Speed Force

Some Flash-related links I’ve collected over the last few weeks.

ART! — Swan Shadow features Flash and the Crimson Avenger, drawn by Chris Ivy.

NEWS! — MovieWeb interviews cast & crew of Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, including Josh Keaton, voice of the Flash. CBR interviews Keaton more extensively.

FANDOM! — Once Upon a Geek has located a DC Comics Snuggie. Speed Force’s Devin “The Flash” Johnson found a satirical piece on the Snuggie that also has a DC link!

The Collected Editions Blog recently celebrated its fifth anniversary.

SIGHTINGS! — Former football player Darrell Green just may be the fastest baby boomer alive, claiming to have run a 40-yard-dash in 4.43 seconds on his 50th birthday.

Need winged boots? These reflective clips for cyclists, inspired by Mercury or Hermes, are in @zieglarf’s words, “almost the Flash.”

COMMENTARY! — Multiversity Comics starts a new feature, Crisis of Chronology, by looking at the DC works of Grant Morrison from Animal Man to Final Crisis, including his brief run on The Flash.

IO9′s 75 Books You Should Own For DC Comics’ 75th Anniversary includes Showcase Presents: The Flash Vol.1, reprinting the first few years f the Silver Age Flash: “Why you should read it: To see the style and substance that made a genre live again… and also how old ideas were made contemporary back in those days.”

Essentailly fanfic, but an interesting take on a Flash movie series at Comic Book Movie.

If you want more frequent updates, you can follow @SpeedForceOrg on Twitter or Speed Force on Facebook. I usually post links there as I find them, then save them up until I have enough for a round-up post here.

It’s been about a year since I last posted one of these things. Speed Force has grown a lot in that time. I’ve tried to have something new on a daily basis, and over a year and a half the site has grown to a total of 824 posts. It’s also expanded past the blog itself, with nearly 3,000 tweets on Twitter @SpeedForceOrg and with a fan page on Facebook.

Speed Force’s audience has grown a lot too, with an average of 989 views per day (up from 469 a year earlier), 220 fans on Facebook, over 400 followers on Twitter…and almost 3,000 comments! Thank you, everyone!

On the downside: I’m kind of stressed out. The Flash is still in limbo after all this time, and while we have an unofficial launch date, DC has continued to change their plans for the character. I’ve also been finding DC’s output more frustrating and less interesting over the past few years, and I don’t want this to turn into a 24/7 rant station.

So here’s what I’m doing to avoid burning out. Read the rest of this entry »

First off, I’d like to apologize for the meltdown in yesterday’s post. I’m still extremely disappointed in DC’s decision to cancel the Kid Flash series and Wally West backups, but instead of flying off the handle, I should have made a terse, neutral news post, then waited a few hours before writing a more considered opinion piece.

Well, it’s too late to stuff all the feathers back into the bag. As much as I’d like to delete it and start over, a lot of people have already read it, and I’d rather keep the original available so that people can read what I actually said, not what someone else said that I said.

So, about the future. Over the last few years, I’ve been slowly losing interest in super-heroes in general and the DC Universe in particular, to the point that right now, the only DCU books I’m reading are Flash: Rebirth and Blackest Night: The Flash.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent four years in “wait and see” mode with The Flash as DC has changed direction seemingly every 6 months. I’m frustrated. So frustrated that I’m getting bitter about what used to be my favorite book.

You know the kind of fan who constantly writes angry rants about how he hates the current version of a book or TV series? The fan who stands up in panels at conventions and complains about books he doesn’t like? The fan who puts “Only Bob is the real Ultraguy!” in his forum signature? The fan who shows up to say “You should be happy that your favorite book is being canceled! Now you can enjoy my favorite book! Isn’t it great?” You know, that guy?

I don’t want to be “that guy.”

So I think I need to take a step back for a bit.

