Tag Archives: Velocity

Flash #3 Slips Two Weeks

According to Diamond’s shipping changes and DC’s page for the issue, The Flash #3 has been rescheduled from June 9 to June 23.

No changes so far on the schedule for Flash #4 or the just-solicited Flash #5.

Update: Flash isn’t the only speedster seeing delays. Over at Top Cow, the first issue of the Velocity miniseries was supposed to ship on May 26, but will be out the first or second week of June instead. Wouldn’t it be interesting if it ended up arriving the day that Flash #3 was originally going to reach stores?

Speed Reading

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Two weeks’ worth of linkblogging, so you’ll probably have seen a lot of these by now…

Commentary

Multiversity Comics presents A Crisis of Chronology: The Flash, as well as thoughts on early solicitations in a digital age.

Silver Age Gold presents: I Hate the Flash’s Girlfriend, all about Iris West! Silver Age Comics responds: Ending with Iris.

Art

slaterman23 has a Flickr set featuring vintage-style DC Comics posters (via The Nerdy Bird).

Paxton Holley has found a comic in which Superman Becomes the Flash (Action Comics #314, 1964)

Chris Samnee sketches Flash vs. Captain Cold at C2E2.

Mr. Maczaps presents Death in the form of the Black Flash.

Bobby Timony draws Jay Garrick (also at C2E2).

By now you’ve probably all seen this visual pun on Flash and the iPad using Alex Ross’ art.

The Top Cow Panel at C2E2 has some incredible samples of Kenneth Rocafort’s art from the upcoming Velocity miniseries.

Karl Kerschl’s webcomic, The Abominable Charles Christopher, is coming to print.

The webcomic Comic Critics tackles Greg Rucka leaving DC.

Other

Comic Book Resources has put together a Comics Twitter Directory [dead link]

Cinema Spy considers how the new status quo seen in Flash #1 might influence the Flash movie. [dead link]

Velocity Returns in May

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Wally West isn’t the only red-headed speedster out there. Velocity, winner of Top Cow’s first Pilot Season, will finally be getting her own series this May.

Well, sort of.

Velocity has been a member of Cyberforce since it launched in the early 1990s, and has had two solo books: a 1995 miniseries by Kurt Busiek and Anthony Chun, and a one-shot in 2007 by Joe Casey and Kevin Maguire. The one-shot was part of Top Cow’s “Pilot Season” event: they released several “first issues” of potential series and asked fans to vote on which one should be picked up. Velocity won, and Top Cow went on to prepare a series. Joe Casey returned, and ChrisCross took over as artist.

That series never actually launched, though. Casey wrote three issues, ChrisCross drew one full issue and several covers, but the book was delayed several times and finally scrapped due to creative differences. With their newly found free time, Joe Casey and ChrisCross went over to DC and did Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance.

Return

Top Cow has announced a new Velocity miniseries starting in May, written by Ron Marz and drawn by Kenneth Rocafort (who did variant covers for the unlaunched series).

Carin Taylor is the fastest woman in the world. At least, she’d better be if she wants to save her own life and the lives of her Cyberforce teammates. When a former Cyberdata scientist — and test subject — seeks revenge against the members of Cyberforce, only Velocity can save her friends before the clock literally runs out.

Ron Marz remarked to UGO:

I’ve been getting to use the supernatural side of the Top Cow Universe as my playground for a while now, so I jumped at the chance to write one of my favorites from the superhero/tech side.

In some ways it does fulfill the promise of Pilot Season, in terms of the character finally getting a book, but it’s an entirely new creative team. And it’s a four-issue limited series, not an ongoing. I guess after two and a half years Top Cow wanted to test the waters again. Kind of a shame, given how rare it is to find and ongoing speedster comic that’s not The Flash (or Sonic the Hedgehog), but it’s probably sensible not to rely too much on the buzz from 2007.

Long-Running Speedster Series

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After reading more about the breakdown of the Velocity ongoing series that would have launched this year, I realized it would have been something very rare: An ongoing solo book about a speedster who wasn’t the Flash.

Off the top of my head, the only series I could think of was Impulse, which ran for 89 issues from 1995 through 2002…but even that was about the Flash’s cousin, who has since become Kid Flash (and was briefly the Flash). There was Top Cow’s Velocity miniseries that I’d just read, and Marvel’s Son of M miniseries starring Quicksilver, and the occasional special…but all of the long-running characters I could think of were either team members like Quicksilver (Avengers), Velocity (Cyberforce) and the Blur (Squadron Supreme), or Golden Age characters who appeared in anthologies, like DC’s Johnny Quick (More Fun Comics), Timely’s Whizzer (USA Comics), or Quality’s Quicksilver (National Comics — and he’s better known now as Max Mercury).

