Linkage: Flash Week

The blog Once Upon a Geek has just wrapped up Flash Week, focusing on everyone’s favorite speedster.

Rogues’ Revenge Review Round-Up

The reviews are in for the first issue of Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge, and they’ve been overwhelmingly positive.

J.G. Jones is the Flash

2 Replies

According to CBR’s coverage of the J.G. Jones Spotlight panel at Comic-Con, the artist used himself as the reference for the iconic Flash cover on Final Crisis #2:

Finally, who did Jones use for photo reference for the Flash image on the cover of “Final Crisis” #2? “I used me!” But self-reliance has its price, Jones revealed, because the posing process slows things down. “I have to pose, take a shot, look at it, pose, take a shot, look at it…” Fortunately for readers, Jones’s patience tends to pay off.

Linkage: Ethan Van Sciver on the Future of Wally West

9 Replies

CBR reports on last week’s Spotlight on Ethan Van Sciver at Comic-Con. Among other things, he talked about redesigning Wally West’s costume and how he sees the personalities of Barry Allen and Wally West.

“I’m redesigning Wally West’s costume right now, and it’s terrifying.” While Sinestro’s costume, with its seemingly random blue color and “jester collar,” was ready for a redesign in Van Sciver’s eyes, “Wally West is the most perfectly designed costume ever, aside from Green Lantern’s costume, in my opinion.” Van Sciver said the challenge was to redo the costume without either making it less cool or more cool than Barry Allen’s and thus implying that one character is better than the other.

“I want Barry to come back and be King Arthur. He’s the most straight-laced, perfect Flash, rigid in his morality and his ethics,” making the looser, cooler, more laid-back Wally a Lancelot figure. Van Sciver told the audience “Kick me in the ass if I fail.”

So there’s at least some hope for Wally fans that he won’t be totally shoved off to the side. Maybe.

On the other hand, he also confirmed that the monthly Flash series will “stop” for Flash: Rebirth. How it will be relaunched afterward — picking up where it left off, or where Barry’s series left off — or with a new #1 — he wouldn’t say.

Linkage: Scott Kolins on Rogues’ Revenge and the Future of the Flash

3 Replies

Newsarama’s Vaneta Rogers interviewed Scott Kolins on Final Crisis: Rogues Revenge and Barry Allen’s return in Flash: Rebirth

You know, we’ve talked about doing a “Rogues” mini-series since… well, ever since back when I was on The Flash with Geoff. But last year in San Diego, I got a phone call from Geoff saying he’d just had a big meeting, and he said, “Dude! Now’s the time to do Rogues! I’ve got all these ideas. We’re going to do this, and it’s going to lead to all this stuff going on in the DC Universe. We’ve got all these things going on, so now’s the time to do it! Come on back! Come on back!” And I thought, OK, this sounds great! So I came back to DC.

And he told me right then what was going on with the Rogues. And we’d talk every once in awhile, getting ready for it. But there would be a couple weeks that would go by that I wouldn’t hear from him because he was busy writing all his 20 million other books he’s working on. And finally, he called up and said, “I just got something! I want to bounce it off of you and see what you think!” And he does that. He always tells me his latest ideas. And he told me the one about Zoom, and my jaw just fell on the floor.

More at Newsarama.

Flash Companion Preview: Mark Waid on Impulse

3 Replies

TwoMorrows’ book, The Flash Companion is now available! It debuted at Comic-Con last week, Amazon orders have been shipping, and it’s been showing up in stores.

Here’s one more excerpt to round out the quartet of Scarlet Speedsters. As with the others, it’s posted here with permission of the book’s main author, Keith Dallas.

Mark Waid: Running on Impulse (excerpt)

By John Wells

WELLS: Why call him “Impulse,” rather than “Kid Flash”?

WAID: Because it was a perfect name. We didn’t want to call him “Kid Flash” because it sounded a little corny, and I still think it sounds a little corny. “Impulse” is the perfect confluence of a character’s name, his powers, and his personality, all in one word. And once we had the name — and I can’t swear it wasn’t Kurt Busiek’s suggestion — it completely summed up the character. Thought to deed in one motion without all those pesky synapses getting in the way.

WELLS: [laughs] It really did. Whose idea was that hair?

WAID: I think it was Humberto’s. Pure Humberto [Ramos]. Mike Wieringo had done the initial costume design, without the mask, but boy, Humberto went to town with the look, with the giant hair and the gigantic feet.

WELLS: Now kind of earlier on, you’d had the Tornado Twins revived in 1991’s Legion of Super-Heroes #18 and immediately had them executed by the Dominators.

WAID: [chuckles] “You” meaning “the Legion editors and writers after you left staff.” Don’t look at me, man.

WELLS: And later on, their DNA created a female speedster called Rush. And meantime, Don Allen was said to have been survived by his wife, Carmen Johnson and their two-year old son, Barry II. So what came first? You said you had the teen speedster idea for the Justice League story []earlier in the interview], was that before or after?

WAID: A little after, so that would have been the “Barry II” that we were talking about at the time, I suppose. But at that point, we were going to reboot the Legion with Zero Hour, so I knew that all bets were off in terms of Rush and those characters. It also freed up the name “Impulse,” which I believe was the codename of —

WELLS: Kent Shakespeare.

WAID: Kent Shakespeare, yeah.

WELLS: Iris brought Bart back to the 20th Century in the hope that Wally could cure her grandson, but she also wanted Wally to rein in Bart and train him in the use of his powers. Why was that not going to work?

WAID: It was so not going to work because Bart and Wally just hated each other. Wally saw in Impulse all of his own negative characteristics, so it put his teeth on edge.

WELLS: On the other hand, Max [Mercury] and Bart did work out pretty well, even though they didn’t think it was going to. How did you see that relationship?

WAID: We went into the Impulse series not sure who the mentor figure was going to be. And for a long time, I think we were talking about it being Jay, but Jay has his wife, Joan, and I don’t know what they could have brought to the series that wouldn’ t have been Ma and Pa Kent. Making Bart’s mentor Max, somebody who was so dry and so much the opposite of Bart, was too much comic potential to let go.

Continue reading →