I’ve got a few informational and linkblogging posts lined up for the rest of the week, but I think unless major news hits, I’m going to sit things out until after Christmas (I’ve got enough holiday stress already) while I figure out what I want to do, both as a reader and as a blogger.

Thanks, everyone, for sticking around for reruns while I dealt with a busy month! I’m still busy, but things are a bit more under control, so I can get back to bringing you more new content!

I’ve got a few more flashback posts in reserve for the next time real life gets in the way of writing. Or I might start a “Flashback Fridays” or “Monday Memories” series.

Tomorrow I’m going to the first-ever Long Beach Comic Con. Among other things, I plan on attending the DC Nation panel, though I don’t expect there to be any big Flash news unless they’ve picked an artist for Kid Flash in the last week. Update: DC is planning to announce something big. I doubt it’ll be Flash-related, but who knows?

Keep an eye on this blog, on @SpeedForceOrg on Twitter, and my Flickr stream for reports and photos from the event!

There’s a project at work that may be taking over my life for a few weeks, and I realized I’m going to have to cut into either sleep, blogging, or downtime. It looks like the best course for now is for me to take some time off of blogging and other fan activities for the rest of September.

Don’t worry, I’m not shutting down Speed Force for a month! I’ll keep up the “Out This Week…” posts, and check on comments, and post major news if it breaks.

To keep things going here, I’ll be rerunning some old Flash-related posts from before Speed Force launched, pulled from my other blog, K-Squared Ramblings.

Then I’ll be back in *ahem* full force next month, probably starting with a con report on Long Beach Comic Con.

Enjoy the reruns!

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been a year since I launched Speed Force!

Flash in Limbo

June 2008 was a very uncertain time for Flash fans.

Over the previous two years, DC had changed Flashes twice and creative teams four times. Sharp sales spikes with each relaunch were followed by sharp drops as readers rejected each new direction. Bart Allen was dead. Wally West‘s revived series, already on its second writer and artist, continued to shed readers at an alarming rate.

It had become clear that the Infinite Crisis relaunch had completely derailed the book.

And then there was Barry Allen. DC had announced his return in April when they released DC Universe #0 (which very heavily hints that it’s narrated by Barry Allen)…but after mearly two months, he hadn’t actually appeared on-panel anywhere. Fans weren’t even sure they believed DC when they said he was back for good.

Still, with sales continuing to drop and the apparent return of an earlier Flash, DC was obviously planning another relaunch. It was just a question of when the hammer would fall, and who would wield it.

There were two bright spots:

• Barry Allen’s fans knew he was returning…sometime.
• Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge was coming up, reuniting the fan-favorite team of Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins.

Jumping Into the Deep End

So what on Earth-Prime made me think that was a good time to launch a blog about the Flash?

Well, the idea had been kicking around in my head for a few months, just as a better place to post news. If I’d been on Twitter at the time, I might have just stuck with that. I had the domain already. I’d picked it up the previous year when I noticed it was available, and hadn’t figured out what to do with it yet.

The trigger was reading about the plans to release a Morrison/Millar Flash collection (or, rather, collections as it’s turned out). I installed a new copy of WordPress on a Sunday afternoon, picked a theme, wrote an intro post and then posted the news.

Running Commentary

Over the past year I’ve made more than 500 posts here. I’ve collected news (and on occasion broken it), reviewed more than a dozen comics, written opinion pieces and the occasional rant, promoted a book, reported on two conventions, done a couple of guest posts and participated in a group April Fool’s joke. I’ve gotten to know (virtually) a bunch of commenters and bloggers, some of whom I’d read or corresponded with before, many of them new. I’ve expanded the site onto Twitter and Facebook.

Meanwhile, as DC announced a new focus on the Flash in Flash: Rebirth, other people started launching Flash websites: Crimson Lightning returned from hiatus. Speedster Site launched a dedicate Flash forum. Tom vs. JLA transformed itself into Tom vs. the Flash, reviewing old Silver-Age Flash comics. The Flash-Back Podcast launched with an eye toward covering Flash: Rebirth, and there’s even a set of Flash: Rebirth Annotations.

