Speed Force

eBay user sneeze58 is selling a piece of Scott Kolins art which would have been the cover of Flash #13, which was canceled for Flashpoint. The seller explains:

I bought this piece at the 2011 Heroes Con directly from the artist, Scott Kolins. This issue was to have the origin of Reverse Flash by Geoff Johns and Kolins, but was canceled due to the schedule of DC’s Flashpoint. I believe this is the cover rough, I’m not sure if a final cover was done however.The art is on 11×17 bristol, and a larger image is shown below.

It’s still not clear whether the Professor Zoom-focused issue was scrapped completely or repurposed as the Flashpoint: Reverse-Flash one-shot.

Citizen Cold #3 marks the end of the limited series, and while I definitely enjoyed it overall, it ended pretty much as expected. Given the nature of Flashpoint, this was probably inevitable, but it’s still a slight disappointment considering how much promise the series started with. More details and spoilers after the cut.

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DC has released a 4-page preview of next week’s Flashpoint: Citizen Cold #3:

He may have once been seen as Central City’s hero, but as the truth about Citizen Cold’s criminal past begins to trickle out, it’ll only be a matter of time before his true identity is revealed. With an entire gallery of Rogues set on killing him, Citizen Cold will have to work to not only protect himself but also to stop Iris West from losing her trust in him. But when she discovers a dark connection between them that he had kept hidden from her, does Citizen Cold stand any sort of chance defeating all of the odds stacking up against him?

Written and drawn by Scott Kolins, FLASHPOINT: CITIZEN COLD #3 arrives in stores on Wednesday.

Citizen Cold #2 is fairly different from the previous issue; for one thing, it’s notably more action-oriented, and this sets a disparate tone. I enjoyed it, but not as much as the last issue. See below the cut for spoilers and more details.

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Speed Force contributors Devin “Flash” Johnson and Greg Elias take a look at last week’s Flashpoint: Reverse Flash one-shot, written by longtime Flash artist Scott Kolins and illustrated by Joel Gomez, with colors by Brian Buccellato.

Check out the comments after the jump…

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At Heroes*Con, Ken O of That F’ing Monkey interviewed Scott Kolins, the writer/artist of Flashpoint; Citizen Cold. Kolins talked how he ended up tweaking the various characters and their looks, including a funny story about the Weather Wizard:

I got to do something that Geoff Johns laughed about; I gave Weather Wizard that goatee. It’s a reference to when we had originally changed his costume in the Flash books years ago and made his pattern green with yellow stripes on it. At that time when I did sketches for him to show DC what we wanted to do I had given him facial hair; at that point it was a handle bar mustache. Geoff was like, “This looks great…lose the handlebar mustache.” So this time when he saw the goatee he was like, “All right, fine. You finally get to put it on him.”

He also mentions that he has his next project already lined up. It’s not one of the 52 relaunched books for Septemeber, so presumably we’ll see something from Kolins’ pen launching in the months to come.

There’s a lot more. Read the whole interview at That F’ing Monkey.

 Citizen Cold #1 is the first in a three-issue Flashpoint series, written and drawn by longtime Flash artist Scott Kolins. I’m happy to report that it doesn’t disappoint, finding it a well-written and fun story and looking forward to the future issues.

Spoilers behind the cut… Read the rest of this entry »

Well, here it is, the supposedly final issue of The Flash. So how does it read? And how does Geoff Johns & Francis Manapul’s brief 12-issue run hold together?

This one’s better than the previous issue, with a super-speed battle, revelations about Professor Zoom, the Speed Force, Flashpoint and Kid Flash, and even the background between Barry Allen and Patty Spivot. Scott Kolins’ art looks better as well — whether he had more time, or whether the super-heroics is just better suited for his current style, I couldn’t say — and Francis Manapul’s cover (revealed just yesterday) is great.

Still, the whole “Road to Flashpoint” arc feels like something’s missing. The biggest problem, I think, is that everything from Flash: Rebirth to this point was supposed to be a steady build toward Flashpoint, but the combination of slowly-paced long storylines and publishing delays meant that instead of progressing from A to B to C to D to E to Flashpoint, we instead spent a lot of time on A and then a lot of time on E without actually following the steps to get there.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think maybe making a clean break at this point and starting fresh after Flashpoint is exactly what the book needs.

A bit about the art:

I mentioned that I liked Kolins’ art better in this issue than last. One sequence that stood out was the way he portrayed Zoom and the negative speed force. It looked more like flowing energy streams within Zoom’s body than the usual lightning leaking around it, which was a nice change, and a good way of showing that Thawne was using the powers differently. Still, I miss the background details that Francis Manapul works into his art, like the fire extinguisher behind someone who’s still carrying a flame.

Further discussion will require SPOILERS! Read the rest of this entry »

Flash and Flashpoint writer Geoff Johns will be signing at Earth-2 Comics in Los Angeles this Saturday for Free Comic Book Day. He’ll be at the Sherman Oaks location from noon to 2:00 pm and at the Northridge location from 3:30 to 5:30.

Actors John Wesley Shipp and Joyce Hyser (Barry Allen and Megan Lockhart from the 1990 Flash TV Series) [Update] and classic Flash artist Carmine Infantino will be at Motor City Comic Con (May 13-15) in Novi, Michigan (near Detroit).

Frequent Flash artist Scott Kolins will attend two cons coming up soon: Phoenix Comicon (May 27-29) in Phoenix, Arizona and Heroes Con (June 3-5) in Charlotte, North Carolina.

On one hand, I found Flash #11 — chapter 3 of “The Road to Flashpoint” — to be a lot more engaging than the previous issue. On the other, it highlights some problems with the series.

I was disappointed to see that Francis Manapul didn’t draw this issue, though seeing Scott Kolins’ name was a relief. That said, while I normally like Kolins’ art on The Flash, it actually looks rushed, especially on the early pages. I have to wonder how much time DC gave him to draw the issue.

The pacing, however, is much better than the previous two issues. After an issue-long teaser and another issue that was 50% exposition, we actually get into the meat of the story here — a story very much about Barry Allen, the man who works as a police scientist, not the Flash who happens to be Barry Allen (which may be part of why I liked it better than #10).

It was nice to see the story actually address some of the problems with Barry’s post-Rebirth isolation, though I get the impression that this was intended to develop over more story arcs. As with the artist change, I can’t help but wonder what we might have seen if they’d been able to keep this book on time. Monthly from April 2010 through May 2011 would only have included two more issues, but the two Rogue Profiles wouldn’t have been added. Under those circumstances, Johns could have fit another 4-issue story between “Dastardly Death…” and “Road to Flashpoint.”

Geoff Johns does a good job of keeping Hot Pursuit’s motivation and methods ambiguous throughout the issue, keeping it unclear whether he’s causing or tracking the murders. The super-heroics kick into gear at the very end, with not one but two cliffhangers to be resolved in next month’s series finale…though with a title like “The Road to Flashpoint,” it seems pretty clear that it’ll wrap with some sort of transition. I expect the “last issue” to end in one of two ways: Either it will feature a teaser with Barry in the altered reality of Flashpoint, or it will end with a fade to white like all of DC’s “Zero Hour” tie-ins back in 1994.

So, let’s move on to some talk including SPOILERS… Read the rest of this entry »