Speed Force

Earlier this month I posted a poll asking readers to choose their favorite Flash story of 2009. The poll closed today, so here are the results.

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Comics Alliance has a couple of Flashy items: First, a page from the Shortpacked! coloring book: Batman Can Breathe In Space, But Not The Flash.

Second: they look back at a pair of Baby Ruth commercials from the 1990s, featuring Hawkman and an obvious Flash stand-in called the Blur. They have a video clip of the Blur commercial. Fun fact: The Blur was played by Tim Thomerson, who played Barry Allen’s brother Jay in the pilot episode of the 1990 Flash TV show.

Speaking of the Flash TV series, it makes Comic Book Movie’s list of Top Ten Most Accurate Live Action Superhero Costumes

The Secret of Wednesday’s Haul contrasts Ethan Van Sciver and Carmine Infantino in their approaches to conveying speed.

noscans_daily has a Flash Appreciation Post focusing on the character from the animated Justice League and Justice League Unlimited TV series.

A Trout in the Milk reviews Wednesday Comics and asks the question: “What have we learned?”

InTylerWeTrust82 casts Superman and the Flash, with some interesting choices for the heroes, their supporting casts, and selected villains.

What Were They Thinking? has an example of Golden Age Flashdickery. Jay Garrick was a bit of a prankster in those days…

All right! DC has announced that they’ll be collecting Wednesday Comics as an oversized hardcover book at 11×17″!

It’s not the full size, which would be ideal, but I do think an oversized hardcover is the best way to collect it. Shrinking the art to standard size would diminish the experience of reading it, and trying to do something this size as a paperback is unwieldy at best, judging by Comic Book Tattoo. There’s a reason I bought the hardcover of that book, and it wasn’t so that I could carry extra weight around the convention floor. (It wasn’t to weaponize a comic book, either, but I’m sure I could knock someone out if I hit them over the head with it.)

Amazingly enough, they plan to sell it for $49.99, the same price as the archive books that clock in at the same page count but smaller page size. Back when I tried to figure out how Wednesday Comics could be collected, I figured a coffee table book from DC would end up costing a lot more.

I do have to wonder how they’re going to manage the paperback edition, but with this option available for this price (and you know it’ll be discounted in places like Amazon)…does it really matter?

Note: I managed to delete the original post when I intended to edit it, losing the comments made earlier this evening. Sorry about that!

Comics Should Be Good wraps up the month of iconic covers with the Top 5 Most Iconic Barry Allen Covers.

Ain’t It Cool News has a preview of Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, the next direct-to-home video DC animated film. It’s based on a number of Earth-2/Earth-3 stories in which the Justice League goes up against their evil counterparts from another world, the Crime Syndicate. There’s a few frames of the evil Johnny Quick in the preview, sporting an entirely new costume. (Thanks to Jesse for the link.)

Speaking of evil, the “Mark Waid Was Evil” teaser turns out to be for a new series, Incorruptible, intended as the flip side to Irredeemable. This series follows a super-villain who decides to become a hero in response to the Plutonian’s fall to the dark side.

Newsarama evaluates Wednesday Comics, giving the Flash strip a B+.

Avatar Press has started a collaborative map of comic shops around the world. You can help by adding the local store where you buy your comics.

Over at my other blog, I made an amusing discovery about Wizard World Los Angeles, the Long Beach Comic-Con, and two convention centers.

Quick round-up of writer/artist links from the past week or so:

Karl Kerschl has been posting commentary on The Flash in Wednesday Comics at AudioBoo: The Page 9 Gauntlet, Wednesday Comics Questions. He’s also done an interview with Newsarama.

Francis Manapul was inspired to do some Flashy art while reading Flash: Rebirth

Ethan Van Sciver and Karl Kerschl will appear at Fan Expo Canada in Toronto at the end of August.

Mark Waid has been confirmed for Long Beach Comic-Con in October. (I finally bought my ticket a few days ago. Hooray for cons within driving distance!)

Many sites remembered Mike Wieringo this week on the anniversary of his passing. To follow up on the links posted on Wednesday: Panels on Pages lists their top six Mike Wieringo covers. Pop Matters has an artistic critique of his Flash work as perfecting “90s nostalgia comics.” Comics Alliance lists some favorite moments. And it’s worth linking again to Blog@Newsarama’s excellent Dial H for History retrospective.

There’s not a whole lot of Flash-related news coming out of Chicago Comic-Con, partly because we’re still in the middle of Flash: Rebirth and partly because they dropped the big news two weeks ago in San Diego. But there were a few items mentioned at DC Nation.

First, Newsarama’s report mentions:

Red Robin will “absolutely” be dealing with the return of Superboy and Kid Flash in the near future.

I believe DC has previously mentioned that Tim and Bart will both be showing up (beyond the cameos in the first issue) of Conner Kent/Superboy’s stories in Adventure Comics. I wonder if Tim and Conner will be showing up in Red Robin at some point?

It’s interesting to note that, with Red Robin, Adventure Comics, and Kid Flash, the three original founders of Young Justice will all have their own series for the first time in eight years. Impulse and Superboy, both launched in the mid-1990s, were canceled in 2002. There’s a great scene from Young Justice around that time in which Bart and Kon are lamenting that “my comic got canceled” (supposedly referring to their favorite series to read), and commiserate until Robin walks into the room — and they proceed to glare at him. Does anyone remember what issue this was?

