posters think is full of rainbows and ponies enforced by a fascist dictatorship of moderators.  I’d like to refer readers to this xkcd comic strip.  Or, if you’re okay with swearing, Penny Arcade’s Greater Internet ——wad Theory (NSFW language) sums it up succinctly.