The next digital chapter of Smallville Season 11: “Haunted” guest-starring Impulse arrives on ComiXology on Friday.
Today, two more issues of the 1987-2009 Flash series starring Wally West are available digitally.
Flash #122-123: Keystone City decides that it can no longer handle the cost of property damage from the Flash’s battles, and want him to leave town. The seaside town of Santa Marta, California, however, would love to have their own super-hero. And who better than the Flash to be a super-commuter?
The cover and title are, of course, an homage to the classic “Flash of Two Worlds” in the first Flash #123.
One thing that surprised me here is that, up until now, DC and ComiXology have been re-releasing the series in sequence. After an initial release of a dozen or two issues by theme, they started with #1 and have been working their way forward, filling in and around those issues that have already been released. Last time, they jumped straight from #115 to #120, skipping the last three issues of “Race Against Time” and the “Final Night” tie-in issue. I wondered if they might be jumping back to fill in the gap this week, but that isn’t the case, at least not yet.
I asked ComiXology about it, and they said that DC simply hadn’t sent them those issues yet. I haven’t heard back from DC.
do many of the Flash comics have that zoom in type reader that a lot of the newer releases do?
The panel-by-panel view? I believe that’s standard on all of ComiXology’s releases.
It’s not always *right* — I remember one issue somewhere in William Messner-Loebs’ run where they put the panels of an unusual layout in the wrong order — and it’s not always pretty, especially when the panels are oddly-shaped and don’t match the screen aspect (a really tall panel on a phone being held in landscape orientation, for instance), but it does usually help with smaller and low-resolution screens.
Oh, I loved the California stories all through end of Hell to Pay!
Not that I’m personally affected, but: Why in the world would DC not have the skipped issues to send to Comixology? Heck, a few years back, they were up illegally. Not like you can’t find those issues for sale. I mean, if I didn’t have all of those missing issues and was relying on digital for them, I’d be a bit put out about now. Like being handed a mystery book with the last few pages missing.
The only reasons I can think of to deliberately skip a few issues in the middle of a series that’s been otherwise filling in continuously:
1. Some sort of rights issue with the content or the creative team (like TV episodes where they had the broadcast rights to the song but need to negotiate the home video rights).
2. They want to push a particular later story for some event (such as when they released the Zero Hour tie-in issues early for a Zero Hour sale).
3. They want to save these stories for an event.
The writing team didn’t change for those issues, and while the artist did change, they’ve been releasing issues by the new artist.
Speaking of that artist change, and reason number 2….how did DC miss the chance to release a 2-issue presidential election story in November 2012 drawn by Paul Ryan?
Anyway, that leaves #3, which only makes sense for the “Final Night” crossover if they’re planning a “Final Night” sale soon. And that’s just one issue out of four.
So I have to assume it’s an oversight, but who knows how long it’ll be before someone at DC notices it. (I’ve sent them a question through the website contact form, but while ComiXology got back to me within an hour, I don’t really expect to hear anything from DC at all.)
A year and a half later, DC finally filled in the missing four issues in along with everything else up through #225, as part of a big Flash sale the week of the TV show launch.