Tag Archives: Archives

This Week: Flash Archives Vol.6, Digital Flash(back) #46-47

Flash Archives Volume 6

This week sees the release of the long-awaited (well, by me anyway) Flash Archives vol.6, featuring Silver Age Flash tales from the mid-1960s.

It’s a Rogues Gallery parade in these tales from THE FLASH #142-150, as the Scarlet Speedster battles The Trickster, Weather Wizard, Mirror Master, Mr. Element, The Reverse Flash, Captain Boomerang and Captain Cold! Plus, a tale guest-starring Green Lantern!

Stories and art by John Broome, Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino, Joe Giella, Frank Giacola. Introduction by Paul Kupperberg. 240 pages – $59.99

If the price seems a bit steep, Amazon has it on 31% discount.

If you prefer your Silver Age reprints in cheap paperpack form, hang on until next week for The Flash Chronicles Vol. 3. The Chronicles are shorter as well as being behind the Archives, so vol.3 only brings us up to Flash #118.

Flash #46: Flash vs. Vixen by Grodd's Command!Also out: digital back-issues of the post-Crisis Flash #46-47. Comixology has been releasing three issues a week for several months now, which makes me wonder whether…

  • it’s a typo (Update: the comics are up now and it’s only #46 & #47)
  • they’re slowing down
  • they plan to release Flash #48-50 all in one week.

Flash #46-47 feature parts 2 and 3 of the three-part story in which Gorilla Grodd leads the animals of Keystone City in a revolt against the humans. Vixen guest-stars, teaming up with the Flash to stop the rebellion.

Flash (1987-2009) on ComiXology

Digital Comics, Wally West, and the Forgotten Gold & Bronze Flash Archives

I hope today’s release of Flash vol.2 #2-6 on ComiXology signals the beginning of a complete digital release of the Wally West Flash series. This brings the total to 63 issues scattered around the 249-issue series (including #0 and #1,000,000, both already available), mostly from the Waid and Johns runs, but there are still a lot of gaps…and most of the material is out of print.

»Flash comics at ComiXology.

The Mike Baron (#1-14) and William Messner-Loebs (#15-61) runs on The Flash have never been reprinted in trade paperback, and only the highlights of the extensive Mark Waid/Brian Augustyn run (#62-162, minus a year off for Morrison/Millar) have been collected. A lot of that is due to the changing market during the 1990s. When Waid started, collected editions were rare. Vertigo was seeing some success, but the idea that people would shell out for a whole series in graphic novel form hadn’t yet sunk in. (These were the days when studios weren’t sure there was a market for complete TV seasons on home video, either.) By the time Geoff Johns took over the title, DC was collecting full runs of a few high-profile series, but not all, or even most of their books.

Now, of course, everyone expects most comic books will be collected, and waiting for the trade is actually a workable strategy. But it’s not often that DC Comics goes back to fill in the gaps in their library — at least, not in print.

Gold and Bronze

With any luck, digital releases will also be the way we’ll finally get the Bronze Age and the Golden Age re-released. I’ve grumbled on a number of occasions that DC seems to keep reprinting the same early years of the Silver Age every time they come up with a new format, and never seem to get past the early/mid-1960s on Barry Allen’s series. (Even the upcoming Flash Archives vol.6 brings that series up to…1964.)

I’d really like to see more Golden Age Flash Archives. DC has only gotten as far as issue #24 out of 104, and the first super-villain (The Shade, as it turns out) doesn’t appear until #33…but these volumes seem to come out so rarely that I expect to die of old age before DC finishes collecting the series. In print, anyway. This is one of the reasons I went forward with my effort to hunt down the original comics, or at least as many of the key issues as I could find in my price range. Continue reading

Flash Archives Vol.6 Available for Pre-Order

The Flash Archives vol.6, announced last month, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. $45 is still a bit steep compared to a trade paperback (funny thing, hardcovers and high-quality paper cost extra), but it’s a hefty discount off the list price.