Anyway, back to DC Nation. CBR’s write-up adds another note.

Asked about the further ramifications about Barry Allen’s return as the Flash, “We are not retiring Wally West,” Sattler said to applause.

As reassuring as it is to know that DC does recognize that Wally still has fans, it’s more reassuring to know that the comment got applause. Of course, the best reassurance is still Geoff Johns’ remark that “Wally’s not only going to be fine, he’s going to kick ass.”

On the other hand, @weeklycrisis pointed out that “at DC, heroes either die off or live long enough to become the bad guy.” Ray of sunshine, there…

A couple of final notes from CBR’s article:

“Wednesday Comics” will be collected into trade according to strips rather than altogether, Sattler said.

I wonder if this means 15 separate books (which would actually be more volumes than the original 12-part series!) or whether it means they’ll be combining them by tone, style, character connections, etc.

“Aquaman Reborn” by Geoff Johns? “Ah, Aquaman,” Sattler sighed. No answer, but not in a “maybe” way–more exasperated.

Aquaman? Really? Not Vibe?

Geoff Johns reassures fans of Wally West that “Wally’s not only going to be fine, he’s going to kick ass.”

The third installment of Views from the Speed Force is up. The spinoff from the Views from the Longbox podcast has been focusing on each issue of Flash: Rebirth, and this one tackles issue #3.

Fanboy Wife contemplates the Flash, alternate meanings of the name, the value of hard water and just what super-speed is good for.

Blog@Newsarama considers what might go into a second volume of Wednesday Comics.

Tomheroes has a collection of super-hero Hostess ads from the 1970s. I’ve mentioned these before, and profiled the lame villains who appeared in the Flash installments. This page doesn’t have the snarky commentary of Seanbaby’s Hostess Page, but some of the scans are somewhat higher quality.

The Weekly Crisis is giving away 4 trade paperbacks and hardcovers in a contest to celebrate two years online.

Over at K-Squared Ramblings I’ve written up the Flash Forward panel at Comic-Con. This show looks like it’s going to be awesome! Also: the Lost panel was full of win. I missed it, but my wife posted a detailed write-up.

6:18:35 PM: Batman’s story is getting more intriguing

6:19:21 PM: Kamandi makes me want to re-read Tellos.

6:20:35 PM: I love the giant splash page on Metamorpho! (And the joke about a subscription to Element Dog!)

6:23:15 PM: That’s an awful lot of typos in Teen Titans for a one page story.

6:25:43 PM: It must suck to have only one soldier to defend your capital city.

6:29:04 PM: When I think “Wonder Woman,” I always think of a talking, glowing fish for a sidekick. (Okay, maybe not.)

6:33:27 PM: Whoa, awkward moment for Barry, Iris and Barry!

6:34:26 PM: The different coloring techniques stand out more this week, too.

6:35:49 PM: I can see a paradox brewin’, though.

6:36:57 PM: Hah! “Stately Blood Manor.”

6:41:47 PM: The Demon and the Cat. Yes, Demon and the Cat. One is a burglar, the other’s a prat.

6:45:55 PM: Hey, kids! Learn Hawkman’s secret sign language! You too can join the Junior JSA!

It’s huge. The most impressive strips are the ones that actually make use of the larger canvas — Adam Strange, Hawkman, etc.

A lot of the creative teams don’t have a good sense of how to tell a story one page at a time. Not many of the strips work well stand-alone. The Cat and The Demon may have been the most successful one in that regard.

I liked the art style on Wonder Woman, but it made really poor use of the space. Panels were tiny, and worse, the words were tiny. It actually felt cramped on a giant newspaper-sized canvas. Almost like someone had taken 6-8 pages of a regular comic book and shrunk them down to digest size, then rearranged them to fit into the space of 4 regular comics pages.

The Flash strip was fantastic. I love what they’re doing with the parallel Flash/Iris West strips.

Having driven along the central California coast a number of times, I can conclusively say that the first panel of Green Lantern is dead on. It looks exactly like any number of stretches of Pacific Coast Highway.

I liked the moody intro to Hawkman, but the Teen Titans into didn’t do much for me.

Supergirl was good, and actually made me laugh out loud at 11:30 at night.

I wasn’t expecting so many of the strips to have such a retro feel. Green Lantern was outright set in the early 1960s, Metal Men was clearly the 1970s, Metamorpho and Flash had the feel of the early Silver Age. (Flash even brought back the logo from the 1940s. And the one from the 2000s. Using both next to each other looks a little awkward.) And everyone seems to be comparing Kamandi to Prince Valiant. I guess it makes sense, given that nostalgia is one of the driving principles behind the series. (That and DC’s quest to keep people coming into the comic shop every week.)

That may be in part why I didn’t like the Neil Gaiman-scripted Metamorpho as much as I’d expected.

I’m not sure how I’m going to store these.

At The Source, DC has posted the first page of the Flash strip from Wednesday Comics by Brenden Fletcher and Kerl Kerschl! The story stars Barry Allen, Iris West and Gorilla Grodd.

As you can see by the layout, each page is basically the size of four standard comic book pages.

Wednesday Comics starts tomorrow and will run weekly for the next 12 weeks.