Welcome to the final installment in our 15-part series of annotations on “The Death Of Iris Allen”! Halved by our two-part interview with author Cary Bates, previous issues can be found here! Links to artwork and research are included throughout this post.
UP TO SPEED: Trapped aboard a runaway time-machine with the murderous Professor Zoom, Flash has chosen to take on the flow of time himself in a desperate attempt to avoid certain doom…
Comic-book futures are constantly changing. We’ve seen four* major versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes, many different “true” versions of the near future, and a half-dozen variations on the eras that brought us villains like Abra Kadabra and the Reverse-Flash. Given the latter’s newfound obsession with changing history in Flash: Rebirth, it seems highly appropriate that his origin tale rewrites itself repeatedly over the course of the issue. It’s fascinating to watch the twists and turns as his life starts down one path, then stops, backs up, and takes another.
CBR has the transcript from Saturday’s 50 Questions in 50 Minutes With Mark Waid at Long Beach Comic Con. Among those questions was someone asking about a story the writer has hinted at for a long time: something disastrous happened the first time Wally West tried to travel through time as Kid Flash, something traumatic enough that it made him extremely reluctant to use the ability at all.
Waid decided to answer the question.
Possible spoilers in the event that he ever writes the full story.
The Grand Comics Database needs better scans of the original Flash Comics. In particular, the following two covers are marked as needing replacement:
That said, there are quite a few others that are either low-quality scans or scans of badly deteriorated comics. If you have any copies of Flash Comics or All-Flash in decent condition, I’m sure they’d appreciate it if you’d help them out by improving their cover database!
Most of my own Golden Age collection is coverless, or in poor enough condition that it wouldn’t be worth contributing, though I was able to submit a few of the later All-Flash covers.
I actually have a copy of that Flash Comics Miniature Edition, and considered sending a scan, until I pulled it out of the box and saw what condition it was in:
As you can see, it’s in worse shape than the one they’ve got! This isn’t terribly surprising. One of the previous owners of this copy wrote a note on the back of the board:
Wheaties giveaway, 1946. All known copies were taped to Wheaties boxes and are never found in mint condition.
Yeah, that might cause a problem…
It makes me wonder what the print run was on books like this. How many copies were taped to cereal boxes and shipped to markets nationwide? How many were removed carefully, and how many were summarily ripped from the packaging? How many were treasured, and how many discarded?
Oh, yeah, you’re probably wondering: Who’s that pointy-headed guy on the cover? That’s Dmane, a one-shot villain (as so many of them were those days) billed as “The Criminal From Tomorrow,” who used futuristic technology to perform miraculous feats in the present day. (Sound familiar?) It’s also an early case in which Jay Garrick travels through time under his own power with perfect accuracy.
For those who have been wondering whether the original Flash, Jay Garrick, could exceed the speed of sound back in the Golden Age of comics…
Yes he could.
The speed of sound is roughly 340 meters per second (varying with humidity, altitude, etc.)
Earth revolves around the sun at roughly 30 kilometers per second.
So in that panel he was running at least 88 times as fast as the Flash: Rebirth promo claims was his top speed before he met Barry Allen.
Source: Flash Comics Miniature Edition (promo book taped to boxes of Wheaties in 1946), in which the Flash goes up against the one-off “Criminal From Tomorrow!” Dmane. And yes, that looks like the same stunt Superman pulled in the 1978 movie with Christopher Reeve.
I seem to remember that Jay reached the same levels of insanely impractical speeds that Barry did on a regular basis — this was just the first place I thought to look, since I remembered the time travel element.
Welcome to SpeedForce.org, a blog focusing on DC Comics' super-hero, The Flash. It's a companion site to Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning, a fan reference site for the Fastest Man Alive.
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