Speed Force

Some Flash-related bits from around the comics blogging community.

Crimson Lightning has a scan from a Funky Winkerbean homage to the Flash, specifically the cover of Flash v.1 #115.

momoney433 has started reviewing the entire run of The Flash vol.2 (Wally West’s series) over at Comic Bloc. Issues #1 and #2 went up yesterday.

softpixels.net reviews Flash: Race Against Time.

Blogcritics reviews the Graphic Audio adaptation of Flash: Stop Motion.

The Irredeemable Shag of Once Upon a Geek fame has launched a new blog, Firestorm Fan. Firestorm ran as a backup feature in The Flash during the early 1980s.

Rokk’s Comic Book Revolution thinks that Wally retiring is a good idea.

Meanwhile, I’m Just Sayin’ ponders the “definitive” Flash and Green Lantern — and doesn’t come up with Barry and Hal.

Even with Final Crisis #5 coming out this week, it’s going to have to be a light one for blogging. Deadlines at work, so I may be staying late, plus I’m sick. (Great combination, huh?)

If I have time I’ll try to finish one of several half-done posts I’ve been working on. And I’ll check the usual news sites in the evening, though I doubt there will be much in the way of huge Flash news this week.

A couple of notes on recent changes here at Speed Force:

1. You may have noticed a welcome banner appearing from time to time on the site. That’s something I’ve been trying out here and at K-Squared Ramblings, and presents an appropriate message to viewers coming from various search sites and social networks. In theory you should only see it once, or at most once a week, if you allow cookies. It’s powered by the Wp Greet Box plugin, and I go into more detail at K²R.

2. I’ve been trying to balance software speed with download speed, especially for visitors on mobile handsets. I used to run WordPress Mobile Edition, which tries to detect most phones and other small-screen, low-bandwidth devices, but it doesn’t work well with server caching. Since I upgraded to a G1 phone, I’ve been trying out WPTouch, which presents a clean interface on the iPhone and on phones that run the Android browser. If you read this site with a mobile device, please let me know how well it works. I’ll probably be tweaking this some more.

3. I’ve updated to a new version of WordPress. Actually, I’ve jumped the gun a bit by installing the WP 2.7 release candidate. (I’ve also dropped the WP_Identicons plugin in favor of the built-in Identicon support, but it generates different avatars than the plugin did. Sorry if you liked your old one better!)

The new version supports threaded comments, but the theme I’m using isn’t compatible with them. I’ll take a stab at updating it manually this weekend.

Anyway, there may be some wonkiness with the upgrade. If you stumble on something odd, please let me know.

4. Holding steady at #8 on Comic Blog Elite. Or at least I was until today.

5. Can’t believe I missed the six-month mark. Half a year! The downside is that I’ve been somewhat neglecting updates at Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning in order to keep this going.

6. More social networking coming up. I’ve added the Twitter account SpeedForceOrg, and I’m working on something to tie this into Facebook. (And yeah, I’ve got a backlog of friend requests. Sorry about that.)

And now for some silliness. I figure this blog’s target audience is more likely to search for “Flash” or “Barry Allen” or “Wally West” than the actual title of the site, but out of curiosity I searched Google for “speed force.” Here’s what I found on the first page: Read the rest of this entry »

I just found out that Speed Force won the October 2008 Project Fanboy Award! (That explains the traffic I was getting from them last week!)

I remember the first ever website award I got was for the “Site of the Week” award from what was then called Jonah Weiland’s Comic Book Resources. A lot of fan sites would give out awards back in the late 1990s, and then it sort of fell out of fashion. It’s cool that there are sites still doing it — and it’s cool to have actually been honored by one!

Thanks to whoever nominated Speed Force for the award, and thanks to the Project Fanboy staff!

Fellow Flash blogger Dixon of Crimson Lightning writes about catching up on his Flash comic index and launching a new feature, “Fast Talk,” all about the technobabble with which the Flashes breeze past the laws of physics.

Wizard Magazine’s 2009 preview, shipping in December, will feature an interview with Geoff Johns in which he talks about Flash: Rebirth. (via Comic Bloc’s BESTBUY)

That Flash neon sign coming in June? Comics Infinity is offering pre-orders for 10% off. (via aeryncrichton)

Aspen Studios’ planned tribute to founder Michael Turner has been making the rounds at The Pulse and elsewhere, and Newsarama has followed up with a short interview with Vince Hernandez.

The Pulse interviews Brea Grant, speedster Daphne from Heroes. Anyone else notice that they still keep dressing her in red?

Finally, Comics Should Be Good has a list of the Top Five Flashes. I’m sure most Flash fans will find something to disagree with in this list.

Today’s Lying in the Gutters has a couple of covers from the upcoming Top Cow Velocity series, both by Madame Mirage’s Kenneth Rocafort.

Wizard has a retrospective on Grant Morrison, including his brief run with Mark Millar on The Flash.

In local news, my review of Flash #244 has become the first post on this blog to pass 700 page views.

It’s often fun to look at the weird search terms people sometimes use to reach a site, but for the most part the terms showing up in the log here have been pretty straight-forward. The weirdest is probably “steampunk ambush bug.”

That said, to the reader who searched for “rogues revenge 4 spoilers” — I hope that was a typo, and you meant Rogues’ Revenge #3 (due out this week), because it’s only a 3-issue miniseries.

You can now follow Speed Force on Twitter at SpeedForceOrg! In addition to announcing new blog entries, I’ll be posting updates and the occasional random bits and pieces. The latest few tweets will also appear in the blog sidebar.

Speaking of which, that sidebar is getting kind of crowded. I’m going to have to do something about that eventually.

Some administrivia today.

1. As of Monday, it’s been three months since I launched this blog. I have no idea what the typical lifetime for a comics-related blog is, but I can say I’ve kept this up far more regularly than I expected, with 162 posts in 94 days — an average of 1.7 posts per day! — and readers have made nearly 350 comments!

It’s also taking a lot more time than I expected, which has kept me away from other projects. (In particular, I’d planned a major update for the Alternative Browser Alliance this summer, which has become more urgent with the announcement and first beta of Google’s Chrome web browser.) I may be scaling back a little on Speed Force soon, but I’ll still aim for several posts a week.

2. I finally got around to replacing the banner at the top of the page. I didn’t want to stick with the theme’s default, since “train station” doesn’t really say “speedster,” and I was never really satisfied with the fractal “lightning.” (Besides, the smallest I could get that image without making it look really nasty was a whopping 50 KB.)

Still, I’m a web developer, not a graphic designer or an artist. Give me the graphics and I’ll build the HTML and CSS to turn them into a web page, but original art? It would make XKCD look like George Pérez. So instead of trying to draw something, I looked for photos of actual lightning on Flickr. I adapted “Lightning Crashes” by ~Prescott under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. The banner can be re-used and/or modified under the same terms.

3. After a struggle for the #3 spot at Comic Blog Elite with Collected Editions, we’ve both been superseded by a number of high-profile blogs that have joined, including Once Upon a Geek, The Absorbascon and 4thLetter. Speed Force has been holding steady around #12 lately.

4. I’ve dropped the Recent Visitors/Viewers boxes from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. They add a lot to the download time, especially on certain browsers *cough* IE *cough* that wait until they’re loaded before displaying the main section of the page.

The news blog Voices from Krypton has invited me to do a weekly Flash column. I’ll be writing a round-up of the week’s events. I’ll also be cross-posting my reviews of the Flash issues, at least for now.