Speed Force

Monday’s post about how Wally West’s dynamic character makes him harder to reboot than Barry Allen got me thinking about something Geoff Johns said to Hero Complex when he took over the book back in 2009:

But you look at what the theme of Flash’s book has been for the last 200-something issues with Wally West and it’s been about a man trying to fill someone else’s boots. It doesn’t really have anything to do with speed. I mean, it has something to do with speed, but it was not totally what the book was about. The new Flash that I’m doing is all about speed.

At the time, I found it disingenuous because Geoff Johns wrote six years of that run himself, and he could have focused more heavily on speed with Wally West if he’d wanted to. And I found it worrying because he felt Wally’s defining characteristic was wanting to be like Barry Allen. Not the journey of becoming a hero, not learning to be an adult, but specifically trying to be someone he’s not.

But now I find the quote even more annoying, and here’s why:

The great over-arching Flash story from 2009-2011 might have been more appropriate for Booster Gold or Rip Hunter. (Or maybe Green Lantern/Hal Jordan, considering that it sounds a little like Emerald Twilight and Zero Hour when you break it down that far.)

Oh, well. Time to chalk it up as one more missed opportunity from that run, and Move Forward.

First off, sorry for the lack of updates last week. Sometimes, life gets too busy to blog.

There’s been a lot of talk about Wally West since C2E2 panels brought up the usual non-answers, and a Bleeding Cool reporter accidentally asked Dan Didio about Wally.

He explained that fans had grown up with Wally West, seen him get married and have children and with the de-aging of Barry Allen, it would cheat those fans who grew to love Wally to de-age him as well.

As a justification, it’s a bit disingenuous. “We shouldn’t do to Wally what we did to Barry” kind of suggests that maybe they shouldn’t have done it to Barry either. And while there’s something to “We’re making your favorite character go away because we know you wouldn’t like what we do with him,” it seems like it would rank right up there with “I don’t want to ruin our friendship by dating you” on phrases that people like to hear.

At Boston Comic Con, Francis Manapul mentioned a rejected a Wally cameo that he tried to put into an early issue of the New 52 Flash.

He doesn’t say how Wally would have appeared, and frankly, that’s a problem in itself. A few months ago when I met Brian Buccellato at a signing, he pointed out that having Barry Allen young and Bart Allen as Kid Flash kind of squeezes out Wally: Wally should be somewhere between Barry and Bart. But if Barry never died, and Bart’s already Kid Flash, where does that leave Wally?

There’s just no room for Wally West in the DCnU.

I kind of suspect that’s by design: A lot of Didio’s statements line up with that first panel of Comic Critics up above (though I’m sure he did watch Justice League Unlimited – and note the reference to the same nostalgia cycle I talked about recently), and he’s often talked about how Barry Allen is “more iconic” and otherwise superior to Wally West. I’ve long thought, cynically, that “more iconic” means “the version I grew up with,” but as I mull over the words reported by Bleeding Cool, I think it means something else. 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 »

Earlier this week, a reader asked me what I thought of DC’s decision to move Jay Garrick out of the mainstream DC Universe and put him in a separate universe (specifically Earth 2) with no links to Barry, Wally and Bart.

At first I was disappointed to lose the legacy aspect of the characters. I think it adds a lot to the Flash mythos to have Jay, then Barry, then Wally and Bart as a series of heroes inspiring and mentoring one another. On the other hand, the old scheme of tying the Justice Society of America to World War II and the Justice League to the present has been getting harder and harder to maintain over the last couple of decades. From that standpoint, I’m OK with them returning to the multiverse approach…as long as they treat the alternate reality as a first-class setting (like the Ultimate Marvel universe), not as something expendable. (How many characters did DC kill during Countdown to Infinite Crisis just because they weren’t from “New Earth” and therefore didn’t matter?)

Moving Jay Garrick to Earth-2? Sure, I can handle that.

But I’m not so sure about this Earth-2.

Over the past week, as we’ve started learning about Earth-2 — in particular the new takes on Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman — just about every new piece of information makes me less and less interested in the series. It’s all about death, all about heroes who kill — and that seems to be the selling point. I’m sure “What would you have to do to teach Superman to kill?” could be a fascinating story. But it’s not one I’m interested in reading as an ongoing. (That, in fact, is why I haven’t read Mark Waid’s Irredeemable — by all reports it’s a great story, but not one I want to read.)

I hope the teasers we’ve gotten over the past week are about a jumping-off point, rather than representative of the tone of the series. That the other heroes of Earth 2 aren’t going to be surrounded by and dealing out death, but rather carrying on the legacy as their world’s trinity fails. A dark, Flashpoint-like take on the Justice Society could be interesting, but if this is the only place we’re going to see Jay Garrick for the foreseeable future, I’d much rather it be in a setting where the Flash can be the kind of hero who tips his hat in respect to each person he saves.

Update: Just a day later, DC revealed Jay Garrick’s new costume and more information about his role in Earth 2.

Earth Two has been officially announced. Batman: Earth One has a release date. Action Comics #9 will explore the Supermen of alternate realities. The DC Multiverse is in the spotlight this week, so what better time to look back at the different approaches to cataloging worlds taken by DC Comics, Marvel, and others.

Read on at Cataloging Worlds. What do you think is the best way to identify alternate universes?

Since the Top is not an especially popular character, occasionally I get asked why I like him or people seem to be incredulous that anyone could. I figured it was finally time to write a short essay about it. This isn’t necessarily intended to change other people’s minds about him; of course he has a ton of flaws and I’m well aware he’s not particularly appealing to most people. It’s just an explanation of what I like about him.

