Every few years, Comics Should Be Good polls its readers for their favorite DC and Marvel characters and ranks the top 50 from each of the two publishers. This year, two Flashes came in the top 10:
Barry Allen at #7
Wally West at #6
This is the third time CSBG has run this poll, and it’s interesting to see how the various Flashes have fared. Jay Garrick and Bart Allen have both been pushed out of the running since 2011, but Barry Allen and Wally West are still both in the top 10. And while Wally is still ahead of Barry in the poll, they’re a lot closer than they were last time.
| Character | 2007 | 2011 | 2015 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jay Garrick (Flash) | #41 | #45 | |
| Bart Allen (Impulse/Kid Flash) | #42 | #36 | |
| Barry Allen (Flash) | #29 | #9 | #7 |
| Wally West (Flash/Kid Flash) | #3 | #6 | #6 |
2007 was kind of an odd year: Barry Allen had been dead for 20 years, and Wally West had been the main Flash for most of that time until he was shuffled offstage in Infinite Crisis. That was 2006, and DC replaced Wally with a prematurely-aged Bart Allen. Then in 2007, they killed Bart and brought Wally back. The poll hit in the middle of all this. Feelings among Wally’s fans at the time were…intense, pushing him up to the #3 spot, right behind Superman and Batman. Barry, meanwhile, lacked visibility, explaining his much lower ranking that year.
It seriously baffles me how DC, for the past 7 years, has done utterly nothing with one of their most popular characters out of this weird paranoia about Barry. Maybe one day they’ll realize they’re popular enough to have BOTH be important, not just Barry.