Joshua Williamson and Howard Porter have done their homework, and it shows here. There is SO much great Flash mythos packed into one issue that I am dumbfounded as to how they did it while keeping such a smooth story arc going. I’ll try to list as many of the nods to history as I can, but even still you may find some extra pieces of Flash history as you read it for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th time…and it WILL be worth the time. Wanna know more? Follow us after the jump!
SPOILERS AHEAD!
DC is going through one of the goofier eras of Flash comics in their digital backlist. This week they’ve added Flash #210, in which Barry and Iris travel to the distant future to visit Iris’ birth parents (in the comics she discovers that she’s adopted, and was sent back in time to the 20th century as a baby). After a devastating war, Earth-West has decided the best way to rebuild is to appoint a robotic duplicate of Abraham Lincoln as President. Enemies from Earth-East send a robotic duplicate of John Wilkes Booth to assassinate him.
Wrestling is involved.
When I first watched “Fast Enough,” the Flash Season One finale, I was relieved that they weren’t jumping into Flashpoint, and that they weren’t wiping out an entire season’s worth of stories (not to mention elements of Arrow). There’s only so far you can take a reset button without removing tension or basically creating a new show.
But as the summer has gone on, the storytelling logic feels less important, and I’ve looked at the characters’ actions from an in-universe perspective (spoilers ahead):
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.