I first developed an interest when reading some short biography, which stated to the effect “He taught himself to spin at high speeds, and the spinning increased his intelligence”. Frankly, I was delighted by the sublime ridiculousness of it, and can’t understand why some people consider that aspect of his origin to be a negative thing. I enjoy at least a bit of silliness and light-heartedness in superhero comics, a genre that by definition has some inherent goofiness.

I admire that he’s very much self-made. He taught himself about tops and the physics of rotation, taught himself how to spin, and built all of his own wide-ranging inventions. His genius intellect and psionic powers were unexpected gifts, but also the result of his own achievement (spinning). His repeated escapes from Hell and returns from the dead seem to have been the result of his own cleverness and stubbornness; he decided he wanted to come back, so he went and did it. He has a hell of an ego, but you can see why. Read the rest of this entry »

I hope today’s release of Flash vol.2 #2-6 on ComiXology signals the beginning of a complete digital release of the Wally West Flash series. This brings the total to 63 issues scattered around the 249-issue series (including #0 and #1,000,000, both already available), mostly from the Waid and Johns runs, but there are still a lot of gaps…and most of the material is out of print.

»Flash comics at ComiXology.

The Mike Baron (#1-14) and William Messner-Loebs (#15-61) runs on The Flash have never been reprinted in trade paperback, and only the highlights of the extensive Mark Waid/Brian Augustyn run (#62-162, minus a year off for Morrison/Millar) have been collected. A lot of that is due to the changing market during the 1990s. When Waid started, collected editions were rare. Vertigo was seeing some success, but the idea that people would shell out for a whole series in graphic novel form hadn’t yet sunk in. (These were the days when studios weren’t sure there was a market for complete TV seasons on home video, either.) By the time Geoff Johns took over the title, DC was collecting full runs of a few high-profile series, but not all, or even most of their books.

Now, of course, everyone expects most comic books will be collected, and waiting for the trade is actually a workable strategy. But it’s not often that DC Comics goes back to fill in the gaps in their library — at least, not in print.

Gold and Bronze

With any luck, digital releases will also be the way we’ll finally get the Bronze Age and the Golden Age re-released. I’ve grumbled on a number of occasions that DC seems to keep reprinting the same early years of the Silver Age every time they come up with a new format, and never seem to get past the early/mid-1960s on Barry Allen’s series. (Even the upcoming Flash Archives vol.6 brings that series up to…1964.)

I’d really like to see more Golden Age Flash Archives. DC has only gotten as far as issue #24 out of 104, and the first super-villain (The Shade, as it turns out) doesn’t appear until #33…but these volumes seem to come out so rarely that I expect to die of old age before DC finishes collecting the series. In print, anyway. This is one of the reasons I went forward with my effort to hunt down the original comics, or at least as many of the key issues as I could find in my price range. Read the rest of this entry »

DC has announced the second wave of the New 52, with more details at USA Today. They’ll be adding six new series in May, and dropping six after #8 to keep the total at 52. Update: CBR interviews Bob Harras about the focus of the new books.

First off, I don’t think keeping it at 52 is a great idea, because the first time they change their line-up to feature 51 books, or 52, or anything else, people will read way too much into it.

Anyway, the canceled books:

• Men of War and Blackhawks. War books are a tough sell these days. No surprise.
• Mister Terrific. A gamble from the beginning, and the only praise I’ve heard about it is from the skeptic community for portraying an atheist in a positive light.
• Static Shock. After all the effort DC went to to get Static (the only Milestone character they seemed interested in), what went wrong?
• Hawk & Dove. The series’ biggest selling point was Rob Liefeld. Make of that what you will.
• O.M.A.C. This always seemed to me as a — I don’t want to call it a vanity project — but basically, a chance for Dan Didio to have fun writing something. My guess is they didn’t really expect it to sell, but positioned it as an ongoing just in case people liked it.

And the new books, after the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s easy for us as fans to look at a character concept and decide that it’s too complicated for new readers. But that’s because we’re fans, and as fans, we like to include every detail instead of focusing on the most critical ones needed to bring someone up to speed. (And it’s not just comics fans, either. I once asked a family friend what Les Miserables was about, and she spent at least twenty minutes describing the plot of the three-hour stage version. And consider this tribute to “excrutiatingly detailed” movie plot summaries on Wikipedia.) I don’t know if it’s our attention to detail, or our love of storytelling, but it’s just so easy to pile things on that a new reader doesn’t really need to worry about until a story warrants it.

You can make a lot of these “complicated” origins awfully simple. Even Wally West.

And yes, even Bart Allen.

Read the original article to see how.

A while back I examined my comic book buying patterns by deciding which books I would buy if I could only buy three comics. It’s one thing to name books you’re ready to drop, or to name your favorites. Looking at it in terms of what you’d keep if that was all you could get really forces you to evaluate. It’s also helpful for ranking if, after you pick your top three, you expand it to four, then five, then six, etc.

I asked the question again last year, and found that things had changed a bit (though that was partly because two of my top three comics had been canceled). With the new year, and with the first round of New 52 stories reaching their conclusions, I thought this was a good time to pick up the question again.

So if I could only buy three comics, they would be…

• The Unwritten – Consistently one of my favorite titles over the last few years, and I wrote about why I like this series for the “Read This Too!” event. It’s been in my top 3 every time.
• The Flash – It’s been a bumpy road. Last year, “The Road to Flashpoint” squandered all the enthusiasm I’d built up with “The Dastardly Death of the Rogues,” and Flashpoint came close to killing what was left, but the new Francis Manapul/Brian Buccellato series feels like it’s finally getting the book back on track.
• Lady Mechanika – This steampunk action/adventure mystery was one of my favorites to come out of 2010.

What DC books missed the cut?

Read the rest of this entry »