IGN interviews Geoff Johns about Flash: Rebirth, Blackest Night and Superboy. He’s still being really cagey about Flash: Rebirth, since it’s “about the greatest crime ever committed against the Flash family and a mystery doesn’t start with the answers, it ends with them.” But a few items that stood out:
I want to explore regarding Barry’s time before he became the Flash. There hasn’t been a whole lot done, if anything, about what Barry did before he was the Flash and what Central City was like before the Flash was around. That’s going to be something I’ll be exploring in the future.
It’s been a few years since I’ve read most of the Barry issues, but yeah, I seem to recall there was very little of Barry’s pre-Flash career as an adult. Readers learned more about his childhood in Fallville, his friendship with Daphne Dean, his comic book collecting and fascination with the Golden Age Flash than about how he met Iris or ended up working for the Central City Police Department. The book that did go into it was Mark Waid’s The Life Story of The Flash, which dealt with how Barry ended up in criminology, how he and Iris met and got engaged, etc.
As far as various character cameos in the first two issues:
There’s stuff going on with all of the Flash’s enemies and allies….every villain that appears there are plans for. Seeds sown. Like Black Hand in Green Lantern: Rebirth. There’s a long race ahead of us.
So Geoff Johns has long-term plans for The Flash. And since he’s Geoff Johns and not Grant Morrison, chances are DC will actually follow through with them and not try to sweep them under the rug as soon as his book is over. (Though to be fair they do seem to be following through on Morrison’s Batman arc, at least.)
At this point, it sounds like a virtual certainty that Geoff Johns will be writing the inevitable ongoing series that will follow Flash: Rebirth. This is probably a good thing, though at this point I want to see where Rebirth goes before calling it.