Written by GARDNER FOX and JOHN BROOME • Art by CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA and FRANK GIACOIA Cover by CARMINE INFANTINO and MURPHY ANDERSON Advance solicited • On sale JULY 25 • 240 pg, FC, $59.99 US

It’s a Rogues Gallery parade in these tales from THE FLASH #142-150, as the Scarlet Speedster battles The Trickster, Weather Wizard, Mirror Master, Mr. Element, The Reverse Flash, Captain Boomerang and Captain Cold! Plus, a tale guest-starring Green Lantern!

» Pre-order at Amazon

Flash Archives Vol.6 Coming in 2012

DC announced a new volume of the hardcover Flash Archives reprint series in their February 2012 solicitations yesterday. These high-quality books reprint the Silver Age run of The Flash that introduced Barry Allen as the Flash, Wally West as Kid Flash, and most of the Flash’s well-known Rogues.

The Flash Archive Vol.6 HC

Written by GARDNER FOX and JOHN BROOME • Art by CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA and FRANK GIACOIA Cover by CARMINE INFANTINO and MURPHY ANDERSON Advance solicited • On sale JULY 25 • 240 pg, FC, $59.99 US

It’s a Rogues Gallery parade in these tales from THE FLASH #142-150, as the Scarlet Speedster battles The Trickster, Weather Wizard, Mirror Master, Mr. Element, The Reverse Flash, Captain Boomerang and Captain Cold! Plus, a tale guest-starring Green Lantern!

I’d been worried that the focus on the newer reprint lines, the large black and white Showcase Presents: The Flash series and the smaller color paperback Flash Chronicles series, had derailed the archives, so I’m very glad to see that they’re continuing. I’ll definitely be pre-ordering this as soon as I can. (More on DC’s reprint lines at Flash series, books & specials.)

DC started this series in 1996, and seems to have settled into releasing one volume every three years. Sixteen years in, we’re just getting to 1964. (Also: inflation seems to have finally hit it. The last five volumes were $49.99 each.) It’s going to take a long time even to finish the Silver Age, never mind completing the series!

Now if we can just get a third volume of the Golden Age Flash Archives

Update (December): It’s available for pre-order on Amazon.

Is There Demand for More Flash Archives?

Note: The discussion is from 2007, and while the Silver Age material has gotten a fifth archive volume, three Showcase books and the start of a Chronicles line, the situation for the Golden Age Flash books has not changed.

Cover: Golden Age Flash Archives vol. 2Newsarama reports that during the Q&A part of the DC Nation panel at this weekend’s Baltimore Comic-Con, a fan asked:

Are there more Legion, Flash or Justice League Archives coming? [VP of Sales Bob] Wayne said that when you get up to the issues that can be affordably bought by collectors the demand for the Archive Editions goes down.

Okay, this might apply to the Silver-Age material. The four Flash Archives books so far are up to Flash #132 (1962). When I was tracking down back-issues in the #133–140 range (the contents of a hypothetical book 5) around 2000 or so, I seem to remember finding reasonably good copies in the $5-15 range. (Better copies, of course, run into triple digits.) Note: Since this was originaly posted, volume 5 has been released.

But there’s still 8 years of Golden-Age material to cover, from 1942–1949: more than 75% of Jay Garrick’s solo run. And those books are much harder to find, with battered readers’ copies often selling for $40–150.

Moreover, those 8 years include the first appearances of every major Golden-Age Flash villain. Continue reading

2009 DC Archives Survey is Up

The Comics Archives has posted their annual DC Archives Survey in which readers are asked to state what future collections they’d like to see. It’s not an official DC survey, but the surveyor does send the compiled information to DC.

If you’re at all interested in DC’s Archives line, or the new DC Classics Library line of hardcovers, you should seriously consider filling it out.

I put in my annual suggestion for more Golden Age Flash archives. Most of the run from 1942-1949 has never, ever been reprinted — not even the first appearances of the Thinker, Shade, Thorn or Turtle. The material that has appeared in the two archive volumes so far mainly has the Flash fighting gangsters. Super-villains haven’t even shown up yet!