DC has posted the main covers to three Blackest Night books including Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, and Scott Kolins’ cover to Blackest Night: The Flash #3. (The variant was posted last week.)
What do you know? It turns out they were keeping it under wraps to avoid spoiling Blue Lantern Barry Allen.
Some linkblogging highlights from Twitter over the last few weeks:
Blue Lantern Flash Custom Figure at The Green Lantern Corps Forum.
Death Race on Reality Prime by Dave Myers and Kurt Christenson.
Blackest Night: The Rogues by xanychaos at Comic Bloc.
Uncanny Comic Book Scans just finished a week of Flash posts featuring single pages from throughout Wally West’s run on the book.
Broken Frontier unearths the dead Rogues.
Bleeding Cool spots an error in Blackest Night: The Flash #2 – Barry Allen’s narration boxes feature the wrong Lantern Corps symbol!
LiveScience: Humans Could Run 40 mph, in Theory (via Devin “The Flash” Johnson).
Perspective: schmevil reminds us all that Your fandom is not Fandom. (Via Comics Worth Reading).
If there’s one thing that best describes Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins’ Blackest Night: The Flash #2, it’s “caught in the middle.” It’s the middle of a three-part story. It takes place between chapters of a larger story. It fits between the end of one Flash series and the beginning of another. It’s about people caught between life and death.
It’s also about mirror images, both in terms of opposites and in terms of forcing characters to look at themselves.
Unfortunately, it looks like this miniseries isn’t going to stand on its own very well, for the simple reason that it’s not a self-contained chapter of Blackest Night. Each issue is interleaved within other chapters of the larger story. The first issue brought readers up to speed with Blackest Night #4. This one doesn’t pick up where the last issue left off, but skips ahead and has to recap a couple of major events from Blackest Night #5 & #6.
That may be a big part of why I liked the Rogues’ story a lot better than the Flash’s: their story actually does seem to be a solid story, not a loose collection of scenes that fit between panels in another series. In that way, it reminds me a lot of Battlestar Galactica: The Plan.
Of course, another reason I liked the Rogues’ story is that it’s hard to go wrong with Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins on the Rogues. As I mentioned last time, Johns’ grim-and-gritty storytelling and Kolins’ angular art style are perfectly suited for the hardened Central/Keystone criminals…and for the undead Black Lanterns.
And now…it’s spoiler time! Continue reading
So…DC’s latest 20 Questions with Dan Didio video has some bad news for fans of the extended Flash family. He answered my question about the Flash and Kid Flash books, explaining that they’ve decided to go back to “the original game plan” and focus on a single Flash book starring Barry Allen.
Wally West’s backup stories, by Geoff Johns & Scott Kolins? “On hold.” [Edit: This may be the result of DC restructuring the second features.]
The Kid Flash book by Sterling Gates? “On hold.”
He goes on to say, “Your Flash fix will be Barry Allen, pure and simple, for 2010.”
DC’s week of 2010 announcements continues with new Francis Manapul art on The Source and a Geoff Johns interview at the Los Angeles Times’ blog, Hero Complex.
First up: the cover for Flash Secret Files and Origins 2010, due in March:
The Source article also features two in-progress images, and quotes Francis Manapul:
The entire creative team is looking forward to introducing new ways of portraying speed. It’s also cool that we’ll be introducing a new generation to Barry Allen as well as myself so I’ll be right in they’re shoes of getting to know this guy. It should be an exciting ride!
The Hero Complex interview doesn’t reveal anything new about the upcoming series, but Geoff Johns does talk about his history with the Flash and thoughts about his approach to the character. Some quotes that stood out to me:
We all have a “thicket of mythology.” You meet someone and they have an entire backstory. A city they were born in. A best friend they lost touch with. An event that affected their whole family. A first job. Everyone has history. And every character has history.
The most frustrating thing for Barry is related to his job as a member of Central City CSI. He investigates crimes that have already happened. Murders he can’t stop. No matter how fast he is, that’s the past.
I look at something like “The Flash” as a long term mission. “The Flash: Rebirth” was the knot to untangle in the shoelace before we could run. I wanted to clear the board, re-examine some key elements of Barry Allen and re-introduce a threat that would play throughout the next several years.
I’d offer more commentary, but I’m kind of swamped at the moment.
Update: Forgot to mention: The first hints of the new Secret Files book had Tony Harris working on the cover. Or, rather, “a” cover. He even posted a snippet of art. Maybe one of them is a variant cover, or maybe DC decided not to use his, or maybe it’ll be an interior splash page.
Here’s your chance to do a side-by-side (well, vertical-by-vertical) comparison of Barry Allen’s and Wally West’s Flash costumes — including several variations. Spoilers for Flash: Rebirth #5.
