Speed Force

The linkblogging catchup continues!

Comics Should Be Good features Flash #54: “Nobody Dies” (William Messner-Loebs and Greg LaRocque) in their Year of Cool Comics. It’s one of my favorite one-issue stories from Wally West’s run, and not surprisingly it made the reader-selected list of top 10 Wally West stories a few weeks later.

A bit off topic, CSBG also reviews Mysterius the Unfathomable. It was a fun fantasy/horror/comedy miniseries last year, and is now available as a trade paperback.

Multiversity Comics recommends the new Flash series. Among other reasons: “he has a secret identity which actually gets used, instead of being forgotten for more exciting superhero stories.” And of course, “Flash has some of the best and most fleshed out rogues in the business.”

Update: One more! Several Flash storylines appear in CSBG’s Greatest Mark Waid Stories Ever Told list: Dead Heat, Terminal Velocity and The Return of Barry Allen.

Comics Should Be Good has posted the results of their reader poll for the Greatest Wally West stories ever told. It’s technically a top ten list, but they included eleven stories because the #10 winner was essentially a prologue for one of the other winners.

It’s interesting to break down the results by writer:

• 7 by Mark Waid (including the top three)
• 2 by Geoff Johns
• 2 by William Messner-Loebs

In a way it’s surprising that Geoff Johns, DC’s current superstar writer, isn’t more heavily represented, but it also makes sense. Mark Waid’s run on The Flash was very much about Wally West and his journey through young adulthood (Messner-Loebs’ run even more so!), while Geoff Johns’ run tilted a bit more toward the Rogues.

Head over to Comics Should Be Good for the full list!

It’s always interesting to see what searches bring people to the site. Every once in a while I look through for questions, or implied questions, that aren’t already answered here.

Current Events

Why did Reverse Flash have a Brightest Day symbol?

We don’t know for sure yet, but the implication is that Brightest Day is related to characters who come back from the dead after or at the end of Blackest Night.

Is Jesse Quick back?

Well, she seems to be…but then she’s still appearing as Liberty Belle in Justice Society of America and the second features in JSA All-Stars, so it’s hard to tell. Maybe those take place earlier, maybe she goes back to the other costume, or maybe she’s just going to switch costumes depending on who she’s teaming up with that day.

Did Jay Garrick die in Smallville?

He only appeared in flashback, when Checkmate was rounding up the Justice Society and arresting its members on false charges. He was mentioned by other characters as if he was still alive. (Spoilers for Absolute Justice.)

Is DC working on an animated Flash movie?

If they are, they haven’t said anything about it. A Newsarama article more than a year ago included the Flash in a list of upcoming projects, but there’s been no mention of it since then.

Looking Back

What comes before Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge?

Rogues’ Revenge concludes a sort of trilogy, which you can follow in these collections:

1. Flash: The Fastest Man Alive – Full Throttle
2. JLA: Salvation Run
3. Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge

It also takes place after the end of Flash vol.2 and during the first three issues of Final Crisis.

What year did the Flash superhero gain lightning?

That depends on what the lightning in question is:

• The symbol dates back to Jay Garrick’s first appearance in 1940.
• Lightning in the Flash’s origin goes back to Barry Allen’s first appearance in 1956.
• Lightning effects used to convey speed were used occasionally in the early 1990s, became more prominent when Mike Wieringo worked on the book (1993-1994), and really became established during Terminal Velocity (1995).

Slightly Off-Topic

What is Dan Didio’s twitter name?

As far as I’m aware, Dan Didio isn’t on Twitter.

Who was the female speedster in Heroes?

The character’s name was Daphne Millbrook, and she was played by actress Brea Grant.

Flashforward novel how did it know the pope’s name?

It’s off-topic, but I get a lot of these since I posted a review of the novel.

Author Robert J. Sawyer explains in this video interview that he looked at the list of past popes’ names for those that had good reputations and might be “ready for a comeback.”

Strangely enough, a lot of the sites I’ve linked to on Twitter or Facebook over the last few weeks were looking back at the 1990s and Mark Waid’s run on The Flash

High Five! Comics profiles Max Mercury: The Speedster Time Forgot (for a while). Of course, Max goes back farther than — he started as Quality Comics’ Golden Age hero, Quicksilver — but the version of the character known today was established in “The Return of Barry Allen,” “Terminal Velocity,” “Dead Heat” and Impulse.

