Comics Should Be Good is doing a new Top 100 Marvel/DC characters poll. List your favorite 10 from each company in order, and they’ll tally all the votes.
When they ran the same poll four years ago, Wally West, Barry Allen, Jay Garrick and Bart Allen all made it into the top 50 DC characters. It’s been a complicated few years for the Flash (to say the least), so it’ll be interesting to see how the audience’s reactions have changed over that time.
Today’s Flash costume gathering didn’t pick up too many people, so it’s been rescheduled for Saturday at 4:00.
Christopher Schmitt is organizing a Flash photo shoot in San Diego.
Time: Friday, 11:00 AM
Place: Ballroom 20 Lobby, next to Sails Pavilion
Duration: 15 minutes.
The goal is to get as many people in Flash and Flash-related costumes (Zoom, Kid Flash, Rogues, etc.) as possible. Call it a Flash mob, if you will.
If enough people show up, the plan is to also set up some action shots as well. There will be a signup list to make sure that the people in costumes can get copies of the photos.
Update: It’s up on the unofficial event schedule.
DC has officially announced 48 of the 52 comics being relaunched in September. The remaining books are sure to include Action Comics and Superman, and covers have leaked featuring Superman, Supergirl and Superboy. It seems a safe bet that unless one of the younger heroes is headlining Action, that wraps up the 52 series.
Conspicuously absent from the DC Reboot (from a Flash fan’s perspective): Justice Society (of the JSA roster, only Mr. Terrific has appeared so far) and the second Flash book, Speed Force, announced by Geoff Johns last summer.
While Barry Allen headlines The Flash and Bart Allen appears as Kid Flash in Teen Titans, there appears to be nowhere in the initial wave for fans to read about Wally West or Jay Garrick.
Factor in the emphasis on younger heroes, the implication that Barry Allen is still learning the ropes in the new series, and the focus on keeping things simple for new readers to figure out, and you have to wonder whether Jay and Wally even exist in the new DCU.
I asked as much on Twitter, and The Flash co-writer/artist Francis Manapul replied:
https://twitter.com/#!/FrancisManapul/statuses/78942736841060352
It’s neither a confirmation nor a denial, but at least the writer working on the new book wants to keep them around, if the higher-ups allow it.
Reportedly there are more series planned for the following months. We know, for instance, that Batman, Inc. will relaunch in 2012 after a hiatus to allow Grant Morrison to work on another project, and we know that Batman Beyond will be back, though it’s not among the 52 books announced for September.
Are there plans for Wally West and Jay Garrick in a second wave of launches? Have they been wiped from existence? Are they still around, sitting on the back burner, waiting for someone to use them? Are their fans (OK, Wally’s fans) still willing to wait after years of false starts, broken promises, and generally being jerked around?
Update: Dan Didio has this to say about the Justice Society (thanks, @SpeedsterSite):
AS for JSA, we have decided to rest this concept while we devote our attention on the launch of the three new Justice League series. As for other characters and series not part of the initial 52, there are plenty of stories to be told, and we’re just getting started.
So it sounds like the “back burner” approach, at least with Jay and the JSA.
At the 2010 Comic-Con International, Geoff Johns announced that DC would be launching a second Flash book called “Speed Force” in 2011 “for all you Wally fans and Bart fans.”
With DC relaunching its entire super-hero line in the wake of Flashpoint this September, the question is: Will Speed Force be among them, or has it been scrapped like the Johns/Kolins Wally West backup stories in Flash vol.3 or the Sterling Gates-written Kid Flash ongoing book that was supposed to accompany it?
DC has announced ten of the new titles and their creative teams launching as part of their massive universe-wide revamp this September, including The Flash #1.
Rising superstar Francis Manapul, fresh off his acclaimed run on THE FLASH with Geoff Johns, makes his comics writing debut in THE FLASH #1, sharing both scripting and art duties with Brian Buccellato. The Flash knows he can’t be everywhere at once, but what happens when he faces an all-new villain who can? The cover to issue #1 is by Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato.
Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato on art? An all-new villain in the first issue?
DC just found a way to keep me reading!
Obviously Manapul as a writer is an unknown quantity, but I love his art on the book, and the way Buccellato colors it. And assigning him the book now seems like a clear vote of confidence from DC upper management, further supporting the idea that he wasn’t solely responsible for the delays in Flash vol.3. I’d hazard a guess that a big part of it was Geoff Johns being tied up with preparations for the universe-wide reboot. That’s got to have been time consuming.
Update: Francis Manapul, addressing concerns about the team’s writing experience, posted the following on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/#!/FrancisManapul/statuses/76339587789766656
As far as what’s in store for the Scarlet Speedster:
https://twitter.com/#!/FrancisManapul/status/76343324516159488
Buccellato adds:
https://twitter.com/#!/BrianBooch/status/76344568219570176
Update: Here’s why I’m calling this Flash vol.4.
Update: Bob Wayne’s second letter to retailers insists: “this is the launch of the New DCU. It is not a ‘reboot.’ I think you will soon discover why that is.” My take, based on what I’ve seen in today’s announcements, is that they’re basically doing what they did after Crisis on Infinite Earths, just in a more coordinated manner. The key difference being, it seems that this isn’t going all the way back to the beginning for every character. We’ll have to see what that means for the Flash. I just hope it means we won’t be reading updated versions of old stories every few months.
(More reports & commentary: CNN, Comics Alliance, The Beat, Comics Should Be Good, Robot 6, Comics Nexus, Newsarama, Firestorm Fan.)