I remarked on this on Twitter, and @cm22 pointed out one more: Marvel launched a Quicksilver series in 1997, though it only lasted 13 issues.

So that’s two. Impulse, which is a Flash spin-off, and Quicksilver, which lasted only a year. Three if you count the upcoming Kid Flash series announced over the weekend, but then again it’s Kid Flash.

For comparison, DC has published an ongoing Flash series from 1940–1949, 1959–1985, and 1987–2008, with only a few months off in early 2006 during Infinite Crisis.

In the last 70 years, there have been only 11 in which no issue of Flash appeared. In the last 50 years, there has been only one year without a Flash book, and that was 23 years ago.

If there was any question that the Flash was the most successful example of the speedster super-hero archetype, this should settle it!

All-Flash #1 Note: It’s arguable that Flash Comics shouldn’t count, being an anthology series…but on the other hand, his name is in the title, his story was always the first feature, he alternated the cover spot with Hawkman, and the numbering was picked up for the 1959 Flash solo series. Besides, during most of the time Flash Comics was on the stands, DC also published All-Flash (1941–1948), which was definitely a solo Flash book!

Thanks to the Grand Comic Book Database for the cover thumbnails.

What Happened to Velocity?

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Velocity #1 - ChrisCross and Snakebite Just last week, I read and reviewed the 1996 Velocity miniseries, and re-read her 2007 Pilot Season one-shot. As you may recall, the book was one of that year’s winners, so Top Cow began preparing a new series around the character. It was originally announced for November 2008, then pushed back, and eventually canceled.

Details of the breakdown have been hazy. Artist ChrisCross left first, citing creative differences. Writer Joe Casey said the book had been lost in a shuffle of editorial firings. Now publisher Filip Sablik tells Top Cow’s side as one element in an interview about the recently-announced third round of Pilot Season:

This series is unfortunately “missing in action”. We started working on the series with the original Pilot Season writer Joe Casey with the best of intentions. We couldn’t secure original artist Kevin Maguire so we brought in ChrisCross, who was Joe’s top choice for artists and Snakebite on colors. We actually had the first entire issue complete and a script in for the second issue along with some art in progress when we ran into a disagreement in how the first story arc should proceed. Joe had a direction he wanted to go in, which we didn’t agree with and truthfully wasn’t something we felt represented Velocity (as a company owned character) [emphasis added] in the best way. We tried to work it out with Joe, but reached an impasse and everyone decided it was best if Joe walked away from the series. It’s a damn shame too, because as any publisher can tell you it’s never an easy financial decision to have an entire issue plus completed and not be able to put it out. At the end of the day though, we can’t afford to put out a comic we’re not completely happy with. We’re still looking into how best to retool Velocity and hope to be able to update the fans in the near future. Again Velocity is going to play a vital role in this summer’s Cyberforce/Hunter-Killer series and I hope she’s a character we get to revist on a solo basis in the future.

Now, obviously, everyone involved is going to want to minimize their own share of the blame, but it does seem to come down to this:

The writer and company wanted to do different things with the character, and the company won.

At first glance, it’s kind of ironic considering that Top Cow is one of the original Image studios, and was founded by artists who were tired of being told what they could and couldn’t do with the characters they worked on.

On the other hand, Cyberforce creator Mark Silvestri is still the CEO of the company. So to the extent that he shapes company policy, it’s still a matter of the character’s creator asserting control. For now, anyway. If he ever leaves Top Cow, they’ll be in a similar situation to Marvel without Stan Lee.

It does make me wonder how things will play out with all the various creator-owned characters in the long run. 70 years from now, will someone be licensing, say, The Savage Dragon from Eric Larsen’s estate the way DC is doing The Spirit?

I’m also really curious as to what Joe Casey had in mind that Top Cow didn’t want to do.

Looking Back at Velocity

Compared to the Flash

The emphasis on running away reminded me of Flash: Rebirth, which has made a point of characterizing Barry Allen’s life (unfairly, but he is depressed right now) as a series of choices from which he ran away. Both miniseries are about taking a character who is not ready to be a hero (Barry with his not-quite acknowledged death wish, Carin with her inability to overcome fear) and moving them to where they need to be in order to become better heroes. Continue reading →

Speed Force

Tracking the Flash – the Fastest Man Alive