For Valentine’s Day, Comics Should be Good’s Year of Cool Comics spotlights Flash: Terminal Velocity and a key event in the relationship between Wally West and Linda Park.

Westfield Comics’ Josh Crawley looks back at Mark Waid’s first run on The Flash, picking up with Flash #0 and running through “Terminal Velocity,” “Dead Heat” and “Race Against Time.”

Mania spotlights the 1990s Flash TV series in 15 more shows that were canceled before their time over the last 25 years. It’s an interesting mix of shows I remember fondly (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), shows I remember hearing about but never watched (Murder One), and shows I’ve completely forgotten (Street Hawk?). It also reminds me that I never got around to watching the last few episodes of Journeyman.

A repost from 2005.

I’ve never really considered Noble Causes’ Race Noble to be a reference to the Flash beyond sharing the speedster archetype—especially since the Nobles owe a lot to the hero family concept pioneered by the Fantastic Four—but a scene from Noble Causes #6 has me ready to change my mind.

The Nobles are both heroes and celebrities. Race, the middle child, shocked his parents—and the world—by marrying an ordinary bookshop owner instead of another super-hero. At this point, Liz has become completely overwhelmed by the life she has chosen, and needed to take some time off. Read the rest of this entry »

Some more linkblogging…

CSBG’s Cool Comic Book Moments #245 features the death of Barry Allen from Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Crimson Lightning finishes up the Super-Powers retrospective with the original mini-comic that came with the action figure.

Silver Age Comics brings up 3 extremely lame bits about Kid Flash. Coincidence, costume change, and…do you dare read on to learn the third?

Indie Squid Kid presents the golden age of octopus fighting. No, really!

Update: Newsarama’s Friday Flashback looks back at the classic Flash #0 by Mark Waid & Mike Wieringo. This classic post-Zero Hour book told a stand-alone story of Wally West bouncing around in time and, at one point, meeting his younger self, reassuring him that everything would work out. It also set things in motion for the epic Terminal Velocity, which started the following month.

Comics Should Be Good highlights more Cool Comic Book Moments from Mark Waid’s Flash story, Terminal Velocity. They’ve got two items from Flash #99: Wally’s sacrifice and Bart stepping up (which doesn’t go quite as well as he expects) — and one of two moments from Flash #100: Wally’s…return? One more coming up tomorrow. Update: the conclusion is up!

Comics in Crisis thinks that now is a perfect time for new readers to jump into the Flash.

Wally’s World: If I Ran DC Comics (Part 1)

iFanboy compares comic book coloring techniques from the 1980s and today, using pages from Secret Wars and The Flash: Rebirth as examples.

Lying in the Gutters, in its final column, cites conflicting rumors on the future of Justice League of America, with either a Grant Morrison/Jim Lee team-up or Geoff Johns. Earlier rumors had Geoff Johns and Jim Lee.

When Worlds Collide has put together a list of the Best and Worst of Grant Morrison, with a Top 10 and Bottom 5. I’ve only read about 1/3 of the combined list. Update: Comics Should Be Good fires back with another Top 10 Grant Morrison list.

Also interesting: my Google Alert for “flash comics” came up with this list of things about the (American) comic book industry that should be common knowledge, but aren’t.

Last week, comic book writer and artist John Byrne posted about how he would have brought Barry Allen back if he’d had the opportunity during the 1990s, as he hinted when responding to speculation about the cover for Wonder Woman v.2 #109. (IIRC, the Flash in the issue was either a clone or a robot. It’s been a long time since I’ve read it.)

Simple, really. It’s very, very, very hard to “kill” a character who can travel in Time. How old was Barry when he “died” in CRISIS? For all we know, he could have been 106.

My idea was to simply have Barry pop into existence in the “current” DCU, returning from one of his trips thru time to find he’d “missed his target” because of disruptions caused by CRISIS. He would then live out whatever life (nature and duration) the Powers that Be would allow.

