Please drop by Nerdage today and check out a guest post I wrote:
Six Things You Might Not Know…
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Category Archives: Flash History
Flash First Impressions: Why I don’t like Joan Garrick
Today’s guest post is by Ken O of That F’ing Monkey.
I’m going to make a confession and I realize it sounds irrational, but I don’t like Joan Garrick. I know that sounds bad. You hear something like that and think, “How can you hate that nice grandmotherly lady?” Before we even get into the whys I want to clarify, I dislike her, I don’t hate her. I wasn’t cheering when she came down with fake-cancer. Besides the fact that cancer isn’t really cheer worthy, I didn’t want to see her die.
So what started all this craziness? Her first appearance. I’m not even talking about her issue as a whole; I’m talking about the first page of Flash Comics #1. Our hero, young scientist in training Jay Garrick meets Joan at school and asks her out to the Victory dance. Her response is, “I…I don’t thinks so, Jay…You’re…a scrub on the football team…and captain Bull Tryon’s already asked me!!”
Wow. How nasty is that? She could have easily said, “Sorry, but someone already asked me,” or anything like that. Instead she decides to bust on his football skills. And bless his heart; Jay somehow still wants to impress her. He gains super speed and immediately uses it for football. Maybe it’s because I’m not a football fan? I’ve also though of Joan as cold hearted after that.
I realize Iris didn’t come off any better. In her first panel she’s chastising Barry for being late. I’ve read a number of other people’s complaints about how nasty Iris was during all those early adventures, but for some reason I never disliked her. Maybe it is because I’ve been stood up before and I know what a soul crushing blow to the ego that can be.
How did the other women in the Flashes’ lives fare with their first appearances? Continue reading
Mayfairstivus – Captains Cold & Boomerang in the 1989 DC Heroes RPG
Today’s guest post is by Frank Lee Delano.
Hello, Flash fans! I go by the alias Frank Lee Delano, was voted second most likely to run entirely too many blogs (after Rob Kelly,) and I will be your substitute teacher for the day. For the second year in a row, I’m running a complex and lengthy inter-blog crossover between Thanksgiving and Christmas, in part because I’m a sadistic misanthrope who takes his hatred of the holidays out on my unsuspecting fellow bloggers. The theme this year is Mayfairstivus, a make believe holiday where we celebrate the Mayfair Games Incorporated DC Heroes role-playing system and its many releases. A large part of the blame for this type of event falls on the shoulders of The Irredeemable Shag, who brought me into his own crossover, Crisis on Earth-Blog, almost two years ago, and continues to conspire with me on these dirty dealings. Shag was your guest blogger forMayfairstivus – Celebrating Flash in the DC Heroes RPG, and when I volunteered to write a second post while your regularly scheduled Kelson was tending to his newborn son, Shag offered the advice, “I believe his blog is typically on the positive/up-beat side, so I wouldn’t trash Captain Boomerang too much (but that’s just me).” As I believe I already established that I am diabolical and make all my promises through crossed fingers, I now present to you Captains Cold and Boomerang, whom I will surely criticize venomously.
I assume I first became aware of Captain Cold through the Super Friends cartoon show, because that’s just what people of my generation did (see also: mustachioed men wearing mirrored aviators and Lacoste polos with skimpy tennis shorts defending original Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.) As you may or may not be aware, Ape Law* dictates that every super-hero must have an ice-themed villain, so to me Captain Cold was just Mr. Freeze on a budget. It wasn’t until John Ostrander wrote Cold into his first Manhunter script as a loser who loved betting baseball that Leonard Snart felt like he had something unique to contribute to the field, as more of a blue collar snow blower. Of course, now Snart is a fan favorite, after taking on a Golden Age attitude toward casual homicide. If you’re going to flash freeze some dope in the equivalent of liquid nitrogen, you might as well indulge the bloodlust of Rome by punching the schmuck’s head into a pink-tinged flurry, right? So cool, Captain Cold is now the baddest gangsta to wear a fur-lined hoodie.
Mayfairstivus – Celebrating Flash in the DC Heroes RPG
Today we’re featuring the first of two guest posts by fellow blogger The Irredeemable Shag (from ONCE UPON A GEEK and FIRESTORM FAN)!
Dear Speed Force readers,
Welcome to Mayfairstivus! That’s right, it’s time once again for the beloved annual celebration of Mayfair Games’ DC Heroes Role-Playing Game! This time honored tradition dates back to 1985 when the first edition of this role-playing game was released … or maybe this is a fake holiday some comic book bloggers just cooked up as an excuse to post related content from Mayfair’s long-running DC Heroes line.
Today we’ll look at a few different Flash entries from the role-playing game (RPG) and learn how the first box set shattered my fragile little comic reader world.
Did the Flash Save Comics?
This essay was originally posted on K-Squared Ramblings in 2008.
When the New York Daily News broke the news about Barry Allen’s return, they brought up the hero’s key role in launching the Silver Age of Comics. Superheroes had fallen out of favor in the early 1950s, and comics were exploring genres like westerns, horror, romance, etc. When DC successfully relaunched the Flash in 1956, there was an explosion of new super-hero titles.
The Daily News quotes former Flash scribe Geoff Johns as saying, “Without Barry Allen, we’d still be reading comic books about cowboys.”
I don’t think that’s precisely true. Not to discount Barry’s contribution—it’s entirely possible, even likely, that super-heroes would have remained a background genre. But for one thing, we’re looking at half a century of ephemeral pop culture. For another thing, let’s consider: why were comics going after the western, crime and horror genres when super-heroes failed? Because that’s what was popular in movies and television at the time.
I’d guess that, without the Flash revitalizing super-heroes, we would have seen more science-fiction comics in the 1960s, more police comics in the 1970s, sitcom comics in the 1980s, and so on. Comics genres would probably have followed along with trends in pop culture instead of becoming heavily focused on a single genre.
We wouldn’t be reading cowboy comics today; we’d be reading reality comics.
Perhaps the presence of multiple genres would have eventually gotten rid of the “but, you know, comics are just for kids” mentality. (Not that it’s worked for cartoons or video games yet, but video games are still relatively new, and cartoons have similarly been dominated by the musical fairy tale and slapstick comedy short.)
Eh, who knows? Maybe they’d be all about pirates.
Mark Waid’s Unwritten Kid Flash Time Travel Story
CBR has the transcript from Saturday’s 50 Questions in 50 Minutes With Mark Waid at Long Beach Comic Con. Among those questions was someone asking about a story the writer has hinted at for a long time: something disastrous happened the first time Wally West tried to travel through time as Kid Flash, something traumatic enough that it made him extremely reluctant to use the ability at all.
Waid decided to answer the question.
Possible spoilers in the event that he ever writes the full story.