It’s been a heck of a year, even if it has kept me really busy, between writing here and keeping up with everyone else. Thanks to all the readers, commenters, linkers, and fellow bloggers out there!

Comment threading is enabled now, so you can now reply to a specific comment on a post and have it appear below it and indented — just like on LiveJournal or WordPress.com. See the comments on this post for an example.

The downside is that it required some changes to the theme, some of which I missed initially. If you’ve visited the site in the last few days, you may have seen some comments showing up in unreadable light yellow-on-white. That should be taken care of now, but if you still see it, just hit reload and it should be fine.

Technical note: It was a caching issue. New visitors, or anyone who hit reload, would get the updated stylesheet, but anyone who had visited the site recently would see it displayed with their local copy of the old version. After I realized this, I renamed the stylesheet to make sure that all visitors would get a fresh copy.

I’ve updated the site to a new version of WordPress Mobile Edition, which seems to handle both low-end and high-end phones well enough that I don’t need a separate plugin for iPhone and Android visitors. This should make things a bit cleaner.

Anyway, if you have a web-capable phone, please give the site another look when you get a chance and let me know whether anything breaks!

In particular, I want to know:

• What phone are you using?
• Are you using the built-in web browser or an add-on like Opera Mini?
• Can you view the site?
• Does it look like the image above, or just like it does on your computer?
• Can you make a comment?

If you can’t post a comment, please try one of the following:

• Bring up the site on your computer to leave the comment.
• Send me a Twitter direct message to @SpeedForceOrg.
• Email me at speedforce - [at] - pobox - [dot] - com.

Thanks in advance!

A quick request, if I may: If you have a web-capable cell phone, would you please try to view this blog in it and let me know how it appears? I’m testing some plugins that should optimize the page for desktop, low-end mobile, and high-end mobile devices.

Please look at the main page and at least one post, then leave a comment below (still on the phone if you can) with the following:

• What phone are you using? (RAZR, iPhone, etc. Specific model if you know it)
• Can you load the site at all? (If not, what error do you get?)
• Does it look like..
  1. The desktop version of the site (red background, lightning banner, full sidebar, complete posts on main page)
  2. A bare-bones page (plain background, mostly text, headlines only on main page, “Powered by WordPress. WordPress Mobile Edition” listed at the bottom of the page)
  3. A sleeker-looking list (grayish background, each post headline in a white rectangle, calendar image next to each headline, main page has headlines that expand to excerpts, dark red banner across top, “Powered by WordPress with WPtouch” listed in footer)
• Are you using the built-in web browser, or something you installed (Opera Mini, for example)?
• Did anything not work?

If you can’t post a comment, please try one of the following:

• Bring up the site on your computer to leave the comment.
• Send me a Twitter direct message to @SpeedForceOrg.
• Email me at speedforce - [at] - pobox - [dot] - com.

I’m mainly trying to make sure that the detection code is working right, since I’ve got 3 different plugins (WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Edition and WP Super Cache) working together to manage it.

Thanks in advance!

Speed Force has been selected for the Premio Dardo (“Dart Award” in Spanish). The Premio Dardo is awarded by other bloggers and “is designed to recognize unique voices and visions on the Web as well as to promote fraternization amongst bloggers of all sorts.”

Speed Force was honored by Matt of Groovy Superhero. Thanks, Matt!

So now I have to choose five blogs to give the award to — it’s basically like a chain letter or tagging meme. The blogs I’d like to pass it along to are:

• Comics Worth Reading
• 4thLetter
• Titans Tower Monitor Room
• ***Dave Does the Blog
• What Were They Thinking?

I was intrigued by the concept of a self-propelled award, and did some digging into its history over at K-Squared Ramblings in case anyone’s interested