This is similar to the way Mark Waid did bring Professor Zoom “back” for “The Return of Barry Allen” and the way a young time-traveling Hal Jordan spent some time in the then-present DCU for “Emerald Knights.” It’s also not far from the loophole Marv Wolfman placed in the character’s death in Crisis on Infinite Earths. The main difference is that in Wolfman’s plan, it would be Barry Allen during his final run, rather than a Barry from earlier in his career.

Byrne goes on to add:

(I also had an idea that, since Wally was being The Flash, Barry would take on another identity for a while, knowing that sooner or later he had to go die in CRISIS. But when the moment came, Wally would bushwhack him, take his place, and that would actually have been Wally we saw die.)

Interestingly, Peter David did essentially the same thing in his final Supergirl arc, “Many Happy Returns,” in which the Earth-1 Supergirl’s rocket gets diverted and lands on Post-Crisis Earth. After a few adventures, the Post-Crisis Supergirl gets in the rocket and takes her place, leading to a story of a 1990s heroine in a Silver-Age world. It doesn’t end well, for either of them.

Found in this week’s Lying in the Gutters, which also features another Flash-related story, short enough I might as well just quote the whole thing:

The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island is having an online auction to raise funds for its non profit theatre. One of the items is a “Flash: Rebirth” #1 coupled with a TPB of “Flash: Terminal Velocity,” signed by the late great Mike Wieringo.

TwoMorrows’ book, The Flash Companion is now available! It debuted at Comic-Con last week, Amazon orders have been shipping, and it’s been showing up in stores.

Here’s one more excerpt to round out the quartet of Scarlet Speedsters. As with the others, it’s posted here with permission of the book’s main author, Keith Dallas.

Mark Waid: Running on Impulse (excerpt)

By John Wells

WELLS: Why call him “Impulse,” rather than “Kid Flash”?

WAID: Because it was a perfect name. We didn’t want to call him “Kid Flash” because it sounded a little corny, and I still think it sounds a little corny. “Impulse” is the perfect confluence of a character’s name, his powers, and his personality, all in one word. And once we had the name — and I can’t swear it wasn’t Kurt Busiek’s suggestion — it completely summed up the character. Thought to deed in one motion without all those pesky synapses getting in the way.

WELLS: [laughs] It really did. Whose idea was that hair?

WAID: I think it was Humberto’s. Pure Humberto [Ramos]. Mike Wieringo had done the initial costume design, without the mask, but boy, Humberto went to town with the look, with the giant hair and the gigantic feet.

WELLS: Now kind of earlier on, you’d had the Tornado Twins revived in 1991′s Legion of Super-Heroes #18 and immediately had them executed by the Dominators.

WAID: [chuckles] “You” meaning “the Legion editors and writers after you left staff.” Don’t look at me, man.

WELLS: And later on, their DNA created a female speedster called Rush. And meantime, Don Allen was said to have been survived by his wife, Carmen Johnson and their two-year old son, Barry II. So what came first? You said you had the teen speedster idea for the Justice League story []earlier in the interview], was that before or after?

WAID: A little after, so that would have been the “Barry II” that we were talking about at the time, I suppose. But at that point, we were going to reboot the Legion with Zero Hour, so I knew that all bets were off in terms of Rush and those characters. It also freed up the name “Impulse,” which I believe was the codename of —

WELLS: Kent Shakespeare.

WAID: Kent Shakespeare, yeah.

WELLS: Iris brought Bart back to the 20th Century in the hope that Wally could cure her grandson, but she also wanted Wally to rein in Bart and train him in the use of his powers. Why was that not going to work?

WAID: It was so not going to work because Bart and Wally just hated each other. Wally saw in Impulse all of his own negative characteristics, so it put his teeth on edge.

WELLS: On the other hand, Max [Mercury] and Bart did work out pretty well, even though they didn’t think it was going to. How did you see that relationship?

WAID: We went into the Impulse series not sure who the mentor figure was going to be. And for a long time, I think we were talking about it being Jay, but Jay has his wife, Joan, and I don’t know what they could have brought to the series that wouldn’ t have been Ma and Pa Kent. Making Bart’s mentor Max, somebody who was so dry and so much the opposite of Bart, was too much comic potential to let go.

Read the rest of this entry »