Our celebration of Speed Force’s fourth anniversary (last Friday) continues with a look back the Top 4s of the last four years.
Don’t forget to share your favorite Flash memory for our contest! Only a few hours left!
Top 4 Most-Commented Articles
4. Young Justice: Bloodlines (June 2012, 61 responses). The recent episode featuring four generations of Flashes. People started out commenting on the big reveal of Impulse, then moved into discussing the episode when it aired. The response to this post, and the images posted on Facebook, Tumblr, and yes, even Google+, convinced me of two things: 1. People like photos more than text. 2. Young Justice has more fans than the Flash comic book. Which isn’t surprising, since Young Justice probably has more viewers than the most popular comic book has readers.
(I wasn’t sure how to count posts with the new comment system, since it includes Likes and Retweets along with local comments, Facebook comments and Twitter replies. Filtering out the Likes and retweets knocks it down to 50, just behind Wally West’s New Costume at 51.)
3. Jay Garrick Redesign Revealed (April 2012, 64 comments). The Earth 2 redesign has been…polarizing? This was a simple repost of the cover from Earth 2 #2 when DC released it alongside a James Robinson interview.
2. Why I Don’t Like Barry Allen Generating the Speed Force (April 2011, 73 comments). An opinion piece about a retcon to the way the speed force works. Judging by the heated responses from some people, I’m not sure everyone read past the first six words in the title.
1. Geoff Johns Leaving the Flash (May 2011, 74 comments). This was a simple newspost following DC’s announcement that their superstar writer would be leaving the series after Flashpoint. Not surprisingly, Flash readers had strong opinions about this.
Top 4 Most-Viewed Posts
Just measuring by page views, the top four are all image-based.
4. Netflix Becomes…The Quickster! (September 2011). An example of the importance of timing. Remember last fall when Netflix, battered by the PR disaster of their rate change, announced that they were going to split the DVD and streaming parts of their business, and rename the DVD business “Qwikster?” That morning I remembered a Spongebob Squarepants character, grabbed a picture off a wiki, threw it online, and went off to work, figuring a few people would have a laugh at it and that would be that. Well, it turned out that no one could spell Qwikster (I even got it wrong while writing this up), and since I’d used the more logical spelling, it turned up in a lot of search results for the netflix/quickster combination until Netflix scrapped the plan, after which it dropped off the radar.
3. Wally West Costume Comparison (November 2009). A few days after Wally West’s Flash: Rebirth costume debuted (see below), I put together a set of side-by-side comparisons showing where the various elements for the new costume came from. The images have continued to be popular with search visits.
2. Wally West’s New Costume (November 2009). The day Flash: Rebirth #5 came out, I snapped a photo of the double-page spread with my phone, making this site one of the first to reveal Wally West’s new Ethan Van Sciver-designed costume online. Within a few hours, a reader had sent me a better image, and that evening, I scanned the page for an even better image. The day it was posted remains the single busiest day ever at Speed Force when measured by sheer traffic, though the post has slowly faded in visibility over time.
1. Flash: Reverse (January 2009). A deceptively simple idea: Papa Zero took the cover to Flash: Rebirth #1, flipped it horizontally, and swapped the red and yellow, then placed the two images together to show he Flash and Professor Zoom facing off against each other. It didn’t attract a whole lot of attention at first, but it’s become an ongoing favorite among image searches. Lately it’s been averaging about 30 hits/day!
Top 4 Most Prolific Commenters
Excluding those of us who write for the site on a regular basis, the most frequent commenters are:
4. West
3. Ken O of That F’ing Monkey
2. papa zero
1. Kyer
Top 4 Social Network Favorites
4. Flash Costumes at Comic-Con International 2010 (August 2010). This photo gallery of people in Flash and Flash-related costumes turns out to be the site’s second-most-viewed page on StumbleUpon. It’s a mix of photos I found on Flickr and photos I took at the convention myself.
3. San Diego Steampunk Flash (August 2011). This post combining photos of a steampunk-inspired Flash costume with writeups by the team that designed and built it went on to become the second-most-popular Speed Force post on Reddit (measured by people who actually clicked through, anyway). Eventually I ran into the guy wearing the costume at the next year’s WonderCon.
2. Green Lantern vs. the Flash Tip Jars found at a local coffee shop. They’ve since done Supergirl vs. Batgirl and Hulk vs. Captain America. This one was a big hit with Reddit, though it’s actually the second-highest rated. The Young Justice pages where Bart’s (favorite) comic was canceled has more votes, but more people actually clicked through on this one.
And finally…
1. Street of the Green Lantern (December 2009) Speed Force’s most popular post on StumbleUpon features photos of real street signs in Dana Point, California, a city that really has a Green Lantern street…and a Blue Lantern street…and more!
And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this look back at the more popular posts over the past year. Please remember to share your favorite Flash memory for our contest. Submissions close at 9PM ET today!
Haaa, great lists. Interesting.
Thanks. Some of them really surprised me, like the Spongebob/Netflix post. I didn’t expect it to take off in the first place, and I *really* didn’t think the spike had been high enough to *keep* it so high on the list.
Incidentally, you and I are #3 and #1 on the top commenters list if you *do* include site authors.
Kyer gets the gold huh??
There’s a shock!! :)I thought I was a mad Wally fan, she puts me to shame!!